THE MINING DISTRICTS OF THE CERRILLOS HILLS
Bill Baxter
(Excerpted from a work in progress)
In early 1879, when the miners began arriving in the Cerrillos
Hills in large numbers, they saw one of their first tasks was to set up a
mining district and decide, by vote, upon the rules of their district. The men
were all there for the same reason; to strike it rich. And they all knew that
riches bring out the worst in people. They knew it was essential for their
coming prosperity that there be mutually agreed-upon rules and regulations.
The Galisteo Mining District and the Cerrillos Mining District
were created in March of 1879, and were followed shortly thereafter by the
Gonzales Mining District.
The concept of setting land aside as a mining district – that the highest
use of mineral lands was for mining rather than homesteading, agriculture or
farming, and that a codified process for discovering and working the mineral
deposits should be part of it – became national policy in the United States and
its territories between 1866 and 1872. Prior to that in the United States there
were only local mining rules and practices, if any.
In New Mexico, however, standardized mining practices prescribed
by the Spanish Crown had existed for centuries. It was those same Spanish practices
(somewhat modified and currently known as the Mining Law of 1872) that the
American nation adopted, and that we still use in the United States.
Long before, of course, the Cerrillos Hills had been the place
where Native Americans had come to obtain certain minerals, most importantly
turquoise for medicine and ritual uses, and later on galena with which to
decorate pottery. In Indian eyes the gifts of Nature were there for everyone
and were the private possession of no one. You came, gave thanks, then gathered
the bounty and made use of it. When you were done you gave thanks again and
returned what had been given you back to Nature.
This holistic approach toward the gifts of the earth would clash
with the practices of some of the subsequent immigrants to New Mexico, the
Europeans.
The Europeans – we call them Spanish but they were as diverse as
the global Empire of Spain – brought their peculiar practices of land tenure. For
example, in very early Santa Fe some “Spanish” metallurgists of record were
what we would today call Belgians.
For minerals, the underlying principle was that all minerals were
the personal property of the Spanish Crown. The Crown, in its kindness, would
allow you to work a deposit and extract the mineral so long as you rendered, in
the case of gold, a fifth of your production to the Crown. There was also a
Christian obligation to tithe the Church a similar amount. For precious metals other
than gold the Crown taxed and the Church tithed less; silver at 10% and copper less
still. Additionally, for an initial period new colonies were exempted from any
tax at all on precious metals, typically for the first ten years. And when
taxes finally came due they were pervasively and chronically evaded, especially
in remote corners of the Empire such as the Crown Colony of New Mexico where
the Crown was never able to achieve functional taxation.
When the Republic of Mexico replaced the Spanish Empire after 1821
what had been the Crown’s “quinto” fifth passed to the new government, along
with the widespread practice of evading it. But because of the Republic’s anti-Roman
Church stance, the tithe along with all other support for the Church was officially
ended.
When the Americans swallowed up New Mexico by way of the divisive,
Manifest Destiny-driven war of 1846, they brought with them no national mining
regulations. In New Mexico by default the Spanish-Mexican mining regulations
were retained.
During all of the centuries of rule by Spain and Mexico and later
the United States, it was normal practice for miners in New Mexico to evade or
minimize the levies on their production. But this was human nature. It wasn’t
just Spain. Being devious or outright lying about the production of your mine
was the norm everywhere in the world, and “selective reporting” remains a
common practice among miners today.
Among quips attributed to Mark Twain is one about a mine being
nothing more than a hole in the ground owned by a liar.
At the beginning of the great Cerrillos mining boom the onetime Spanish-
onetime Mexican territory of New Mexico had already been an American possession
for over thirty years. Despite those decades of Americans occupation New Mexico
was still predominantly a land of Spanish culture (Spanish-descendant Spanish
speakers and Hispanicized Indian-descendant Spanish speakers known as genízeros). The Americans were largely an
Anglo (that is English speaking, not necessarily of English heritage) overlay. The
most literate and powerful Hispanos and Anglos were frequently fluent in both
languages.
This was the world into which the Cerrillos Hills boomers arrived,
and though the boomers themselves were often recent immigrants from Germany or
France or Poland or Greece or Italy or South Africa, their common denominator
was the use of English. A number of the workers employed in the Cerrillos mines
were longtime New Mexicans – Spanish speakers – but the boom in the Cerrillos Hills
was a largely Anglo event.
The origins of the Cerrillos boom can
be traced to 1869, when the Court of Public Land Claims declared the Baca y
Delgado grant, which was supposed to have covered the Cerrillos Hills, invalid.
In a related decision the following year the same court declared the Hills were
open for development.
Such court action was necessary
because the Hills had been for nearly a century the fiefdom of the powerful Baca
y Delgado family, and they continued to hold sway. Manuel Salustiano Delgado
[1792-1854], and most importantly for our story, five of his sons – Simon,
Pablo, Fernando, Felipe S. and Felipe B. – protected the Delgado lands. If you
were foolish enough to trespass upon the Delgado properties the family or their
retainers would make sure you didn’t stay long, and that you didn’t come back.
The CPLC judgment voided the
Delgado’s legal standing at the same time that political and family connections
left them a force to be reckoned with.
El rancho Delgado was at (or very near
to) the site of the 1695-96 Spanish mining camp Real de los Cerrillos. Today it
is where the Bonanza Creek Ranch headquarters complex is situated.
The most important of the early
Anglos in the Cerrillos Hills was Doctor Enos Andrews, who came to Santa Fe
from New York just before the Civil War. His dental office cum jewelry and
watch shop, assay office, and newsstand was for the next five decades a fixture
on the Plaza of Santa Fe.
In early 1872, before the new more
restrictive 1872 Mining Law took effect, mining entrepreneurs across the
American states and territories scrambled to acquire properties. In the
Cerrillos region Enos Andrews, R.B. Willison and John Gwyn were the most energetic
scramblers. By himself, and sometimes with partners such as Julius Fairfield,
James McKenzie, Trinidad Alarid and John Gwyn, Enos Andrews came to control
about 1,000 acres of mineral land on what had been the Delgado grant, especially
in the Vallecitos (later called Hungry Gulch), where several of the old Spanish
silver mines were situated. It is assumed that in order to accomplish this
Andrews had made some kind of arrangement with the Delgado family, possibly a
lease.
Andrews built a smelter on the north
bank of the Rio Galisteo and that smelter is one of the few named features to
appear on maps of this era. Among his many mining properties in the region, Dr.
Andrews registered for himself the “old Indian turquois” deposit everyone called
Chalchihuitl. And it may be that Enos Andrews himself is largely responsible
for setting off the Cerrillos mining boom.
By one account Andrews employed a
miner by the name of Frank Dimick (sometimes Dimmick), who had wandered from
Colorado down to New Mexico, to work his mines. By another account it was
Territorial Representative Stephen B. Elkins, who had a few years earlier
acquired the entire 108 square mile Ortiz Mine Grant as well as over 600 acres
of land on the Galisteo where he intended to develop a railroad center (it
would become Cerrillos Station), who employed Frank Dimick and his Oro City,
Colorado, partner Robert Hart. In either case – and both accounts might have
been the case – in late 1878 Frank Dimick was back in Colorado, at the new town
of Leadville, showing ore samples and representing the little hills south of
Santa Fe as the latest and best El Dorado.
The first claim of the Cerrillos boom
was filed on the Bonanza Lode on January 15, 1879 by Frank Dimick and Robert Hart.
The Bonanza Lode claim was situated on the lower slopes of the Central
Mountain, several hundred feet northwest of the turquoise hill called
Chalchihuitl.
The Cerrillos rush was on!
On March 14, 1879, the Santa Fe Anglo
miners got together and formed the Galisteo Mining District (GMD), and elected
Enos Andrews president and M.A. Bartleson recorder. W.P. McClure was appointed
Deputy Recorder.
This district shall be defined and bounded as follows – west by the
public road known as the Albuquerque Stage road running past Pino’s ranch to
Galisteo Creek – East by a line ½ mile east of Township lines of Townships 14
and 15 north of Range 8 East.
The miners affirmed that the Galisteo
District would follow the 1872 United States mining law, which allowed surface
claims of up to 1500 feet in length and 600 feet width, a maximum of 20.44
acres. But some of the early GMD claims were only half-size, 300 feet width.
This 300-foot size, allowable under the 1872 law, doubled the potential number
of claims in the Hills and in theory accommodated more miners. The three
hundred feet rule was formally adopted by the rival Cerrillos Mining District two
weeks later.
As a general rule the 20-acre claims
in the Cerrillos Hills predate March 1879 and the more numerous 10-acre claims
date between 1879 and about 1907.
It is of interest that the GMD miners,
in Resolution II of their by-laws, set the pay for a day’s labor on all lodes
at an unrealistically high $4. The going rate for mine work in the region had
been $1.50 to $3 per day. A year later the Engineering & Mining Journal
reported that miner’s wages in the Cerrillos area were $25 to $35 a month (of 10-hour
days and 6-day weeks) plus board. Twenty years later, long after the Galisteo
District was history, miner’s work in the region still paid $1.75 to $3 per
day. It is unlikely any mine worker was ever paid $4 for a day’s work. The
Cerrillos Mining District was to be more honest when it came to their $4
figure.
The GMD mine owners and miners of
record for the first three months included Andrews, Bartleson and McClure, and
also C.L. Thayer, William T. Guyer, J.S. Taylor, W.H. McBroom, the
Spiegelbergs; Abe, Solomon, Lehman, Levi, Willi and Willi S. (you’ll see Abe
and Willi S. later), J. Giroux, M.L. Good, the brothers George C. Bennett &
Edward F. Bennett, T.J. Anderson, H.F. Swope, John Forsha, D.D. Finch, N.
Sanderson, John Ayres, C.H. Gildersleeve, William M. Tipton, William Mailand,
J.S. Loud, John N. Thompson, George E. Blain, Mo Breeden, H. Ilfeld, L.A.
Hughes, A.D. Craig, G.S. Barnes, W.S. Jenkins, Grace Breeden & Hattie Watts
[the only women on this list], W.A. McKenzie, A.G. Irwin, John T. Elkins [brother
of Stephen B. Elkins], U.A. Gould, Joseph L. Baker, Edward W. Rice, Henry Reed,
B. Kahn, John B. Gaunt, F.A. Manney, Sam Keiser, Valentine S. Shelby, John
Shaw, W.F. Johnson, John Martin, J.H. Stewart, Charles Mailey, W.M. White,
Simon Filger, and M.F. Hawkins. This list of initial GMD participants is
noteworthy for the preponderance of Anglos and the absence of Spanish surnames.
Having a local mining district with a
local recorder was a convenience, since the miners did not then have to go to
the county recorder in Santa Fe every time a transaction was made, but it also
made the transactions more costly because everything had to be registered
twice. The district recorder entered your claim in the district record book,
and in return for the $1.50 fee he was supposed to ensure that all his entries
were duplicated into the county’s master books, the fee for which came out of his
$1.50.
In practice, not all of the miners
spent the money to have their claims and other transactions recorded with the
local recorder, as they should, and not all of the local recorder’s entries
made it into the county books, as they should. The study of the details of these
omissions reveal a great deal about the perceived worth of the various claims
and about the apparent intentions of the filers.
The much larger group of newcomers
from Colorado, reacting to the institution of the Galisteo District by Andrews
and the Santa Feans, formed the Cerrillos Mining District (CMD) on March 27. With
their own district the Colorado miners could institute their own rules,
including limiting surface claims to a maximum of 10.22 acres. Frank Dimick was
elected president and recorder of the CMD and Robert Hart secretary. William B.
Guthrie was deputy recorder.
The division of the mineral lands between
the districts was apparently peaceful. The Galisteo District was west of the
Central Mountain (soon to be known as Grand Central Mountain), and included the
south half of Hungry Gulch where Enos Andrews had his best mines. The larger
Cerrillos District covered the east and north sides of the Cerrillos Hills,
including the north half of Hungry Gulch.
At their southern extremity the two
districts split down the middle the tiny cluster of shacks on the banks of the Rio
Galisteo, where it was understood that someday a train station was to be
located. As it turned out the first railroad train appeared at that camp almost
exactly one year later, on March 15, 1880. Founder’s Day for Cerrillos Station
was observed on March 8th.
The owners and miners of record for
the first several months in the Cerrillos Mining District were as follows: (On
this list of 78 of the earliest CMD participants, the seven that appear also in
the early GMD are marked with *) Frank Dimick, Robert Hart, P.F. Herlow, Henry
M. Atkinson [the Surveyor-General of NM], William B. Guthrie, Nelson Hallach,
James Willard, William C. Rogers [remembered today by Rogersville], Jordan B.
Cottle, Samuel Bonner, W.E. Cousins, W.A. Forbes, E.O. Smith, Christian
Eberhart, William Bolander, W.A. Givens, George H. McCloskey, C.A. Bush, David
J. Miller, William M. Tipton*, Ben M. Thomas, J.C. Davis, W.A. McKenzie*, J.C.
McKenzie, A.G. Irvine*, Quincy Stitler, J.H. Belcher, A.M. Ghost, J.R.
Wallingford, William B. Fenderson, Henry F. Swope*, Henry C. Griffin, J.L.
Sanderson, Philip Mould, W. Streiby, Lowell O. Ives, A.M. Williams, H.N. Shaw,
W.H. Lawrence, W.T. Thornton [future mayor of Santa Fe and future governor of
NM], John W. Martin*, John Grady, George H. Vickroy, P.H. Warner, Simon H.
Lucas, S.T. Armstrong, Joseph M. Gough, W.E. Dame [later the first chair of the
Cerrillos town trustees], John S. Volger, Charles E. Caldwell, Charles L. Guirmond,
W.S. Jenkins*, James H. Stewart*, Robert H. Longwell, Ed Miller, John J. Bush,
O. Bostrum, Samuel Hull [agent for the Marshalltown Mining Company, of Iowa],
J.C. Hull, Warren W. O’Brien, J.C. Piersol, T.A. Maddux [the unofficial mayor
of Carbonateville, and its Justice of the Peace], J.W. Windfield, Charles
Carter, H.B. Sullivan, Ed Dalbow, John Doyle, James L. Morris, John Martin,
Samuel Dean, Charles Krouse, W.R. Blount, A.D. Giles, Albert Grunsfeld, William
B. Henderson, Lew Wallace [the current NM governor], John R. Friend, Peter E.D.
Loye, and William McMullen.
From the beginning the two districts
had everything in common save a few personalities. Both districts had a
component of New Mexico-resident Anglos and both districts a majority of Coloradans.
The newcomers were called “Colorado miners” but were in fact predominately from
the rest of the States (Colorado at this time had been a state for less than
three years), or recently arrived from Europe.
At a CMD miner’s meeting at
Carbonateville on May 21, 1879 it was proposed to look for a way to combine the
GMD and CMD, but nothing came of the effort.
At another CMD miner’s meeting three
weeks later, on June 13, it was decided that the recorder should receive $1 per
claim recorded, and that three miners should be selected as Committee of Safety
to investigate alleged malicious destruction or fraud of any claim, and they
should have the power to arrest and hold the miscreant if necessary. To defray
the expenses of the Committee of Safety the recorder was ordered to charge an
additional 50 cents for each and every claim recorded. (Which surcharge made
the registration fee in the CMD the same as that of the GMD.) Furthermore, conflicts
between miners would be resolved by three arbitrators, one each chosen by the
parties in contention and the third chosen by the first two. Finally, the first
year’s annual assessment work prescribed by the 1872 law (10 feet of work) should
in the CMD be accomplished within 90 days of the location of the mine.
The Cerrillos Mining District regulations
were modified again on September 1, 1879.
The CMD boundaries were set (this is
the original orthography)… to wit;- The
South boundry line shall be the Galisto River and the West boundry line shall
be the East boundry line of the Galisteo District, previously established; and
from the north East Corner of the Galisteo District to Peno’s Ranch on
Cerrillos Creek, thence to Ojo principal Spring, thence to San Marcus Spring;
thence to Galisteo River along the Santa Fe and Old Placier road.
Surface claims were set at a maximum
size of 1500 feet by 300 feet, as before. Ten days were allowed from the day of
location to having the claim staked and the location notice posted, and 90 days
from the day of location to having the claim registered. All controversies
related to claims would be resolved at a meeting of miners called by the
recorder. A meeting of district miners could be called by any five miners. The
CMD recorder was now allowed $2 per entry in the record book, but he had to see
that those records were filed with the office of the Probate Clerk in Santa Fe
at his own expense.
The following month, October 1879, an
energetic and personable man named Maj. Hugh Marshall arrived in the Cerrillos
Hills, and by December he, with his partner James F. Callendar, and with the
cooperation of a nearby hacendado, Nasario Gonzales, had begun to organize the
Gonzales Mining District. This was on the land on which Willison and Gwyn had
been scramblers back in 1872.
On March 1, 1880 the Gonzales Mining District
was formalized at the Marshall and Calendar ranch (location unknown) and three
days later was registered with the county recorder. The Gonzales District was
to be a square of ten miles, with the store and dwelling of Francisco Gonzales
at its center. Nasario Gonzales was elected president of the district and Henry
Nevin the secretary. The district rules required that ten feet of shaft or
other work be performed each year in order to hold a claim, and that a survey
of each claim be made within three months of registration.
The “square of ten miles” would have
subsumed, in modern terms, all the land between the Santa Fe airport and the
town of Cerrillos, but in practice the Gonzales Mining District’s activities
were concentrated in the small 3 by 3-mile area between the Rancho
Delgado/Bonanza Creek Ranch and the northernmost Cerrillos Hills. As the
boundaries of the Gonzales and Cerrillos districts overlapped, whether a claim
was registered in one or the other district was a matter of personalities and
of politics.
The early participants in the Gonzales
Mining District were Hugh Marshall, James F. Callendar, D.C. Hyde, Nasario
Gonzales, Manuel Baca y Delgado, J.H. Wadsworth, Henry Nevin, William E. Cook,
S.E. Carter, Levi Hughes, Alexander G. Irwin, John McDonald, Alfred Brainard,
Miguel Yeoman, Olivas V. Aoy, S.A. Lawick, J.J. Mahony, M.G.R. Fritzgartner,
Alexander Newby, and Lehman Spiegelberg.
Possibly the best mine in the
Gonzales District – one of the few that paid for the working of it – was Hugh
Marshall and James Callendar’s Marshall Bonanza lead-silver mine, only a short
distance south of the Rancho Delgado.
More than Andrews for the Galisteo
Mining District, Marshall and Callendar were the reason that the Gonzales
Mining District existed. Especially because of the smooth-talking Maj.
Marshall. And Maj. Hugh Marshall harbored a deep dark secret.
Of the three districts of the
Cerrillos Hills, only the Gonzales District included Hispano New Mexicans.
Nasario Gonzales, as one of the wealthiest landowners in the region, lent his
important name to the enterprise. Maj. D.C. Hyde, of the New York Hydes, had
enormous financial resources and a disposition to use them to exploit the gold
that he knew for certain was to be found in the Cerrillos turquoise deposits.
Olivas V. Aoy was a Spaniard, a convert to Mormonism, a Renaissance man, and
the founder and publisher of the first newspaper in the region, the Los
Cerrillos Prospector, later called the Los Cerrillos Rustler. Consul J.J.
Mahony, formerly the U.S. Consul at Algiers, was the founder of Bonanza City,
situated three miles north of Carbonateville, and a man of probity and
experience and an interest in turquoise as well. Lehman represented the
Spiegelbergs, the premier mercantile family of Santa Fe.
Lehman Spiegelberg and A.G. Irwin
have to share the award for promiscuity when it came to filing claims in all
the different mining districts. They had mines in them all.
Thus, the Cerrillos Hills at the pinnacle
of the boom had three separate and competing mining jurisdictions, the
Galisteo, the Cerrillos and the Gonzales. Notwithstanding their differences,
they were all very much alike. The districts all functioned to provide
stability and order to a rowdy and adventurous group of mostly itinerant men. The
region’s miners might have made a greater effort to merge them had their
attentions not been focused on other things; developing their mines and making
money. Especially on making money.
From the beginning the Cerrillos
Mining District was the dominant district of the three. The Cerrillos District
covered more claims and thereby counted more voting miners, it contained more
of the profitable claims, and it had the most competent district recorder, a
man named N.B. Laughlin.
Napoleon Bonaparte Laughlin – he so
disliked his given names that he never used them; only the initials – was
intelligent, well-schooled and as honest a man as you could find. Born in
Illinois in 1844, ex-Confederate, he came to the Cerrillos Hills in the spring
of 1879 by way of Dallas, where he had practiced law. One member of Laughlin’s
small party from Texas was J.W. Bell, who two years later would gain a degree
of fame by being one of the deputies killed by Billy the Kid during the Lincoln
jailbreak. Laughlin was elected recorder of the CMD in June and served, at a
time when other recorders served no more than one year, for the next three
years. Later Laughlin became the judge of the First Judicial District (Santa
Fe), and was also a justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court from 1894 to 1898 (during
the second Cleveland administration).
The Cerrillos Mining Distict miner’s
meeting at Carbonateville on July 5, 1880 resulted in some significant
adjustments to the boundaries of the district. The miners approved the absorption
of the redundant Galisteo District without ever mentioning it by name, and they
voted to extend the Cerrillos District northeast to include Turquoise Hill and
a lot more. The revised district was to be known as Los Cerrillos Mining
District and was delineated thusly (original words):
…beginning
at a point on the East boundary line of Santa Fe County which is due west from
the N.W. corner of the Pecos Pueblo Grant, thence west to the Santa Fé Creek,
thence along said creek in a Southwesterly direction to the Western boundary
line of Santa Fé county. Thence in a Southerly direction along said boundary
line of Santa Fe County to the N.W. Corner of the Ortiz Mine Grant. Thence East
to the Eastern boundary line of Santa County, and along the north line to said
Ortiz Mine Grant. Thence in a northerly direction along the Eastern boundary
line of said Sant Fé County to the place of Beginning.
The district encompassed an east-west
swath across all of Santa Fe County, between the Galisteo River on the south
and today’s prisons on the north.
It was also specified at this meeting
that for purposes of assessment work labor shall be estimated at $4 per day.
This is probably the real story behind the GMD’s $4 per day. Not that any
worker was paid that much, but that valuation could be applied toward the $100
yearly assessment work requirement.
At another meeting on January 24,
1881 the merger of the CMD and GMD was formalized, this time by name, and it
was stipulated that the rules of the CMD take precedence. The GMD recorder,
William R. Golden, was invited to turn over his record book to CMD recorder
Laughlin.
The Gonzales Mining District, which
had overlapped the Cerrillos District on the north, had also come to be of
little consequence. From its beginnings in the spring of 1880 the Gonzales
Mining District usually appears in the records by the phrase “Los Cerrillos
Mining District, sometimes called Gonzales Mining District.” That terminology persisted
into 1881 and did not pass from currency until sometime after the truth about the
Gonzales District Godfather, Maj. Marshall, came to light.
The beginning of the end of the
Gonzales Mining District came when Maj. Hugh Marshall was discovered not to be a
Major at all. And worse, he was not even Hugh Marshall. The rumor had
circulated that Hugh Marshall was in fact Edward Eggleston, accused of murder
in Colorado and now on the lam in New Mexico. But the Colorado authorities had offered
no reward so the Cerrillos miners, those who were aware of his likely identity,
had no interest in pursuing the matter. Hugh Marshall/Ed Eggleston continued
with his great and diverse interests in New Mexico in the belief that his true
identity remained a secret.
The rumor eventually reached the ears
of the authorities in Santa Fe, who telegraphed Colorado for more information.
And then on March 27, 1881 they arrested Marshall-Eggleston in Albuquerque. A
man named Rice, on whom Eggleston had originally jumped bail, came down from
Colorado to take Marshall back for trial. But in Albuquerque on June 10th,
while handcuffed and in the custody of Rice, Marshall disappeared.
A couple of days later Rice, too, was
not to be found, and it was whispered that Rice was in cahoots with Marshall
and had helped him escape. Again!
The last laugh was that the Marshall
Bonanza mine, which Hugh Marshall (or whatever name he went by next) never saw
again, turned out to be one of the more profitable properties in the Cerrillos
Hills.
The Cerrillos boom ended at the start
of 1884 when the New Mexico legislature’s new law making it more difficult to
speculate in mining claims took effect. Because of the money made through
speculation the Cerrillos boom had lasted, based on the minerals discovered and
their production, perhaps two years longer than it might have.
Though greatly scaled down after 1884
the Cerrillos Mining District endured.
At an April 14, 1885 meeting of the
remaining miners A.D. Giles moved to discontinue or abolish the office of the
recorder. His intent, probably, was to eliminate the recorder’s fees and his
motion was supported by then-recorder Henry Beckwith. Giles proposal was voted
down because the miners feared such action would also bring an end to the
district. Mr. Giles then moved that registering claims with the recorder be
made optional, which also lost.
At a meeting later that year Beckwith
was elected as recorder again. Beckwith ultimately served as recorder for four
years, during which time he made a total of twenty-two entries in the record
books.
The last few entries in the Cerrillos
mining record books (in CMD Book #7) were: for 1887 two proofs of labor, in
1888 relocations by E.F. Bennett and Mike O’Neil of two previously abandoned
mines, and in 1889 the relocation of the Norma Lode by W.S. Spiegelberg and
Mrs. Henrietta Jefred, and the relocation and renaming of the adjacent Bourbon
Lode as the Henrietta Lode by Willi’s brother Abraham F. Spiegelberg.
This is Willie S. Spiegelberg,
Solomon & Bertha Spiegelberg’s son, not the more prominent Willi
Spiegelberg, who had moved from Santa Fe to New York City in 1888.
Since the Cerrillos record books had
been passed in the fall of 1888 by Beckwith to Willi Spiegelberg, who was catering,
along with his older brother Abraham, to his sister, Mrs. Jefred, those last
two entries in 1889 probably shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
One way to measure the Cerrillos
Hills boom is to count the records filed. N.B. Laughlin, in his three years as
Cerrillos Mining District recorder and notary public of Carbonateville, had
made well over 1,200 entries in the CMD books. During those last three years of
Beckwith and Spiegelberg, 1887 through 1889, the books show a total of six
entries.
The Santa Fe New Mexican reported on
a Los Cerrillos Mining District meeting held on May 29, 1907 at the house of
Mike O’Neil in Cerrillos. It is not known whether there had been any official
CMD meetings during the twenty years before this 1907 meeting. Spiegelberg and
then O’Neil possessed the CMD record books during that time and, except for a
couple of pages dated 1898 documenting the (lack of) business at the
Carbonateville post office, there are no records from these years. This 1907
meeting was not recorded in the books either. And to further fuel the
uncertainty, over 75 paper pages have been removed from Book #7, the last of
the CMD record books.
The attendees at the 1907 meeting
were Dr. Friend Palmer, W.A. Brown, James P. McNulty, Mike O’Neil, Diego Mares,
Edgar Andrews, J.F. Williams, H.S. Kaune, Dr. Fred A. Yoakum, Fred Muller, A.
Spiegelberg and W.H. Kennedy, who represented 12 of the 15 persons said to be
at that time engaged in mining here in the district.
O’Neil and McNulty were longtime
Cerrillos miners who specialized in turquoise, as was Mares, whose 160-acre homestead
was situated between the Lone Butte and the modern TTVFD station. Edgar Andrews,
no relation to Enos Andrews, was a Cerrillos miner who met his end in a mine
accident in 1918, but his wife achieved a kind of fame in Cerrillos as the
proprietor of the Old Boarding House, and for her pies. Palmer and Yoakum were
medical doctors in Cerrillos who dabbled in mining. W.A. Brown was the manager
of the Consolidated Mining & Smelting Company, across from the railroad
bridge at Cerrillos. Williams was a livery, feed & coal merchant in
Cerrillos. Kennedy (formerly hardware merchant in Cerrillos), Kaune, Muller and
Abe F. Spiegelberg were Santa Fe merchants with interests in the Cerrillos
mines. Kaune and Mares were partners in the Elisa mine, a Turquoise Hill patent
claim.
Among the three unnamed miners not
present at the 1907 meeting one was probably the ailing Enos Andrews, the Alpha
and the Omega this story, who did not depart this world until 1910. Another of
the CMD miners missing from this meeting might have been Willi S. Spiegelberg.
There were only two actions taken by
those present at the 1907 CMD meeting. One was to rescind the half-size claim
regulation and institute the full 1500 by 600 foot claim size, and to validate
those full-size claims that had been made, perhaps illegally, in the interim. The
other action was to elect a CMD clerk and recorder for the ensuing year: Mike
O’Neil.
As recorder O’Neil would have had
custody of the eight district record books until at least 1908. We know that at
some point the books passed to O’Neil’s stepson, Verne Byrne, who was born in
1908 and whose homestead was what is now the Silver Hills subdivision. After
Verne’s death his wife Laverne passed the books to the current [2012] holder,
Homer Milford.
The most recent chapter of the
Cerrillos Mining District culminated on February 9, 1973, when the historical
Cerrillos Mining District was approved and entered into the State Register of
Cultural Properties #273. The submission to the State Register was sponsored by
David H. Snow and A. Helene Warren. The historical district is defined by old
Route 66 (I-25) on the west, Bonanza Creek Road (CR-45) on the north, Turquoise
Trail Scenic Byway (SR-14) on the east, and Waldo Canyon Road (CR-57) on the
south.
The old Cerrillos Mining District may
be long gone but the role of Cerrillos in the story of New Mexico endures.
**
The single record book for the Galisteo
Mining District contains entries dated between March 14, 1879 and January 15,
1881. From March to June 1879 M.A. Bartleson served as the district recorder,
along with his deputy W.P. McClure. Then W.P. McClure took over as recorder,
with H.E. Spiegelberg (no apparent connection with any other Spiegelberg
mentioned in this paper) as his deputy. The year 1879 was concluded with C.M.
Purdin serving as recorder and William R. Golden as his deputy. Golden took
over the office of recorder in January 1880 and served without a deputy until
the district was dissolved a year later.
In late 1881, after the GMD was no
more, the Cerrillos Mining District recorder, N.B. Laughlin, made four new entries on some unused pages of the book.
The Cerrillos Mining District records
comprise seven books, containing mining records dating from April 11, 1879 to July
9, 1889. The seventh CMD book also includes two pages of tally documenting the
(lack of) business at the Turquesa (Carbonateville) post office in 1899, the
year it was finally shut down.
The entries dated between April 11
and August 28, 1879 are all made by the first CMD recorder, Frank Dimmick and
his deputy W.B. Guthrie. N.B. Laughlin’s first entry as recorder is September 4,
1879, and his last is August 28, 1882. During Laughlin’s long tenure L.M.
Lymons appears as his deputy for one entry only, November 7, 1879. On January
1, 1880, W.A. Robinson is deputy recorder for a single entry. These probably
represent the very few days when Laughlin was absent from the district. Finally,
E.F. Nisbet served as Laughlin’s deputy recorder in 1882, during the last eight
months of his tenure.
Starting in September 1882 A.A.
Cruttenden takes over as CMD recorder, and is joined in March of the following
year by A.D. Giles as deputy recorder. Cruttenden and Giles serve through
August 1883.
J.A. Larock is CMD recorder from
September 1883 through July 1884, and he is succeeded by Henry Beckwith, among
the longest serving and least busy of all the CMD recorders, whose last entry
is dated March 24, 1888.
The aforementioned Spiegelberg
entries dated July 9, 1889 are the last mining entries in the record books. It
is likely that Beckwith handed over the books and the job of recorder to Willi
S. or Abraham F. Spiegelberg in either ’88 or ’89.
The subsequent chain of possession of
the CMD record books is uncertain, but it is likely that one of the
Spiegelbergs gave them to Michael O’Neil, who probably passed them on his death
to his stepson Verne Byrne. Byrne was about 22 years old when O’Neil died in
1930. Verne’s wife Laverne, some years before her passing, gave the books to
the current holder Homer Milford.