Page 35 - Cooke's Peak - Pasaron Por Aqui

punitive expeditions and to replenish lost supplies, the Apaches attacked the capital city of Arizpe on July 29, 1786. InwritingtodeAnzaonOctober25,Jacobo Ugarte y Loyola indicated the anticipation of a similar attack for which he was attempting to prepare. He reported that intelligence gathered from other Indians indicated that the Apaches intended to gather near
Cooke’s Peak and move on Arizpe by different 91
routes.
De Anza, although transferred to Tucson and
promoted to military Commandant of Sonora in 1787, continued to maintain an interest in improving the roads,especiallybetweenSantaFeandTucson. He sent an expedition from Tucson to link up with one led byGovernorConchaofSantaFe. Thetwocolumns failed to make contact, and de Anza died in December of that year, still having failed to establish the desired road. Another attempt at finding a route was ap- parently made by Don Jose de Zuniga in 1795, with the usual result, and there was no indication that any frontier official made any further attempts.92
By the 1790s, the Spanish were beginning to recog- nize distinctions between the various Apache bands and named them primarily for the area in which they lived or for their cultural traits. Therefore, the Indians closelyassociatedwiththeCooke’sPeakareawere
93
referred to as the Mimbres
generous reservation system, the Spanish had achieved a sort of uneasy peace with many of the Apaches, and by the early nineteenth century the pace of Spanish campaigning against them seemed to have slowed.
An immense deposit of copper ore exists about 30 miles northwest of Cooke’s Peak. As a native mine it had been known and used by the Indians at least as early as A.D. 900. Copper artifacts discovered at the Etowah Site, Georgia (circa A.D. 880-1550), have been spectrographically proven to originate at the New Mexico mine, thereby supporting the contention that an Indian trade route across the present-day southern United States predated any European in- itiated explorations. The copper mine was revealed to the Spaniards in 1800 when an Apache Indian guide
94
informed Carrasco (now a Colonel) of its location. Carrasco lacked the means to develop and market the mine and sold his claim to Don Francisco Manuel de Elguea, a wealthy Chihuahua merchant, in 1804. However, Carrasco had already bequeathed the mine the name Santa Rita del Cobre, after the patron saint of strays from the flock, a name it still bears today. De Elguea opened the Santa Rita del Cobre for exploita-
tion, and it quickly achieved an important niche in the Spanish economy. To protect his 600 miners from the Indiansandcontrolthemanyconvictlaborersamong them, de Elguea constructed a walled fort in the shape of an equilateral triangle with 200 foot sides and walls
95
By 1796, through a
Chapter 1
21
3 to 4 feet thick (Figure
Despite sporadic Indian problems, the locally con-
centrated ore was shipped south to Janos for process- ing, including the minting of coins. In 1807 Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike reported that the mine was producing 20,000 mule-loads of copper a year, or 3 to 6 million pounds of rich ore. Reportedly the ore con- tainedsufficientgoldtooffsetnearlyalltheexpenseof
9 transportation.
Mexicans, Americans, and Others
Meanwhile, far from New Mexico, other forces had been set in motion that would have a profound effect on that province and the Southwest. Spain was in trouble on the continent of Europe and, after 250 years, the cumbersome and inefficient colonial ad- ministrativemachinerywascollapsing. IntheNew World the struggle for freedom from Spain was in- itiated in September 1810 when Father Miguel Hidal- go y Castillo started a movement for Mexican independence that was not completed until 1821. By 1825 all Spanish colonies except the Caribbean islands
97
were free and independent nations.
In New Spain, the internal chaos building since 1811
had resulted in a complete breakdown of any consis-
tent Apache policy and a loss of control. Following the
Mexican Revolution, Don Ignacio Zuniga reported
that between 1820 and 1835, 5,000 Mexicans had been
killed, 100 settlements destroyed, and another 4,000
settlers forced by Apache depredations to leave the
northern frontier, including the abandonment of the
98
copper mine.
Mexico, after achieving independence, entered a
period of instability; torn by power struggles large and small, the country plunged into a period of political anarchy and civil war that lasted for half a century. Concurrent with Mexican independence and political upheaval, a period commenced during which adven- turers and filibusterers from the United States repeatedly fueled the antagonism between the two countries. But, it was not all this way.
12)