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welcome to an exciting special edition of Mysteries of the Superstition
Mountains today we're going to join Jack San felice out at the Silver King mine
now Jack he is a noted historian of the area of the superstitions and the Silver
King, Pinal City and he's written five books on the subject let's go talk to
Jack right now about how the Silver King mine started. jack it's a real pleasure
to meet you out here at the Silver King mine you know I've been wanting to meet
Jack San felice for a good long time and well I'm excited to get going so thank
you for being here
here's the way of this story goes and I wrote a book on it
was something nobody never written a book on it so I decided to do some
research after ten years I finally got a book and put it together and while I'm
writing that book I'm really learning the history of this entire region
now this whole story starts about 1870 isn't there a connection between the mine and
the military when it was discovered
the the army was still fighting Apaches out here
and they needed a trail from where their
camp was the camp is over 5,000 feet in elevation and it's up this way and over
to the right towards Globe about eight miles from the top of this mountain so
where did the mine get its name
this by the ways king's crown mountain king's
crown is what it was called and there actually is that I can point out to you
later a crown on this mountain and there actually is a crown on the mountain and
it's right there as a matter of fact if you got if you look at it and that where
that white rock is and you look above it and you see some other dirt Rock
different colored and on top of that there you'll see three prongs from a
king's crown and that thing is actually sits 300 feet or 300 yards rather away
from the mountain well anyhow its king's crown mountain 1870 were the the United
States is fighting
the Apaches and they try to put them on reservations the
soldiers come out here in 1870 and they're assigned to
General Stoneman and he's out here in 1870 to fight he was he was a civil war
veteran he was a major general in the Civil War it's an engineer by the way
not a cavalry man anyhow they're putting a camp up this road here and way about
eight miles when you get top of that hill it's about eight miles toward Globe
east of here and that's where the soldiers are going to be quartered
400 of them but
the Apaches are down here coming from Tucson, from Florence, from
the Pima villages over there out west
and they had to find a way to get from
there down to here. so Stoneman being an engineer gets his captain and it gets a
group of men and they start building this road all the way from signal Peak
Mountain which is over there around here eight miles to here and from here all
the way to Picket Post Mountain which is out that direction on top of ticket post
and on signal peak they had heliographs and they would down there from signal
peak they could see this far Tucson on a clear day and they could see the dust
trails coming through the desert and they could tell you those soldiers could tell
you how many Indians were in the group and if and they had binoculars great big
ones and they would look and so they would send by Morse code on the
heliograph the signal pick says start some soldiers down so many Apaches are
coming so many Indians are coming back so send them down this road once they
got the road built and then on down that direction and the soldiers down below
could see the flashing mirrors and somebody was in the Signal Corps in the
army would interpret for them and they said well we got to go east we got to go
west and we're going to meet them up well right about here so that's what
they did that's the way it was and so this road and it's building of this road
there was a soldier named John Sullivan John Sullivan found some pieces of black
rock and he broke him he didn't know what he had
and he showed some soldiers who had been miners and he said well that silver
that's high-grade silver boy where'd you find that and he wouldn't tell him so
why wouldn't Sullivan tell his fellow troopers where the silver was because in
those days you had to share with your the men in your group and you had to
share with the commanding officers everybody got a share of your claim
so Sullivan didn't want to share that and spread that money out he did how
much and silver was there or gold or whatever so he kept it quiet and so
about 1873 sullivan musters out of the army and he takes a job with a fella by
the name of Charlie Mason over by Florence working at his ranch his farm
over there
Charlie Mason has a brother that's an
engineer and brother had done a lot of things he had been in the Secret Service
and right after they created that after the killing of Lincoln and he had worked
in mines as a mining engineer so he wanted to come down here and Charley
Mason says well let us find what's up there yet
and finally they couldn't get John Sullivan to tell him where exactly where
it was but Sullivan was broke and he had no clothes and he didn't have a mule or
a horse so they traded him and an animal and they gave him some clothes and boots
didn't have boots good boots and some money for a clue for where they thought
the mine was the high grade mine was so they got this knowledge and they searched and
they couldn't find it they couldn't find it and they were they they did know that
out of Globe they were mining silver silver led and globe the globe ledges of
what they called them
so one day in 1875 March in March of
early March of 1875 they go to Globe and they start mining
and when they get enough high-grade they load up their mules and they come
back and the way they're coming back to go to Florence is stoma and grade the
trails already there so they're taking it and when they're at the top at a
spring year-round water at this spring they were attacked by Apaches it's March
21st 1875 they killed that man and at the location where they killed him there
were these ovens stone ovens where the bakers for the army made bread every day
see on this trail when the army was here there were mule chains coming by every
week they were delivering big loads of flour and other supplies for the soldiers
well they're coming down there they said we'll wait a minute after this that you
know when something with that with that much trauma occurs in someone's
life they have a tendency to remember things and everything to come sharp and
focus and they remember things things they wish they'd done things about other
people and and things that that people said and one of those four that are left
say hey wait a minute Sullivan said that it was on the grade
and there was the largest boulder on the grade and the little brown Hill Stones
Throw well let's see if we can find one of those well there's nothing but little
brown Hills all away from the mountain all the way down take it post okay but
this part up here is called the grade the rest of it's called the Stoneman trail
so this part coming down here it's about a mile and the grade and they said
so they're coming down and a little brown here is they're checking them and
they looked over in this direction they see this boulder the brush they come
through the brush and they see the boulder up there the trail goes right
past this rock formation over here which became the
glory hole that's the little brown Hill so they throw a stone at far as they can
in those days believe it or not soldiers played
baseball okay they played baseball and miners played baseball
anyhow I guess he had the best arm throws a rock over into this
little... yeah he can get to this brown Hill. they come over climb over top
laying right on the top of it is high-grade silver and they said this is
the place this is it so they they unload the mules with the silver led they dump
it out and they fill up their sacks with this high-grade silver and they go to
Florence they get an assayer to look at the ore and the assayer says boys
this is great this silver is great this or is great you got a king of a mine
here he said that's what we'll call it we'll call it the silver King and so
they filed a claim on it with the new county of Pinal County
and in the book and I actually have a copy of that original claim called the
Silver King they called it the Silver King so they come back and you lay out
put their stakes out and they stake out around it and they you can't keep that a
secret then okay everybody's following these guys alright so they come back
during the night and first like they started making some other claims and
they did file over the hill they file they found another vein of high-grade
silver, copper down over the hill and they named that one the Silver Queen but
the next thing you know there's a thousand claims out here so they said
time to start working boys and so on that brown Hill they dig they figured
this is where the high-grade is but no at the glory hole they dig down and they
go down 70 to 75 feet and they missed the vein the vein comes like this
so they cut down through here and they passed the vein they said oh!
what happened so they got some engineers an engineer says we we believe from what
we've seen that the high-grade body or bodies over here this distance so what
they did was they came over this way underground and they went right there
and then they found they crosscut the high-grade vein right here and then they
dug up from there they dropped the they dropped the rock from the from the.....
top of the shaft that they were digging drop that down and and they pulled it
out by buckets and eventually what they did was they had they dug a shaft and
where they're digging is shaft this is almost pure lumps of metal and that's
how I rich that ore was that they were bringing it out
thank you Jack
you know finding the Silver King mine was just the beginning and we're going
to continue with Jack San Felice and find out all about the history around
the Silver King mine part of the Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains
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