It happened on the San Pedro, just as in many other places, that the
Mormons were just a little ahead of some great development. September 3,
1877, at Tucson, Ed. Schieffelin recorded the first of his mining claims
in Tombstone District, which then lay in Pima County.
Schieffelin's first discovery was several miles from the later site of
Tombstone and about four miles from the San Pedro. Later, with Dick Gird
and Al Schieffelin, the original discoverer located the lower group of
mines in the camp of Tombstone, then established. A number of other
settlements sprang up, including the nearby Richmond, Watervale and the
mill towns of Charleston and Contention City, both on the San Pedro,
where water could be secured.
Several miles west of Tombstone, just where Ed Schieffelin camped at the
time of the discovery of his Tombstone claim, is a large monument of
cemented rock, under which lie his remains, brought back from the
Northwest for interment in the land he loved. His death was on May 12,
1897.
The Tombstone Gold & Silver Milling & Mining Company, of which former
Gov. A.P.K. Safford was president, in 1880 owned the original group of
Schieffelin claims, of which the Tough Nut was the main property. A stamp
mill was built on the San Pedro and a contract entered into with the
Mormons to build a dam and ditch, from which it was hoped to secure
motive power. Concerning this job, estimated to cost $6000, Merrill later
wrote that the contractors found themselves fined $300 for six days'
overtime on completion of the job. Joseph McRae's record tells that, in
1879, some of the brethren went up the river, twenty miles above St.
David, and put in a rip-rap dam and a mile and a half of ditch at
Charleston for the Boston Mining Company. This may have been the Boston &
Arizona Smelting & Reduction Company, a Massachusetts corporation which
had a twenty-stamp mill and a roasting furnace on the San Pedro, between
Charleston and Contention, ten miles from Tombstone. This job returned
$6000 in cash.
The mines brought a relative degree of prosperity to the San Pedro
settlement, furnishing a ready and profitable market for agricultural
products, but especially calling upon all transportation facilities that
could be afforded. Teams were busy hauling from the terminus of the
railroad at Tucson and at Benson, until, in October, 1882, there was
completion of the New Mexico and Arizona railroad, then a Santa Fe
corporation, from Benson to Nogales, much of the way through the San
Pedro Valley, past St. David and the milling towns. The mines paid $30 a
cord for fuel wood and even $40 a ton for hay.
Lean days descended upon the community, however, in the early summer of
1886, when the great pumps of the Grand Central mine were stopped by
fire. The following year Tombstone practically was abandoned and the
market it had afforded was lost. Not till 1901 did the camp revive. It
closed again in June, 1903, by the drowning of the pumps. Latterly the
old mines, consolidated, have been worked to some extent by the
Phelps-Dodge Corporation, but again have been closed, early in April,
1921.