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Vulture City

Updated June 23, 2019 | By Matthew Christopher

The history of Vulture City, the most significant ghost town in Arizona, reads like a dime store western novel, full of Apache raids and stagecoach robberies. Attempting to find any concrete truth buried in a never-ending stream of conflicting and inaccurate accounts feels a little like panning for flecks of gold in a nearly barren claim. The surviving structures there were not built to last as long as they have either, and, much like the city’s past itself, they are disappearing beneath desert’s shifting sands. The Vulture Mine, which necessitated the surrounding town, is the most profitable mine in the state’s history, having produced an estimated 340,000 ounces of gold and 240,000 ounces of silver. During its operations from 1863 to 1942 it has been said the mine generated anywhere from $30 million to $200 million (like many things related to it, there are nearly as many differing accounts as there are sources) and is directly responsible for the foundation of the nearby cities of Wickenburg and Phoenix – yet prosperity itself created violence, and the man who discovered the mine ultimately wound up destitute and ended his own life.

The California Gold Rush began in 1848 when a foreman found the precious metal in the tailrace of a lumber mill in Coloma, located about 36 miles from the fort that was the city of Sacramento’s origin. This revelation was still unknown to the general public nine days later when a peace treaty was signed with Mexico, ending the Spanish-American War with concessions that included ceding the territories of California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Colorado. While the mill’s owner tried to keep the discovery a secret, within a year the news had spread across the globe, and a flood of prospectors descended upon the west coast. Thus began one of the region’s bloodiest epochs, as lawlessness and greed ran rampant and conflicts with Native Americans over land usage and hunting areas prompted massacres by both sides that only seemed to escalate in brutality. It was clearly a fight for survival on the part of the Native American tribes: between 1845 and 1870 it is estimated that 80% of their population in the territories were slaughtered, as the population of settlers in San Francisco alone soared from 500 to 150,000 in a comparable period.

While the influx of immigrants in California rapidly birthed cities to house them, much of present-day Arizona was still remote and barren until railroads reached the area in 1880. Still, with miners traveling through the region more frequently, the population was increasing and in 1863 it split off from New Mexico to become its own territory. This was also the year that the Prussian prospector Henry Wickenburg discovered the quartz ledge that clued him in to the presence of gold.

Henry Wickenburg was born Johannes Henricus Wickenburg in 1819 in a Prussian coal mining town. Henry and his brother mined coal on their own land until their farm was raided by the government in a dispute over mineral rights. He decided to emigrate to America shortly after at the age of 27, travelling from New York to San Francisco five years after the initial discovery of gold there. He joined a party searching for gold in the Arizona Territory in 1862, settling near Hassayampa River in a small town that now is a city of over 6,000 residents, and still bears Wickenburg’s name.

There are multiple stories about how Wickenburg found gold. In the most common variation, he threw a rock at a burro that was either refusing to move or trying to escape. The rock missed and split, and Wickenburg noticed gold inside of it. In another, a vulture he shot fell onto an outcropping with gold. The third is that he simply noticed the white quartz in an outcropping large enough to see miles away, and, knowing that gold is often found with white quartz, decided to investigate. In some stories, Wickenburg was close to starving at the time of the discovery and vultures were circling over him, so he named the mine after them. Whatever the case might be, he staked a claim on the land and began working the mine alone, most likely unaware that his breakthrough would change thousands of lives.

The area was barren, inhospitable, and under constant threat of attack. Water and food had to be brought from the Hassayampa settlement 15 miles away, and the outbreak of the Civil War resulted in Federal troops withdrawing from the area. Attacks by Yavapai and Tonto Apache tribes were frequent and ferocious, and yet prospectors who hadn’t found riches in California were coming to the area in increasing numbers. The newcomers were asserting ownership over tribal land and their agricultural techniques were playing havoc on tribes’ food-gathering abilities. The genocide in California, where the state itself was offering bounties on the scalps of Native American men, women, and children, must have added a certain level of desperation and anger to the efforts to drive off the encroaching white men who were going to such insane lengths to procure a mere metal.

Despite the attacks, Vulture City sprung up around the mine and stamping mills were brought in to refine the ore. Henry Wickenburg contributed funds to the Swilling Irrigating Canal Company to help supply food and water for those arriving at Vulture City and Wickenburg; the farm community it produced was based on an ancient system of canals, and christened Phoenix in reference to the new town rising from the old civilization’s ashes.

Life on the frontier was unforgiving. Gold ore had to be transported to a smelter at Wickenburg and often the wagon trains were attacked and robbed. Theft and high grading – keeping the best grades of ore rather than turning them in – were common. In fact, it is believed that the infamous Lost Dutchman Mine, which at least 19 have died searching for, was just a fabrication invented by Jacob Walzer so he could sell gold he stole from the Vulture Mine. Most of the stories of the town during the early years are of horrors: a man killed and another maimed in a mine explosion, for example, or an attack where assailants who were thought to be Apaches but may well have been white men in disguises opened fire with Spencer and Henry rifles on a passing mail stagecoach, riddling it with bullets. Six were killed (including a young correspondent from a Boston literary magazine), one of whom was scalped; a man and a woman were badly injured but survived the attack and had to travel nine miles in the desert until they found a stage returning to Wickenburg that rescued them. One article went so far as to suggest the survivors themselves orchestrated the attack. In a letter to the Weekly Arizona Miner (Prescott, Arizona) in 1868, A. Barnett wrote of the situation in Wickenburg, “Our population numbers about 400, and, night and day, all are in danger of losing their lives and property by Indians. Our Mills are doing as well as ever. People are arriving here from Texas, California, and other States… What security have we for life and property? The Indians can come here at night and kill us. We cannot watch them, at night, as every man here works during the day, and needs rest at night.”

Another article in the Weekly Arizona Miner in 1872 recounts a list of grievances: “Soon they will have read our account of the recent attack on a freight train, near Wickenburg, and the wounding, by Indians, of one of the teamsters; of the Indian break near the Vulture Mine, where another White man, while attending to his business, was shot down by the red assassins; of the attack upon Messrs. Saunders and McCloud and of their narrow escape from death or captivity; of the butchery of S. T. Cullumber and Thomas Harris, in their own house, near Camp Date Creek, within a very short distance of a military post where, for a long time past, Indians have been fed and treated in a manner every way calculated to allay the savage hatred they are known to entertain for their White neighbors. And later still we have news of the shooting down of another White man, near Camp Verde…”

The settlers clearly felt they were the victims of the “savages” whose land they were seizing, but by 1873 the Prescott area alone was said to have 7,300 mines. Vulture City was performing exceedingly well. Outside investors were sought and Henry Wickenburg decided to sell his 80% share of the mine in 1875 for $85,000 to a group of investors (who would later become the Vulture Mining Company) represented by Benjamin Phelps. Wickenburg was given $20,000 and a note for the remaining $65,000, but the new owners disputed his title to the property and refused to pay on the note. Wickenburg spent the money he did receive on lawyers, unsuccessfully trying to get the Vulture Mining Company to honor their agreement. Many gold veins were quickly exhausted. This is said to have prompted Wickenburg’s decision to sell, but it was not the case with the seemingly endless bounty at the Vulture Mine. Wickenburg regretted his decision to sell for the rest of his life.

Vulture City’s population peaked at 5,000. In 1880, it had a number of offices and buildings related to the mine, general stores, saloons and brothels, a butcher selling 10,000 pounds of meat a month, fruit stands, a cook house and mess hall, a blacksmith shop, boarding houses, even a school. The town was also home to an old ironwood tree that 18 men were hung on throughout its history. Henry Wickenburg held numerous jobs in the area including Vulture City’s Postmaster, a school inspector, a judge, and the Justice of the Peace. In 1890 a recently constructed dam on the Hassayampa burst after heavy rains, sending a 100-foot wall of water crashing downstream towards Wickenburg. The messenger who was sent to warn the town got drunk along the way and forgot. Between 70 and 150 people were killed, and Henry Wickenburg’s farm was destroyed. Along with several other residents he pressed a lawsuit against the water company and the dam’s builders, neither of which resulted in any compensation for the loss. Over his remaining years, Wickenburg donated what was left of his property to the town named after him. Broke and melancholy, in 1905 he went out to a grove behind his house and shot himself in the head with his 32-caliber Colt revolver. The present town of Wickenburg surrounds his grave.

The Vulture Mining Company continued operations at Vulture Mine in the years that followed. In 1923 another tragedy struck when “personal miners,” employees who secretly worked off the clock and kept what they found, chipping away at ore in support columns and caused a cave-in. Roughly a hundred feet of rock collapsed on them, creating an enormous depression on the hill that came to be known as the Glory Hole. The area experienced a resurgence when a building contractor who decided to try his hand at prospecting made a gold strike in 1930 while following a hunch through a ravine. A new, albeit smaller gold rush began as men desperate for work and wealth during the Depression flocked to the area. While I have no evidence to support my own hunch, it seems that the influx of new residents might financially benefit someone such as a building contractor. A year later the Vulture Mining Company was claimed have found new traces of gold in a 490-foot exploratory shaft.

The Vulture Mine was closed for good in 1942 with all other gold mines, as the federal government directed all resources towards the war effort. The decision was appealed and it reopened briefly, but closed again not long after. Vulture City was abandoned. The town of Wickenburg stayed afloat in part through dude ranches where tourists could come to experience the Old West, and through events like the Wickenburg Gold Rush in 1955, where $4,000 of low grade gold ore was dumped in the river and 10,000 visitors converged in the town to pan for it. The mine was sold several times; the last record of a sale I can find is in 1970 to the owners of a menswear store in Scottsdale. John and Marge Osborne became the property’s caretakers, living in a mine supervisor’s house. For a minimal fee visitors can wander the remnants of Vulture City unsupervised. It’s a vastly different experience than some highly regulated ruins that have been turned to tourist attractions, compromising authenticity for safety; many of the buildings are collapsing, with only your common sense to prevent you from going up to these areas for a closer look.

My odyssey there was attended by the merciless heat of a summer afternoon, with only the ubiquitous jackrabbits and lizards keeping me company as I hiked through the scattered shells of the blacksmith’s shop, Assay Office, power plant, and boarding houses. There is a sense of impermanence here; I doubt the crude wooden structures that remain will hold up much longer, and when they are gone only the wildly contradictory legends will remain. Maybe in some ways it is fitting that any hope at accurately describing the region’s past is swallowed with the city itself by time: there is a legend that those who drink the waters of the Hassayampa never tell the truth again, and after many hours of frustrating research I am inclined to believe it. There was no way to tell if the remaining artifacts in the buildings have been staged or not (or even whether they were introduced for effect after the mine closed), just as there is no way to tell if the lore surrounding many of the dates and occurrences is trustworthy. It is a sometimes vexing aspect to searching for the traces of events long gone: you rely on sources that may or may not be accurate, from people who may or may not have their own agendas. While you can hope that more academic volumes reference moderately reliable sources, the further out on the frontiers that you get, the more questionable and inconsistent the facts become.

Vulture City was a reality, founded on one man’s discovery and hard work. It was ultimately swindled from him, and in the mad dash for wealth many, many people died. These are the things I know for sure. Beyond that, it is a peaceful place now, and likes to keep its secrets.