Into this wilderness land of ambushed death, Ed Schieffelin, unknown as yet to fame or fortune, came as a civilian scout in , with a flying column recruited in the Hualapai country on the borders of the Grand Canyon and under the command of Al Sieber, celebrated in Apache campaigns as one of the greatest government scouts of the Southwest. The troopers made their headquarters at Camp Huachuca, a newly established army post at the north end of the Huachuca range, and scoured the country round about for Indians.
Eastward across the San Pedro Valley from the post, a group of high hills cut the skyline. Unlovely hills, treeless, their brown slopes a dreary monotony of huge rocks and boulders among which cactus and greasewood made hard shift to live. A sheer desert tumultuously uplifted and set on edge. There was a look of frank poverty about them. One sweep of the eye took them in. No dark, mysterious gorges, no hidden pockets, no shadowy valleys invited curious investigation. Spaniards of Coronado’s time coming up from Mexico on their quest for the Seven Cities of Cibola had passed them by with only an incurious glance. Scouts had threaded through them, troops of cavalry had circled them, Mexican smugglers had camped in their lower draws. But no one had suspected that their drab pauper’s mantle was only a masquerade hiding one of the continent’s richest treasures. They were hills of silver, veined through and through with ore of fabulous richness, filled to the cactus roots and ready to burst with precious metal. One rip of their sides with a miner’s pick and the hoarded wealth would have come gushing forth in resplendent flood. But their hour had not yet struck. The man with the pick had not yet arrived.
On one of their scouting expeditions from Camp Huachuca, Al Sieber and his men rode through the northern reaches of these hills. Schieffelin’s eye caught the gleam of deep mineral stains on a stone. He dismounted and examined the piece of float intently. Silver! Schieffelin looked up in astonishment at the piled-up ugliness of the range. For one skeptical moment, the squalid ridges seemed a sky-high lie. He shook his head. It was impossible. And yet … He dropped the chunk of rock in his coat pocket and rode on after his comrades. He said nothing. But his secret thrilled him like wine. He would be a scout no longer. When the Apache hunt was over, he would turn prospector again and hit the trail for the end of the rainbow.
On his return to Camp Huachuca, Schieffelin rode off alone on his mule to seek his fortune. For a while, he made his headquarters with George Woolfolk, who had just taken up land on Barbacomari Creek, sleeping at Woolfolk’s place at night and going out every day into the hills. He found the spot where he had picked up the float, but he was unable to trace the rock to its source. Falling in with William Griffith and a partner who had come from Tucson to do assessment work on the old Brunckow mine, he was induced to stand guard for them against the danger of Indian attack while they completed their job in the shaft.
The old Brunckow house, a long three-room adobe, stood in a little bowl of a valley a mile east of the San Pedro River. Its history even then was long and romantic. It was built in by Frederick Brunckow, a native of Berlin, graduate of the University of Westphalia, scholar and scientist who, exiled from Germany because of his activities in the revolution of , had drifted out into these solitudes. Brunckow had begun to dig a mine near the house, and it had reached the depth of a grave when an Indian arrow toppled him over into it dead.
Science on that primitive frontier connoted a sort of magic, and a story spread that the German wizard, by occult divination, had located a vast treasure deep in the earth. So a long succession of adventurers came and dug in the shaft, but death was all any man-jack of them ever found. Two in addition to Brunckow were killed by Apaches, and claim-jumping fights over the worthless hole in the ground brought the toll of dead men, it is said, up to seventeen. But the myth of treasure deeper down still lives, and year after year assessment work is done to hold the claim. Nowadays, the old house and mine are said to be haunted. Travellers along the old Charleston road, it is declared, hear cries and groans at night or see shadowy forms stalking in the moonlight.
Here at the old Brunckow mine, Al Sieber riding up with a party of scouts found Schieffelin sitting on a pile of rock on guard with his rifle across his lap.
“What’re you doin’, Ed?” asked Sieber.
“Prospecting, mostly,” Schieffelin drawled.
“Whar?”
“Over yonder.” Schieffelin waved his hand eastward toward
