In February of 1876 two old west prospectors – George Scott and John Brannaman – discovered the Pioneer silver deposit in the Southern foothills of Arizona’s Pinal Mountains.

Later, the next year, John Brannaman was tending bar in the nearby settlement of Globe and got involved in a dispute over a card game. In what can only be described as a quintessential old-west scenario, the dispute escalated into a saloon brawl where one of the card players beat John Brannaman over the head with a chair until he died. The killer, Jack Gordon, fled the scene before he could be arrested. He was eventually tracked down and killed by Jack Swilling (who is known to Arizona history as the founder and father of the City of Phoenix).

John's widow Elizabeth, who was left with four small children, then married her husband’s partner George.

Elizabeth and George Scott eventually made their fortune from selling the Pioneer claims.

Three Mines, One Town

Theft and Conflict

Zinc Metallurgy and the decline of Silver Mining

By 1881 a town had grown up around the Pioneer silver deposit and there were three mines taking out ore from the Pioneer veins within 600 feet of each other – the Pioneer, the South Pioneer, and the Great Republic. The Pioneer mines went on to produce rich ore and great wealth for a short few years.

Then, just when things seemed to be going great, the mines shut down in the mid-1880s.

There are several factors that occurred almost simultaneously that caused the shutdown:

The mine Superintendent (Mr. Helling) absconded with the mine's mill to another Arizona mine that offered him a fortune to mill their mine's ore instead of Pioneer's ore.

The forger/fraudster James Reavis filed a lawsuit claiming that he owned this portion of Arizona through a forged Spanish land grant document and began demanding that all of the mines in the area pay him to mine on what he said was his land.

There was a miner's strike and during the shutdown the mines flooded with water.

And, after the "money guy" in San Francisco died (Major Baldwin), several of the mine officials filed lawsuits against each other. This prevented resumption of company operations until the lawsuits cleared the court system.

There were two major factors, however, that were the most significant in preventing the mines from re-opening:

First, as the mines reached below the 200 foot deep level they each entered a high-grade silver/zinc-sulfide zone. In those days smelters hated zinc. If a mine's ore had too much zinc the smelters would completely refuse it. So, even if Pioneer miners did spend the money to re-build the mill, mills of the 1880s did not have the technology to remove zinc from silver concentrates. This made the ore more and more worthless the deeper they went -- even though silver grades stayed high.

Second, almost all silver mining in Arizona (not just at the Pioneer) shut down in the late 1880s as efforts to revive the national silver standard failed and investor interest in silver mining waned. There was only so much mining investment money to go around, and as America began to be powered by electricity and the hunger for copper grew, copper mining captured the interest of almost all of the investors in Arizona mines. Silver was king in Arizona for about 1 decade, but copper has been the undisputed king for the 14 decades since then.