High-contrast monochrome archival photograph of two 19th-century Old West prospectors with pickaxes inspecting silver ore veins on a rugged Arizona mountain slope.
High-contrast monochrome archival photograph of two 19th-century Old West prospectors with pickaxes inspecting silver ore veins on a rugged Arizona mountain slope.
High-contrast monochrome historical photograph of a chaotic 19th-century frontier saloon fight, showing a prospector being struck over the head with a wooden chair.
High-contrast monochrome historical photograph of a chaotic 19th-century frontier saloon fight, showing a prospector being struck over the head with a wooden chair.
High-contrast monochrome vintage portrait of a 19th-century Old West couple getting married outside a wooden frontier church in Arizona.
High-contrast monochrome vintage portrait of a 19th-century Old West couple getting married outside a wooden frontier church in Arizona.
High-contrast monochrome photograph of a small 1880s Old West mining town nestled in rugged mountains with two wooden mining shaft hoists prominent on the hillside behind the buildings.
High-contrast monochrome photograph of a small 1880s Old West mining town nestled in rugged mountains with two wooden mining shaft hoists prominent on the hillside behind the buildings.
High-contrast monochrome historical illustration of a wooden 19th-century silver processing mill engulfed in heavy fire and smoke at night in the Arizona mountains.
High-contrast monochrome historical illustration of a wooden 19th-century silver processing mill engulfed in heavy fire and smoke at night in the Arizona mountains.
High-contrast monochrome macro photograph of complex silver-zinc sulfide mineral ore samples sitting alongside antique 1880s mining surveying equipment.
High-contrast monochrome macro photograph of complex silver-zinc sulfide mineral ore samples sitting alongside antique 1880s mining surveying equipment.

Two Prospectors Find Silver!

Tragedy in the Old West

A Combined Family

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

Sabotage and Conflict

Zinc Metallurgy and Copper Era

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 mill was sabotaged and burned to the ground, the Superintendent (Mr. Helling) absconded with mine assets, 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 their land, during the shutdown the mines flooded with water, and then several of the mine principals filed lawsuits against each other which prevented rebuilding the mill.

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 all entered a high-grade silver/zinc-sulfide zone. In those days smelters hated zinc, if your ore concentrates had too much zinc the smelters would completely refuse it. So, even if they did spend the money to re-build the mill, mills of the 1880s could not remove zinc from silver concentrates. This made the ore more and more worthless the deeper they went. And second, almost all silver mining in Arizona (not just 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 is 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.

The Old West History of the Pioneer (the 1800s)