The Anaconda standard. [volume] (Anaconda, Mont.) 1889-1970, 1899-07-16
RICH MEN IN THE WEST
Some Huge Fortunes Made on
Cattle and Sheep Ranges.
MILLIONAIRE PIONEERS
Who Dress, Look and Live Like Tramps
Without Any Idea OF How to En-
joy Their Vast wealth-Some
Are Unable to Read
From the San Francisco Chronicle.

There are several rich old miners and
cattlemen in Arizona and New Mexico
whose lives upset the commonly &C
cepted ideas in the eastern mind con-
corning the conduct of newly made
wealthy men in the West. Six or seven
men in the territories, who have made
great fortunes in f1ocks and herds and
mines and lands and are adding thou
sands of dollars to their several estates
every year, are so strangely economical,
live so primitivey and know so few
if any, of the joys, spirit and aspira-
tons of ordinary men of wealth that
they are picturesque.
For example, there is Benjamin Wat
ters, the millionaire sheep and wool
king of San Miguel county, New Mex
leo. His income is variously estimated
at from $4,000 to $780, 10000 a year, and
he spends less than S400 of it in living
and dress. He owns thousands of
acres of land, has a share in rich coal
| fields at Cerillos, and holds a number
of $4,000 and 100000 mortgages. He is
little, dried-up man, with an enor-
| nous white beard and long white hair.
He was '49-er from Maine. He has
| lived among the mountains and with
his fockS for 40 years, and has never
altered his manner of living while his
wealth has been piling up. He goes to
Santa Fe or Lamy or Cerillos on horse
back twice a month to transact bust
ness with his bankers and to collect in
terest and dividends from his coal prop
critics. That Is his only intercourse
with the busy world, from which he
and his fiocks live wholly apart. All
he knows is sheep and the value of
land for grazing purposes. He sleeps
iv, h lie nnh t III.
takes him. Once, a few years ago,
when he had over $4,000 on deposit in
one bank in Santa Fe, he refused to
pay rs cents for lodging at hotel in
town and went and slept in horse
barn.
The richest man in Southern Arizona
lives at the little Mexican hamlet of
Orc Blanco, in the extreme southern
part Of Pima county, close upon the
boundary line between the United
States and Mexico. He is James A.
Robinson; his age is nearly 81 years,
and his wealth Is variously estimated
from $1,200,00 to $1,S0O,00 for no one
knows about all the old gentlemens
vast possessions in mines, cattle and
lands. He owns 10000 acres of grazing
land in Sonora and has several blocks
of land in Guaymas.
Lazy and ancient Orc Blanco is about
the last community in the country
where one would look for the residence
of a Yankee-born millionaire 1t is a
mere huddle of one-story mud struc-
lures as primitive as the homes of the
Pueblo Indians. There are not four
wooden floors in the hamlet. 1t con-
tains only two little stores, each with
saloon adjuncts, and one blacksmith
shop The sparse population is over
four-fifths Mexican. Yet Black Jim
Robinson, as he is known all over the
region, has made his home in Orc
Blanco for 80 years, and will probably
never live anywhere else. He was on
his way in an oX-team wagon to the
Pacific coast by the Sante Fe trail in
1860, when possibilities of making
money in cattle came to him. Forth
with he abandoned the emigrant train
and has been living in Arizona ever
since. He has been through many In
dian campaigns and has had fights for
his life and property with Mexican and
half-breed outlaws that would make
hair-raisins narratives. All the finan-
cial ups and downs of frontier life have
been his, but about 1875 he proved his
title to $4,000 acres of land about where
he lives, and he settled down to cattle
ranching.
For 20 years Black Jim Robinson has
netted an annual income of $4,000,
while he and his family have been liv-
ing on a few hundred dollars each year.
ried 30 years ago, and he has four sons
and five daughters, but only three re-
main at the parental home. All the
others have married into Mexican fami-
lies and live in shanties and mud
houses along the border, just like the
sons and daughters of the poorest cow
punchers and sheep herders in the re-
gion. The adobe homestead would be
dear at $3.50. The children in this rich
cattlemans family have always slept
in hunks; the tables and chairs have
been made of pine by Indians, and doz-
ems of articles in the line of furniture
that the eastern household deems abso-
Lutte necessities have never been SO
much as dreamed of in Jim Robinsons
| home at Orc Blanco.
The old couple dress in the same
| coarse, rude garment as of old. The old
man wears overalls and a Bingham
shirt all the time, except occasionally,
| when buyer for a Chicago or Kansas
| City packing house comes from Nogales
| railroad station, 30 miles across the hot,
| dusty plain, to talk over a $50, 600 or
| $40, 900 cattle transaction in the kitchen
of the old mud house. Then Robinson
may put a threadbare and faded coat
that he bought fully 20 years ago in
Tucson. His library consists of a cat
tlemans guide and a volume of receipts
for curing horses and cattle diseases
His family never reads newspaper,
buys no furniture, KNOWS nOlnlnS OF
bric-a- brac or many of the ordinary
home comforts. His only luxury is plug
tobacco. He and his wife have not been
over 100 miles away from ORC Blanco
in many years. Two of his boys cannot
read or write, so closely confined have
they been with the herds among the
foothills and canyons all their lives.
Patrick Driscoll, who owns four of
the best paying silver and gold mines
in the Chloride valley of Mohave coun-
ty, Arizona territory, is reported to be
worth about 100000. His income from
mines is about $500 a month, and he has
interests in the lumber companies at
Williams besides a block of stocks in
the Santa Fe, Prescott and Phoenix
railroad that pays him handsome divi-
dends every six months. He is a bach
elor-without kith or kin in the world
that he knows of-and he spends on
himself less than $50 month.
Everybody in and about Clifton and