Mohave County miner., 1910-10-08
Town Must Vanish Before Onslaught
of Seekers For Gold.

" SSSNSaS ~ ~NShS"
Lust for gold will soon cause the
abandonment of the little Mexican
hamlet of San Antonio, on the east
bank OF the Yaqui river between La
Dura and Tonichi, in the state Sonora,
say a number of mining men who have
recently returned from the new Yaqui
river placer and quartz district.
Two hundred years ago a band of
hardy priests and their proselytes built
a small chapel in the center of the
present site of San Antonio and plant
ed the standard of the cross amid the
fierce and warlike camps of the Yaqui
Indians, who were living at the time
in the upper Yaqui valley.
AS the years passed by the town
grew in size and became a stopping
point for the travellers and explorers
in their Journeying through the val
ley, with its rich placers and fabulous
wealth of quartz mines. The old m
dian workings in La Dura were re-
sumed by the Mexicans, who thought
they had found the ''Golfo de Oro. :"
spoken of in the chronicles of Monte
yuma, and the gold seekers poured in
from all parts of the republic on a
wealth adventure. almost at the first
cry of discovery.
San Antonio was founded early in
the eighteenth century, in the days
when the Spanish don drove the sons
of the Incas before him in the never
ended quest of gold. 1t had its days
of Spanish dominion, its days of mis-
sionary zeal, its nights of native pill
lage and fire, its year of Yaqui fear.
Out of this turmoil of history is left a
village of 100 families, who are miners
and tillers of the soil in the Yaqui
river valley. The mountains that rise
on the bluffs above the river supplied
the Spanish colOnists of the early days
with a great quantity of the precious
metal that found its way into the suf-
fetos of noted cathedrals and the cof-
fers of the Spanish crown. Every now
and then, following the heavy rains, a
landslide exposes to view an opening
high up on the cliffs which is the
mouth of one of these ancient mines
1t is but a natural consequence that
where the country is so highly miner
allied with gold, the river bed and val
ley should prove profitable as a placer
field, and it is in the truth of this fact
that the fate of San Antonio is sealed.
During the Yaqui Indian troubles, it
is curious fact that while the Yaquis
killed and drove out of the rich placers
in this region during the days of the
uprisings, the Mexicans, they permit
ted the Chinese to 90 onto the ground
and work it. What the Chinese have
taken out of this ground will never be
known, but it has whetted their appe-
tites for placer mining to such an ex-
tent that they are now always the first
to go into any region where placer
ground is discovered.
The San Antonio placer is an old
channel of the Yaqui river, which has
shifted its course. The Spaniards
worked down the gulches from the
mountains flowing into this bed, and
the bed itself, the Chinese following
the same methods. But when the
level of the workings got below the
underground flow of the Yaqui river,
operations had 10 be abandoned. Her.
man Wendler, a New York engineer
representing Eastern capital, is now
testing out this ground to depth with
Keystone drills. The values have
been found to run high enough to war
rant operations with dredges on a
large scale. San Antonio is located
on a portion of the area included in