Tall Tale or True Story: How the Bryan Mountains got their name.

Kirk Bryan was born in 1847, in Swansea, Wales. Small Kirk grew up in the shadow of Swansea’s giant smelter. He ran the cobbled streets with the other small boys pinching potatoes, leeks and apples from the market stalls and grubbing for flakes of copper in the slag from the smelter. Sometimes he went down to the wharves to filch fish, marvel at the ships and dream of the places they might take him.

Like many of his compatriots, at the tender age of 8, small Kirk was sent to work at the smelter. His tasks consisted of fetching and carrying coal, sweeping coal dust and scrubbing things that had been blackened by coal. Unlike most of his compatriots, small Kirk paid attention, not to the working of the smelter but to the stories of the men who brought the ore in to be smelted. One day, Kirk heard a story that sounded almost too fantastical to be true. The story went something like this…

A former soldier turned miner named Peter R. Brady had sent a shipment of ore all the way from Ajo, Arizona in the United States of America. Brady had hauled his ore from his Ajo mine by wagon to Gila Bend, then floated it down the Gila River to Yuma. From here the ore had boarded a ship down the Gulf of California, and finally been carried all the way around Cape Horn and across the Atlantic Ocean to Wales and the Swansea smelter. This one shipment of ore netted Brady the kingly sum of $5,000.

Five thousand dollars seemed like a fortune to a boy who was used to stealing leeks, and indeed, in 1856, it was. Small Kirk had to get to Ajo. It took a little while to find a ship in need of a cabin boy, but in 1860, not quite so small, 13 year-old Kirk got himself a place on a privateer bound for the Caribbean.

For 3 years Kirk plied the waters of the Caribbean with the crew of the privateer. Now he was grown, and he had a little money in his pocket. He said goodbye to the privateering life and put ashore permanently at Vera Cruz, Mexico. Now he could read a map and orient himself with the sun, the moon and the stars. He headed north and west towards the Sonoran Desert and Ajo.

Kirk Bryan crossed the US/Mexico border in the spring of 1865, he had just turned 18 years old.

The border Bryan crossed bore no resemblance to the border today. There was no “port of entry,” no checkpoints, no Border Patrol and, certainly, no wall. Aside from the boundary stones put out by the Boundary Survey Commission 10 years earlier, following the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, the border was just an imaginary line in the Sonoran sand.

The Ajo that Bryan rode into that spring also bore no resemblance to the Ajo of today. For a start, it was not even in the same location. In 1865, the Ajo townsite, and to call it a townsite is being generous, was located where the open pit mine is today, on three little hills. The “townsite” consisted of a few tent shacks thrown up next to their attendant small mining claims.

Two men sat in the shade of their tent shack sharing a bottle of nondescript spirits, they beckoned Bryan over. These two drinking buddies were John Growler and Frederick Wall. Wall and Growler had started and abandoned hundreds of prospects across what is now known as the Growler Mining District, so far they had failed to strike it rich. 

For the next 5 years, Bryan dug, blasted, shoveled, sorted, dragged, loaded and transported ore for Wall and Growler. The work was hot, hard, repetitive, long, exhausting and only occasionally paid. Bryan learned how to tell a good prospect from a bad one, how to identify different metals in the rock, how to follow a seam of gold, silver or copper, and how to speak Spanish. He was ready to strike out on his own, but not so fast….where to strike?

Many small claims in Ajo were being consolidated by the larger speculators There was no room for a lone operator there. Bryan knew the Growler District too well, aside from the proliferation of claims, he knew that the prospects had very low yields. Bryan determined to explore the desert to the West of the Growler along the Camino del Diablo.

Kirk Bryan's map of the Ajo area and Camino del Diablo

In 1870, the Camino del Diablo was the domain of notorious Mexican outlaw, Cipriano Ortega. Ortega and his posse rode the trail robbing and sometimes murdering unwary travelers. Bryan was not looking to get robbed or murdered, so the decided to join Ortega’s posse. He had, after all, some experience in Ortega’s line of work from his time as a privateer. Bryan said goodbye to Ajo and to Growler and Wall, pretty much in the same state he had found them, sitting in the shade drinking. He headed South to Ortega’s hacienda at Santo Domingo.

Ortega was always looking for recruits, with his fluent Spanish, high seas experience, knowledge of the desert, and youthful enthusiasm (Bryan was still only 23) he was a perfect candidate. 

Riding with Ortega was not like it appears in Spaghetti Western movies. For starters there were no saloons, brothels, or gambling houses on the Camino. There was little water and where there was water, in natural tinajas, it was covered in a green scum and made terrible coffee. After long hot days, the nights were cold and the ground was covered in cholla buds, cats claw thorns and those painful little burs and pokies from the dried desert grasses and flowers, that pricked through bedrolls, pants and even boots. Still as the only trail from Sonora to California the pickings on the Camino were good. Bryan meticulously stitched his share into the lining of his saddle bags. Equally meticulously, he mapped the mountains and noted potential prospects.

Born in 1832, by 1873, Ortega was not a young man. Now his Santo Domingo hacienda and his mining interests were making money and demanding more of his time and attention. Ortega disbanded his posse and settled down to rule his empire from Santo Domingo. Bryan was fine with this arrangement. He had what he wanted, enough money to buy mining tools and an idea of where to stake his claims.

Leaving Ortega , Bryan headed northwest. He stopped at Dunbar’s store to purchase mining tools and at Quitobaquito Springs for water and food. Here he met Lupe Orozco. From the Springs he traveled on the, now familiar, Camino to Agua Dulce before turning North towards his destination, a small strip of mountains separated from a larger range called the Mohawks. On this small range he staked his first claim by securing a stick with a pile of rocks so it stood up out of the ground and placing an empty tin can over the top of the stick.

Kirk Bryan settled into the mountains that today bear his name. He dug a well. He built a two-room adobe house and a small corral for his horse. His prospects yielded, if not a fortune, enough to live on. He married Lupe Orozco . He traveled into Santo Domingo or Ajo for food and other supplies. Often, he stopped for a night or two of drinking and reminiscing with Growler and Wall. Sometimes he even went North to Gila Bend or West to Yuma for some special need or if he had a particularly good load of ore.

In 12 years, Lupe and Kirk had nine children. Their names have been lost to history. Two died in infancy, another one in childhood and six survived. They went along well enough until the summer of 1885. On August 19, 1885, Lupe died. Not wanting to stay in the desert without her, Kirk took the children to live with their relatives at Quitobaquito and went back to the wandering ways of his early years.

The Civil War was over. The Southern Pacific Railroad had been built. Kirk Bryan took the railroad to Texas and from there to the bustling city of St. Louis, Missouri.

St. Louis, in 1887, had its fair share of saloons and, perhaps more than, its fair share of speculators. One of these speculators was a man named AJ Shotwell. Shotwell was a gambler and a con-man and he had a mark, John Boddie. One evening, over a glass of whiskey, Kirk Bryan met AJ Shotwell. As they got drunker, they got more voluble and together they hatched a plan.

The plan was this…Bryan would talk up Ajo mining to the mark, John Boddie. Shotwell would gather a group of investors to launch a copper mining company in Ajo. Boddie would be the biggest investor. Bryan and Shotwell would go to Ajo to “supervise mining operations.” They would mine just enough ore to keep Boddie’s money flowing into the venture and then, once they had accumulated a large enough amount, they would split it and split.

Bryan was known in Ajo, although he had not been seen there for a couple of years, his name and face might be recognized. He needed a new identity, so Professor Fred L. McGahn was born. 

Boddie took the bait. Armed with Boddie’s initial $15,000 investment Shotwell and Bryan/McGahn set up the St. Louis Copper Company and set off back to Ajo. The Ajo that Bryan/McGahn and AJ Shotwell rode into in 1890, was now a bustling little town. In addition to the miners, ranchers and vaqueros, Manuel Levy had opened a store in the townsite, Dona Liberata Rodriguez brought wagon loads of goods to sell from Mexico and Jeff Milton had set up a customs station. One thing had not changed, Growler and Wall, a little older, a little more sunburnt and a lot more paunchy were still sitting in their usual spot with their usual bottle.

Needless to say, the St. Louis Copper Company was a failure, it was supposed to be a failure. The prospects tapped out almost as soon as they were dug and the ore veins they found proved to be of very low quality. Shotwell wired back to Boddie in St. Louis, they needed more money. Boddie was obliging, another $15,000 was forthcoming. Shotwell organized the Rescue Copper Company, to save the St. Louis Copper Company. The Rescue Copper Company fared no better than its predecessor.

Now Shotwell and Bryan/McGahn were getting greedy. They decided to take one big gamble to try and double their money before they quit. It had to be good.

Bryan thought back to his days at the smelter in Swansea. There was still no smelter in Ajo, ore was now traveling by rail instead of wagon and to other parts of the US rather than to Wales, but it was still a long, expensive and dangerous journey. What if they built a smelter in Ajo?

The McGahn Vacuum Smelter

In 1900, Professor Fred L. McGahn unveiled his blueprint for the McGahn Vacuum Smelter. It is worth remembering here that small Kirk Bryan spent all his time at the Swansea smelter dreaming of far-away lands, not learning how the smelter worked. McGahn’s idea was so simple it would have been beautiful if it had had any chance at all of ever working. Theoretically, the ore would be melted in a giant vat with spigots at different levels that would draw off the pure gold, silver and copper. The smelter would also be self-fueling, using gases that escaped from the ore to fire the furnace that melted the ore.

Shotwell wired Boddie again. Boddie sent $34,000 for the smelter project.

The “smelter” was built under conditions of the greatest secrecy. The project had excited the curiosity of miners from all around Ajo, Shotwell and Bryan/McGahn did not want too much curiosity.

They also needed to cover the cost of building the smelter, preferably without taping into their $34,000. They invited the local miners to stake small claims in the smelter in return for an early place in line to have their ore smelted on opening day.

THE MCGAHN VACUUM SMELTER

OPENING DAY APRIL 1, 1901

AT 8 O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

LINE SPOTS STARTING AT $10 

April 1, 1901 dawned warm and sunny. Miners from Ajo, Sonoyta, Gunsight, Quijotoa and as far away as Bisbee, in fact every mining district except Growler, lined up ready for the great moment of the launch of the smelter. The clock ticked to 8 o’clock. There was no sign of Shotwell or Bryan/McGahn. Everyone waited a bit. Time moved on. The day started to heat up. People started shifting on their feet. Someone decided to go to the Rescue Copper Company tent and look for the two men, maybe something had happened to them. A trio of miners headed for the tent calling out “Mr. Shotwell!” “Professor!” There was no answer. Finally, one of the men pulled back the flap of the tent. It was empty.

Shotwell and Bryan had vanished into the desert, with all the money. Only two men had seen them go. Growler and Wall had recognized Professor McGahn as Kirk Bryan. That is why there was no Growler ore in the line for the launch of the vacuum smelter. Grizzled and grey, Growler and Wall watched through bleary eyes as Shotwell and Bryan slipped out of Ajo by moonlight.

____________________________________________________________________________

Is this a TALL TALE or a TRUE STORY? You decide in the comments below......