RANDOM THOUGHTS - Part II

A year and one month after joining San Rafael, in Aug, 1938, the company collapsed for the same reasons as at Santa Getrudis [or ‘Dos Carlos’ as it was later known]. These were:- The low price of silver, exhaustion of reserves of good grade ore in the mines and increased labour costs. Agreement was reached between the Company, the Government and the labour union to proceed to form a cooperative, similar to the one on trial at Dos Carlos and to be run by the union with Federal Government backing, using the entire plant, mines and mill, and all assets of the Company.

I was invited by the union bosses to remain as Mill Supt. to help them to run the mill, but I declined and consequently was without a job for two months until William Reed,
Manager of the Cia Minera de Los Azules offered me the post of Asst. Mill Supt. at their plant in Chihuahua.

The journey by car from Pachuca to the mine of Los Azules was eventful in that a hurricane had come ashore from the Gulf of Mexico and was blowing tree branches and debris across the highway by the time I had reached Valles, and the light rain had turned into a downpour. The car was lifting on its right hand wheels and speed was down to 60 kph. Victoria, reached about 4 pm, was flooded but wind had dropped as the eye of the storm passed overhead. My intention of staying the night in the main hotel proved impossible as the rooms were all full, even the stairs had occupants. So
I left for the north, and as evening fell, ran into the high winds beyond the eye and. partial flooding. Reaching the town of Linares about 9 pm, the principal hotel proved full, but a friendly petrol station owner who filled my depleted gas tank offered me a room in his house and a welcome bed. Next morning the storm had abated and sun was shining, so I drove on followed by a string of cars of tourists returning to the U.S.A. Just outside the town limits the highway bridge was washed away and the procession halted perforce until a temporary ramp could be built, allowing cars to descend to the river bed and cross to the other side as the water level dropped. Our cavalcade resumed its journey, until reaching the Rio Cabezones, where one complete span of the bridge had fallen and the depth of the swollen river prohibited passage of vehicles across the bed. Rapidly appraising the situation, I turned and headed back to Linares to get a room in the hotel before the other drivers could do so. We all stayed four days stranded, until the rivers could drop and we then learned that the storm had washed out ten bridges of the Pan American Highway, luckily causing no fatalities to human life.

During our enforced stay we spent hours drinking beer in the local pub discussing matters and I found myself in a heated argument with a citizen about the evil condition
of town roads, which were full of potholes. Later, it was disclosed that he was mayor of Linares and not amused by this criticism. On the fifth day we went as usual to see how the Cabezones river looked and found it much more promising, so I was able to chaffer with the owner of a bullock team to haul my Ford across with chains. In the deeper channel the water came up to my chest inside the car, but we got across - then of course the engine would not start. Later I arrived at another river minus a bridge and got another bullock team to haul the car across. Midday brought us to the outskirts of the City of Monterrey - another bridge out, but the Rio Catarina was fordable. Heading due west via Saltillo, Torreon, 360 km away, was reached at dusk and I headed for the nearest cafe to eat a gigantic meal, after which a stroll around the town revealed the presence of an amusement park, whose roller coaster proved irresistible.

The following day my Ford was loaded onto a flatcar and tied down for the rail journey
to Parral. The evening train conveyed me to the junction at Jimenez and at 6 am next morning connection was made on the branch line to Parral. The only excitement of this journey occurred when the train broke in half while crossing the barren desert and our rear section was left behind. The engine driver eventually became aware of having lost part of his convoy and returned slowly to recouple the tail end coaches and proceed to Parral, which had by then taken seven days to reach from Pachuca. The flatcar carrying my Ford arrived one week after that. From Parral it merely remained to make a two hour drive over the range of hills due west, past the mines and mill of San Francisco del Oro to reach the area of the mine called Los Azules, situated at the foot of a hunch back mountain called La Bufa. My advent was welcomed by the British Manager, Billy Reed, and quarters assigned for sleeping. All staff ate their meals in an adjoining mess.

The Los Azules Company was owned by German interests and supplied ore by electric haulage to the mill from the mines of EI Rayo and La Adela. A prospect shaft sunk in a nearby canyon and called La Descubridora had reached a depth of about 250 ft, but no payable ore had been found. The mill had a capacity of about 500 tons per day, two Krupp mills, jaw crusher, Symons short head crusher, table concentration cyanide plant, ore avg 10 gms gold [marginal], drum filters mill on one hill, filters on next hill.

After about three months, Margaret and the two children were able to come up from Pachuca to join me and we were assigned another company house. Living and working in the northernmost state of Mexico, which is also the largest - Chihuahua was very different from Hildalgo on the Central Plateau. Parral was about 2,000 ft lower than Pachuca, 5700 vs 7826 ft, the climate was drier and good water for bathing and cooking was very scarce. Our bathroom in Los Azules was supplied with mine water which was dark brown, smelly, loaded with copper salts and undrinkable. Water for cooking came from a spring at some distance from camp and was distributed to households in buckets.

About the only facility for sport was a concrete tennis court near the houses.
Native workmen came mostly from the Tarahumara tribe, whose country cousins wore short tunics, had bare legs and sandals, and carrying bows and arrows to hunt small game. Occasionally a few of these braves came through camp following ancestral trails, but were not troublesome, although curious. There was no school closer than Parral, some 70 miles to the east, so it was fortunate that Martin - four, and Charmian three were not yet old enough for kindergarten.

Returning to the workmen, the average operator in the mill seemed to have no concept of the passage of time or the importance of his presence on the job on his rostered shift. The necessary permission to absent himself for days at a time was not sought. He would eventually return to work with a bright smile and upon being reprimanded, would pipe up ‘I killed and cut up a pig’ as though this was reason enough. The prevailing dialect of Spanish had many words different from those prevailing down south. For instance ‘soga’ for reata [rope], ‘marrano’ for puerco [pig], ‘troca’ for camion [bus], ‘cono’ for quajolote [turkey], etc, which increased the difficulty of communication. Added to which, a small number had been across the border into the U.S.A. and learned some English, and consequently gave themselves airs and presuming to offer advice and criticism in that language.

In common with workers in every gold or silver camp, stealing was prevalent and difficult to combat. Miners would try and pilfer lumps of high grade ore, while mill workers went for precipitate or bullion - worth much more. Regarding the mine at Los Azules, years of extraction had left huge empty galleries, stopes and drifts beneath the mountain and management began to suspect that miners had discovered a secret entrance allowing them to sneak into the active stopes by night and purloin high grade ore. This was found after much searching to be a hole high up in an old tunnel on the far side of the hill above. A party of masons with materials loaded on donkeys was assembled and soon the hole was sealed with steel rails set in as huge concrete block. We knew that it would eventually be dynamited with stolen explosive, but as least we knew where to look.

Thieves among the mill crew were very cunning. A break in to the locked room where the precipitate press was located enabled a gang to unscrew the frame jack and
abstract gold precipitate from about ten frames. This exploit forced us to set up a padlocked chain to prohibit opening the press. This measure served for some weeks until we discovered that they had cut through a link in the chain and camouflaged the cut with precipitate!

Social life in Los Azules was restricted to some games of canasta or bridge in the mess room, tennis or walks around the wooded hills. An occasional dance at nearby mines such as Tecolotes in Santa Barbara and La Prieta in Parral brought together staff and their wives to socialise, but the odd fight by intoxicated blokes forced hosts to demand that guests leave their guns outside.

It was a rough isolated camp and not attractive for families, also the finances of the company were a bit rocky. One month I had to forgo my salary to enable the manager to pay workmen’s wages, though this was made up later. So when I received one offer by Allen Probert to return to Pachuca to join the staff at Loreto Mill of the US Smelting, Refining and Mining Company, it was possible to resign and return south.

Lacking a paved highway, we packed our scanty belongings in the reliable old 1934 Ford, plus two cans of extra petrol and took off across country headed south east towards a hamlet called Inde in the State of Durango following faint tyre tracks and traversing a field of burning maize stalks. Martin, aged five and Charmian, four were getting thirsty by the time we reached a small village and obtained some bottled lemonade. Beyond Inde the trails eventually led us to Palmito where a concrete dam’" was under construction, and thence a paved highway due east to Bermejillo on the main trunk road north from Torreon, which we reached by about 9 pm after 15 hours travel.

We brought with us a pure bred dachshund puppy as a parting gift from Walter Engel, not realising that he was suffering from a lung complaint. By the time we got into the hotel in Ciudad Monte he was obviously sick and shortly expired, sadly for all of us. From Torreon via Monterrey to Mante we crossed the Rio Cabezones which had been in flood on the way up the previous year. By this time the bridge had been repaired.

Early in June, 1939 we returned to Pachuca and took up residence in the group of houses formerly occupied by the top staff of the Santa Gertrudis Company, known as San Lunes. This was situated out of town close to the Sta Gertrudis mine. The house we rented had been that of the then Mill Superintendent, W.E.Crawford and was commodious, having three bedrooms. About twenty five years old, it was still in good
condition with the exception of the floor in the bathroom - and thereby hangs a tale :
upon a certain afternoon while I was eating a belated lunch in the sala, Margaret took
a shower and shortly I heard a muffled cry of ‘HELP’ from within. Not being able to open the locked door, a shoulder charge broke the lock and revealed a live head level with the floorboards whose cheeks were smutty and hair full of soap. Careful manipulation managed to extract my bruised and startled wife from among the pipes
and joists to be vetted for injury and washed. She had been standing on a trap door which had rotted away unnoticed and was extremely lucky not to have suffered any damage.

We occupied that dwelling for two years and loved its ample garden and comparative isolation, but I had to run two cars to enable Marge to take the youngsters to kindergarten, run by Lillian and Helen Pratt in the town, while I went to work in Loreto Mill of the ‘Cia de Real del Monte y Pachuca " an American owned company subsidiary of the U.S.Smelting, Refining & Mining Co. of Boston, Mass, U.S.A.

This mill was by far the largest in the district, having a capacity of 4,000 metric tons per day throughput, compared with the Sta Gertrudis maximum of 2,000 tons per day. In fact it was and is the largest operation treating strictly silver ores world wide, and achieved its large capacity by amalgamation of the Guerrero Mill from below Real del Monte with the old Loreto Mill, when the former was closed down in 1931 to centralise all operations in one unit. The mill is located at the north end of the town of Pachuca at the junction of the canyons of San Nicolas and San Buenaventura, which usually have a trickle of water in them, but this becomes a torrent during the rainy season and a dangerous flood when the hurricanes come ashore from the Gulf of Mexico in the autumn. All water from the two canyons becomes the Rio de Las Avenidas and drains through a deep channel through the town and dissipates on to the plain beyond. The location was originally chosen because of its proximity to the sources of ore in the veins on Magdalena Mountain, which outcropped on the summit and in effect mark the original discovery of silver in the area even before the Spanish Conquest.

Aztec miners undoubtedly obtained metallic silver by building fires on outcrops having visible evidence of native silver, but Spanish adventurers were able to avail themselves of the "Patio" process developed by a compatriot Bartolome de Medina in the year 1556, which recovered silver by amalgamation with mercury. This process endured successfully for over 360 years until displaced by cyanidation early in the twentieth century. Thus, Loreto Mill site has known methods and techniques for treatment of silver ores for over five centuries to date.

The silver bearing ore bodies of the Pachuca region have been associated with the mother lode called the ‘Vizcaina Vein’, which extends over nine kilometres and has many parallel veins, most of which carried mineralisation and whose dip was generally close to vertical. Discovery of silver began at the western end near the town of Pachuca and further discoveries in and around the town of Real del Monte at the eastern end, the strike of the Vizcaina being approximately east west. However, another set of parallel veins intercepted the Vizcaina at Real del Monte whose strike was north south and these veins proved very rich and productive. Thus the whole area came to be considered as two separate mining camps, hence the name of the company was shortened to ‘ Cia de Real del Monte y Pachuca’.

Exploitation of the argentiferous ore bodies proceeded sporadically with many ups and downs due to a plethora of factors such as political upheavals, greed, lawsuits, lack of finance, strikes, flooding for lack of adequate means of dewatering, banditry, underground fire, such as at the Encino Mine on May 6 ^th , 1786, and changes of ownership.

During the Spanish Colonial Period many miners owned or rented mines from the government on a personal basis without any coordinated cooperation with each other, but from 1740 on until Mexican independence from Spain the industry was dominated by Pedro Romero de Torreros [later elevated to the title of Conde de Regia], his son and eventually his grandson, who inherited the titles of Code de Regia II and III respectively. Mining during these sixty odd years was more orderly and extremely productive, yielding a massive fortune °to the first Conde de Regia.

Unfortunately resistance to Spanish over lordship in Mexico began building towards the end of the century, culminating in unrest, insubordination, open rebellion and eventual paralysis of all mining operations. There was no maintenance, the workings flooded and the whole industry came to a halt. Stability did not return to Mexico until after expulsion of the last Spanish forces in 1825 and the bankrupt Mexican Government determined to make a great effort to re-establish the silver mining industry and thereby restore the finances of the fledgling republic.

As a result of negotiation with English financiers and mining experts, an English group of adventurers headed by John Taylor was formed, which undertook to unwater, repair timbering and reopen all the productive mines in the Pachuca area and thereafter operate them under a lease agreement with the Conde de Regia. Workmen willing to go abroad were contracted, mostly in Cornwall. Equipment, including a complete steam pump was acquired plus materials and tools and all was shipped to Mexico in three cargo ships, landed at Vera Cruz and transported overland in wagons to Real del Monte.

Once the ruined shafts had been repaired, adits and drifts cleared of rubble and man ways reopened the Cornish beam pumping engine was set at work, unwatering first the Moran Mine and then others, which were soon dealt with.
The English company restored and operated these mines for 24 years, from 1824 to 0
1848, but after investing ten million dollars the value of silver produced and sold amounted to only five million dollars, so the directors decided to cut their losses and terminate their leases, returning the entire property to its owners. Ironically, shortly after their relinquishing control a huge bonanza was discovered in the Rosario vein and enormous profits accrued to the Mexican owners who had continued operations and they arranged for a number of Cornish miners to supervise this. Many Cornish families remained in Mexico and their descendants continue to reside in the area. The British Cemetery in Real del Monte, established in 1840 on a wooded hilltop, has many graves whose tombstones bear the names of foreigners - my father Sydney W.
Ough was buried there on November 4 ^th , 1934.

The Company continued in Mexican ownership until purchased by Guggenheim interests in 1906 and the U.S.Smelting Refining & Mining Co. assumed control. The results of this were immediate in Loreto Mill - the Patio process of amalgamation was abandoned and cyanidation adopted, as was being done in other mills in the district and elsewhere in Mexico. The cyanide process developed in Scotland by MacArthur & Forrest for gold ores was first tried out in the Crown & Talisman Mine in New Zealand in 1889. It rapidly spread to Australia, South Africa and eventually the U.S. and was also applied successfully to silver bearing ore in Mexico. My father went to Mexico in 1903 from London and engaged in perfecting the infant cyanide process in various reduction works in San Luis de la Paz, EI Oro, Temascaltepec, Guanajuato, Tominil and Pachuca until the outbreak of the revolution against President Porfiro Diaz in 1911 and then the beginning of the Great War in Europe in 1914. He took his family to England and remained there during the war, returning to Mexico in 1919 and became manager of the Cia Minera y Beneficiadora de Maravillas y San Francisco and resided in Pachuca until he died in 1934.

Loreto Mill in 1939 was staffed by thirty foreign bosses, from General Superintendent of Mills to Relief Shift Bosses, which included seven in the Parting plant. My first assignment covered sampling and weighing lots of purchased precipitate and familiarising myself with current operation practices in all departments on all three shifts of the twenty four hours. Alan Probert, Mill Supt, who had been instrumental in hiring me to work for RDM, was a man of ideas with a first class brain and abundant energy, consequently he constantly sought to improve mill operations and had several schemes proceeding at anyone time.

The dust recovery system he designed and had installed in the crushing department was a brilliant success. For two years I became his activator, legman and Mr. Fixit until the death of George Embury, the General Supt. of Mills in 194 t. Alan Probert was promoted to his job, Dick Stribley became Mill Supt. and I was boosted to General Forman with direct charge of. departmental foremen and shift bosses, also the responsibility to respond to all night calls to organise repairs for any breakdown of machinery and deal with fatal accidents.

This call out by night reminds me of the occasion when I had a heavy day, got home late and tired out, had supper and retired to bed. About 11 p.m. the raucous phone by the bed partially woke me up and I heard a. very excited voice jabbering "Senor, Senor, somebody has stolen my hat" - that really woke me up in disgust and I yelled "Who is speaking ?". The voice said "Juan Domingues". As a result I relieved my feelings by calling him names in Spanish and cursing him for waking me for such a petty reason and hung up. Getting back to sleep was difficult but successful. Then at 3 a.m. the phone rang again - same voice "Senor, not to worry - I’ve found my hat ".

Three months after joining the Company Britain and France declared war on
Germany to resist Hitler’s aggression and a meeting of all British expatiates was held by the Vice Consul to decide what we should do. A number of youngsters opted for going to Canada to train for action in the R.A.F., but the others decided to consult H.B.M Consul General in Washington who told us that the British Government did not want extra mouths to feed and if we were employed gainfully, to stay put and continue working, especially married men with families. The Mexican Government was alienated from its traditional friendship for Germany by increasing annoyance from submarines violating her neutral waters, culminating in the sinking of a Mexican cargo ship - the Potrero del Llano, which led to severance of relations and eventually the declaration of war on the side of the Allies.

At first, the state of war has little effect on the operations of the Company, mainly because the U.S.A. remained neutral until Pearl Harbour in December, 1941, but once they began to mobilise for action on a massive scale, many raw materials for export became scarce and spare parts hard to come by. The situation for R.D.M Company was made more difficult because our main product - silver - was not considered strategically important for the war effort, so export permits to Mexico had to be negotiated and were frequently denied.

In view of the foregoing, RD.M acquired a small copper mine at Artemisa in the State of Sonora and built a plant close to Loreto Mill for production of zinc dust, from zinc ore obtained from a mine at Cardonal. Operation of these two units enabled the management to claim that RD.M, producing base metals, should be granted the permits she required for importation from the U.S of all her needs in supplies such as cyanide, machinery spares and chemicals - this fortunate situation outlasted the war.

Living and working at an altitude of .8,000 feet is tolerable, and we were able to
engage in different sports in Pachuca - golf, tennis, swimming, front6n, I even played soccer for a couple of seasons, but found it a bit too strenuous. The rarefied atmosphere takes time to accustom oneself to, so it is advisable for foreigners to go down to sea level for a fortnight or so at least once a year. We - that is Margaret, Martin, Charmian and I managed to arrange our annual leave during the American School summer holidays and were lucky to spend some three weeks in Acapulco on the Pacific coast during July - August in 1941, ‘42, ‘43 and ‘44. In 1940 we had a week or so in Guernavaca and in 1945 we went to Vera Cruz for a change. During. these years the youngsters learned to swim well and do body surfing in the waves at Homos beach in Acapulco.

On January 1 st. 1946 Margaret took them both to Jamaica for their secondary education, which they completed by 1952 by passing their GEC exams at Jamaica College and Wolmers College respectively. Martin became King’s Scout and left for England in the S.S.Ariguani to do join the army and enter Sandhurst Military Academy, from which he passed out in 1954 with a commission as second Lieutenant in the RE.M.E.S.