Arizona Gold Rush

Ancient Washes, Real Gold

In the spring of 1863, old mountain man Pauline Weaver guided a band of gold-hungry prospectors—Abraham Peeples among them—into the rough country north of the Hassayampa. While chasing a stray burro up a mesa, one of the party (a Mexican tracker, the stories say) stumbled across gold nuggets the size of potatoes just lying in the dirt of what they soon called the Potato Patch. They pried them loose with knives and spoons. Within weeks the hill was christened Rich Hill, and Arizona’s richest placer strike was on.

Word raced across the Territory. In the first month alone the ground yielded over $100,000 in coarse nuggets; within five years it had coughed up half a million. Miners poured in by the hundreds, then thousands. Three rough camps sprang up in the shadow of the hill: Weaver (named for the guide), Antelope Station, and later Octave. Easy gold made for easy trouble. Weaver quickly fell under the thumb of Francisco Vega and his outlaw crew. Stagecoaches were hit, claim-jumpers vanished, and respectable folk learned to give the place a wide berth. Daily murders weren’t uncommon. Even Michael Goldwater (Barry’s grandfather) ran a store there amid the chaos.

Antelope Station fared little better once an Irishman named Charles P. “Chuck” Stanton rode in. Smooth-talking and ambitious, Stanton acquired interests in claims like the Leviathan, opened a store, got himself named postmaster, deputy sheriff, and justice of the peace, and simply renamed the town Stanton. Working with the Vega gang, he cleared out competition—sometimes by ambush and sometimes by worse. The Martin family massacre of the early 1880s was widely blamed on his orbit. Then, on a November night in 1886, three Lucero brothers (tied to the Vega outfit) walked into Stanton’s store and filled him full of lead, supposedly for trifling with their sister. One brother was killed escaping; the others vanished toward Mexico. The Vega gang’s hold loosened after that, but the district’s reputation for lawlessness stuck.

By the 1880s the easy surface and creek gold was thinning. Hard-rock mines like the Octave took over for a while, and production eventually reached into the millions (period dollars). Weaver faded into ruins; Stanton and Octave lingered as ghost towns. Gold never entirely left, though. Prospectors kept working the gravels for decades, and in more recent times metal detectors have pulled fresh multi-ounce nuggets from the same ground that once made outlaws rich and dead men famous.

As the Outlaw Miners of today, we're working the ancient gravels in the washes below Rich Hill, picking up where the old-timers left off. Although we're just a small group of Prospectors sharing a common dream, we're offering our equipment, time, and support to help you find more gold.