Henry Wickenburg and the Vulture Mine

The town of Wickenburg owes its existence to a stubborn prospector, a large rock, and a bird. The prospector was Henry Wickenburg, an Austrian immigrant who had been working the Arizona Territory since the early eighteen sixties with very little to show for it. In the spring of eighteen sixty-three, the story goes, he was searching for a stray mule in the desert hills south of the Hassayampa River when he noticed something glittering in a rock he picked up.

The rock was heavy with gold. Some versions of the story say he threw a rock at a vulture and the rock he threw was the first piece of Vulture Mine ore. Whether that story is true or legend, the mine took the vulture's name, and the mine turned out to be one of the richest gold strikes in the entire American Southwest.

Henry Wickenburg worked the ore but did not have the capital to develop it himself. He agreed to sell most of his stake for about eighty five thousand dollars, but a dispute over clear title meant he actually collected only a fraction of that, a shortfall he reportedly regretted for the rest of his life, as the mine eventually yielded gold and silver worth many millions. The Vulture Mine operated in various forms from eighteen sixty-three until nineteen forty-two, and over those nearly eight decades it produced an estimated three hundred forty thousand ounces of gold.

The town that grew up near the mine's headquarters took Henry Wickenburg's name, though the relationship between the man and the town was not always a happy one. Henry Wickenburg struggled financially in his later years despite being the founding figure of the local economy. On the fourteenth of May, nineteen zero five, he was found shot to death near his home at the age of approximately eighty-five.

A coroner's jury ruled the death a suicide, though some historians have questioned that conclusion. He is buried in Wickenburg, the town that carries his name and that would not exist without the mountain he found.