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THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



made eight hundred thousand pounds 

 of copper, and even under such adverse 

 conditions the annual output grew to a 

 production of two milHon pounds in 

 1880. The mine which the Leszynskys 

 attacked, was the Longfellow, yielding 

 a very rich self-fluxing ore. The fur- 

 naces first erected were small reverbera- 

 tories, built of brick, which are said to 

 have cost a dollar apiece. These were 

 abandoned and cupolas of the Mexican 

 design were then erected, and the ore 

 fused by charcoal hauled in from the 

 Burro Mountains eighty miles distant. 

 To increase the life of the furnaces 

 metal plates lined the walls, and these 

 were cooled with a spray of water. The 

 next step was the erection of furnaces 

 built entirely of large troughs cast from 

 their own copper; and these primitive 

 original prototypes of a water jacket 

 were in use until 1883, when the Arizona 

 Copper Company, a Scotch organization, 

 acquired the Leszynsky plant and mines. 

 Meanwhile however, a much more 

 important producer had sprung into 

 existence. The Southern Pacific had 

 reached Benson on the San Pedro River 

 early in 1880. Sixty miles to the south- 



east of Benson a claim called the 

 "Halcro" had attracted attention by a 

 large outcrop of oxidized copper, iron 

 and manganese ore. It was relocated 

 as the "Copper Queen," and had at- 

 tracted the attention of several mining 

 engineers. There was however an in- 

 vincible dread in the minds of the pro- 

 fession against sporadic ore bodies in 

 limestone, and the claim fell into the lap 

 of an eastern lawyer and a western rail- 

 road man, who were encouraged to buy 

 it for a trifle. They erected a small 

 thirty-six inch water-jacketed furnace 

 near the outcrop. Their adviser and 

 first manager was Mr. Lewis Williams, 

 a practical Welch smelter. No mining 

 equipment was required for over a year, 

 for the large outcrop of pure rich ore 

 sufficed to feed the miniature smelting 

 establishment with a furnace mixture 

 netting over twenty per cent copper, 

 and yielding from the start more than 

 ten tons of copper bars per day. In 

 1881 a second furnace was added, and 

 from this small plant thirty-four million 

 pounds of copper were made from the 

 first ore body prior to 1885. 



Although the Queen Company was the 



Section transversely across the southern portion of the Bisbee-Warren district, Arizona, showing 

 the vertical distribution of some of the bodies of ore 



The disposition of ore bodies of the Arizona district is erratic. After a permanency of several 

 hundred feet a mine may suddenly end blindly in limestone and the cost of finding another ore body 

 may be greater than the cost of mining it after found 



