The Journal of San Diego History
SAN DIEGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY QUARTERLY
Spring 1996, Volume 42, Number 2
Richard W. Crawford, Editor
Cover: The gold mining town of Hedges in the Colorado Desert, northwest of Yuma, Arizona, ca 1900.
Page 56. Hedges and vicinity.
Page 63. The Golden Cross mine headframe, ore bin, and hoist house. (Unless otherwise indicated, all photographs are circa 1900).
Page 64. Hoist house and headframe of the Golden Crown mine.
Page 65. The Golden Queen mine shaft’s headframe with ore cart dumping into ore bin.
Page 66. This pumping plant on the Colorado River conveyed water twelve miles to Hedges.
Page 66. Pump house detail.
Page 68. The 100-stamp mill. Ore was conveyed from the mines in horse drawn rail carts on the tracks, in the foreground, to the crusher house, at left center. The crushed ore was carried via the ramped conveyor to the mill for processing.
Page 68. Looking south at the 100-stamp mill. In only five years following the mill’s construction the tailings it produced were piled up to its base.
Page 69. Air compressor and steam engine inside the 100-stamp mill.
Page 70. Stamps and amalgamation tables in the 100-stamp mill.
Page 74. By 1900 the huge pile of tailings from the 100-stamp mill dominated the eastern edge of town.
Page 74. A bulkhead protects the schoolhouse, at center, and the rest of the eastern edge of town from burial by tailings, ca. 1896. Courtesy of Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.
Page 76. Miners filling ore carts with tailings for the trip to the cyanide plant, ca. 1902. Courtesy California Historical Society, TICOR, Special Collections, University of Southern California Library.
Page 77. The cyanide plant under construction. At the right of the processing house the small vats are to hold reusable cyanide solution.
Page 77. The Free Gold cyanide plant under construction. The vats on the platform will hold the tailings to be leached.
Page 78. The Free Gold cyanide plant. On the hill upper left, the solution vats; center, the leaching vats; lower left, the extraction room building and in front of it, sump tanks marked “Poison-No Admittance” in Spanish and English.
Page 78. Rail carts of tailings move up the trestle to the leaching vats at the Free Gold cyanide plant
Page 79. The metal leaching vats of the Free Gold cyanide plant, shortly after completion.
