112 YEAR OLD BISBEE MINERALS by Rolf Luetcke


Mary and I were collecting wildflowers for a mini pressed wildflower collection during the spring bloom near Tombstone back in the mid 1980’s. As we were looking for new flowers to press we spotted a roadbed down along the valley that had a lot of “rusty” rock along the sides.
I had lived in Bisbee for years and was very familiar with what Pyrite did to the surrounding rock over time. This looked just like that and we walked over to the roadway to see what it was. When we got there we saw lots of Pyrite that was staining the surrounding rock, just like we had seen in Bisbee. We walked the old roadbed for a ways and decided we needed to come back and do some collecting.
Over the next couple of years we walked much of the built up roadway. We had at first thought it was a road bed but finding old railroad nails and railroad ties we soon figured it was a railroad bed. No rail was left and in many places the old bridges had rotted away with time and weather. Where the highway is now between Tombstone and the mill site at Charleston is a bit of a climb so the Walnut wash was chosen for a rail line to be put in to connect Tombstone with the main line at Fairbank.
From my time in Bisbee I recognized the rock as having come from there. I knew it had come from there many years ago but didn’t know much about this old rail bed. Sometime later a man stopped by who was a railroad enthusiast and had a copy of maps of the various railroads of Arizona. It had completion dates on all the lines in Arizona and there was the spur between Fairbank and Tombstone. The date the line had been finished was 1902. It had been started as far back as 1882 by one company and was not finished until a mining boom in both Bisbee and Tombstone had another company come in and finish the railroad to haul ore out to the main line in Fairbank. It is a short spur, only 9 miles but that gave us a lot to look at.
We did as much research on the railroads of Arizona as we could but there was nothing published we could find about where they got the rock to build the various railroad beds. The one that goes through Benson also has places of the “rusty” rock that indicates Pyrite. Most of this railroad bed is other rock though. In talking to friends who know a bit about old railroads of the area we learned that the use of readily available overburden from mines was often used in building the rail bed for the tracks. I have found mine rock in many of the lines of Cochise County and even on the main line still used today.
Some of the spurs along the San Pedro River valley are built from the slag from the copper smelter in Douglas Arizona. The slag is very hard and ideal for building railroad beds. In the heyday of mining, at least three spurs were built running between the mines in Bisbee and Tombstone and the main track in Benson. A different and later spur in the San Pedro River Valley is built from the slag from Douglas. Locals call this one tar bell road. A man came into our store one time on his way home to ask about two meteorites he had purchased at the swap meet in Tucson. I immediately saw they were pieces of the railroad slag and hoped he had not paid too much for them. The man selling them claimed they were meteorites. The man had paid $5 each for them but that is about $5 too much since you could fill a truck with the material along miles of the old track. That is when I started calling them railroad meteorites. Much of the slag washes down the washes during floods and is scattered all over the area. It can resemble a meteorite, especially when found by itself with no other rocks like it around. Sadly there are some who take advantage of people who are not familiar with a real meteorite and make a lot of money selling slag as meteorites. I told the man he should report the fraud but he said his ten bucks was lesson enough.
I have found nice Siderite specimens on a different spur close to Benson. One spot in the Benson city limits has zinc ore from Bisbee and the Sphalerite from some places in Bisbee is fluorescent, a nice orange red. Under the railroad bridge over the San Pedro River in Benson I found a 20 pound chunk of yellow Limonite mixed with red ocher Hematite with white Calcite seams. When split it made beautiful specimens.
I have been fortunate to have lived in Bisbee and collected there in many places and recognized the rail bed near Fairbank as having come from Bisbee. In recent searches Mary did on the internet about those old railroad lines she was able to find dates they were built but not anything about where the material came from. It would be nice to be able to pin down the exact mine in Bisbee that the overburden came from but that may not be possible. We know it pre dates the Lavender Pit started in 1950 and the Sacramento Pit started in 1917. The Mineralogical Record from 1981 is a great source of information on the mines in Bisbee, including dates of the mines and the minerals that they produced.
It has been fun going to the old rail bed and finding minerals that came from the Bisbee mines over 112 years ago. Over the years I have found about 25 mineral species and some in large sizes. There are boulders of Hematite that weigh tons. One 120 pound chunk of Chalcopyrite was solid. Pyrite chunks can be picked up in large size, as can Siderite. My brother in law found a fist sized piece of Campbellite with beautiful colors of Azurite and Malachite. Many of the minerals are only in micro material but a few like a Calcite we found on the most recent trip was a cabinet size piece with wonderful bladed crystals. Since it is overburden, little of the fine minerals found in Bisbee are laying out here but for a micro mount collector it has been fun to find specimens from so long ago.