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Updated: June 24, 2025
We were delighted to meet with the boys, safe and sound, and made good time towards camp, which we reached just about sundown. We found Mr. Mastin a very intelligent American; and, as he informed us, the discoverer and part owner of the Pino Alto gold-mines, about fifty miles above, near the Santa Rita del Cobre.
Tangiers, in Africa, is built upon a similar sloping hillside, and that capital of Morocco does not look a bit more Moorish than Santiago de Cuba. On the narrow strip of laud bordering the eastern edge of the harbor, the Moro at one end and the city at the other, are some villas, embowered in groves and gardens, which, we are told, belong mostly to Americans who are interested in the Cobre mines.
When in flower in February, neither trunk, leaves, nor branches can be seen for its dense clusters of bright blue blossoms, which are unfortunately very short-lived. Four miles above Spanish Town the hideously named Bog Walk, the famous gorge of the Rio Cobre, commences. I do not believe that there is a more exquisitely beautiful glen in the whole world.
It is not generally known that it has also been transported into the Island of Cuba, and employed at the mines of El Cobre, near Santiago; and later still in fact, at the present hour an attempt is being made to naturalise it upon the central plains of Texas and California.
"And yet I didn't see no wheel marks as I come along." "Fetch 'em from Silverbell. We got a sort of wagon track through the hills. Closer than Cobre. Some wagon road in the rough places! Snakes thick on the east side; but they don't never get over here. Break their backs comin' through the gap. Yes, sir!"
Over the cyclopean wall of this mesa appear the rounded tops of higher and more distant foot-hills, densely clad in robes of perennial verdure, while beyond and above them all, at a distance of five or six miles, rise the aërial peaks of the splendid Sierra del Cobre, with a few summer clouds drifting across their higher slopes and casting soft violet shadows into the misty blue of their intervening valleys.
Not content with realizing a very large income from the mines by way of taxes upon the product, the Spanish government increased these excise charges to such an extent as to absorb the entire profits of the works and kill the enterprise, so that the rich ores of Cobre now rest undisturbed in the earth.
He did not believe, it is said, that he could "capture the garrison" without completely investing the city on the east and north. If he attacked it from the southern or Morro side, he might take the city, but the garrison would escape by the Cobre or the San Luis road.
It acquired practically all the copper property in the Cobre field and began operations on an extensive and expensive scale. A huge sum was spent in pumping thousands of tons of water from a depth of hundreds of feet, in new equipment for the mining operations, and in the construction of a smelter. The best that can be done is to hope that the investors will some day get their money back.
The gorge of the Bocaguas, through which the Rio Cobre winds in a glorious succession of cascades and whirling pools, is said to have been entirely filled up, causing the waters to overspread the upland basin of St. Thomas-in-the-Vale with a lake, which lasted nine days before the waters tore loose from their confinement, and swept over the plains to the ocean.
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