Our latest Hazy IPA was brewed with our friends at The Casual Pint Central Phoenix to celebrate their 9th anniversary. We decided to do a 50/50 split of two of our favorite hop varieties - Citra and Nelson Sauvin. We hit the whirlpool with an equal split, then gave it the double dry-hop treatment.
The Bully Bueno Mine — Bradshaw Mountains, Arizona Territory
1869 — Bradshaw Mountains, Arizona Territory
There are mines a man works for silver, and mines that seem to work upon the men.
The Bully Bueno was of the latter sort.
I had heard its name before I ever saw the place. Most mining camps earn their reputations from what comes out of the ground. The Bully Bueno earned its from the number of men who failed to leave it.
Charles Vickroy had opened the claim years before, and trouble had followed with remarkable persistence. The camp was attacked again and again—twelve times, by the count I was given. Men were shot, wounded, driven off, and replaced. Yet every time the smoke cleared, Vickroy put men back to work.
By the summer of '69, nine were dead.
Nine.
I remember looking toward the workings and wondering what quantity of silver could persuade a man to become the tenth.
Still, there was something peculiarly Arizonan about the place. The mountain would not surrender its ore, the men would not surrender the mountain, and apparently neither party possessed the good sense to abandon the argument.
One fellow told me of an earlier attack when Cornelius Jeff Davis and another miner found themselves badly wanting for defenders. Some visiting gentlemen from Philadelphia had left fine coats and hats behind at camp. Davis and his companion put on the Eastern clothes and paraded themselves about as different men, changing hats and coats and making such a spectacle that those watching from the hills apparently concluded reinforcements had arrived.
Two miners became an army by changing their clothes.
I have witnessed men accomplish considerably less with considerably more.
By the time I came through, however, there was little humor left in the arithmetic. New hands occupied the bunks of dead men. Picks struck stone. Ore came out. Men went underground each morning beneath the same hills that had already collected their price.
No one spoke much of the nine.
Perhaps miners learn not to count too carefully.
I did.
Nine down.
And still they went underground.
— H.V.B.