Overview
The Silver King Mine struck its bonanza in 1875 in the rugged country north of present Superior, Arizona — for years the territory's richest silver producer, its camp of Silver King boasting hundreds of residents, mills and the freight roads that seeded Superior itself below; the ores faded by the 1890s and the camp followed, leaving foundations, dumps and headframe traces in hills now edged by modern mining claims and operations, which — with open shafts — make the plain rule legal access only, always. The ground's telling is double: the mining canon of lamps on the workings, single-jack echoes and figures at the old camp — undocumented, traditional — and, rising above it, Apache Leap's solemn presence: the escarpment where, in the telling honoured by the San Carlos Apache and the town alike, warriors leapt rather than surrender to cavalry in the 1870s, their grief crystallised — legend says — in the obsidian 'Apache tears' found below, a story told with the Apache perspective and its sorrow first. Present Silver King as bonanza archaeology beneath a mourning mountain — the desert's most storied square mile.