In reply to a post on another thread, which discussion rightly belongs in this thread
Cactusjumper wrote
Roy,
My only reason for writing that little story were to prove that a convincing fictional story could be penned without truth being at its core. By using true historical facts and legitimate geographical locations, it would not be all that difficult to make "wishful thinkers" believe the story. I count myself as a wishful thinker.
One thing I do believe, is that the Jesuits did what they had to for survival. If that went against the "rules", they were intelligent enough to work their way around it. They were men, not angels nor saints, just men in a very hard place. That means there is room for what you and many others believe about them. I am not convinced by the evidence you and others have presented. I believe there could be explanations that lead into another direction or explanation.
<snip> Hope to see you soon
First, in case you have not read the shorter reply in the thread on father Polzer and the stone maps,
ditto, we are looking forward to seeing you and Carolyn soon too! I am getting quite nervous about the postal service, as they have pulled some nasty tricks the last two years, but have started sorting the load to pack for the trip. I really hope they don't pull something like they did last time, refusing to allow Beth to have her vacation time even though it had been scheduled months in advance and green-lighted weeks beforehand. It is tempting to just disconnect the danged telephone a week before it is time to head out, just to be sure they can't pull something.
Cactusjumper also wrote
Nothing would make me happier than to see you, Don Jose or anyone else prove the stories correct. That would include my story which, I believe, has many truths in it.
Well you may call it what ever you wish, however how can we describe the case of Jesuits having mines when you can literally
stand in them? Is that wishful thinking? It would be like saying that Bigfoot is a figment of the imagination while sitting in the lap of a Bigfoot. Or are you taking the position that these old Jesuit mines, including (but not limited to) the Salero, Wandering Jew, Montezuma, Old Padres, the 'Pima' (Vekol) were NOT Jesuit mines, then who or whom are you saying they did belong to? If they belonged to someone else, why then did this attribution to Jesuits happen at all, and why would the Anglo miners have claimed to have found documents in the old Jesuit missions that helped them locate the mines? Isn't it just as easy to say that an old mine was Spanish or Mexican?
We have letters
written by Jesuit priests themselves, Kino referring to his shipment of silver, Segesser about not being able to work the mines and the irony of living in the rich 'silver mountains' and yet having little silverware to use, the Indians whom had been their charges as the sources for most of these tales of Jesuit mines and treasures, and many OLD sources that attribute the earliest mining to the Jesuits? Add in the not-lost mines, some*** of which had extensive workings, the piles of slag found at several missions and slag built into mission walls by the Franciscans who followed, and the Catholic study which listed SOME of the mines owned by the Jesuits yet neglected to mention some rather remarkable ones.
***<Side note: And in some cases the 'workings' were barely noticeable, as at the Vekol, once known as the lost "Pima" mine, yet even here there are ancient workings that may date to the time of the Jesuits that have been broken into by more modern miners. As evidence that the Vekol had been in operation during the time of the Jesuits, we might note that the silver ore found there has a fair amount of platinum in it, and the smelting slag found at Guevavi likewise had a fair amount of platinum in it - platinum was virtually worthless in the time of the Jesuits so was discarded, and as far as I know, no other known source could have produced the platinum bearing ore/slag found at Guevavi in Arizona>
Now recall the able Jesuit defender Lamar disclaiming ALL such reports, stating that there never was
any mining by Jesuits, no enslaving of natives or forced labor, and certainly no casting of bells whatsoever in North America in colonial times. Yet Tayopa was famous for their sweet-sounding bells, and for the high silver content in those bells; in fact one of the main Russian colonial churches in Alaska (Sitka if memory serves) proudly boasted of having a Tayopa silver bell to call the faithful to prayer. <The church had a terrible fire in the 1900s, and I do not know if that Tayopa bell was recovered or not, they did not reply to my enquiry> Do we then dismiss the Russian colonists boast, and conclude they never had any such bell, obtained by trading with the Spanish in California? This modern whitewash of the historical record is shameful. Even the Park Service has taken part in the modern whitewash, removing all of their former excellent display showing how the crude mining of the padres was carried on.
These Jesuits were indeed men, and were living in different times and in a very dangerous place, so perhaps we should not judge them, yet neither should we dismiss their work. Was it kindness to have some "lazy" Indians whipped, or put into stocks as punishment? Why did the Pimas revolt, one of the leaders of this revolt fleeing to the supposedly evil Spaniards to escape the wrath of the Jesuit padres? Doesn't that tell you something?
Deducer posted an excellent summation of the case in Nentvig's work Rudo Ensayo, we have in that 'rude essay' (translation of title)a very real 'smoking gun' - proof of motive, opportunity, and ability. No one would dispute that the Jesuits were certainly the best educated men on the frontiers, and we find numerous references to the attention they paid to the rich mineral deposits. If this were supposed to attract Spanish settlers, why then do we find Jesuits working
against the Spanish settlers and miners, trying to prevent them from hiring "their" Indians, and in private letters, complaining about Spanish visitors to their missions that were habitually taking what ever they desired and never offering payment?
Do you recall the post in which a Jesuit complained about his Indians fleeing his mission to go work for the "evil" Spaniards in their mines, and that they often refused to return to his mission even when the padre promised a silver mine to the runaway Indians? How could a padre even offer to give a silver mine to an Indian, if he had none to give? Further, what does it say about the treatment of the Indians at the missions, that they were running away to go work for those "evil" and cruel Spaniards in their mines? The mission system was often referred to by the Spanish authorities as "reducciones" for their main mission was to literally REDUCE the Indians to submission to Royal authorities, to become a work force for the Spanish and to produce incomes for the Spanish. The Jesuits seemed to be working at cross purposes then, for while they were supposed to be working to convert their Indians to Christianity, and to speak and read Spanish, becoming Spanish subjects to produce tax incomes etc, yet instead we find the Jesuits preventing the Spanish colonial frontiers from advancing, asking and most often obtaining extensions of time beyond the ten years that was supposed to be allotted for the padres to fully convert and REDUCE the Indians to submission. Franciscan father Garces was shocked, to judge from his letters, to find the Indians at the former Jesuit missions did not learn to speak or read Spanish, that they could not even give the Catechism. Garces sarcastically blamed this on the Jesuits being "too busy" with all of their other "labors" to have been properly instructing the mission Indians, a situation he stated would be corrected.
To me, the alternate theory simply doesn't float. If the early mining activity really was Spaniards, then what Spaniards were they? Why did the earliest American prospectors state that they found documents describing Jesuit mines, if these mines really belonged to Spaniards? Surely they would have had better success by visiting the Spanish archives and records than by going through the old papers at the decaying missions, right?
I get the impression that for some people that dismiss the Jesuit mining and treasures, part of the problem is in the IDEA of what that really means. It is not an all-or-nothing proposition, not vast treasures to rival Trump and the 'secrecy' part is more like an open secret, with the mines being known of to a degree by the Spanish authorities but they were willing to turn a blind eye, especially on the wild frontier where it was hoped the wild Indians would become passive members of the Spanish colonial empire. If someone is imagining a vast treasure, enough to fill a train and pay off the national debt, super-rich mines that amount to gigantic veins of precious metals that only needs to be chopped out of the rock to make one instantly wealthy, then of course that vision of reality is deeply flawed and incorrect. The Jesuits did not have the manpower or technology available to operate at such a level to produce such treasures and we know from actual records just how rich mines can be in Arizona. Some can be very rich indeed, and certainly the first prospectors on the spot had the best to choose from. Would you consider a treasure of silver, estimated at worth $40,000 circa 1850 (probably twenty times that today or $800k) to be a treasure worth looking for? For me, that is certainly worth pursuing. Likewise for the mines, although a 300 year old mine will likely need considerable repairs to make it safe to enter let alone work it, the chances are good that it would be of a rich enough grade that Jesuits using quite simple technologies were able to extract metals from it so would probably be rich enough for the typical 'Mom-n-Pop" type mining operation today. This may not be the case in every mine either, as the Spanish found with some of the gold mines in Baja that had been operated by the Jesuits, the ore was too poor to mine it profitably for the Spanish, due to labor costs. That said, I am sure that to some people including among the treasure hunters here, a treasure of $800,000 is not worthy of attention, small potatoes, "incidental' level mining.
Then too, what do silver and gold mines produce, but silver and gold, correct? We have very little record of much silver or gold being shipped out by the Jesuits of the frontiers. Where did the bullion go? We have a version of what happened to it, in the stories told to early Anglo miners, that these treasures were secreted away when the Jesuits were ousted. Of course one can stand on a turnip and demand that unless someone shows you such a treasure you won't believe or accept it, but in this case we have several circumstantial pieces that point to the Jesuits having stashed some fairly impressive treasures in "their" areas. As to WHY they might have been doing this, which was clearly illegal under Spanish law, we can only surmise, yet even here we do have some indication that
something was afoot in 1767, and would have required a 'war chest' of a lot of money. Namely, that the Jesuits were plotting to betray Spanish America to the Dutch, and also one key strategic island off Chile to the English. We have this from an English source which rather confirms the claim, and then recall what the Spanish king wrote in his order expelling the Jesuits - that he had "reasons which he kept in his mind" (paraphrasing but essentially correct). We know that the Jesuits had been involved in political plots in Portugal and France, and almost certainly in Spain as well. Did the King get wind of the Jesuits plotting with the Dutch and English? If he had, would that not explain why he ordered their expulsion to be something like a 'sting' operation, to sweep them up quickly and quietly and get them OUT of America before they could react?
Now remember that the Spanish made some efforts to find the treasures of the Jesuits.
WHY would they have bothered, if the Jesuits had
not been known to be amassing wealth? We have the complaint of bishop Palafox about the Jesuits seemingly grabbing up all the wealth of the country in Mexico, to the point that it was becoming a threat to the very existence of the state and this occurred nearly a century before their expulsion. This search for the hidden wealth failed to find very much, and was almost certainly NOT the main reason for why the Jesuits were expelled, yet it is not to be denied that the Royal authorities executed searches, not in every mission of course but at the larger cities, and almost certainly had good reason to be looking!
I fail to see how this all amounts to "wishful thinking" or to dismiss the stories of Jesuit mines and treasure to the fevered imaginations of treasure writers, when we have posted numerous sources in this very thread that are NOT treasure writers, telling us that the Jesuits had mines, rich ones in some places, and were amassing an impressive amount of wealth and power. So much so that bishop Palafox became alarmed at it, as well as their arrogant attitude shown him. We have posted links to the study published by a Catholic source and written by a Catholic listing the wealth of the Jesuits in Mexico at their expulsion - does that read like a group of poverty stricken men living hand to mouth to you? Yet even this study failed to uncover some of the mines, and only mentioned a handful. Lt Mowry found documents for over 100 mines in Arizona that the Jesuits had. When you consider that they had a rather long time period, and a free source of manpower, plus the driving need to produce income, this number should not be too shocking. Plus we know that the padres were 'pumping' the mission Indians to get information to help find still more veins of silver and gold, as mentioned by Nentvig.
Well now that I have blabbed another sixty thousand words where fifty probably would have done, I will close. Perhaps over the winter, I will find the time to go back over this thread and the other one where the debate started, to try to sum up the evidence for Jesuit mines and treasures, but do not have the time right now. Good luck and good hunting Joe and everyone reading this, I hope you find the treasures that you seek.
Oroblanco