Sylvester Mowry’s life was short but eventful. Some called him an egotist, a braggart and a liar. But when the news of his death, at age 38, reached Arizona in 1871, one newspaper noted: “In the death of Mr. Mowry, this Territory has lost the most faithful friend it has ever had. … We can ill afford to lose the advocacy of a man so influential and so earnest.” Mowry’s influence included the mining town that bore his name — and was one of Arizona’s oldest mining camps.
The Rhode Island native and West Point graduate purchased what became the Mowry Mine, southeast of Patagonia in present-day Southern Arizona, for $20,000 in 1860. A year earlier, he’d gotten into a dispute with Edward E. Cross, editor of The Weekly Arizonian in Tubac. At the time, present-day Arizona was part of New Mexico Territory, and Cross had been critical of Mowry’s “fabulous” statements about Arizona, which were aimed at splitting Arizona off from New Mexico. Incensed, Mowry challenged Cross to a rifle duel in Tubac and Cross accepted; after several rounds of shots failed to fell either man, Mowry declared himself satisfied and the two publicly apologized.
Mowry got his wish for an Arizona Territory, which was created in 1863. And the Mowry Mine produced a reported $1.5 million in silver — according to some accounts, 12 blast furnaces at the site reduced the ore into 70-pound bars. But Mowry later became, in his own estimation, a political prisoner: In 1862, he was arrested and charged with “aiding and abetting the enemy” for selling lead for Confederate bullets. He was imprisoned at Fort Yuma, California, for several months before the charges were dropped.
Accounts vary on what happened to the Mowry Mine during its owner’s captivity, but Mowry later was reported to have sold it for $2.5 million to investors from San Francisco. Its output declined sharply after the Civil War, and by the 1870s, visitors described the area as abandoned. Mowry spent most of his postwar years on the East Coast, then fell ill while in Washington, D.C. He died in London after traveling there to see a specialist.
Today, a steep dirt path in the Coronado National Forest, just east of the intersection of Harshaw and Apache roads, leads to what’s left of the town of Mowry. Hiking up the path offers a look at building foundations, crumbling adobe walls, slag piles and, at the top of the hill, a large stone building with its four walls still intact. Mowry’s cemetery is about a mile east of the road to the ruins, and near the intersection is the grave of early Mowry resident Orton Phelps.