Samuel Peter Heintzelman and the Sonora Exploring & Mining
Company. By Diane M.T. North. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1980.
Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 248 pages. $12.50.
Reviewed by James E. Fell, Jr., Research Historian at
the Colorado Historical Society, author of Ores to Metals: The Rocky Mountain
Smelting Industry (Lincoln; University of Nebraska Press, 1980), several
articles, and a number of book reviews.
Samuel Peter Heintzelman spent almost his entire career as a
professional soldier. He came from modest circumstances-born in Pennsylvania in
1805, the son of a village merchant and postmaster. Little is known about his
youth, but at the age of seventeen, he entered the United States Military
Academy at West Point. His record there was only slightly better than mediocre,
and after graduation he began a long series of varied assignments as he slowly
moved up through the ranks, eventually rising to major general. All during this
service, he dabbled in assorted business enterprises, perhaps to an extent that
might now be regarded as conflicts of interest, though apparently not by the
standards of the nineteenth century which were far less rigorous. Throughout his
career Heintzelman kept a journal of the places he went, the things he saw, and
the thoughts he harbored; and after his death in 1880, his family gave his
diaries to the Library of Congress, where they are today.
It was in 1850, while still a brevet major, that Heintzelman
was ordered to the Southwest, to the territory recently acquired from Mexico.
Over the next four years he built and commanded Fort Yuma, located at the
junction of the Colorado and Gila rivers, earned the dislike of his fellow
officers (the feeling was mutual), and speculated in a number of business
ventures. Later in 1857 Heintzelman and others, including Samuel Colt, the arms
manufacturer and Charles Debrille Poston, the so-called "father of Arizona,"
organized the Sonora Exploring and Mining Company to reopen some old mines on a
vast tract of land south of Tucson. Heintzelman obtained a leave of absence from
the army and spent some six months in the desert managing
the company's property, but with little success. After this,
he returned to active duty.
This book is not a biography of Heintzelman, although it has
much biographical material that outlines the major thrusts of his life,
particularly his career in the Southwest. Rather, Diane M.T. North has presented
a selection from Heintzelman's diary-the period from August 1858 through
January 1859 when he managed the Sonora Company's mines. The importance of this
selection lies in Heintzelman's observations of life in the desert country
during this time and in the myriad of problems his firm confronted in trying to
develop mining property in so isolated an area. Because Heintzelman was such a
literate man, his journal makes good reading which is well complemented by the
footnotes and endnotes. Some may question the decision to publish only a
six-month selection from the diary, as opposed to all the segments covering
Heintzelman's career in the Arizona-California region, but the book is valuable
as is and it should prompt further investigation of the unpublished portions,
not only for Heintzelman's observations of the early Southwest but also for what
he has to say about other parts of the country.
