The native silver of the cerro de la Arizona, and how a colonial lawyer checked it
Masses of native silver were found lying at the surface in Pima country on the last bounds of Sonora, one of them said to weigh 160 arrobas. Mota Padilla, writing at Guadalajara in 1742, reports it and then shows his work: the finder questioned before witnesses, the frontier captain's eyewitness statement, the autos of the president of the audiencia. The same page records the suits that followed, including one he argued himself for a moreno whose 22-arroba ball a partner tried to halve.
Why this wins its question: The silver of the Arizona is usually met either as a place-name story — the etymology of the word Arizona — or as a paragraph in a mining history, cited from later compilers. This entry goes to the earliest sustained account, a chronicle finished in 1742 by a practising lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara, and prints what the compilers drop: the physical description that makes the legal problem, and the three-step verification the chronicler performed and recorded in order — the finder examined before witnesses, the frontier captain's eyewitness affirmation, and the judicial autos of the president of the audiencia. It adds the suit that nobody quotes, in which an Afro-descendant named Juan de Amésquita went to a royal court over a twenty-two arroba mass of silver and was defended there by the author. And it keeps the three things that make the passage evidence rather than advertisement: the author was counsel in the case he reports, the chapter it sits in is a petition for a mint and a port for his own city, and its closing sentence urges armed entradas into Pima country with avarice named as the instrument and the Pimas themselves absent from every other line of the account.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The find is described exactly, and the description is what makes it unusual rather than the quantity. Page 317: on the cerro de San Antonio de la Arizona, "que es en los ultimos terminos de Sonora, allá entre los gentiles de la nacion Pimas, ahora cinco años, se descubrió la nunca vista maravilla de trozos de plata vírgen al pelo de la tierra, tan grandes, que no habia fuerzas humanas que los moviesen, y era necesario aplicarles fraguas de fuego que licuasen la plata para poder en partes levantarla; hubo peña que pesó 160 arrobas." Native silver lying at the surface of the ground, in masses that had to be melted in situ with forge fires before any part could be lifted, is not ore and is not a mine, and the whole legal and fiscal difficulty the passage goes on to describe follows from that. The chronicle was written in 1742 and "ahora cinco años" therefore points to about 1737, but no year is printed on the page and this entry supplies none.
The author states his own disbelief before he states his evidence. "Fuerza me hizo el oirlo, y no me atreviera á referirlo, si no me lo hubieran testificado personas de verdad." A colonial chronicler announcing that he would not have dared put a report in writing on the strength of hearing it is declaring a standard, and the three paragraphs that follow are him meeting it. The formula matters because the same volume elsewhere passes on portents and miracles without any such precaution; the care is switched on for this claim in particular, which suggests the author knew which of his reports would be doubted.
The verification is done in three distinct and ascending forms, and each is labelled. First the finder, examined rather than quoted: "Un fulano Fermin me dijo, siendo por mí preguntado, en presencia de personas de autoridad, ser este el peso que tuvo la pieza que él halló" — questioned by the author, in the presence of persons of authority, and the author does not know or does not give his surname. Second an eyewitness of standing: "D. Francisco Bustamante, capitan de fronteras, por muerte de D. Juan Bautista de Auza, me lo afirmó como testigo de vista". Third the written record: "Y lo de la pieza de 160 arrobas, lo hallé justificado en autos que formó el actual señor presidente de Guadalaxara, marques del castillo de Ayza." Interrogation before witnesses, then eyewitness testimony, then the file of a formal judicial enquiry, offered in that order for the one figure the author expects to be challenged.
The find generated litigation, and the litigation is where an Afro-descendant enters the record as a party rather than as a labourer. Page 317: "otros han litigado en la audiencia de Guadalaxara sobre bolas de plata, de veinte y de mas arrobas, y yo defendí á un moreno, á quien con el pretexto de compañía, se le quiso partir una bola de veintidos arrobas; llámase el moreno Juan de Amésquita." A man the source classes as moreno held a mass of native silver of twenty-two arrobas, was met with a claim that a partnership entitled another to half of it, took the dispute to the royal audiencia of New Galicia, and was represented there by a practising lawyer of that court who names him in print. That an Afro-descendant could be a plaintiff over property of that value in an audiencia is the substance of the claim; that a partner tried to take half of it under a pretext is the same sentence.
What the litigation passage does not say has to be said with it. The page gives no date for the suit, no docket, no adverse party, no plea and — decisively — no outcome: the verb is "se le quiso partir", someone wanted to split it, and the reader is not told whether they succeeded. Nor does it say whether Amésquita was free or enslaved, though a party appearing to defend his own property with counsel of that standing implies free status, and this entry states that as an inference rather than as a fact of the source. The author is the only witness to his own advocacy, is writing to his own credit, and gives no register or escribano's name that would let the case be found. What the passage establishes is that the court was reachable, not that it was fair.
Next to the silver the same chapter puts an untaxed gold economy, described without euphemism. Page 316, paragraph 2: the real del Mezquital, "diez y seis leguas de Guadalaxara, entre Norte y Poniente", yields gold "tan aquilatado, que pasa de veintitres quilates y tres granos, y en tanta abundancia, que se comercia con él en todo el reino, aunque como en secreto, y todos los pobres que van y vienen á dicho real, aunque sea á vender cigarros (que es como por lo comun se gasta el tabaco) llevan oro." Gold of that fineness circulating through the whole kingdom in secret, carried by the poor who walk to the camp to sell cigars, is a description of an economy operating outside the royal fifth and the assay, given in one sentence by an officer of the court that would have had to prosecute it.
The chapter's purpose is advocacy and the advocacy is on the page, which is the reason to read every figure in it as a lawyer's. The chapter head printed on page 316 announces that it will show what the two kingdoms of Galicia and Vizcaya produce for the royal treasury "á punto fijo", how much more they would produce if the king opened trade to them and if the mints, monopolies and contracts were not all engrossed at Mexico, and "cómo se poblaran mas dichos reinos, por cuyo medio se convertirian muchos infieles". The Arizona paragraph sits inside that argument: a demonstration that the north is richer than anyone believes is the premise of a request for a mint, a port and settlement, made by a man who practised in the audiencia of the city that would get them.
The call to action that closes the paragraph is the passage this entry would be dishonest to omit, because it states the motive without disguise. Page 317, paragraph 3, after ranking the find above Moctezuma's treasures and Ginés Vázquez de Mercado's cerro de plata: "Aliéntense, pues, los que buscan riquezas, hagan entradas con formalidad, que yo aseguro que á la sombra de esta ambicion no se dejarán de cosechar frutos que, siendo hoy de poca ley, con el beneficio serán de la mejor ley que se siembre en los muchos gentiles, que ciegos andan sin atinar con la ley verdadera." The pun turns on ley as assay grade and as law or faith: under the shadow of avarice, ore of poor grade will be refined into the best grade of law sown among the gentiles. Entradas into the country of an unconquered nation are being urged, in print, by an officer of a royal court, with greed named as the engine and conversion as the justification.
The people whose land it was are named once and are otherwise absent, and that absence is the finding. The silver is "allá entre los gentiles de la nacion Pimas"; the Pimas appear again only as the source of a rumour, "si hemos de creer á los indios pimas y gentiles", that greater riches lie further in. No Pima is a party to the find, a witness in the verification, a claimant in the audiencia or a person in the paragraph that urges entradas into their country. The chronicle that takes such care over the weight of one mass of silver records nothing about whose ground it lay on, and this entry reports the care and the silence together because they are on the same two pages.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 316 and 317 of the Mexico 1870 printing of a chronicle finished in 1742; the manuscript was not seen and the edition's readings are not collated. Every quantity is the chronicler's: no assay, no treasury entry and no weight certificate is quoted for the 160 arrobas or the 22, and the arithmetic that would turn an arroba of twenty-five Castilian pounds into about eleven and a half kilograms is the entry's and not the source's. The autos of the marqués del Castillo de Aysa, the statement of the frontier captain Francisco Bustamante and the examination of the man called Fermín are reported as Mota Padilla says he saw and took them; none was consulted here, and the Archivo General de Indias and the Mexican archives are unreachable from this container. Nothing here establishes what the crown ultimately ruled about the masses, whether they were treated as a mine subject to the fifth or as something else, how the suits ended, or what became of Juan de Amésquita.