Apr

1

Song in Plaster: Calexico “Contention City”

Filed Under Updates 

la-ciudad-de-contencion

In a spot near Tombstone, Arizona, well above the San Pedro River a prospector named Hank Williams told everyone that he’d had a mule break loose towards the camp of Schieffelin and Gird. Tearing after it he saw the rock on the ground that the mule’s halter chains had scraped off. Silver ore, right on the surface of the ground. Leaving the mule, he ran back to camp for tools, and set to staking a claim around the silver.

Gird, however, said that the claim was his, and contested Williams’ claim. Williams didn’t put up much of a fight, and Schieffelin and Gird persuaded him to sell out all rights, real or imaginary, to the claim.

That was in 1879. The mine dug, Schieffelin and Gird named it Contention. They quickly realized that they needed a lot of water to process the ore and turn it into anything worthwhile, but the hole was too far away from the San Pedro for the river to do them any good. So a stamping mill went up twelve miles from the mine, above the riverbank, and by September a town named Contention City had been bought and surveyed just across the river. Within a year the shanty town had a Post Office; within four years of exuberant adobe construction, it had two more mills, the New Mexico, Arizona & Sonora railhead, restaurants, and an epidemic of saloons.

The mines exhausted themselves quickly, and began flooding. The town’s fortunes declined almost immediately. The Post Office closed in 1888. The mills and their workers had nothing to process. People moved on. And so the adobe city melted back into the Sonoran dirt and mesquite, leaving only faint imprints of the depot and the crumbling stone foundations of the first mill. When the rain makes its rare visits, the San Pedro swells from a trickle to a torrent and the holes in the ground turn rapidly into flooded pools.

Through miles of waste to cross upstream
Risking all dreams for what the surface brings
Free like the flow that pours from your hand
Claiming its own,
New River

Calexico: Contention City (Carried to Dust)

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By certain key metrics, Brendan likes Calexico better than most any other band. Someday he will take his wife and they will watch that band bring it live.

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