Chisos Mining Company:

An Inventory of Chisos Mining Company Records at the Texas State Archives, 1905-1943, undated, bulk 1928-1942

Agency History

The Chisos Mining Company was established and began operations in 1903 near what would become Terlingua, Texas. The company specialized in quicksilver mercury mining. The marketability was established in 1799 when Charles Harvard discovered that compounding the element generated fulminate mercury crystals. These crystals can be used to cause small explosions and are useful in the manufacture of gunpowder cartridges and shells.

The Chisos Mining Company was preceded in the Big Bend area of west Texas by the Marfa and Mariposa Mining Company, which began operations in the 1880s. That company erected the first Scott furnace in 1899. The furnace was a necessary part of extracting quicksilver from the cinnabar that was prevalent in the region. There were several other mines in the area; however, Chisos ultimately eclipsed them all and was the most profitable. The town of Terlingua grew around the company, which necessitated the establishment of services including a post office, public school, store, and jail.

The company's founder and president, Howard E. Perry, was born in Chicago and began his career working at his father's lumber mill. How Perry acquired the tract of land in Texas that was mined is contested, but most likely he acquired the land in lieu of payment for a debt. He incorporated the Chisos Mining Company under the State of Maine on May 8, 1903 and listed Augusta, Maine, as the principal office. In July 1903, Perry registered Chisos as a foreign corporation doing business in Texas. After acquiring the tract in Texas, he went on research trips to California and Spain to see how quicksilver mines operated. After the Chisos mines were successful, he returned to Chicago where he ran the business remotely.

Perry's managerial style and his choice to administer the business from Chicago led to some structural idiosyncrasies. He established the precedent that he communicated only with one or two agents who then distributed information to all other agents and departments. The earliest correspondence with Perry in this capacity was with the store manager and purchasing agent, H.A. Ferguson. Perry also communicated with James Lafarrelle, a contemporary of Ferguson, who worked as a superintendent or supervisor. Ferguson resigned from his post in 1910 and was replaced by C.A. Hawley, who came from the Marfa and Mariposa company. Wayne Cartledge, who joined the company in 1909, rose through the ranks to become general manager in 1923. His younger brother Robert became general manager after him and held the post until 1940. Robert Cartledge's work at the company is extensively documented throughout the records.

Generally, the positions open to Anglo workers were mine superintendent, general manager, assayer, furnace manager, store manager, and purchasing agent. Manual labor was performed by Mexicans; a labor force from Mexico was readily available due to the site's remoteness from white settlements in Texas and its proximity to the Texas-Mexico border.

By 1905, the quicksilver industry was booming and would continue to do so with the advent of World War I. Competition was fierce and so secrecy was essential. Telegrams between Perry and his company were often in code. In response to the company's success, Perry commissioned a Scott furnace to be built. Previously, the Chisos company had been using the Marfa and Mariposa company's furnace; with its own furnace, Chisos grew to outpace the production of the older company. By 1910, the Marfa and Mariposa mines closed. The Chisos Company maintained steady business, aided by the discovery of the high-yielding ore chimney in 1914. The business reached its apex of profitability during the years of World War I; by 1921, demand and production decreased, but remained stable for the next few years.

The company store, from its inception the center of the community at Terlingua, was established no later than 1905 (the earliest documentation is a Brewster County tax record). Originally a temporary tent, the permanent structure was built around 1908. Its central location in the town made it the ideal location for the offices of the general manager and the company purchasing agent, as well as the Post Office. The one telephone in Terlingua was installed there in 1913, and when Precinct No. 4 was established, the office of the Justice of the Peace was also located in the store. It was a necessary establishment; there were no other general stores within a hundred miles, and this attracted patrons from outside the company's employ as well.

Payroll practices were closely bound to the running of the store. It would appear that laborers were paid at the end of each shift, either in silver pesos or coupons which could only be used in the company store; this may account for the inconsistent recordkeeping regarding the payroll of the labor force. In the early years, employees were paid in cash at the end of each shift. In seeking to maintain a closed economy, it is alleged that management paid wages in marked pesos and maintained an inconsistent exchange rate to U.S. dollars. Store clerk C.A. Hawley reported unscrupulous practices to the Mexican government, which in turn attempted to file suit against Chisos. This fiasco likely led to the institution of the coupon payment system, perpetuating the company store's closed economy. When Robert Cartledge started work for the company, one of his first duties was setting up the coupon payroll system. After that point, the daily-issued coupons could be traded in for cash twice per month, although this practice was not encouraged.

The institutions of the post office and the public school were established early to serve the growing community, and while they were more or less public, government-based institutions, their staff were employed by the Chisos Mining Company. George "Ed" Babb was for many years the postmaster, as well as a prominent member and occasional president of the school board. Other Chisos employees or affiliates on the school board include a Mrs. Burcham and a Mr. Waters. Other Chisos employees held political positions in Brewster County, including Wayne Cartledge's post in 1918 as County Commissioner. Purportedly these seats were maneuvered by Perry in order to influence budgets as well as taxes levied on the company.

The culture of Terlingua was structured around company mandates and customs. A seven-day work week was standard. The mine laborers worked in three eight-hour shifts, which rotated every two weeks, always on Saturdays; this opened Saturday evenings to social gatherings. The company, as well as Terlingua itself, was deeply segregated between white and Mexican employees. Though the majority of pupils in the Terlingua school were Hispanic, the school board forbade the use of Spanish therein. A notable example of this unequal treatment of Anglo and Mexican residents may be found in documents from 1922, when the mine closed for over two months because of flooding. Without wages and no means of savings, the laborers asked for credit to be extended at the store, and were refused.

Social strain was accompanied by legal difficulty. In 1928, communications began between Perry and representatives from the neighboring Rainbow Mining Company, including Alpine attorney John Perkins and Rainbow board member M.B. Whitlock, attempting to determine whether Chisos's latest excavations had led them beyond the perimeter of Perry's land and onto that of the Rainbow Mining Company. Perry insisted that the mine was entirely on Chisos land and had his attorney W. Van Sickle research past land surveys. Upon finding a disparity between the original survey and a more recent one, Van Sickle filed a claim with the land office, asserting Chisos's ownership of the contested area. Rainbow in return filed an injunction against Chisos on May 31, 1929 and Wilbur L. Matthews of Templeton, Brooks, Napier, and Brown in San Antonio was assigned to investigate the claims. Matthews uncovered evidence in favor of Rainbow's claim and clinched his victory by locating the original survey marker as indisputable proof of Perry's transgression. The matter was settled on February 17, 1930 with the court awarding Rainbow $75,000 in damages.

As the country slid into depression in the 1930s, the quicksilver industry suffered. On July 18, 1933, the National Quicksilver Producers Association (NQPA) was founded to support the industry's interests in the legislation being passed as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal initiative. The Association was comprised of mining companies around the nation and Howard Perry of the Chisos Mining Company served as its vice president upon its founding. The NQPA applied for a Code of Fair Competition from the National Recovery Administration on July 31, 1933. The Code was supposed to protect American quicksilver production from being replaced by cheaper, foreign suppliers as well as to set standards for how business was conducted.

Though this code was approved March 21, 1934, Howard Perry and the Chisos Mining Company had already severed ties with the NQPA and organized with other Texan quicksilver interests as non-NQPA members to address the problems unique to the area. Perry's primary disagreement with the code approved at the national level was its minimum wage requirements (30 cents per hour), which Perry thought were too high for a primarily Mexican workforce. Perry and his consortium received a temporary exemption from the minimum wage requirements, requiring them to pay at minimum 20cents per hour.

Perry's dealings with the NRA were far from over, as in 1934, NRA Executive Assistant T.U. Purcell began his investigation of Howard Perry and the Chisos Mining Company. Purcell found that not only was Perry underpaying his employees even beyond the allowed exempt amount, he was violating numerous other terms of the Code of Fair Competition. In addition to wage violations, Purcell's report cites Chisos for requiring a 54-hour work week (as opposed to the 40-hour work week required by the code), failing to pay overtime wages for these additional hours, and paying his Mexican employees in foreign currency rather than U.S. dollars. Further citations for safety, child labor, and "oppression" painted Perry as such an unreasonable employer that Purcell's report came to the attention of the Texas director for the NRA, H.P. Drought. What followed was a lengthy series of heated meetings with Purcell, Drought, Perry, and representatives from other mines in the Terlingua area, eventually removing Purcell from the investigation because of his attitudes towards Perry. By March, 1935, new investigators had been sent from the NRA to Chisos and Perry and his staff had made enough adjustments to the practices as to satisfy their inquiries. The company was found finally to be in compliance with the code and Perry was left to run Chisos without further interference from the NRA.

As the 1930s progressed, production of quicksilver declined and Perry was grasping at any opportunity to make the mine profitable again. Past due notices were making up most of the correspondence received by the company and Robert Cartledge was running Chisos with a skeleton crew, while trying to communicate to Perry the futility of continuing on at Chisos. Perry's creditors filed an involuntary bankruptcy suit against Chisos on September 5, 1942. After a last scramble for cash, Perry and Chisos filed the paperwork to finalize the bankruptcy on October 1, 1942 and the mine and furnace were shut down for the last time.

(Sources: Ragsdale, Kenneth Baxter, Quicksilver: Terlingua and the Chisos Mining Company, Texas A&M University Press, 1976; Ragsdale, Kenneth B., "Chisos Mining Company," ( http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/dkc05 ), and W. D. Burcham and Harris S. Smith, "Mercury Mining," ( http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/dkm02 ), Handbook of Texas Online, published by the Texas State Historical Association, accessed November 6, 2011; and the records themselves.)

Scope and Contents of the Records

The Chisos Mining Company records document the operations of a quicksilver mining company during the first half of the twentieth century in Texas's Big Bend. This collection is comprised of a variety of material relating to the administration of the Chisos Mining Company including the company store, post office, and public school. The collection documents the company's interests in Terlingua, Texas, as well as it interactions with the towns of Alpine, Texas and Marathon, Texas. The records includes correspondence, internally and externally generated receipts, work records, advertisements, price lists, partial catalogs, a document detailing the history of the company, various partial and complete payroll registers, coupon books, trial balance sheets, purchase orders, credit memos, expense reports, budget proposals, check stubs, blueprints, and government-issued forms, documents, and manuals. Generic government documents are included in the collection as well, concerning agricultural quarantines, postal regulations, and immigration documentation. Dates covered are 1905-1943, undated, bulk dating 1928-1942. History of Chisos Mining Company is a single typewritten history of the company dating after 1942, author unknown. General correspondence contains correspondence among company employees discussing management and labor, as well as correspondence between the Chisos Mining Company and outside vendors, including orders for supplies, past due notices and requests for quicksilver. School board and Post Office correspondence and records contains letters and forms relating to postal regulations and employment openings at the Terlingua school. Advertisements, price list and other material is comprised of advertising ephemera, which illustrates how the company store would have been stocked. General receipts and accounting records illustrate the variety of recordkeeping formats and practices used by the company, and the store especially; some groups of documents are remarkably consistent, while others are sporadic. The few payroll lists include names of employees. General merchandise receipts are a consistent set of bundled receipts of purchase at the company store by Chisos employees, showing their everyday purchases. Post Office receipts and accounting records are largely of bundles of receipts for deliveries by the Terlingua mail truck, showing near-daily deliveries of necessities such as bread. Also present therein are government- issued accounting ledgers, maintained by G.E. Babb in his capacity as postmaster. Accounting ledgers and books comprise five series of more or less complete, discrete, preprinted record books documenting sales at the store, payment of wages through the coupon system, and other accounting practices, largely from the earliest years of operation.

Topics addressed include labor, particularly the employment conditions for Mexican immigrants hired by the company. Overall the records offer insight into the workings of a mining company and describes Texan life in an industrial frontier town in the early twentieth century.

Restrictions

Restrictions on Access

Materials do not circulate, but may be used in the State Archives search room. Materials will be retrieved from and returned to storage areas by staff members.

Restrictions on Use

Under the Copyright Act of 1976 as amended in 1998, unpublished manuscripts are protected at a minimum through December 31, 2002 or 70 years after the author's death. Researchers are responsible for complying with U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17 U.S.C.).

Technical Requirements

A few of the blotters and check registers are in various states of deterioration and must be handled with extra care.

Related Material

Administrative Information

Preferred Citation

(Identify the item and cite the series), Chisos Mining Company records. Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

Accession Information

Accession number: 2009/167

These records were transferred to the Archives and Information Services Division of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission by the W.R. Poage Legislative Library, Baylor University, on August 4, 2009 and by an unknown donor prior to 1980.

Processing Information

Card index inventory done in the 1970s by State Archives staff.

Processing and a DACS-compliant finding aid and XML markup were completed in fall 2011 by Rebecca Reel, Jenny Singer, and Annie Sollinger of the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin.

Detailed Description of the Records