Searching For Lost Relatives

The message was short, to the point and caused quite an uproar when it was received by the Lacy Manufacturing Company in Los Angeles. It was Aug 13 and the message had come, oddly enough, from Guaymas. It read " Arrived. Your Father died. Buried in camp. Ed leaves Sunday for home. Morrison in charge. Has supplies for three months. Please instruct.   P.L. Larson".
The "father" who was dead was William Lacy, founder and CEO of Lacy Pipe & Manufacturing and Puente Oil Company. At 60 years old he was considered to be in good health. He had sailed, only three weeks earlier, to Baja California aboard his 73 ft. yacht, the Penolope. P.L. Larson was captain of the Penolope. The year was 1897.
William Lacy was born in London England in 1837. He was the 5th son of a prosperous businessman. Educated as as an architect, he immigrated to the US of A in 1860 with his brothers. The brothers first settled in central Illinois where William married. By 1863 he'd had enough of Illinois and the Civil War so he took his wife and infant daughter and headed to California via Panama. He first settled in the San Francisco area where he was successful in business and Real Estate development. He was living in San Diego when he received his American citizenship in 1873. By 1875 William was both designing and organizing banks in Los Angeles. One of which went on to become the First National Bank of  L.A. He was very active in the community serving on school boards and fire boards. By 1886 he was one of the most successful businessmen in L.A. having helped establish the second oil field in southern California.  By all standards he was the epitome of the successful capitalist businessman. 
So what  was he doing in Baja? He was doing what every successful American business man of his time was doing, exploiting the labor and land of less fortunate persons. It is not known when William acquired his holdings in Baja. There he had at least one gold mine and an ore mill. His son Ed also had a mine there. He started serious development on this property only two years before his death. What caused his death remains a mystery. His death was officially attributed to complications from appendicitis but some family members suspected foul play. After his son Ed returned home another son was to have gone to retrieve the body but it never happened. His body remains in a restored grave at the mill site near Punta Final.

I  was having a beer with my friend Jody when she told me the story. She was taking her sister Kathy down to Punta Final in a few weeks to see the site. She asked if I'd like to come along to see the grave site of their great great grandfather.
Never one to miss a chance to explore more of Baja I found myself, a few weeks later, in a mini expedition headed down the coast. We were based at a friends beach house at Punta Bufeo about 20 miles from Punta Final. We were well stocked with food and supplies to last a week. We also took along some dive equipment to explore the waters off Punta Bufeo, but that's another story.
The day of exploration arrived hot and dry. It was tough to tear ourselves away from the beach to get in the cars for the 40 minute trip to Punta Final. Only the knowledge that we could get ice, for our beers, at Rancho Grande kept us going.
Jody had been there before and pretty much knew the way. The mill site and grave site are south and a little west of the beach camp at Punta Final. The grave is on the north side of a small cone standing by itself in the valley. The grave is a simple wooden cross with a stainless steel plaque at the base. The site is elevated 15 ft off the valley floor with a nice view of the waters of Gonzaga Bay to the north. It is maintained by a family, with a beach home at Punta Final, that are also relatives of William Lacy.
The cone itself is the backbone of the mill or "molino". A road spirals up around it. The ore would have been hauled in carts up to the top where it would have been dropped into a steep shoot with steel bars across it, called an ore house. Hopefully gravity would cause most of the bigger boulders to break against the bars. Men with sledge hammers would finish what mother nature couldn't deal with. The structure was designed to break the ore into a more manageable size and get rid of non ore bearing rock. The picture at left shows the foundation of this structure and the rock wall at the top is part of the road spiraling around.
Around the base of the cone are the foundations of other mill buildings. Another 50  yards from the cone is the remains of a donkey powered crushing wheel. Here the ore from the ore house was crushed even smaller so the gold could be extracted.  There are some large slabs of granite in this area with holes chiseled in them. You can still see the trough the donkeys drank out of. Also at this site is a depression in the ground that is all that remain of  the "Pozo" or well. One of the people we met at Punta Final told us he filled it in many years ago because he was worried one of his kids would ride their motorbike into it. There are several large metal things scattered about, most noticeably a large tank or boiler at the base of the ore house. We found a few chunks of some reddish ore bearing rock at the ore house but did not see much else in the way of tailings. Most of the remains of the buildings were made out of the white granite, which I felt odd since it was not ore bearing rock. Later I noticed that many homes in Punta Final area are made from white granite or reddish irregular sized rocks. So much for what happened to the walls of the mill buildings and the tailings.
Everyone was starting to grumble about the heat and wanted to head back to the beach for a picnic. I still hadn't seen any sign of a mine but there was a very promising trail heading south from the mill site. So while they went for a dip in the bay I headed up the trail, by myself, to see what I could. While it was obvious that it was a road that went somewhere it showed little sign of use. I was following tracks left by an ATV and scrapping the sides of my truck on overgrown Elephant trees when I had an attack of common sense and turned around.
I could hear the far off calls of cool water and cold beer. Further exploration would have to wait for another day.

To Be Continued....