UNION PASS, Ariz. - The Black Mountain Range east of Bullhead, City, Ariz., may seem two-faced and deceptive upon first glance because one perceives the soft purple, orange and beige desert surface makeover, but upon closer observation, its subsurface reveals rugged, deep pockmarks and lines in sharp contrast to a visage that rapidly began aging more than a century ago when gold and silver mining operations in several camps were struggling to flourish.

In the early 1900's, miners blasted, cleaved, tunneled and chambered out the granite and rhyolite subsurfaces of the Black Mountain Range near Union Pass, midway between Bullhead City and Kingman, in exhaustive efforts to find gold and silver. Results of their diligent prospecting, however, usually yielded nothing more than vacant space in the ground. Miners lived in hovels of canvas and wood, adobe and rock and left behind a legacy punctuated with rusty tin cans, bottles (now antiques) and an assortment of other cast-off artifacts scattered and buried with the past.

Some miners only left behind hints of their previous existence evidenced by dilapidated buildings, deteriorating head frames, rusted steel rails, dump-sites and loading chutes, and still for other miners, solitary rewards for their labors and sacrifices were eternal resting places six feet below the earth's surface.

Legend has it that during the summer of 1867, a squad of soldiers from company D in historical Fort Mohave prospected for gold in Union Pass in the Black Mountain Range and as the story goes, they had barely set up camp when a band of Hualapai Indians attacked them. During the night fighting, two troopers were killed and another wounded. The survivors hastily broke camp and made their way back to the Fort Mohave a few miles south of Bullhead City.

However, some historians question the validity of this incident. The Hualapai Indians between 1867 and 1869 were at war with the white settlers in this area suggesting, therefore, that it is doubtful soldiers would have strayed so far from the fort in search of gold at Union Pass. There are few remnants and artifacts, if any, of the original site of U.S. military fort immediately south of Bullhead City. Regardless  whether the story is historically accurate, files at the Arizona Bureau of Mines
indicate that gold was found as early as 1893 in a digging site known as the "Frisco Mine" at Union Pass. Records available at the Mohave County Historical Society in Kingman reveal that two prospectors who discovered ore near the Frisco Mine filed the first mining claim around 1906. This discovery, along with other nearby claims became known as "The Tragedy Group." The name reportedly was given the mine after one of the original prospectors killed his partner during a violent argument.