Lost Santa Rosa Mine – Google Docs
The Lost Santa Rosa Mine
Nobody has ever really explained how a zinc mine that is listed in official Mexican land records as being six miles north of Silver City, New Mexico could believably be ‘lost,’ but here we are. The mine is supposedly somewhere at Gomez Peak, and would be one of the oldest mines in New Mexico, if it actually existed. The operational records are scanty: Santa Rosa Mine was supposedly opened in 1846, decades before any actual mining in the area, and that’s pretty much it. After the Mexican-American War, the area fell under the administration of the United States, and there’s no record of a Santa Rosa Mine in American archives.
The listed owner of the mine — one Pedro Augustin Cortes Bocadillo — has more of a paper trail, not least because somebody by that name had arrest warrants from the Spanish Imperial, Mexican Republican, both Mexican Imperial, Texan, and American governments, and there is one paper that suggests that French Louisiana was looking for him, too. And not for trivial things, either. Murder, sedition, ‘outrages,’ armed robbery, grave-robbing, banditry; the record stretches a good sixty years, and does not so much end during the 1860s as it simply peters out. Local New Mexican and Sonoran legends tell of a wicked sorcerer who terrorized the border before disappearing in the collapse of the Second Mexican Empire, but everybody bad in folk legends eventually becomes a sorcerer.
It is admittedly odd how Cortes could manage to get a deed to a mine when he was wanted by the Mexican government, but the whole thing’s probably a fake anyway. Gomez Peak is a perfectly normal wilderness area that’s lightly managed for picnickers and hikers, and there are certainly no zinc mines in the mountain, either lost or not. The mine itself is not even a local tall tale, and park rangers love to make up legends like this, so the evidence for nonexistence is all very conclusive, as such things go.
So it’s odd that a certain mining corporation — the kind that plays very fast and very loose with paperwork and permissions — has been researching the area. And that they apparently sent a field team out two weeks ago to assess the mountain. The fact that the first field team hasn’t reported in in a week is not odd, in the sense that the sudden loss of communications in anomalous field conditions is wearily and inevitably familiar to people who are in this line of work. At any rate: the corporation is sending a second team to check out the situation. Time to send in your team, to do the inevitable cleanup for whatever occult, ultra-tech, conspiratological, horrific, supernatural, metaphysic, or Just Plain Weird disaster is really going on here, and resolve the situation.
What’s that? Yes, of course you can separate out anybody who doesn’t really deserve their fate and manipulate them out of said disaster via the usual implausible set of hair-breadth escapes. We’re not monsters.