Total Wreck Mine, Arizona — oxidized Pb-Ag-Cu-Mo-V-Zn deposit famed for wulfenite crystals on stained limestone, with mottramite and vanadates.
Key facts
Total Wreck Mine is one of those Arizona localities whose name threatens to overshadow the minerals—until a good specimen is put under the lamp. The mine lies in the Empire Mountains of Pima County, southeast of Tucson, in the old Empire Mining District near Cienega Creek and The Narrows. It was primarily a silver-lead producer, but the collector interest comes from the oxidized Pb-Ag-Cu-Mo-V-Zn assemblage developed in shattered carbonate ground. Wulfenite is the signature species: small, sharp, lustrous, yellow-orange to butterscotch tabular crystals on iron-stained, brecciated limestone, commonly with calcite, quartz or chalcedony, mimetite, jarosite-group minerals, and dark vanadate crusts. The mine is also an important Arizona occurrence for mottramite after wulfenite pseudomorphs and for less common oxidized minerals such as fornacite, willemite, plumbojarosite, descloizite, vanadinite, and chlorargyrite.
Geologically, Total Wreck is a fault-controlled replacement and vein system in Permian carbonate rocks cut by Laramide intrusive rocks. The old reports describe badly faulted limestone and dolomite, thin quartzite beds, calcite veining, cellular quartz, and multiple fissure systems in which oxidized ore formed both along veins and outward along bedding planes. That fractured, chemically open setting explains the locality’s collector character: specimens tend not to be large, clean “pocket plates” in the broad commercial sense, but intimate pieces of oxidized limestone full of small vugs, brightly colored micro- to thumbnail-scale lead molybdates and vanadates, and sparkling white calcite contrasts.
Historically, Total Wreck mattered before it mattered to mineral collectors. Discovered in 1879, it quickly became a high-profile territorial silver camp. By the early 1880s the Empire Mining and Development Company had a 20-stamp, 70-ton mill in place, and the settlement had stores, hotels, saloons, a butcher shop, laundries, and a post office. For a brief period it was one of the notable silver producers of Arizona Territory; after the first bonanza years, it declined into sporadic reworking, later molybdenum recovery, and finally a ghost-town-and-specimen locality.
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The best Total Wreck pieces reward magnification. Wulfenite from here is typically not the broad, cabinet-scale crimson material that made the Red Cloud Mine famous, nor the large orange plates of some other Arizona localities. Its appeal is precision: gemmy orange plates, beveled edges, high luster, and strong contrast against pale calcite, white quartz, blue chrysocolla, or black-brown mottramite and iron oxides. The locality is also unusually interesting for collectors who like alteration history preserved in miniature—wulfenite partly replaced or completely pseudomorphed by mottramite, green fornacite in chrysocolla-bearing seams, and breccia fragments cemented by late calcite.
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Total Wreck Mine is in the northeastern Empire Mountains, about seven miles south of Pantano, in the Empire Mining District of Pima County, Arizona. Historic records place it near Cienega Creek at roughly 4,600 feet elevation. The old mine is an underground Pb-Ag-Cu-Mo-Au-Mn-V-Zn occurrence, developed on a group of claims, some of them patented, and worked through shafts, adits, tunnels, drifts, inclines, winzes, and stopes.
The deposit is best understood as an oxidized, structurally prepared carbonate replacement and vein system. The host rocks are Permian carbonate units—reported in modern locality summaries as Concha Limestone and Rain Valley Formation, and in older mining descriptions as thin-bedded gray to black limestone and dolomite with quartzite beds. The beds are cut by small diorite or quartz-monzonite intrusive bodies and affected by strong faulting. The Andrada fault lies immediately north of the mine area, and the workings follow a network of east-west, northeasterly, and northwesterly structures.
The ore was developed along three principal vein or fissure systems. Older descriptions distinguish a North fissure and a South fissure, about 90 feet apart, both striking approximately east-west and dipping steeply north, intersected by a main fault or vein striking northeast and dipping steeply southeast. Ore occurred within these fractures and as irregular replacements spreading outward along limestone bedding planes, in places for only a few feet and in other places for distances approaching 100 feet. The “veins” were described as several feet wide, with a principal vein around 5 feet wide, but the collectible mineralization is more irregular: altered, crushed limestone, vugs, breccia zones, calcite, cellular quartz, iron oxides, and secondary lead-copper-vanadium-molybdenum minerals.
The early ore was dominantly oxidized lead-silver material. Chlorargyrite, cerussite, anglesite, galena, silver-bearing galena, wulfenite, vanadinite, malachite, chrysocolla, and chalcopyrite appear in the historical and mineralogical record, with calcite, quartz, hematite, jarosite-group minerals, limonite, and siderite as common gangue or alteration minerals. Silver values reportedly decreased with depth while copper values increased, a typical vertical zoning pattern in an oxidized polymetallic carbonate system. A breccia body 40 to 50 feet wide was noted in the 450-foot-level area, along with pale clayey material, suggesting repeated movement, crushing, oxidation, and mineralizing fluids.
Discovery is generally credited to John Dillon or Dilden in 1879, with the famous name arising from the broken appearance of the hillside or from Dillon’s own “total wreck” remark after a hard prospecting day. Serious work began after the Empire Mining and Development Company acquired the property in 1881, built a 20-stamp mill with a reported 70-ton daily capacity, and operated actively on high-grade silver-lead ore. The camp rapidly became a small town. Contemporary and later accounts list a post office established August 12, 1881 and discontinued November 1, 1890; by the early 1880s the settlement had hundreds of residents and a full suite of frontier businesses.
The first phase was brief but lucrative. Historic summaries report a five-month run yielding about $450,000 from approximately 7,500 tons of ore, and total production figures often cite about 14,000 tons of ore averaging roughly 8% lead and 7 ounces of silver per ton, with minor copper and gold. Production statistics for the earliest years vary between sources, but all agree that the bonanza period was concentrated in the early 1880s. The mine and mill were closed by the end of 1884 and the property was later sold for taxes to Gates and the Vail brothers. Later operators or owners included C. T. Roberts, E. P. Drew, Schley, Adams & Saxby, Gardner & Young, Torres, and M. Bonner Denton. Reworking occurred in the 1907–1911 period, and in 1917–1918 the mine also shipped molybdenum concentrates, reflecting the wulfenite-bearing character of the oxidized ore.
By about 1910, the underground development was described as totaling roughly 5,000 feet, with workings reaching about 500 feet deep. The mine plan published with the early USGS work shows a complex system of shafts, tunnels, stopes, levels, a mill adit, low-grade lead ore areas, and deeper workings. For collectors, the important implication is that specimens have come from multiple accessible and now partly collapsed levels and from both underground exposures and old dumps, rather than from a single modern pocket operation.
Documented modern collecting has focused on wulfenite, mottramite after wulfenite, calcite, quartz, chrysocolla-bearing seams, and micromineral material. Field collectors have described wulfenite in underground walls and vugs below the upper levels, with some pockets yielding orange, tabular crystals but many areas producing etched, broken, or poorly developed material. Another described collecting zone involved a chrysocolla seam in the ceiling that yielded green platy crystals later identified as fornacite, associated with orange wulfenite, quartz, chrysocolla, and locally willemite. The most desirable finds are small but sharply crystallized: lustrous orange wulfenite plates on coherent matrix, mottramite pseudomorphs that retain recognizable wulfenite form, and calcite-rich pieces with strong color contrast.
Access today should be treated conservatively. The mine and surrounding area include a mixture of private, patented, state, and rough backcountry access considerations, and published descriptions repeatedly warn of dangerous abandoned workings, open holes, unstable slopes, and difficult roads. Permission from the relevant land and mineral-rights holders is essential before any collecting attempt. Underground collecting is particularly hazardous here: old stopes, inclines, loose debris slopes, bad air, bats, and rotten ground are all realistic risks in a mine whose very name fits its fractured workings.
Wulfenite is the collector mineral at Total Wreck, but it is a locality for connoisseurs rather than for big show plates: the characteristic crystals are small, thin tabular plates, yellow-orange to butterscotch and sometimes near-clear, commonly only millimeters across, with better examples reaching attractive thumbnail scale or about 5 mm on edge in well-documented market specimens. The best pieces show sharp, lustrous, gemmy orange plates on iron-stained limestone or quartz-calcite matrix, sometimes partly dusted or bordered by white calcite and associated with mimetite, jarosite-group minerals, chrysocolla, quartz or chalcedony, willemite, and green fornacite. Underground collectors have described the crystals as extremely brittle on a delicate iron-rich matrix, so superior specimens are those with intact plates, clean contrast, minimal bruising, and no collapsed matrix; mottramite after wulfenite pseudomorphs add a second collecting category, preserving the wulfenite form as dark brown to black vanadate replacements rather than fresh orange PbMoO4.
Calcite at Total Wreck is less a stand-alone glamour species than the mineral that gives many of the locality’s specimens their architecture and contrast. It occurs as vein and vug filling in the altered limestone, as white to colorless crystals and crusts with wulfenite, quartz, mottramite, and breccia fragments, and as small lustrous crystals or disc-like aggregates on larger mottramite-calcite pieces. Well-documented cabinet material shows calcite cementing or coating intensely brecciated limestone fragments with dark mottramite, while wulfenite specimens may carry small white calcite crystals partly coating orange tabular blades. The best calcite-associated pieces are those where the calcite is bright, clean, and texturally distinct—white crystals against orange wulfenite or black mottramite—rather than massive carbonate with only minor sparkle.
Beyond wulfenite and calcite, Total Wreck is an unusually rich oxidized polymetallic locality. Mindat and collector reports document acanthite, anglesite, azurite, cerussite, chalcopyrite, chlorargyrite, chrysocolla, descloizite, fornacite, galena including silver-bearing galena, gypsum, hematite, hemimorphite, jarosite, kaolinite, limonite, malachite, mimetite, mottramite, plumbojarosite, pyrite, quartz including chalcedony, siderite, smithsonite, vanadinite, and willemite. The most notable rarities for advanced collectors are mottramite after wulfenite pseudomorphs, green fornacite associated with chrysocolla, quartz, willemite, and wulfenite, and small fluorescent willemite-bearing pieces from the oxidized zinc-bearing assemblage.
Total Wreck specimens are often small, old, and structurally fragile. The finest fresh wulfenite is thin, brittle, and easily damaged; many plates are cleaved, chipped, or missing edges, and even otherwise attractive pieces may show bruising where matrix was trimmed or extracted. Intact luster and sharp outline matter greatly. Because the crystals are small, a specimen that appears ordinary to the naked eye may be excellent under 10x magnification, while a larger piece with scattered broken orange flecks may be less desirable than a tight thumbnail with a few perfect plates.
The most common locality-specific labeling issue is confusion between fresh wulfenite and pseudomorph material. Total Wreck is known for mottramite after wulfenite, and these pieces can preserve tabular wulfenite form while showing dark brown, bronze, black, or sparkly surfaces rather than fresh orange wulfenite. Such specimens should be labeled as mottramite after wulfenite when the replacement is complete or dominant. Dark vanadate crusts on calcite or breccia may also be sold simply as “mottramite” without noting whether recognizable wulfenite pseudomorphs are present; that distinction matters to collectors.
A second labeling issue concerns green microcrystals in chrysocolla-bearing seams. Fornacite has been confirmed from the locality, but green Total Wreck vanadate/chromate material can be visually deceptive, and older labels may read mottramite for material later regarded as fornacite. Advanced buyers should value specimens with modern analytical support or with strong provenance from knowledgeable collectors, especially for fornacite, willemite, descloizite, and other less common species.
Documented market material ranges from modest thumbnails to better small-cabinet pieces. A recent well-described wulfenite with calcite specimen measured 6.7 x 5.0 x 3.3 cm and carried gemmy orange tabular blades up to 5 mm on edge; it sold as a relatively hard-to-find example from the locality. Mottramite pseudomorph thumbnails and calcite-mottramite cabinet specimens also circulate, often from older collections. In general, Total Wreck is available but not abundant: patient collectors will see examples, but choice wulfenite plates with clean orange color and little damage are much scarcer than ordinary oxidized matrix pieces.
Fluorescence can be useful. Willemite is documented from Total Wreck and may respond under ultraviolet light, and the locality has a collecting tradition of examining old mine material with UV. As always with old oxidized lead-silver-copper deposits, treat powders and friable matrix with respect. Avoid inhaling dust, do not acid-clean mixed secondary assemblages casually, keep specimens away from children, and wash hands after handling pieces rich in lead, arsenate, vanadate, or molybdate minerals.
The name begins with a wrecked-looking hill. John T. “Jerry” Dillon, a New Mexico cowboy who came to Arizona in the 1870s and worked around the Empire Ranch, is the figure most often placed at the discovery. One version has him asked what he would call the claim; another has him looking at the shattered ridge and saying, “The whole damned hill is a total wreck.” The name stuck because the geology looked the part: broken carbonate ground, quartzite boulders, fissures, and rubble above a lode that turned out to be rich enough to build a town.
For a few years, the place belied its name. In the early 1880s, a Los Angeles Times reporter found not a ruin but an orderly frontier camp. The main street was called Dillon Street, and the town had stores, hotels, a restaurant, five saloons, a carpenter, blacksmith, butcher, shoe shop, dressmaker, brewery, and dozens of houses. Later summaries list three general stores, four or five saloons, several Chinese laundries, and a population usually put around 200 to 300, with some later estimates ranging higher. The camp had a magistrate and a deputy sheriff, and the reporter was told that ninety men could be mustered within an hour if trouble came.
Total Wreck’s prosperity was real enough to shape the surrounding country. Nathan Vail helped finance development, Walter Vail and associates became deeply involved, and mine profits were later connected with the expansion of the Empire Ranch. A reported five-month mill run in the early 1880s yielded about $450,000 from roughly 7,500 tons of ore, an astonishing pulse for a camp that would become nearly empty within a few years. The mill, rated at 70 tons, consumed wood, water, labor, wagons, and nerves; in old photographs the place appears as a spare scattering of buildings against a pale, open hillside.
The camp also had its grim frontier episodes. In June 1883, woodcutters hired to supply the mill were working on the west slopes of the Whetstone Mountains when a band of Geronimo’s Apaches attacked. Six of the men were killed, and a team of mules was driven off. Those woodcutters were remembered as the first burials in the Total Wreck Cemetery—a stark reminder that the mine’s supply chain extended beyond the tunnel and mill into the surrounding mountains.
Then there is the story every ghost-town writer repeats: E. B. Salsig and the love letters. Salsig reportedly got into a dispute; the other man drew a gun and fired. The bullet struck Salsig in the chest, but a large packet of love letters in his vest pocket stopped it. The romantic ending is almost too neat, but it is part of the Total Wreck legend: Salsig survived and later married the woman who wrote the letters.
Modern collecting stories are just as vivid, though on a smaller scale. One collector visiting in the 1980s remembered the road in as a long, rough approach off Highway 83, climbing toward a steep ridge, breaking into forks and side tracks, and demanding high clearance. At the mine, the entrance he used was not dramatic: a small foot trail, a horizontal tunnel, and then a series of descending passages. He carried lights, tools, and a five-gallon bucket. Underground, the workings branched in several directions; sparkles in the headlamp beam were sometimes quartz or calcite, sometimes wulfenite. The place was so dirty with iron and manganese oxide that a companion called it the dirtiest mine he had ever collected in.
The same account includes one of the great rockhound ironies. After a day underground, a member of the group spotted something beside the bushes near the cars: two flats left by some previous collector. When opened, the flats were full of wulfenite specimens. The finder loaded them up, declined to share, and answered the disappointed group with the oldest field rule in the book: “finders-keepers.”
A later Rutgers field account captures the modern mineralogical draw and the danger of the ground. After a conference in Tucson, two collectors drove into the Empire Mountains, leaving pavement for rocky desert tracks through yucca-covered hills. Black oxidized tailings finally gave away the site. At the timbered opening, bright desert light turned to darkness; gloves, headlamps, and N95 respirators came out. Their lamps picked up brecciated and altered limestone, iron-oxide staining, calcite, cellular quartz, and repeated alteration events. They descended three stories into accessible levels and then stopped for safety.
Their target was the orange flash of wulfenite. At Total Wreck, those plates sit on delicate iron-rich matrix, and extraction is unforgiving. One careless hammer blow near a promising face can turn a specimen into dust. Their rueful lesson was simple: do not celebrate until the specimen is safely out of the mine. Some crystals that looked museum-worthy underground did not survive the process.
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