The Vigilance Committee of San Francisco sent a considerable number of unsavory immigrants to Arizona, who with the refugees from Mexico, Texas and Arkansas, rendered mule property rather insecure in the early days. Gambling has been an industrial pursuit since the first settlement of the country, and the saloon business flourishes with the prosperity of the times. Strange to say, amidst this heterogeneous population there has never been a vigilance committee. The Company and the country (synonymous terms) continued to improve, with occasional interruptions by the Apaches, until the beginning of 1861, when the reverberations of the gun fired at Sumter were heard in the Arizona mountains. A newspaper had been started by the company at Tubac, called _The Arizonian_. Our mail came overland by Butterfield coaches, at the rate of a hundred miles a day, but at last we waited for "the mail that never came." In the spring of 1861 a coach was started out from the Rio Grande with thirteen of the bravest buckskin boys of the West, and ten or twelve thousand dollars in gold, to pay off the line and withdraw the service; but the Apaches waylaid the coach in Stein's Pass, killed all of the men, and captured the gold. In the month of June the machinery was running smoothly at Arivaca, the mines were yielding handsomely, and two hundred and fifty employees were working for good wages, which were paid punctually every Saturday afternoon. One day an orderly from Fort Buchanan rode up to headquarters and handed me a note from Lieutenant Chapin, enclosing a copy of an order from the commanding officer of the Military Department:-- Santa Fe, June, 1861, Commanding Officer, Fort Buchanan:-- On receipt of this you will abandon and destroy your Post; burn your Commissary and Quartermasters' stores, and everything between the Colorado and Rio Grande that will feed an army. March out with your guns loaded, and do not permit any citizen within fifteen miles of your lines. (Signed) Major General Lynde A council of the principal employees was called, and the order laid before them. The wisest said we could not hold the country after the troops abandoned it,--that the Apaches would come down upon us by the hundred, and the Mexicans would cut our throats. It was concluded to reduce the ore we had mined, which was yielding about a thousand dollars a day, pay off the hands, and prepare for the worst. About a week afterwards the Apaches came down by stealth, and carried off out of the corral one hundred and forty-six horses and mules. The Apaches are very adroit in stealing stock, and no doubt inherit the skill of many generations in theft. The corrals are generally built of adobe, with a gate or bars at the entrance. It was a customary practice for the Apaches to saw an entrance through an adobe wall with their horsehair ropes (cabrestas).