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LITTLE GREENE SCHOOLHOUSE LIBRARY

Published in 1974, this book, a masterfully researched story by one of the best of historical researchers, C. L. Sonnichsen, zooms up and down from beginning rise, to zenith, to plummeting fall in the life of speculator William Cornell Greene, originally from New York State, a descendant of the Rhode Island Greenes, who some Greenes call the original Greenes, directly related to the General, Nathaniel Greene. The beauty of this book, a drudgery of sorts because Sonnichsen is so precise in his details--cut and dried historical reporting--is in its detailed analysis of how one starts with a hill of beans and capitalizes that hill into a mountain of Wall Street gold. How Wall Street really works, and believe me, it hasn't changed since this story took place during the late 1890s up until the time of the Mexican Revolution in the early years of the 20th Century.

This map was a Greene promo piece. List on the left are the mining properties and Sonora enterprises of Colonel Greene.

Red circles show the areas of the Greene Consolidated Copper Co. and Greene Consolidated Gold Co. in Sonora, Mexico.

Here is a closeup of areas of Sonora where the Greene properties were. Note Cananea in the middle of top circle--the copper mine. In the bottom circle note Cucurpe, on the Santo Domingo River, the site of the gold mine.

This is a list of Mexican railroads at this time provided on the Greene Consolidated Gold Co. promo map. The red numerals on the map are where the railroads were located. Colonel Greene built the Cananea, Yaqui River & Pacific.

Here is a stock certificate for 70 shares of Greene Gold-Silver Company, which started out as the Greene Consolidated Gold Company in 1902. The mine was on the Santo Domingo River, the gold was in the sands of that river for sure and geologists figured it was in the surrounding river banks as well, which was 30 miles south of Cananea, Sonora, Mexico (directly south of Nogales, Arizona), the headquarters for Colonel Greene's copper kingdom. Greene started gold mining in 1904. Sadly, the Colonel was never able to successfully mine even those sure river sands. Greene Gold-Silver Company was a West Virginia corporation with 15 million in capitalization. Alfred Romer, who signed the above certificate as president of the company, was Greene's cousin and loyal companion. The secretary is R.A. Jones (sic) and is unidentifiable using Sonnichsen's book, though there was an Emadair Chase Jones, a photographer, who took a lot of pictures of the Santo Domingo mine and the stamping mill and also the hospital at Cananea. Greene's legal advisor in this mine was the infamous Alfred B. Fall, later prison-bound due to his involvement as Secretary of the Interior in the Teapot Dome scandal during the Harding Administration.

Henry O. Flipper and his relationship to Colonel Greene and the Copper Rocket

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Howard O. Flipper was the first black graduate from West Point who, because of his color, was falsely accused of stealing or some such nonsense. He was one of the top candidates in his class and was highly thought of by the West Point instructors and officers; yet, he was black and because of that, they drummed him out. After he joined Colonel Greene and the whole Greene enterprise failed, Flipper hung around that part of the world, dying in 1940 in Atlanta, Georgia.

From the San Angelo, Texas, City Council meeting of July 2001:

INTRODUCTION OF AN ORDINANCE CHANGING THE NAME OF EAST AVENUE B, BETWEEN SOUTH OAKES STREET AND BURGESS STREET, TO HENRY O. FLIPPER STREET

Henry Flipper was stationed at Fort Concho (where San Angelo, Texas, is today) with the all-Black 10th Cavalry, a unit Henry had joined at Fort Sill.

HENRY'S FIRST COMMISSION:

Flipper was commissioned a Second Lieutenant and was assigned to frontier duty with the all black Tenth United States Cavalry at Fort Sill, Oklahoma (Indian Territory). The Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry became known as "Buffalo Soldiers." They fought Apache and Comanche warriors and policed rustlers and outlaws. Buffalo Soldiers built new roads and telegraph lines and protected stagecoaches. Perhaps the Plains Indians dubbed them "buffalo soldiers," because their hair seemed similar to a buffalo's or it may have been a term of respect, since the buffalo played an integral role in the life of the Plains Indians.

From: www.mobeetie.com/pages/flipper.htm

In 1885, Colonel Greene's cattle empire was headquartered in Hereford, Arizona [see photo above], according to a source outside of Sonnichsen. Supposedly, the Colonel built the largest house in the town...in the above photo, there is a large house behind the tent-roofed building on the far right, which is much clearer in the postcard from which this was scanned. The house is just down the tracks from the railroad station, which, again via the outside source, was the El Paso & Southwestern. It kept cattle-loading pens in Hereford.

Here is a Mexican postcard of Colonel Greene's Ronquillo Mine and Smelter in Ronquillo, just west of Cananea with Colonel Greene's mansion sitting on a plateau between the two villages. This photo is looking east. Cananea is just in the distance past the smokestacks.

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