According to the website of the group Save Vulture Mine (savevulturemine.org), the Vulture Mine was established in 1863 by German immigrant Henry Wickenburg. The mine became the largest-producing gold mine in Arizona until it closed in 1942. An estimated $200 million in gold was taken from the mine. The adjacent Vulture City eventually grew to include about 5,000 residents, most of whom either worked in the mine or worked in some type of mine-related business.
The Save Vulture Mine website quotes the Sacramento Daily Union as reporting on August 11, 1879, that 10 bars of Vulture gold were stolen from a stagecoach near Phoenix. Another story has it that in 1871, four men robbed two bars of Vulture gold from a stagecoach and disappeared. Thirty years later, on his deathbed, one of the bandits told three friends that one of the bars was buried in the yard of a Phoenix home. They found the gold, asked a local assayer to break it into three parts, and were never heard from again.
In his Western novel "Vulture Gold," released in January 2011, writer Chuck Tyrell uses the Vulture Mine as a backdrop. The novel begins with a group of desperadoes stealing $100,000 in gold bullion from the Vulture Mine. The Vulture City marshal must chase down the thieves, which leads to a kidnapping, gunfights and skirmishes between cowboys and American Indians. The novel has received favorable reviews from readers on Amazon.com and from the blog Write a Lot (nik-writealot.blogspot.com).
The nonprofit group Save Vulture Mine is dedicated to preserving the Vulture Mine and what is left of Vulture City. The group maintains that the mine and its environs should be preserved because the mine played a large role in the settlement and development of the Phoenix area as well as in the push for statehood for Arizona. According to the group's website, Vulture Mine owner Henry Wickenburg and his associates provided capital for the canals that allowed the development of the Phoenix area.
