El Patroncito

THE SILVER MAGNET--Grant Shepherd --Button ($3).

Batopilas, Mexico, lies on a narrow shelf of land in a narrow valley in western Chihuahua, 350 miles south of El Paso, 300 miles north of Mazatlan. There, in the summer of 1880, five-year-old Grant Shepherd arrived with his mother, four sisters, two brothers, various relatives, two nurses, a doctor, four dogs. His father was manager of the ancient silver mines whose 70 miles of workings honeycombed the hills. The family had come overland from Washington, D. C., by train, wagon and pack mule, to make their home in Batopilas.

In that springtime of U. S. imperialism, Batopilas was a wonderful place to grow up in. The prosperous mines shipped as much as $200,000 worth of bullion a month. The native workmen were contented, friendly, pleased with their steady wages, the company store, the hospital, the electric lights, respectful toward the manager El Patron Grande and his sons, Los Patroncitos. The countryside was beautiful, with orange trees growing within high hacienda walls, with the swift Batopilas rushing beside the house, with ruins left by the Spaniards, who had worked the mines in 1632.

There, Grant and his brothers flourished. As good-natured, reckless kids, they stole rides on the ore cars, hunted in the mountains, searched in the ruins for buried treasure. A little later they went to school in the States, to Lawrenceville and Sewanee, returning during vacations to Batopilas, where in the evenings they promenaded around the plaza with the young men of the town, while the band played and the young ladies eyed their admirers. They danced, trained fighting cocks, learned to drink. Sometimes they got into little scrapes with the police or the townspeople: when Con Shepherd tried to jump his horse over the drummer in the band, and landed in the bass drum; when Grant knocked down a Mexican policeman. But such pranks hurt nobody; the Americans were popular, President Porfirio Diaz maintained order in the land. The Shepherd girls grew up and married Americans. The boys went to work: Alex in charge of the power plant; Grant in charge of one mine; Con of another.

But something happened. To this day Grant believes that Diaz was a good president for Mexico, whose excesses, such as shooting arrested men without trial, were necessary to suppress lawlessness. A "renegade labor-union cast-off" tried to organize the miners, but older workmen, working with Grant's friend, the chief of police, soon ran him off. Why, then, did so many of the miners join Pancho Villa? Why did a fault-finding stockholder in the U. S. protest that there were too many sons, sons-in-law, nephews and brothers-in-law on the payroll? Why did a greenhorn mining engineer, sent to Mexico by the board of directors, report that the mines could produce more than they did?

In The Silver Magnet Grant Shepherd does not answer these questions, or explain exactly what finally happened to the mine. Midway through his book he begins to write less about the lost pleasures of Batopilas, and more about long vacations, about sprees, about squabbles with mean-spirited natives, about the petty thievery among workmen, the stupidity of newcomers, the pusillanimity of the Wilson administration, etc. His story becomes a monotonous recital of how the Shepherd brothers put tough customers in their places, of his political opinions and longings for good days long-past. But if its final impression is one of confusion, The Silver Magnet gives a better picture of capital in a foreign land than many an economic treatise on imperialism and absentee ownership.

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