Landing Uphill: Seven Years at San Luis

By Eleanor Herz Swent

Award-winning historian Eleanor Swent writes about going as a young bride in 1947 to a remote silver mine in Tayoltita, Mexico, landing in the mountains inland from Mazatlan, in a canyon with a tilted landing strip. Drawing primarily from letters to family and friends, she recounts the challenges and rich rewards of life in a Mexico unseen by most visitors — a Mexico of deep personal connections across cultures and generations.  She weaves together her letters and later recollections, her husband’s oral history from UC-Berkeley, other first-person accounts, and historical documents to present a history of silver mining in Mexico, early Spanish settlement of California, and her own experience as a newcomer.  She describes operations at the three mines where her husband works, and her visits to them: San Luis, Santa Rita, and Contra Estaca, accessible only by riding a mule for several hours. 

Eleanor grew up in Lead, South Dakota, home of the Homestake gold mine.  Her undergraduate and graduate degrees (from Wellesley College and Denver University) did not prepare her for life in Tayoltita, where she learns to speak Spanish, ride mules, and cook on a wood stove.  She also discovers opportunities to serve her new community.  The Mexican women envy her because she has only two children after five years of marriage.  They trust her enough to ask her for information on family planning, and their husbands thank her for providing it.  Some of her new friends descended from Spanish royal minister Don Jose Antonio Delaveaga de Gurruchategui, who arrived in the Guarisamay district before 1776.  They welcome Eleanor‘s help with their food distribution to local poor people. 

Eleanor’s mining engineer husband, Langan Swent, grew up in Tayoltita, and was called “El Niño Americano,” the American boy.  He graduated from Stanford University and studied at Harvard and UC-Berkeley before serving in the Navy in the Mediterranean theater during World War II, receiving the Presidential Medal of Honor.  His father was the first manager of the San Luis mine when the Hearsts bought it from descendants of Don Jose  Delaveaga.  Langan’s mother was the first Anglo woman to live in Tayoltita. 

Some of Eleanor‘s story is deeply personal.  When Langan is thrown from a horse and seriously injured, she fears for his life.  She gives birth to two children in Oakland, California, and one in Denver, Colorado.  Each time she enters the hospital alone and sends a telegram to Mexico notifying Langan of the birth.  Securing passports, residence permits, and birth certificates is another hurdle.  She returns to Mexico, grateful for her beautiful company house and garden and plentiful household help.  After seven years, Langan is offered a new job, and they are torn between his professional opportunity and their love of Mexico.  He accepts the job and they move to Lead, South Dakota, with mixed feelings. 

By turns scholarly and personal, but never overly sentimental, Landing Uphill offers unique insight into historical Mexico, mining history, and Eleanor Swent’s journey from her arrival in Mexico as a bride, knowing no Spanish, to her tearful departure, speaking fluently with Mexicans who will be life-long friends.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Feb 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781977272928

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Landing Uphill

Seven Years at San Luis

All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2024 Eleanor Herz Swent

v5.0

The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DEDICATION

To Langan, who suggested that I keep carbon copies of my letters.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Landing at Tayoltita, August, 1947

Chapter 2: Courtship

Chapter 3: Office

Chapter 4: Drill Bits

Chapter 5: Los Pobres

Chapter 6: 1948

Chapter 7: 15 Level

Chapter 8: Contra Estaca

Chapter 9: The Tayoltita Turtle

Chapter 10: 1951 Recalled

Chapter 11: 1952

Chapter 12: 1953

Chapter 13: 1954

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

La Sierra Madre Occidental, the mountains near Mazatlan, Mexico

Chapter 1

LANDING AT TAYOLTITA, AUGUST, 1947

We flew from Mazatlan at dawn in a small Stinson plane, and he shouted above the noise to point out landmarks: when we left the flat coastal plain to enter the Piaxtla canyon, then followed the river. Mountains go up to 8,000 feet but the plane never goes over 6,000 feet. You can imagine what it’s like to see enormous peaks whizzing by each shoulder, and then you glance back and see the tail just barely missing the ridge below until the plane gives a sudden bank and goes zooming straight down and finally, we land uphill on the narrow airstrip.

It was an uphill journey for me, learning to live at the historic San Luis silver mine where my husband had spent his childhood. I was twenty-three years old, had a B.A. and an M.A. and had supported myself at a responsible job. I knew my way around Chicago, Denver, Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.; knew how to type, play the piano, ski and ice-skate, ride a horse, drive a car, and fly a plane. I could speak passable French. I thought I was well educated, but my education was just beginning.

A few people were at the airfield to welcome me, among them the manager and his wife. We crossed the river on a high cable-hung footbridge, and climbed a steep, narrow trail a short way to the entrance of La Colonia, the Colony, location of the mining company’s offices and residences. There was a gate in a metal fence, a man in a small booth smiling a welcome, and a short walk along beautiful gardens to a two-story building called the staff house. There we would stay in a room while our house could be arranged for us. The crates with our wedding gifts would follow months later, brought by truck from Mazatlan to Dimas and then by mule on a trail along the Piaxtla River.

Weeks earlier, Langan Swent composed a five-page letter on stationery from the Bowman Hotel, Nogales, Arizona:

I arrived here in Nogales this afternoon … and spent the afternoon finding out what you will have to do… . As a new immigrant to Mexico you are entitled to bring in used household goods free of duty. This does not apply to new goods or to luxury goods (such as sterling silver bon-bon dishes). You should wash all linens and leave them un-ironed. Also take off all price tags and gift tags… . I told the [agent at the] Brokerage that you didn’t speak a word of Spanish and wouldn’t know anything about giving a bribe, so they said that they could handle that part of it… . Be sure to have your birth certificate with you at all times.

When I took the train from Denver to Nogales, I wore the appropriate travel outfit for that time and place: high-heeled shoes, a seersucker suit [jacket and skirt], and pretty straw hat. I brought the crates of china, silverware, bed linens, the typical wedding gifts of the time. There was a set of a dozen pretty ceramic holders for place cards at dinner parties and a wooden mold for making butter pats with a flower motif. I had a small carton of calling cards printed with my new name, Mrs. Langan Waterman Swent, and a metal slug nameplate for use when I needed to have more printed.¹

My first letter to my college friend Edith is dated September 3, 1947:

I took the train to Nogales, where Lang met me. We spent two hectic days there getting all our things through the customs. We had to stand for hours in the blazing sun, waiting for things, and when we finally got to the big cheese himself, the broker slipped him a bribe and he didn’t even glance at our stuff. They simply put it directly on the train. It almost made me mad – it would have been some justification for our big fuss if they’d at least opened one box!

We flew down to Mazatlan, flying most of the way along the Gulf and the indescribably green coastal plain. It really is the most brilliant color imaginable, and we flew over the very richest gardening section, where there were enormous fields of cane and tomatoes. The foothills are about a hundred miles inland, and the plain is absolutely flat, with meandering rivers that make circles of tan out into the gulf.

Mazatlan is everything I thought tropical Mexico would be… . The only hotel of any consequence is the Belmar, right by the ocean, complete with waving palms between you and the sunset. Breakers crashing practically on the porch, where everyone sits and rocks with Tom Collins. The front rooms – which we had one of – have private balconies overlooking the ocean, and enormous four-poster beds, the kind princes are born in, and everywhere there is gorgeous Spanish tile being mopped by barefoot boys… . The town is picturesque – you drive around in two-wheeled horse-drawn carts, and the houses are adobe in all colors of the rainbow. Tile everywhere, and patios filled with gorgeous trees and flowers and birds.

Hotel Belmar, Mazatlan, and taxi, 1947

There were other vivid memories, unrecorded:

It was difficult to climb in and out of the carriage with high heels. I took off my hat, put aside the suit jacket, loosened the blouse. We went to stroll on the beach; I took off the nylon hose and the shoes; it was hard to put them on again because my feet were swelling.

I went in the bathroom and found that the mirror was covered with moisture, as if someone had just taken a hot bath there. When I took a towel to wipe it dry, the moisture followed my hand, and the mirror was fogged again.

The next day, I bought a cotton skirt and blouse and a pair of huaraches [sandals] at shops on the plaza. I was ready for a new way of life.

For a few days, we were the center of welcoming parties in Tayoltita: buffet-style suppers in gardens, with dozens of people, Mexican, American, and a variety of Europeans. We ate tamales and hot dogs and chicken, tortillas and bread, potato chips and corn on the cob, ice cream and cake. No candle-lit tables, no place cards or fine china. Canvas lawn chairs, wicker armchairs, benches, trestle tables, checked tablecloths, a charcoal fire in a wheelbarrow, guitars and an accordion playing in the background. Rum poured from wicker-clad containers, drinks served in tumblers, beer in bottles. Men wearing bright colored shirts, shirt-tails untucked, no ties, short sleeves. Women in cotton sundresses, bare legs, huaraches.

Then began a second round of similar parties, farewells for the metallurgist who was returning to the States. I had vowed not to be like other women I had known, who spent years in Mexico or Peru or Chile and returned to the States overweight and ravaged by alcohol. I sipped a beer or a Coca-Cola and happily joined in the singing and the dancing, but was told, You don’t have any fun. The learning curve was becoming even steeper; I not only had to learn Spanish, but how to get along with the other Gringos.²

Later, I wrote:

The memories of my seven years in Mexico are not about scents. The flowers – flame trees, crepe myrtle bushes, poinsettias [what the Mexicans call Christmas flowers, flores de Noche Buena], jacarandas, cannas – bloomed riotously but without perfume. In the lower part of town there were chickens and burros and outhouses which must have smelled, but we had indoor plumbing and bought our eggs from vendors who came to the door. Our food was cooked on the screened back porch; we didn’t smell it. Our water came from a deep well, clear, cool, and odorless. There was an embargo then on imported goods; we used a locally made soap, jabon Olga, which was not perfumed, and for scrubbing, the maids made wads of fiber from the cactus plants.

The special memories are of sounds that were new to me: cocks crowing and burros braying in the morning, the tinkling of cowbells led to pasture, the scratching of rakes on gravel paths, the sound of hands patting tortillas, the slapping of a rag mop on tile floors, and in the rainy season, the deafening roar of boulders crashing down the arroyo and into the river. In the town, the only vehicle was an occasional wheelbarrow so there was no background noise of traffic. From across the river, we heard the faint hum from the mill, the processing plant where the silver was extracted.

What I missed most after leaving Mexico was the music everywhere: the maids and gardeners singing as they worked; all over the town, music from radios in houses where windows were always open; and music from the cantinas [saloons] on the lower street, all day and long into the night. Our bedroom overlooked the steep path that led up from the lower street, and as we were falling asleep, we heard men on their way home from the cantinas who stopped to rest part way up the path, and softly played a guitar or harmonica as they sang.

Dinner parties always ended with singing, sometimes local ranchero songs: Road to San Ignacio, Road to San Javier. Some were familiar tunes: La Paloma [the Dove] and Cielito Lindo [Beautiful Sky]. The final song of the evening, El Barco de Oro, a beautiful melody unfamiliar to the Americans, brought some of the Mexicans to tears: Now I must go, friends of my life, the ship of gold will take me far … . These are the memories of Mexico that last.

View of Tayoltita from the Air

Chapter 2

COURTSHIP

A year earlier, I had left my job as assistant to the president of Elmira College, in New York, and gone home to Lead, South Dakota. The Homestake gold mine there was the largest in the world, and my father, Nathaniel Herz, went there in 1911 from Yale University as a graduate mining engineer and metallurgist. My mother, a graduate of the University of Iowa, studied geology and met him when she was in the Black Hills on a field trip. By 1946, he was Chief Metallurgist for Homestake Mining Company. Lead was a cosmopolitan town with people from every part of the world. Most of the people who lived on Slavonian Alley (as they also called it) celebrated Christmas on January 6. There were five Lutheran churches: one held services in English, one in Swedish, one in Norwegian, and two in Finnish. Some of the Finns were Bolsheviks, so they worshipped separately from the non-Bolsheviks. Eventually, they consolidated into one Lutheran church.

My Wellesley College friend Edith, who was from Pennsylvania and worked for a bank in New York City, went with me to Lead because she wanted to see the West. My mother arranged a dinner party for some of my old friends, and my father invited a nice young engineer who had just come to town.

That’s how I met Langan Swent, recently discharged Navy Lieutenant, who had studied mining and geology at Stanford, Harvard, and UC-Berkeley, and now was in a training program for engineers at the Homestake mine in Lead.

Two days later, Lang and Jim Noble invited Edith and me for a sunset drive to beautiful Spearfish Canyon. We came to several cars that were stopped because a deer had been struck and killed. A tiny fawn was lying beside her; no one knew what to do. Lang quietly stepped forward, dragged the deer to the side of the road, picked up the fawn, and said, We’ll take it to the Ranger. There was a Forest Service station nearby and they welcomed the fawn. I was impressed by Lang’s kindness and quiet competence.

Edith went back to New York, and I went to Denver to work as a graduate student and teaching assistant.

Lang worked three shifts in rotation: day, night, and graveyard. Every third week was long change and then he came to Denver. We also had many phone calls and letters.

On Memorial Day weekend, he picked me up and drove to Loveland, Colorado – a propitious name. It was not as romantic in fact as it sounded, but he drove around a bit and found the city park. Then he told me he had accepted a job at the San Luis mine in Mexico, to report by July 1. We could get married now or wait a year until he had a vacation. I didn’t see any reason to wait.

We located a phone booth and called my parents. No asking for my hand; Lang just told my father we wanted to get married right away, and the planning began. Mother enlisted all her friends, and the wedding was set for June 22, in the Methodist church in