Bonanza

... and as several Indians belonging to a so-and-so Villaroel wandered among some mountains eighteen leagues from the Villa de la Plata, they came upon a very large peak seated on a plain, the size of which I cannot quite explain except to tell Your Mercy so that you may understand that it is as large as one might see in these parts. And they found in it signs of silver, and in smelting they found it so rich that wherever they took earth and fired it, it yielded almost nothing but silver, such that the least they got was eighty marks per hundredweight, which was almost half.

— ANONYMOUS, possibly Lic. Polo Ondegardo, 1547

AS ONE MIGHT EXPECT, Potosí's discovery generated legends. According to several Spanish writers it was early in the year 1545 that a native Andean man known either as Gualpa or Guanca happened upon an outcrop of silver ore while chasing a llama, a guanaco, or a deer up a conical red peak in the southern Bolivian highlands. The reddish mountain, possibly known as Potoc'chi, was not terribly high by Andean standards, but at just under 5,000 meters (nearly 16,000 feet) above sea level it did command an impressive view. The horizon was dominated by lumpy, barren, puna a high desert cut through by canyons topped with basalt cliffs, and with glimpses of vast salt flats framed by distant cordilleras.

According to most early accounts, there was little evidence of Inca or other pre-Hispanic mining activity on the red mountain's flanks. Not far off, about a half-day's journey southwest, were the former Inca mines of Porco, where Gualpa or Guanca was working as a yanacona or personal retainer for his presumably Spanish overlord, called "Villaroel" in the account above. Porco's silver mines were rich, but many had flooded due to the high water table, driving up costs and diminishing returns.

It was a moment of crisis according to the providentialist narratives, and in one of them Diego Gualpa became the Juan Diego of the Andes. The Virgin of Guadalupe did not appear to him, but either the Christian God or the God of Wind (in Quechua, Wayra) used him to reveal the riches of the Cerro Rico to the world. Fortunately, we have an account that seems to be from Gualpa himself, or as close to him as we may get (see appendix). In 1572, on orders of just-arrived viceroy Francisco de Toledo, a Spanish priest interviewed the nearly 70-year-old Andean man as he lay dying in his home in Potosí.

The discoverer was by this time known as don Diego Gualpa, the title "don" signifying noble ancestry. He claimed to have been from the Cuzco-area province of Chumbivilcas, a retainer for the ill-fated Inca Huascar, a keeper of sacred feathers. Gualpa was also at Cajamarca, he said, when Francisco Pizarro and his followers ambushed and captured the Inca Atahualpa in 1532. Young Gualpa attached himself to a Portuguese soldier who used him as a personal servant or yanacona but who also protected him from Spaniards who had treated him poorly. Diego Gualpa ended up in Porco mining silver a few years later. He claimed that he and other yanaconas routinely passed the hill or mountain of Potosí (he does not call it Potoc'chi in the testimony, but we must keep in mind that this was filtered through a priest in 1572) on their way back and forth between Porco and La Plata, or Chuquisaca, the budding regional capital on the eastern slope of the Andes.

Gonzalo Pizarro, younger brother of Francisco, had even ordered test diggings low on the mountain's flanks, but they yielded nothing. The occasion Diego Gualpa gave for his discovery of the great mines of the Cerro Rico was that he and a friend had been sent to the mountain's summit to search for a shrine dedicated to the resident spirit, or huaca. The pair found an offering, he claimed, which they removed and took down the hill to deliver to their masters. Presumably it included gold and silver objects, but the testimony offers no details.

On the way downhill the two men were separated, according to don Diego Gualpa, who said he was hit by a gust of wind so powerful it flattened him and nearly knocked him out. As he lifted himself, he saw that his hands were marked by a substance he immediately recognized as pay dirt. Gualpa wrapped several pounds of this material in his blanket and took it to Porco to refine. He found it rich, but his current master and other conquistadors were not convinced that the ore had come from the hill already called, apparently, Potosí.

Finally, one Spaniard accompanied Gualpa back to the red mountain, but again the wind kicked up, and was soon so fierce that it dashed the man tothe ground and blew off his hat, angering him so much that he began to beat and curse Gualpa. The two soon returned to Porco, where word of Gualpa's discovery reached the man called Villaroel, a Spaniard who moved quickly to stake claims aided by his indigenous retainer, the yanacona Chalco.

No llamas or deer or upturned roots appear in Gualpa's story, as in many other accounts of Potosí's fateful discovery, but wind figures prominently. Wayra (or guaira in Spanish phonetics), the Quechua word for wind, would continue to be providential in Potosí for several decades. Yet even this seemingly native account of Potosí's discovery smacks of Catholic legend, of the innocent yokel who witnesses an apparition, only to struggle desperately with supposedly learned authorities to prove its truth. Was Gualpa's discovery real?

ANDEAN METALLURGY AND GEOLOGY

By the time Europeans and Africans reached South America in the early sixteenth century, Andeans had spent thousands of years extracting and working gold, silver, copper, tin, mercury, salt, lapis lazuli, emeralds, turquoise, nephrite, obsidian, and many other minerals. Andean stone masonry was among the most advanced in the Americas, giving lie to the notion of "Stone Age" primitivism. One need only visit the former Inca capital of Cuzco or the ruins of Machu Picchu to see this matchless artistry firsthand.

In Central and South America as well as parts of the Caribbean, gold-silver-copper alloys were commonly used in jewelry and grave goods, and in coastal Ecuador and Colombia even the difficult metal platinum was worked, ingeniously soldered with gold dust and burnished. Metalworkers in Bolivia and Peru developed arsenical bronze, yielding durable tools and weapons, and at the great temple complex of Tiwanaku near Lake Titicaca, bronze ties held massive, hand-carved building stones in place.

Andean metallurgy was so ancient that few rich metallic mineral deposits remained unknown by the time the Spanish arrived. The conquistadors and their successors suspected this right away, and when native Andeans failed to lead them to gold or silver...