Don Miguel Peralta

Gonzales Peralta

Miguel Peralta

* History of the Peraltas : (Note that this isn't 100% facts. A lot of versions, hypothesis and dates have been told about the episode of the Peralta mine, and ver poor information is available on the internet...)
    The most powerful family in Sonora, at least during the 1840's, established in Arizpe. At this time, the Arizona territory belonged to Mexico.
   Don Miguel Peralta was the patriarch of this family. He was an old yet influential man of Spanish descent and held impressive investments in land, mining and livestock. Along with his sons and an army of men, horses, cattle, and burros he discovered and exploited gold mines, called "Las Minas de la Sombreras" (the Sombrero Mines), located in an Apache territory, in the Superstition Mountains. There have been several expeditions here, but the last one happened 1847. In this year, the Apaches get angered because they considered this land as sacred (the abode of their Thunder God), and Peralta refused to quit such a lucrative place. This just added to the almost natural hatred for the Spanish the Apaches used to have, during these remote days. All the expedition was killed by the Apaches warriors.
   It is told that one of Don Miguel's sons, Gonzales Peralta, survived and sculptured petroglyph maps of the location of the mines.
   It is also said that a son of Gonzales, Miguel Peralta, has been saved during a fight by German associate emigrates, Jacob Waltz and Jacob Weisner, and in acknowledgement, he showed them the maps and brought them to the mines.

* Their place in the Barks/Rosa stories universe :
    First, the name Peralta is evocated in "The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff" when Jacob Waltz gives the Peralta and Peg-Leg mines maps to Scrooge McDuck.
   They are seen in "The Dutchman's Secret", when the Ducks learn about their history. In this story, the grandson of Don Miguel Peralta, also named Miguel, is unnamed, and is just told to be Gonzales Peralta's son. A detail is added, in this story : It's told that as Don Miguel helped to finance the renovation of a Jesuit Church in Arizpe, he'd been given a strange map discovered in the archives. This map indicated the place of the mines, and that's how the Peraltas discovered it, in 1847. This map has probably been written by the Jesuit Father Eusebio "E.F.C." Francesco Chino, the actual first discoverer of the Pima mine, and took by the Peraltas when the Jesuits were expulsed from America.
 
 

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