George Washington Sanders was born September 6, 1839, in Fort Covington, New York. He was the oldest of eleven children born to Eliphalet Pike Sanders and his first wife, Melissa Henry. In 1846, the Sanders family moved to Ashtabula, Ohio.
On September 9, 1861, George Sanders enlisted in the Union Army at Trumbull, Ohio, and was assigned to Battery C of the 1st Regiment Ohio Light Artillery. However, he did not see much action as he was often sick and in hospital. On September 26, 1862, he was discharged for disability at Camp Chase, Columbus, Ohio. Despite his relatively short service, he became a devoted member of the Grand Army of the Republic, being elected commander of the Arizona Department in April 1903 at the San Francisco Grand Encampment.
Sanders moved to Polk, Iowa, in 1863. In 1866, he married Mary Beebe, and they soon had two children, Albert and Ethel. After Ethel’s birth, Sanders moved the family to Salt Lake City. He and Mary had two more children in Utah; Ida and George.
After Mary’s death in childbirth in 1877, Sanders took his family back to Iowa. By 1880 he was remarried to a woman named Lizzie.
It wasn’t long before Sanders set his sights on the West again. This time he travelled to Arizona. By 1881, he and nine other men had created the Sanders Arizona Mining company which aimed to produce copper, silver, gold and other metals from mines in Pima County.
It was right at the turn of the century and near the end of his life that Sanders experienced his greatest achievements and his greatest losses. By 1899, he had divorced his second wife Lizzie and lost his daughter Ethel and grandson Sanders in what was believed to be a murder-suicide. But it was also that same year when he became superintendent of the Vulture Mine near Wickenburg and began work to get the mine back into production.
When Sanders first took charge, the Vulture Mine didn’t have enough water. By cyaniding the tailings, he recovered enough gold to finance drilling the mine deeper to locate an existing water source. In 1901, the mine struck a new vein of gold ore. As one of the financiers, Sanders received much of the initial profits.
It was also during 1901 that Sanders was married for the third time--to Clara Glenn.
On March 20, 1902, Sanders sustained serious injuries when
he was thrown from a streetcar of the Phoenix Railway Company. He died on February 6, 1904, of heart
complications attributed to his 1902 accident.
He was buried in Porter Cemetery under the auspices of the local GAR
post.
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