In the Big Bend region, cinnabar, the ore from which mercury or quicksilver is extracted, was first discovered in 1884, and several mines soon opened in the Terlingua Quicksilver District. The Chisos Mining Company, established by Howard E. Perry in 1903, eventually processed and shipped more mercury than all other area mines combined, and Terlingua grew into a mining community that drew immigrant laborers from Mexico, especially from the San Carlos-Ojinaga corridor, despite hard and dangerous work underground and in ore processing. For many miners, conditions there were still an improvement over native Mexico during years of political instability and civil war, and by 1913 Terlingua had a well stocked commissary, an ice making plant, public food and lodging facilities, erratic telephone service, a dependable water supply, and U.S. Mail service three times a week; later amenities included the Oasis ice cream shop, the Chisos Theater, and weekend dances. Demand for mercury rose during World War I because it was used in explosives and because war disrupted European supplies from Spain and Italy, making this the peak of the Terlingua mining era, but after the war prices fell, briefly recovered by 1927, and then dropped again after the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression. Perry kept the Chisos mine operating at a loss in expectation of another wartime boom, but it went bankrupt in 1942; the Texas Railway Equipment company bought the facilities in 1943 for $81,000 and continued operations through the war before the site was abandoned in 1946 because of uncontrollable artesian groundwater in the mine and a depressed postwar mercury market.