The Lost Dutchman Mine: Evolution of an American Legend
You might ask: why would an educated, sane and experienced exploration geologist have anything to do with the infamous Lost Dutchman Mine? Well, the Arizona Trail, which I walked in 2017, traverses the eastern end of the Superstition Mountains, where a fair proportion of those who care about such things think that Jacob Waltz's golden trove is located. I returned to this area two weeks ago, for the first time since my AZT hike, with JD Keetley, a long time friend with a keen interest in the legendary mine. Now before you click out of this page in dismay, I want to be clear that I'm not going to launch into another crazy old white guy's unsolved mystery narrative, full of circular reasoning and ambiguous clues. There will be no mention of extraterrestrials or contrails here, no Jesuit or US government conspiracies and no attempts to match dubious treasure maps or doubtful petroglyphs with Google Earth topography. What I will do is attempt to prune back the exuberant shrubbery of accreted legend and try and uncover the few facts that lie at the root of the tale of Jacob Waltz's lost mine. I will then look at the general geology of the Superstition Mountains in terms of its prospectively for gold deposits, and review the known districts and deposits in the region as possible sources of or, at the very least, analogs for, the Dutchman's gold. Finally, I will assess the probability of there being an undiscovered high-grade gold deposit in the Superstitions.
Firstly, let's establish that there was a Jacob Waltz (or Walz, spellings vary) in Arizona starting in at least 1863, when he filed a mining claim with three others in the Pioneer (Superior) district (Kollenborn, 2004). He appears on and off in mining claim, census, voter registration, tax records and rare newspaper articles of the state until his death on October 25th, 1891 in the home of Julia Thomas. He is buried in the Pioneer Cemetery, near the Capitol building, in downtown Phoenix. Secondly, let us also agree that there is gold in the greater Superstition Mountains area, when we define the latter as extending W-E from the lowlands along the western end of the Apache Trail (SR 88) to SR 188, which runs from Roosevelt up Pinal Creek to Miami, and S-N from US 60 to the Salt River. There are numerous reports in old Arizona newspapers of small gold finds in this area, starting in the 1860s and culminating with the "official" discovery of the rich Goldfields-Youngberg deposits, along SR 88, in the NE corner of what is today Apache Junction, in 1892. In geological terms, the Superstitions are the northern extension of the Mexican Sierra Madre Occidental volcanic province, which is a major historical and present-day producer of gold and silver from epithermal deposits.
Beyond these not-unsubstantial facts, things get a little fuzzy and documentary evidence connecting Waltz with gold in the Superstitions is slim pickings. It consists largely of a story in the Salt River Herald of Aug 11, 1892, stating that Julia Thomas, Hermman and Rhinehart Petrasch were setting out on a "Queer Quest", hunting for Waltz’s lost mine in Superstitions. This was followed by two (in)famous articles, published in the (Phoenix) Saturday Review of November 17th, 1894 and in the San Francisco Chronicle, of January 13th, 1895, both written by Pierpont Bicknell, an Arizonan with a penchant for tall tales and hunting lost mines. These articles contain most of the elements found in later accounts, including 1) the story of Waltz's deathbed revelation of the mine's location to a female care-giver, presumably Julia Thomas, who then unsuccessfully searched for the mine with companions, 2) the previous ownership of the mine by the Peralta family, of Mexico, 3) murder by Waltz of Mexican miners to secure the deposit, 4) a description of the mine's location, within a 5 mile radius of Weaver's Needle. Here are my hypotheses for the origin of these elements:
1) Deathbed revelation: There are a variety of accounts of Waltz giving Julia Thomas gold ore and/or directions to its source when he was near death. I reckon there is something to this, given her search for his mine within a year after he passed away. And then there is the question of the matchbox supposedly made from a piece of Waltz's ore, again reported to have been given to someone (or taken by someone) while he was on his deathbed. It is put on display now and again in the Phoenix area. The provenance of both the matchbox and the ore it came from have yet to be established to my satisfaction and until it is, I'll leave this aside.
2) Previous ownership of the mine by the Spanish/Mexican Peralta family: I'm convinced that this is a confabulation by Bicknell of James Addison Reavis' spurious tales, invented to back up his fraudulent land grant claim (see my review of the Baron of Arizona), with the Waltz story.
3) Murder of the Mexican miners: Probably added by Bicknell to spice things up.
4) Location near Weaver's Needle: A convenient and spectacular landmark.
With regards to 2 and 3, above: there is no historical evidence that I have been able to find in either authentic documents of the day, or archeological finds, of Spanish or Mexican mining north of the Gila River in Arizona. In 1583, Don Antonio de Espejo, exploring out of Santa Barbara, in what is now the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, was led by Native Americans to copper and silver deposits south of the San Francisco Peaks, near Flagstaff, probably in or around today's Jerome. Marcos Farfan de los Godos followed-up on Espejo's discovery in 1598, at the behest of New Mexico Governor Juan de Onate, and actually staked claims on the deposits, but the Spanish never mined them. Spanish, and later Mexican, miners worked small-scale gold and silver deposits along the Santa Cruz River valley in far southern Arizona, near the protective cordon of presidios and missions that stretched northward from Sonora. Arizonac, the fabulously rich, if short-lived, silver district for which the state was named, is located just a few miles south of the border, near Nogales. In general, the remoteness of the region, its distance from supply sources and thus, their prohibitive cost, probably all factored into this northern limit of Spanish mining, but without a doubt the biggest impediment was that Southeastern Arizona was part of Apacheria, and the Apaches made life miserable to impossible for intruders.
The surname "Peralta" was not uncommon in 18th C Sonora, Arizona and California. In fact, there was a Gabriel Antonio Peralta family that accompanied Juan Bautista de Anza on his expedition from Arizona and Sonora to California in 1775-1776 and settled in the San Jose, California area. There was a Jose Maria Peralta living in Tucson in the 1820s-1880s. I can find no mention in the records available on the internet of a Sonoran Don Miguel Peralta, who was supposedly the guy who gave Waltz and his partner, Weisner, a lease on his Superstition Mountain gold mine in the 1850s, but this is certainly a subject for further research.
Skeptics and conspiracy theorists will say that "of course there are no records of important Spanish mines, the owners didn't want to pay the onerous Quinta Real (royal fifth) taxes on them" or "the Jesuits hid them and the wealth they produced from the crown, which is why they were ultimately expelled from the New World in 1767". My rejoinder is that Mexico and Peru had vastly more important Spanish colonial precious metal mines than anything in Arizona, yet their locations and history are well known, they paid taxes (at least on some of their production) and they didn't all close down when the Jesuits (who, by the way, were prohibited from mining) were expelled....in fact, as far as I am aware, none of them did!
Two watershed events catapulted the Lost Dutchman tale into the national consciousness. The first was the death in the Superstitions of avid lost-mine hunter Adolph Ruth in 1931, the second the publication of Barry Storm's book Thunder God's Gold in 1945, subsequently made into a Hollywood western, called Lust for Gold, in 1949.
Adolph Ruth was a 67 year old D.C. resident, former gov't employee and amateur treasure hunter who had a copy of the infamous Bicknell articles and/or a map based on them. He packed into the Superstitions with local cowboys on June 14, 1931 to search for the LDM. He was reported missing on June 18, 1931 and search parties set out immediately to find him, with no results. Finally, on December 10, 1931, an archeological expedition into the Superstitions found, by pure happenstance, what turned out to be his skull, with two additional un-natural holes in it. Another search was launched, which found more remains and his possessions. All of this has fueled the imaginations of subsequent generations of Dutch-hunters. While many have tried to make him the victim of an assassin, the authorities ruled his death to be from natural causes, with the holes possibly caused by predatory or scavenging animals. The story of his death was headlined by the Arizona Republic and went national. Bottom line: he was the first and most famous of a long line of poorly prepared, crazy old white guys obsessed with the LDM legend to meet his demise searching for it.
Barry Storm, pseudonym for John G. Climenson, was a colorful character from Seattle who failed at prospecting (though he never gave it up) then turned to writing to make his fortune. Storm published a number of pamphlets and books on the Superstition treasure culminating in 1945's Thunder God's Gold. He basically amplified Bicknell's articles into a book-length treatment of the Lost Dutchman, illustrated with photos of the Superstitions by his good friend Barry Goldwater. In 1949, Hollywood made Thunder God's Gold into a movie called Lust for Gold, starring Glen Ford and Ida Lupino. Storm wasn't happy with the result and sued Columbia, delaying the release of the picture by two years. Regardless of this hiccup, Hollywood made the Lost Dutchman legend loom even larger in the American consciousness, and true believers, crazies, con men and their marks from around the world have come to the Superstitions looking for it ever since.
Another key event that transpired in the region since the Dutchman's demise was the establishment of the Superstition Wilderness Area in 1939, ratified by the Wilderness Act of 1964. Treasure hunting, prospecting and mining are subject to strict rules contained in the Wilderness Act and promulgated by the Forest Service. Mineral location (claim staking) is prohibited and access is limited to non-motorized means of transport, which severely restricts the ability to explore for and develop any mineral deposit that might be found there.
A May 20, 2018, a search for "Lost Dutchman Mine" on Google gave 317,000 results. There was a 2016 History Channel series devoted to it called "Legend of the Superstition Mountains" and another documentary entitled "The Last Expedition" is expected to be released in 2018. I'm not sure anyone has an accurate count of the number of books and articles that have been published on the subject, but it must run into the hundreds, if not thousands. While this tells us nothing about the truth, or lack thereof, behind the LDM story, it does tell us something about the fertility of the human imagination and about our love of mysteries, challenges and quests.
