Rebel Gold

by Warren Getler

  An ailing eighty-one-year-old Waltz, the story goes, described the general location of the mine from his deathbed inside a Phoenix boardinghouse, in October 1891. The fading fortune seeker reportedly made the disclosure—via a cryptic verbal message—to his caretaker and neighbor Julia Thomas. Upon Waltz’s death, Thomas set out with a few friends to try to pinpoint the site containing the mother lode, but to no avail. Exhausted and broke, she abruptly ended her search around a prominent 4,500-foot peak, called Weaver’s Needle, and went home. She would let others take on the crippling heat, the lethal Mojave and western diamondback rattlers and Centruroides scorpions—not to mention tarantulas and black widows—all in the otherwise magnificent Superstitions, with their towering saguaros and flowering prickly pears.

  From that moment on, amid a handful of turn-of-the-century newspaper articles about Thomas’s dedicated but fruitless search in the unforgiving Superstitions, a mythology developed around the Dutchman’s alleged missing bonanza. Countless, often conflicting, versions of the tale have swirled through oral and written histories (“hearsay” might be the operative word) up to the present day. The Wall Street Journal carried this front-page headline in 1971: “Did the Old Dutchman Leave a Big Gold Mine or Merely a Legend?: Many Still Work—and Fight—To Find Lost Dutchman Mine Fabled for a Century or So.”2

  Fueling the controversy are certain largely undisputed observations. Each winter, from about 1868 to 1886, Waltz was seen wandering off to undisclosed locations deep in the remote Superstition canyons. (Winter is the only period that a sane person would endure—over long periods—the heat from the surrounding Sonoran desert, where temperatures can soar above 120 degrees in mid-summer.) Waltz was also known to have cashed in small quantities of rich gold ore and, some say, gold nuggets in the frontier towns of Phoenix, Florence and Mesa. Shortly before his death, he reportedly hid a small hoard—weighing some fifty pounds—of gold-bearing quartz under his boardinghouse bed.

  Such accounts support the notion that the gritty old-timer may have known of, and had access to, a highly productive hidden mine or gold-bearing vein in the Superstitions. An alternative theory is that Waltz had stolen, or “high-graded,” fine gold ore from mines outside the Phoenix/Superstitions area in his earlier life as a miner/prospector. Waltz, according to this scenario, hid the high-grade material in a secret recess in the Superstitions and had been cashing in over time, as he grew older and more infirm.

  But arrayed against such tantalizing leads are some hard facts. Expert geologists have ascertained that no large, naturally occurring, commercially viable deposits of gold exist in the once-volcanic eastern Superstition range, where Waltz was said to have wandered. Second, no one has come forward with evidence that a mine or a cache exists, at least since Thomas embarked on her abortive search. A limited amount of gold ore was extracted at Mammoth Mine at Goldfield, a short-lived desert boomtown that sprang up to the west of the Superstitions in the 1890s, just after Waltz’s demise. But no one to date, at least for the record, has limped out of the craggy Superstitions weighed down with sacks of gold nuggets. Consider, as well: no mining company has shown any interest in the general area in a very long time!

  Perhaps, as some have said, the Dutch-hunter phenomenon is nothing but blind optimism. Whatever the precise motive, something powerful continues to drive hundreds of zealous gold hunters to nearby Apache Junction.

  The closest town to the 200-square-mile Superstition Wilderness, some thirty-five miles east of Phoenix, Apache Junction hosts a cottage industry of hope. Its various hotels, RV parks and stores minister to those on a mission—ranging from the obsessive to the mildly curious—to find Dutch Jacob’s fabled gold mine. They come from all over America and from abroad, undeterred by the widely reported story of the macabre, unsolved murder of Adolph Ruth, an elderly retired federal civil servant and Dutchman-seeker whose decapitated corpse was found deep in the Superstitions in late 1931. (Ruth’s skeleton was discovered a month after his bullet-riddled skull was found several miles away and months after he was reported missing.) Then there are the subsequent reports, in 1948, of a second decapitation murder of a solo Dutch seeker, James Cravey, who also may have been hot on a Lost Mine lead. More than five subsequent, albeit less gruesome murders have also been reported and gone unsolved, and there have been other incidents of apparent foul play.

  Fueling Lost Dutchman interest, the mainstream media every so often will return to the Southwest’s most publicized mystery and generate dreams of quick fortune all over again. The “Lost Dutchman’s Mine” was listed in U.S. News & World Report’s “Mysteries of History” issue in July 2000. On a map of the world showing a “Lost and Found” of rumored unfound treasures, the “Dutchman Mine” was the only land treasure site to be noted in the United States. The caption reads:

  In Arizona’s Superstition Mountains in the 1840s, the Peralta family discovered a mine with some of the purest gold ore ever found. Indians killed most of the family, but in the 1870s a descendant told Jacob “the Dutchman” Waltz where the ore was. He mined it for a time and died in 1891, leaving a pile of gold beneath his bed.3

  The original version of the story, whether fact or legend, says that Waltz stumbled on the hidden mine during an 1870 excursion into the Superstitions from nearby Florence, or possibly from what was then the even smaller frontier hamlet of Adamsville, in Arizona Territory. (Arizona, which became part of New Mexico Territory after the Mexican-American war, became a “Territory” in 1863. It attained statehood in February 1912.) Another version, believed to have begun circulating in the early 1900s, was that knowledge of the mine originated with a fairly wealthy Spanish-Mexican mining family of northern Mexico, the Peraltas, who, through various coincidences, passed on the decades-old knowledge of the “mine” and its vast riches to Waltz. (This scenario, cited in the U.S. News brief, was described as one of several popular Lost Dutchman versions in the Wall Street Journal feature.)

  No one knows for sure whether the rumored Peralta family existed in northern (Sonora) Mexico or, if it did, if the family had any link to the alleged gold mine, or mines, in the Superstitions. No documented evidence exists to establish a firm connection. Nonetheless, there is a twofold significance to the unverifiable Peralta version of the Dutchman legend.

  First, it establishes a storyline involving marauding Indians—the Apaches. The nomadic tribe had made the Superstitions a sacred stronghold in the 1800s. According to legend, the warlike Apaches had ambushed a Peralta mining expedition’s return trip to Mexico in 1848. All the miners allegedly were killed, except for a handful of Peralta family members who managed to escape to Mexico and whose descendants later informed Waltz (and possibly an undocumented partner, Jacob Weiser) of the secret mine.

  Second, the Peralta version serves as a possible link to a set of mysterious carved stone tablets, the so-called Peralta stone tablets, or Superstition stone tablets, allegedly found by a visiting hiker in the Superstition foothills in 1949. The cryptic tablets were the subject of a June 12, 1964, Life magazine story, “Mysterious Maps to Lost Gold Mines.”4 The four exquisitely carved “maps” of reddish-gray sandstone—containing indecipherable signs and symbols, broken Spanish inscriptions and jumbled figures—do not mention gold, treasure, mines or the name “Peralta,” for that matter. (Curiously, numerous engravings on the stone slabs were covered up by black tape in the photos that appeared in Life.)

  That said, the stone maps have been associated loosely with a patchwork of abstract carved symbols on rock faces and on giant saguaro cacti spread throughout the Superstitions. Experts have not been able to determine whether these carvings in the field—some call them “petroglyphs,” from the ancient Greek for rock-writing—are Spanish “treasure signs” or Indian picture writings or a mere hoax.5 (The Conquistadors, followed by the Jesuits, explored the area beginning in the mid-1500s; the ancient Hohokam Indians had settled in the surrounding Salt River Valley more than two thousand years ago, followed by the Pima and Maricopa Indians.) No
doubt both outsiders and indigenous cultures left carved messages behind, but to what end? Today, the ledger-sized stone maps—each weighing around twenty-five pounds and extending some sixteen inches long and nearly a foot wide—are housed in the Arizona Mining and Mineral Museum in Phoenix.

  The origins of the stone tablets aside, much of their symbolism is noteworthy. One tablet contains an inset (concave) heart, with the date 1847 inscribed. It also reveals a carved dagger next to the heart. A separate, three-dimensional valentine—a smaller heart-shaped stone tablet in its own right—fits neatly inside the inset, with inscriptions of its own. On the reverse of the main heart tablet is a large cross. A second tablet has a carving of a large draft horse, with the phrase, in broken Spanish, YO PASTO AL NORTE DEL RIO, or, loosely, “I pasture to the north by the river,” engraved next to it. On the flip side of the horse tablet is a priest-like figure holding what appears to be a cross, with a caption, again in broken Spanish, that reads: ESTA BEREDA ES PELIGROZA … YO BOY 18 LUGARES … BUSCA EL MAPA … BUSCA EL COAZON, or, “This trail is dangerous … I go 18 places ... Look for the map. Look for the heart.” Floating next to the “priest” is a menagerie of symbols, including what appear to be crescent moons, circles and a small heart. The fourth tablet contains a flurry of numbers, letters and a dotted line pocked by smooth drill-holes. On the flip side of this trail tablet is the word DON. Placing this last tablet alongside the heart tablet with the latter’s superimposed valentine creates a neat trick: the dotted lines link up to form a trail leading to the center of the removable heart.

  Did Mexican “Peraltas” of the mid-1800s leave behind these stone “maps” as guideposts for finding their way back to a hidden mine? That titillating concept has ardent believers, yet there is no evidentiary foundation to it. Moreover, the colonial Spaniards who discovered gold and silver deposits in northern Arizona in the late 1500s were not likely to have left behind engraved rock maps with the apparent date 1847 and coded messages written in fractured Spanish. No, someone or some organization went to great lengths to create the abstract inscriptions, with their deliberately misspelled words and odd phrases with potential hidden meanings. Although the tablets’ age and provenance might never be fully known, they do seem to possess a certain authenticity.

  While many aspects of the Lost Dutchman Mine story appear apocryphal, the Dutchman himself left behind a paper trail. That trail corroborates Waltz’s long residence in America and his professional pursuits as a miner and prospector. From immigration and census documents, mining claims, tax rolls, deeds, county register listings, correspondence and other primary source material, a consensus “history” about Waltz has emerged. Tom J. Kollenborn, an Apache Junction historian and an administrator of the local school district, has compiled well-researched, documented “facts” about Jacob Waltz, which most Dutchman researchers support. The Kollenborn consensus pivots on the following historical profile, which includes information provided by other diligent researchers, such as T. E. Glover.6

  The mysterious German immigrant, who lies buried in an unmarked grave in a downtown Phoenix cemetery, spent his youth in the Black Forest region of what is now southwest Germany, near Stuttgart. Born in 1810, Waltz emigrated to the United States around 1845, arriving first in New York City. What Waltz did before emigrating has not been documented, although there is speculation that he was born to a farmer and schooled as a mining engineer. Once in the United States, he headed for the country’s first known commercial gold fields, established in North Carolina and Georgia in the late 1820s. He then moved to Natchez, Mississippi (the adopted home of pro-slavery secessionist and Mississippi Masonic leader, Gen. John Anthony Quitman), where on November 12, 1848, he signed a declaration of intent to become a U.S. citizen. Citizenship would bolster his case for staking a mining claim, and he was soon off to the gold bonanza just getting under way in Sacramento County in northern California. The discovery of significant amounts of placer gold at John Sutter’s Mill along the American River in Coloma, California, had occurred at the beginning of that year. (Smaller amounts of panned gold had been found some forty-five miles north of Los Angeles in 1841, but nobody seemed to notice.)

  Between 1850 and 1859, based on census records and other official documents, Waltz prospected for gold in the most productive regions in the Sacramento Valley. (A “J. W. Walls” shows up in an 1850 census taken in Sacramento, which most Dutch researchers believe is a misspelled reference to Waltz.) But by then the northern California Gold Rush in the Sierra Nevada foothills was largely over. By 1860, Waltz apparently had moved to the Los Angeles–San Gabriel Mountains area, where he again worked as a miner and prospector, according to an 1860 census in Los Angeles County that lists a “Jacob Walls.” On July 19, 1861, Waltz successfully applied to become a naturalized U.S. citizen in federal court in Los Angeles, under the correct spelling of his name. It was during this stay in the Los Angeles–San Gabriel region that Waltz apparently met Elisha Marcus Reavis, who would later become known as the “Hermit of Superstition Mountain.”

  Reavis, who headed west to California from Illinois during the Gold Rush, prospected for placer gold along the San Gabriel River east of Los Angeles. He later taught school in El Monte, a mean mining town in the region, where he is believed to have met Waltz. The two may have met while working placer claims along the San Gabriel banks, where American, European, Mexican, Chinese and other prospectors lived in close-quartered mining camps. Or they might have met in one of the many KGC castles in the area. In any event, both men headed to Arizona Territory sometime in the early 1860s, at a time when limited gold strikes had been reported in the north of the territory.

  (Elisha Reavis was a cousin of James Addison Reavis, an assumed KGC operative, who, in the 1880s, attempted to secure a great swath of Arizona and New Mexico Territory, including the Superstitions and points east along the Gila River watershed. J. A. Reavis did so through a grandiose fraud known as the “Peralta Land Grant” involving a slew of forged documents.7 The scheme by the Missouri-born ex-Confederate involved attempting to grandfather nearly 20,000 square miles of federal property as privately deeded land. He fraudulently claimed that the “deeds” stretched back to noble Spanish families that in fact never existed. The bogus claims were exposed in a well-publicized federal court case that landed J. A. Reavis in jail during the 1890s. Coincidentally, Reavis was known to have marked some of the boundaries of the “land grant” with star figures and other symbolic KGC carvings in rock faces. To date, no historical account has explained how one man nearly pulled off such a coup to “steal” a chunk of Arizona overnight, or how he could have obtained the funding to carry on his outlandish exploits over more than a decade. In the end, it appears that the KGC hung J. A. Reavis out to dry, much as it had George Bickley, after his usefulness had expired.)

  Waltz, for his part, is known to have arrived in Arizona Territory sometime in 1863. In September of that year, he filed a mining claim with four partners in Prescott—the first capital of the territory—for a site in the nearby Bradshaw Mountains, where Elisha Reavis also wound up. Can it be chalked up to coincidence that one of Waltz’s chief claims (1864) in the Prescott-Bradshaw region was named “Big Rebel”? After his 1863–67 stint in Prescott and its surrounding mineral-rich hills, Waltz migrated to the Salt River Valley in 1868. The valley’s western edge abuts the Salt River Mountains, later renamed the Superstitions. There Waltz eventually settled in an adobe home in what would become Phoenix, on the north side of the Salt River, after having registered a homestead claim on 160 acres.

  Elisha Reavis arrived in Phoenix around the same time, in 1869. But by 1874, for reasons unknown, he decided to decamp for the hills and live in a mountain hideout inside the high canyons of the eastern Superstitions, at some 5,000 feet above sea-level.8 A thickly bearded loner who reportedly made a living selling vegetables grown in his garden at “Reavis Ranch,” he died under suspicious circumstances on a remote trail inside the Superstition range in 1896. His corpse was fou
nd beheaded.

  Reavis had always been on the move, hunting across the valleys, mesas and canyons, and selling vegetables to the surrounding towns of Pinal, Picket Post, Mesa, Florence and Tempe. Not much is known about his relationship with Waltz, the wandering “Lost Dutchman,” other than that they knew each other. The ranch-owning Dutchman never moved into the Superstitions, but he certainly did not spend all his time cultivating his wheat crop and tending his chicken roost in Phoenix, either. Curiously, during the 1870s, Waltz had a group of laborers, many of them Mexican, residing at his Phoenix ranch, according to the local census.9 What might they have been doing?

  To see Jacob Waltz for what he was—a Southern partisan and KGC sentinel—and to see the Lost Dutchman Mine legend for what it was—a fabricated cover story for an enormous KGC depository of cached gold and silver stretching across the Superstition Range and beyond—required special knowledge: the type Bob Brewer had acquired by the mid-1990s, through decades of unrelenting research.

  13

  A Confederate Fort Knox in Arizona?

  THE start of 1996 proved a tough time for Bob Brewer. Coming off a bout of depression from the Wolf Map fiasco, he felt physically and emotionally drained. He was already smarting from a shoulder injury caused when he stumbled over a bluff in Arkansas. The pain—an aggravation of an earlier injury suffered in Vietnam—eventually became so distracting that he decided to undergo surgery and receive a shoulder replacement. His defenses down, he wound up with a severe case of pneumonia. Although a massive dose of antibiotics killed the infection, both his lungs had been scarred, leaving him weak for an extended period.

  His main concern during convalescence was not letting his health interrupt his odyssey. A big-boned man with a strong dose of Indian blood, he had always relied on a combination of intense mental focus and ample physical strength to get things done in a timely fashion, whether cutting and hauling logs, repairing tractors and automobiles, or excavating treasure caches. His diminished strength was something that he only grudgingly came to accept. The physical setbacks and the mental aggravation from the Michael Griffith debacle notwithstanding, his resolve to get to the bottom of the KGC mystery and its links to W. D. Ashcraft remained undiminished.