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CHAPTER FIVE:The Nuggets from the Lost Dutchman Mine

Somewhere in the very aptly named Superstition Mountains in Arizona, well to the east of Phoenix, the Lost Dutchman Mine is believed to be situated. In 1887, Jacob Walz, also known as Jacob Walzer, was continually found in the saloons and drinking dens of the wild pioneer town that was Phoenix then.

Walzer invariably paid for his drinks with gold nuggets. When asked where they had come from, he always maintained that they were his own. He said that he had extracted them from a secret mine, the location of which only he knew and in which none but he had ever dug.

Most of those who heard his version of the origin of the nuggets tended not to believe him; the general opinion was that he had stolen them from other miners whom he had probably killed in the course of the theft. A few suspicious people spied on Walzer and followed him everywhere, but it brought them no closer to the mysterious Lost Dutchman Mine allegedly hidden away somewhere in the sinister Superstition Mountains.

In 1891, Walzer died, but not before telling everyone that he had hidden the tracks to his mine and camouflaged its location so effectively that after his death no one would ever be able to find it. For well over a century, prospectors have traced the trail from Phoenix to the Superstition Mountains, trying their best to get on the track of Walzer’s legendary Lost Dutchman Mine.

As far back as 1965, the great Erie Stanley Gardner, the author who created Perry Mason, produced a fascinating book entitled Hunting Lost Mines by Helicopter. Most of that excellent book refers to the Superstition Mountains and Walzer’s lost mine.

A very old Hollywood western, Lust For Gold, starred Glen Ford and Ida Lupino. Much of the filming was set against a rock formation, which in reality was a part of the Superstition Mountains. The film shows an enormous boulder and a natural opening in the rock that looks particularly atmospheric when the moon’s rays stream through it. There is also, at this point, a weird inscription that has been cut into the stone. It is generally believed that the Lost Dutchman Mine is somewhere below this inscription. Erie Stanley Gardner had a theory that the mine was first discovered, worked, and then hidden by the indigenous Amerindians of the Superstition Mountains. They preferred not to have their territory invaded by prospectors hungry for gold. Gardner also believed that every clue to the mines whereabouts was wiped out by earthquake devastation a century ago.

Even without earthquakes, the Superstition Mountains are not the healthiest of places for innocent and honest prospectors and treasure hunters. At the end of the nineteenth century, while Walzer was spending his nuggets in Arizona, nearly four hundred men met violent and untimely deaths in that area.

Arizona at that time was technically Mexican territory; in practice, however, it was controlled by the indigenous Apaches. According to tradition, the Peralta family from Mexico discovered the original location of the mine. They set up camps at Sonora and Chihuahua, and then despatched their Mexican drivers with mule trains to pick up the nuggets from the Lost Dutchman Mine and pack them on to their mules.

The ancient Romano-Welsh goldmines in Dolaucothi, Wales are as mysterious as the Lost Dutchman Mine in the Superstition Mountains, USA.

Mysterious bag of gold nuggets on the church mural at Rennes-le-Château in France — close-up.

Mysterious bag of gold nuggets on the church mural at Rennes-le-Château in France — wide view of complete picture.

One such group was on its way back when the Apaches attacked them. The mule drivers were slaughtered, the gold was unloaded, and the mules were taken away. This was not a happy event for the mules, as the Apaches in those days were alleged to have regarded mule meat as something of a delicacy.

According to more of the ancient legends and traditions that surround the weird history of the Lost Dutchman Mine, a prospector accidentally discovered one of the heaps of gold that the Apaches had unloaded from the mules. He took as much as he could carry and went to Tucson; instead of having the good sense to enjoy it there, he got himself into a gun fight, which he lost. The Tucson undertaker was the main beneficiary of the gold that had been found.

Probing such information as exists as carefully and as thoroughly as possible places a big question mark over Jacob Walz, or Walzer, from whom the mine eventually took its name. Opinions of Walzer range from his being an innocuous old prospector who had just stumbled by chance on the incredible treasure lying within the mine, to his being one of the most callous and ruthless serial killers in that part of Arizona. Was he a man who, like the notorious Charles Peace of Victorian England, camouflaged his ruthless homicidal tendencies behind a convincing veneer of respectability and harmless semi-senility?

Treasures of many types and in many locations seem to attract sinister hazards. Those who have spent any length of time researching the mysteries of Rennes-le-Château at first hand will be swift to agree that Rennes has a number of sinister secrets attached to it and that it is by no means a safe place to explore. Just as the semi-legendary Oak Island, Nova Scotia treasure has already claimed at least six treasure hunters’ lives, so the Lost Dutchman Mine has claimed a series of victims over the years.

One set out way back in the 1930s. A treasure hunter named Adolph Ruth made his way towards a strange, isolated peak known as Weaver’s Needle. Ruth said that he had obtained an accurate map of the location of the Lost Dutchman Mine from certain confidential papers that had come from the Peralta family. When Ruth’s skeleton was finally discovered, the head had been removed and the body shot through by two rounds from a nineteenth-century Colt Peacemaker, or a similar type of heavy-calibre hand gun.

As recently as 1947, James Cravey also believed that he had an accurate map. He hired a helicopter and asked the pilot to set him down — by himself — at a point that he indicated. He also gave the pilot orders to pick him up again two weeks later. The pilot kept the rendezvous faithfully and went to find his charter client as planned — but there was no sign of James Cravey. He had vanished as surely as Benjamin Bathurst vanished when he walked around the horses at Perleberg and was never seen again. Cravey vanished as finally and mysteriously as the three lighthouse keepers from the Flannans, or the captain and crew of the Mary Celeste.

Almost a year later, however, a skeleton that was almost certainly Cravey’s was found near the sinister Weaver’s Needle. He had suffered the same fate as Adolph Ruth had fifteen or sixteen years before — Cravey’s head was missing. Insofar as a mine or its location can be broadly defined as an object, the Lost Dutchman Mine — or the gold allegedly taken from it — is among the most mysterious objects on Earth. Something in the Superstition Mountains produced a supply of gold far greater than most other workings in Arizona. How much did the Peralta family really know about it? What did Walz the Dutchman discover? Who killed Adolph Ruth and James Cravey — and had the two succeeded in finding the Lost Dutchman Mine before its mysterious guardians found them?