Thunder Gods Gold

Barry Storm

• Publisher: Golden Springs Publishing
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781787201927
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Amerikanische Bürgerkriegsgeschichte

The amazing true story of America's most famed lost gold mines and epitome of Western traditions, this book tells the tale about the Lost Dutchman gold mine in the Superstition Mountains in Arizona during the late 1930s and 1940s.Based on author Barry Storm's travels over the mountains in search for lost Spanish treasures, this book was the inspiration behind Lust for Gold, a 1949 American western film about the legendary Lost Dutchman, starring Glenn Ford.Contains lots of on-the-spot work in the mountains reading treasure signs, trail markers, maps and great photographs.

PART I—WESTERN TREASURELAND

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”

—SHAKESPEARE

In the turbulent backwash of centuries since California was thought to be an island{2} rich mineral lodes were found and abandoned, bonanza mines lost, treasure troves buried. Today, fabulous headlines{3} often prove the truth of Western traditions!

1. IN TREASURELAND

More than four centuries ago the first bearded adventurer set foot upon a wild, new world in a frenzied search for gold. And hard upon his trail came sanguine thousands of every race and color who marched and counter-marched through incredible, high-handed treasure hunts. Today in the vast, fabulous reaches of our American West the daring ones are marching still not only after new mineral wealth but after, too, all those golden promises of hidden mines and treasure troves long since lost in the turbulent backwash of time!

And there are clues for the hardy, roseate visions for dreamers. For endlessly with each fresh sigh of the nightwind there come vague whisperings of half-remembered tales and exciting traditions which somehow fall just short of being accredited history or discredited legend, traditions of all those phantom bonanzas forever hidden beyond the purple horizon mists—yet, strangely, nowadays occasionally refound!

Refound like one of the eight Lost Peralta Mines{4} in Arizona, the Lost Wheelbarrow Mine{5} in Idaho, a covered Spanish shaft{6} in high Colorado and vast, unrecorded workings{7} in Nevada, like the Lost Padre{8} in California long since secretly gutted of its gold or the Santa Rita{9} in New Mexico still a producing mine. And with hidden hordes of treasure too like the seven muleloads of phantom bullion{10} drifting wraith-like over a full dozen states or the buried Spanish smelters in the mission-yard of Tumacacori{11} actually found stuffed with gold, silver and copper ingots!

Indeed, the adventures of a Coronado{12} who found nothing save mud huts and skulking savages in 1541 or of an Espejo{13} who discovered gold mines in 1852 are well enough chronicled. But what of those uncounted others who trekked into unexplored wilds and prospected, mined or looted there as opportunity offered? Sometimes we hear of them by chance when an ancient treasure map comes to light among the heirlooms of some pioneer family, when an antigua mine is suddenly stumbled upon where no mine had been known, when the cabalistic lettering of explorer-priests or the mysterious treasure signs of long forgotten miners are found cut into rock, trees, cacti. And what human can sleep soundly beneath Western stars when the subtle jingle of lost gold rings so persistently over the land!

If then the first flaming facts of Cortes’ fantastic plunder,{14} of the fabulous mines of Tayopa{15} and Gloria Pan,{16} of the incredible riches of Nueva Grenada stampeded the Old World, the more recent, equally as fantastic facts of California and Colorado gold{17} could hardly be blamed for stampeding the New. Nor was it long before Nevada silver had stampeded both, and Arizona copper had stampeded Nevada.{18} And all the lessor but equally as exciting facts{19} before and since of bonanza lodes found, lost, rediscovered and hidden—and the secret treasures each had produced!—will forever exemplify in those wide, frontier lands dreams as paradoxically old as time itself yet as perpetually new as tomorrow’s golden dawn.

That eternal, ever-recurring vision was set forth in these exquisite words by Casteñeda{20} who recorded Coronado’s sanguine hunt for a Seven Golden Cities Of Cibola: “Granted that they did not find the riches of which they had been told, they found a place in which to search for them.”

And that place is still there with its ever-accumulating traditions of long lost treasure trails to be heard about in every crossroad tavern and village store, in every cow-camp and mining town and wherever desert dust and mountain haze obscures still-wild distance. That place is still largely a raw, rugged land of endless plains, wide deserts, towering mountains and twisted canyon-chasms. Such ground can never be plowed under for it is too vast, too primeval, too hot or cold or remote. So the wild countryside preserves its treasures well and has given to the whole of America an exciting folklore, a strange flavor from more spacious ages, peculiarly its own.

In fact, when Gonzales,{21} the last of the Peralta descendants, passed on to his American friend, Erwin C. Ruth,{22} in 1912 an heirloom map to mines once worked in Arizona by his ancestors he merely perpetuated the timeless dream. For if one wanted fortune, one simply set out to find it. If one didn’t need fortune, well, couldn’t one search anyway?

The adventurer always has little which he accounts of as much value as Adventure. The adventurer always has sublime dreams to discredit fear and mock disaster. And so long as phantom gold—his modern allegory of every misty mirage ever pursued by the high heart of man—is somewhere else, anywhere else, he can seek it with an undying faith. But let the gold be found or the treasure counted then gone forever in the fears of possession is an essential way of life that is peculiarly American, a way of life built entirely upon individual achievement, the way of life that has constructed a new world, launched fleets, moved mountains, migrated populations, conquered frontiers. Thunder Gods Gold is of all this compact, epitome of the fabulous fabric of dreams that forever will blend over wild Western lands the romantic flavor of many centuries, many peoples, many traditions.

And if it would seem that these traditions of hidden wealth and boundless treasure all have a certain family resemblance, it must be remembered that there was—and is!—a resemblance too in the remote wilderness of Spaniard and American alike—and thereby in the usual causes of disaster. For disaster, in one word, has ever been the story of phantom bonanzas, has always occurred to hide the missing link on a return trail to once-found fabulous mineral wealth. Indeed, had not someone been killed, had not time erased memories or confused directions, had not wars, politics, accident or human greed intervened there would be today none of the hidden tunnels, abandoned lodes or treasures in already-mined riches which are accidentally stumbled upon or purposely sought and occasionally refound.{23} And because Spanish miner and American prospector alike were working virgin ground first it was invariably the largest lode present that was left, the richest vein that was hidden—phantom mines which usually and quite logically were real bonanzas.{24}

Occasionally the traditions of these bonanzas had been recorded in great and exact detail by their original discoverers. But far more often they are as intangible as the drifting morning mists because of understandable and very human reasons; because crime had been committed or tax or tithe evaded, because traveling in possession of a known fortune was dangerous or because someone might one day wish to return to its source, because once fortune was obtained at great hazard it was easier and far safer to simply walk off from its source rather than encounter the necessity for explanations to jealous men and greedy governments. Yet, whether whispered tradition or authenticated fact, such little-known, almost incredible...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• PART I-WESTERN TREASURELAND
• PART II-BONANZA HISTORY
• PART III-ADVENTURE TRAILS
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER