Men Who Matched the Mountains: The Forest Service in the Southwest

Perhaps the two most famous "lost mines" in the Southwest are the Adams Diggings in New Mexico and the Lost Dutchman mine in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona.

Men have been looking for the lost Adams Diggings since the 1870s. Some place in the vast area of the Gila or Apache National Forests—or perhaps even in the Cibola—is the vast wealth in gold nuggets that Adams found and then lost because he could not find his way back to the mine.

And in Arizona, the Lost Dutchman mine still defies searchers as it has for nearly 90 years. When Jacob Waltz died in 1881 in Phoenix, the secret of the location of his mine died with him.

In his roamings of the Gila Forest, Ranger Henry Woodrow did a lot of looking for the Adams Diggings in the more than 30 years that he was a Ranger on the McKenna District. Woodrow, in a paper he wrote after his retirement in 1942, said that a fellow named Horn Silver Bill (William P. Dorsey of Silver City) "came by the Gila and wanted me to go with him up into the mountains at the head of Mogollon Creek to look for the Adams Diggings. I spent some time looking for it myself and did not find it, so it can stay lost now, as far as I'm concerned."

Gilbert Sykes was for nearly 30 years a Ranger on the Coronado Forest—23 of those years on the Nogales District. This is an area where there are numerous mines and mining claims—"quite a few patented claims, and an awful bunch of unpatented claims" as Sykes put it.

When the uranium boom started in the Southwest "the mountains were alive with wide-eyed weekend prospectors," Sykes related, "and they would argue and squabble over their claims and want you to referee their battles."

"Then the Tumacacori Mission treasure down there was another thing we had lots of fun with," Sykes went on. "Right to this day there are two or three fellows out there hunting for the treasure. They have dug in numerous places. I had a regular treasure hunting clientele all the time. One old chap there in the main canyon, Pack Canyon, has been in there for about 14 or 15 years. He's getting up in years, he's over seventy now. I guess he has moved 250 or 300 tons of rock by himself since he's been there. He's down in the bottom of one of these natural rock slides and he's decided the treasure is buried in under that. He decided the rocks were put there by man. Of course these natural rock slides are in numerous places all through the mountains there, and you see them in lots of other places. If a rock is too big for him to load into his little ore car and wheel to the edge of the bank and dump over the hillside down into the canyon, he drills and shoots it. He shot several times when the ranchers would be riding down below. All of a sudden a blast would go and a shower of rocks, and it took years to train him to yell 'fire' before he shoots. Four or five of those rock slides I know treasure hunters have been digging in. They file a mining claim and will get just enough color sometimes to hold their mining claim. You know there is mineral pretty well all through the country there of one sort or another. They can get away with a mining claim when actually they are treasure hunting.

"After they get to know you they will break down and tell you. 'Well, I'm doing some mining there, yes, but I think we might find something else also.' Of course I don't know that there ever was any Tumacacori treasure, but they have the old story down in the records at Tumacacori. If you take the article and follow it out with a protractor and trace the lines out and bear west so many steps or yards or whatever they call for and then go east, you trace it out and you come back almost to the place you started from, following this yarn.

"Some of them have spent thousands and thousands of dollars there. One old camp is up off the side canyon coming into Peck Canyon. Mrs. Shipley operated there for several years. She got thousands of dollars put up by two or three profs from the University here and a doctor or two and others, and she was excavating there. She even had a machine gun set up at one time to guard this 'valuable treasure.' Two of the fellows that were her body guards are still in Nogales; one is a contractor and the other got to be deputy sheriff in Nogales. She sold a lot of stock in this venture. There was all sorts of digging there. In one place she had an inclined shaft. One of the old ranchers there told me that one of the workers she had one time was a wetback from across the line. He was down in this precarious shaft digging for the treasure that was supposed to be down there and it caved in on him and killed him. While no one knew particularly that he was a wetback from across the line, there was no better place to bury him, so he is still down in the shaft. It caved in and that's that. We called that Camp Loco. She hired a pack horse from this rancher, for several seasons. He ranted her a kind of an old sway-backed horse that wasn't much good for anything else. She would tell prospective bait that he had got sway-backed from carrying out silver bars. Finally she got hold of some stationery of the Treasurer of the United States and faked some correspondence on that—I don't know just what—'your shipment of bullion had been received and the approximate valuation was so much and the exact valuation would be sent to her shortly.' She passed this around and they picked her up on that charge—doing things she shouldn't have done. They sent her up but she came back after a while and went to operating again. She finally moved over to the Coast and committed suicide. That was the end of that. She was quite a gal."

Zane Smith left a lot of "buried treasure" on the Verde District when he was transferred out of there in 1940. Telling about a local stockman and lion hunter, Nick Perkins, Smith said that he had made a lot of interesting trips with Perkins, who liked to prowl around old Indian ruins.

"This Sycamore Wilderness country was full of old Indian ruins," Smith related. "We'd usually stop and have our sandwiches in the middle of the day somewhere where we could prowl around the old ruins and pick some arrowheads and that sort of thing. I found a number of old metates in that country that I never quite got out. I always wanted to bring one out, but they were too heavy to carry, and I never seemed to find one when I had a pack animal with me. I would cache them around a tree or a rock butte or something, hoping one day I'd pick up one. So I guess the 10 or 12 metates that I cached away maybe are still back there."

Nick had a few treasures cached away, too, according to Smith, as he discovered on trips with him. He recalled one trip and a particularly hard day back into the mountains.

"It was away into night when we got the horses taken care of," Smith said. "There was a sort of overhanging cliff that Nick camped under occasionally, particularly if it was bad weather. He always had a little firewood gathered up there and sometimes had a sack of salt or something hung up. In the summertime, he might even keep a few cans of vegetables or canned meats so he wouldn't have to pack so much food in. Anyway, we'd had a real rough day and way into the night, and the next morning it was frosty. Nick crawled out of bed before I got fully awake, and built a fire. Then I heard him rustling around in one of the kyacks and could hear plates and tin cups rattling, and pretty soon I heard Nick at my bedside. I threw back my tarp, and here was Nick with a tin cup and a bottle of Old Yellowstone that he cached away, over in the rocks. He thought that would be a good way to wake me up and get me out of bed.

"I'll never forget old Nick and his bottles of Yellowstone that he cached away at almost all of his more favored camp spots—all the way back through the Sycamore Wilderness there. He never drank much that I ever saw, but he would have a little short nip of a morning to wake up."

Sam Servis has a story about buried treasure, too, but this time it's a buried church bell:

"In the early days there was a young couple at Deming who decided to spend their honeymoon fishing on the West Fork off the Gila. They came up to the West Fork and the fishing wasn't too good so they took the zigzag trail that dropped off to the meadows, and fished the Middle Fork for a while. Coming back up the trail, a rain storm struck them and they got turned around and lost. In wandering around there, they came upon some rocks and adobe ruins that might resemble a church. This fellow went over there and dug under what would have been the place for the altar, and I'll be darned if he didn't find two bells, both mounted in silver. Two sizes, a small one and a large one. Well, they started packing them, but the large one got too heavy, so they buried it beside the zigzag trail. Apparently it was buried between the top of the hill and Big Bear Canyon, or even in Big Bear. Anyway, they carried the little bell out, and it was on display in a bank in Deming for many, many years. The bank burned down and the silver melted off, so it isn't in good condition today, that is, there isn't too much silver on it.

"That woman who was the bride is now in her eighties, and you know as you grow older you don't remember too well. She can't remember exactly the description of the area where that bell is buried. They had always meant to go back and get it but they never got around to it. There is a silver mounted bell buried somewhere between the zigzag and the trail, dropping off to the meadows, and there's also a ruin up there that I would like to find, because there may be more. That's all they took time to do, was just to scratch around and they found it just under the surface, so maybe there's more."

Servis recalls that there were a couple of easterners who did find Eldorado:

"They were looking for a place to start mining and came to Magdalena. A bartender just stepped outside the door and pointed toward a little hill outside Magdalena. He said, 'Well, boys, you just go out there and dig. There's lots of ore in that hill.'

"So the boys immediately bought some supplies and went out—it's a couple miles from town—and went to digging like fools. Of course, the people sat around and laughed at them. Be darned if they didn't strike silver and take $80,000 worth of dough out of there. Oh, my Lord, those people never told anybody else where to go and mine!"

The greatest treasure in the Forest is the Forests themselves! The annual income from the National Forests of the Southwest exceeds several million dollars a year.* This money comes from many sources, but chiefly from timber and grazing fees. Carson National Forest has revenue from producing oil wells and potential for more. There has been active leasing also on two other Forests, the Sitgreaves and Coconino; and the underground wealth in minerals has probably only been sampled. There is no way to estimate the tremendous value of the treasure that the Forests hold for the future.

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*Twenty-five percent of this money is returned to the counties in which the National Forests are located. Ten percent is returned to the Forests for roads and trails within the Forests.

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