In the mountains of Arizona in January 2011, the remains of men were found who disappeared last July. Curtis Merivors, Ardyn Charles and Malcolm Minx from Utah went to the mountains of Superstition in search of the so-called "Lost Dutchman Mine". They planned to thoroughly survey one of the sections of the mountains, spend the night in a motel and then return. And they did not return …
Relatives of the missing men contacted the police on July 11, 2010 and said that all three had left five days ago and since then nothing has been heard about them: the radios were silent, and the mobile phones did not work..
Searches for gold diggers were carried out over the next six days, but ended with little or no result. Employees of the local sheriff's office reported that they only managed to find an empty car of the missing. The car was abandoned at the foot of the mountains …
In America, there have long been terrible legends about the lost and forgotten gold mines. Some of them are invented from beginning to end for the entertainment of tourists, others are based on true facts.
Superstition Mountain - Mountains of Superstition - located in the state of Arizona in the middle of a sultry valley overgrown with cacti, near the city of Phoenix. Many creepy and even creepy stories are associated with them.
Treasure hunters have been searching for gold here for more than one hundred years. According to one legend, it is cursed. According to the other, the mine is guarded by mysterious guards who want to keep its location secret.
The history of these places goes back more than one thousand years. According to archaeological excavations, until 1400 there were developed Indian civilizations Hohokam and Mogollon.
The first European to become familiar with this ancient culture was the Spaniard Fray Marcos de Niza, who came to the area in 1539 in search of the legendary Cibola - seven cities entirely built of gold!
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Whether the Spanish invader found Cibol or not remains unknown, since de Niza went missing.
From the middle of the 16th century, Jesuit priests from Spain began building missions in what is known today as Arizona and New Mexico. It was during this period that the Jesuits established relations with local Indians from the Apache tribe, who helped them to mine gold in the mountains, which was then sent overseas to their king.
200 years later, the Jesuits were forced to leave their "homes". Some believe that before returning to their homeland, they convinced or intimidated the Apaches with something that it would be very, very bad for them if they ever showed the location of the gold mines to outsiders.
And allegedly for this reason, for centuries to this day, the Apaches sacredly keep the secret of treasures and do not want to provide any information about them.
According to the legends of the Native Americans themselves, in the mountains of Superstition, in the places where the precious ore emerges, there is a sacred grotto leading to the “otherworldly Lower World”, where the ancestors of the Indians live, and which must be constantly guarded and protected from strangers.
At the end of the 18th century, the British found gold in the mountains and used the same Apaches as slaves for its extraction. In the end, they rebelled, killed all whites and liberated their ancestral lands.
Over time, the Americans again seized the mountainous territory, but the mine was never found. It was rumored that he was protected by Indian spirits. Everyone who tried to penetrate the secret of the "Apache gold" perished in the most incredible way.
In 1848, the numerous Mexican Peralta family managed to find an abandoned mine after a long search. Having mined several tens of kilograms of gold there in a fairly short time, they, having heard local legends, hastened to get away to avoid trouble, but in the valley they were suddenly ambushed by Apaches and almost all were destroyed.
Only one of Peralta survived, who, having returned to Mexico, later said that during the shootout, the bullets of "these damned Indians" for some reason were not taken, as if they were zombies that had crawled out of the graves !!!
Testament of Jacob Waltz
In 1860, a Phoenix doctor named Thorne cured a terminally ill leader of the Apache tribe and he, as a reward, blindfolded him and brought him to the legendary mine, where he allowed him to take as much ore gold as he could carry. After that, Thorn was again blindfolded, put on a horse and returned home.
In Phoenix, Thorn's story was immediately believed, since the doctor was a highly qualified specialist and respected person in the city. However, the seekers who followed him into the mountains did not find anything.
Ten years later, a German immigrant named Jacob Waltz, nicknamed the Dutchman, appeared in the vicinity of Superstition Mountain armed with maps drawn by the survivor of Peralta. How he came to an agreement in Mexico with Peralta, and in the mountains with Indian spirits is unknown, but nevertheless, over the next eight years, together with his companion Jacob Weiser, he soaped and dug up gold for seven million dollars in the mine, after which he safely moved to permanent residence in Phoenix. One. Weiser, he said, was taken by the Apache spirits.
In 1891, Waltz died, but before he died, he reported the whereabouts of the mine to his nurse Julia Thomas, who looked after him until his last hour.
Naturally, Thomas, along with her friends, was not slow to go to the mountains for riches, but soon returned back alone, and not entirely healthy. Doctors diagnosed her with madness!
The woman claimed that her group met in the mountains numerous ghosts of miners who went before her in search of the damned gold and never returned. They were like "real" - made of flesh and blood, but it was impossible to physically harm them. Even a bullet!
The ghosts in every possible way hindered the march of Julia Thomas's people, and when they finally found the mine, they pounced on them and killed everyone. Only Julia was left alive - as another reminder that you should not look in the mountains for something that did not belong to you and does not belong to you!
After this incident, hundreds of gold prospectors nevertheless set off in the footsteps of Julia Thomas, but none of them managed to find the "Lost Mine of the Dutchman". But many have met with death.
Of all the mountain groups in the region, the Mountains of Superstition are considered the most sacred by the Indians who inhabit the area, and this is the main reason why so many people die in the mountains.
A secret that cannot be revealed
In the twentieth century, in the mountains of Superstition, several rather mysterious deaths of "treasure hunters" were recorded. So, Adolph Root disappeared while searching for the mine in the summer of 1931. His skull - with two bullet holes in it - was discovered six months after he disappeared. The story made it to the top of national news, reigniting widespread American interest in the Dutchman's mine.
Adolf was the son of Erwin S. Root, who practiced law in Phoenix. In 1912, Erwin S. Ruth rescued a certain Pedro Gonzalez from a long prison sentence at trial. He, in gratitude, admitted that he was a relative of the "famous" Peralt, and gave Ruth several old maps indicating the location of the "Dutchman's mine" in the mountains of Superstition.
Erwin S. Ruth was a respectable American woman who did not believe in treasures or ghosts. Therefore, the cards lay like a dead weight in the documents of the Ruth family until June 1931, until finally Adolph Ruth, who had matured by that time, immediately met them, without hesitation, decided to go to the mountains for the lost treasures, promising his mother that he would return in a maximum of two weeks.
But he did not return either after two weeks or after a month. His first searches did not lead to anything, and only in December 1931 the local publication Arizona Republic reported that the search engines had found a human skull with bullet holes in the mountains!
The find was passed on to the anthropologist Alex Hrdlichki, who, for complete identification, requested all of Adolf's photographs and dental records from the Ruth family.
The conclusion of the scientist was disappointing: the skull found in the mountains belonged to Adolf Ruth. According to the conclusions of the respected scientist, the treasure hunter was killed with a powerful rifle with two shots at close range!
In January 1932, another group of searchers was sent into the mountains, who finally found human remains gnawed by wild animals about three-quarters of a mile from where the skull had previously been found. Here were also found the personal belongings of Adolph Root, including his pistol, as well as a checkbook, on one of the pages of which Adolf wrote that he had finally discovered a ghost mine! The note ended with the famous words of Julius Caesar: Veni, vidi, vici! But the most important thing - maps - were not in Ruth's things …
In 1942, the headless remains of James A. Cravey, who was also trying to find the Dutchman's gold, were found in the mountains.
Three years later, another seeker - Barry Storm - claimed that he only narrowly escaped death in the mountains. He was shot several times from behind the rocks by a mysterious sniper, whom he named "Mister X". Storm suggested that both Adolph Ruth and the other dead searchers were the victims of this particular sniper.
In 2009, the Englishman Alan Biggles died in the mountains under mysterious circumstances. And here are the new deaths of visitors from Utah! How many more will there be?
According to experts, about a hundred seekers annually go to the mountains of Superstition in search of the "Dutchman's gold mine". Most of them return safely. But a few, nevertheless, disappear forever, or then find their remains. Perhaps they are the ones who come closest to a secret that cannot be revealed?
Gennady FEDOTOV, AN columnist