Mysteries Of The Superstition Mountains

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Everyone loves a treasure hunt. Very few things are more exciting than the prospect of rolling up your sleeves like Indiana Jones or Scrooge McDuck and uncovering a long-hidden hoard of gold and making the cover of all the papers. But how far would you go for fortune and glory? Would you climb into a hellmouth?

The Superstition Mountains are a mountain range east of Phoenix and are known for their picturesque volcanic peaks and jagged canyons. But they're even better known for something else: the legendary Lost Dutchman's Mine, a much-ballyhooed secret stash of wealth sought by daring adventurers known as "Dutch hunters." But George Johnston, president emeritus of the Superstition Mountain Museum, claims that more hikers disappear in the Superstitions than any other mountain range, with an average of four or five hikers disappearing or dying there annually.

This could be due to the range's sheer drop-offs, deep canyons, wild swings in temperature, or unfriendly wildlife. Or it could be related to the strange sounds, mysterious disappearances, and unexplained deaths that led to the feeling of superstition that gave the range its name. Join us as we peer into the hellmouth and search for the truth of the Lost Dutchman's Mine and other mysteries of the Superstition Mountains.

The story doesn't end here, of course, as you might have gathered by the fact that we haven't gotten to a Dutchman yet. (Spoiler: there is never a Dutchman.) The next player in the tale is one Doctor Abraham Thorne, who, like the Peraltas, is not Dutch. According to the Lost Dutchman Days website, Thorne was a doctor from Illinois who wanted nothing more than to travel west and practice medicine among Native American tribes in the Southwest. When President Lincoln created a reservation for the Apache along the Verde River, Thorne got his chance.

Thorne would spend years living among the Apache, tending to their sick and wounded, and garnering respect from tribal leaders. In 1870, in order to repay his kindness, elders of the tribe promised they would take Thorne to a place with lots of gold. Their one strange yet convenient condition was that Thorne had to be blindfolded when they took him to the gold. With his eyes covered, Thorne was taken on a journey of about 20 miles. When the blindfold was removed, he saw a sharp pinnacle of rock, generally interpreted to be Weaver's Needle (pictured above), the most notable landmark of the Superstitions. In front of him, he saw a huge pile of gold nuggets against the canyon wall (you know, like mines have). He gathered up as much as his non-Dutch arms could carry and later sold the nuggets for $6,000, presumably in 1870 dollars.

Finally, the Dutchman comes in. Well, sort of. Like we said, there's no Dutchman, at least in the sense that there's no one from the Netherlands in this story. There is a Germanman, let's call it. The Dutchman terminology comes from the same mix-up of the words "Deutsch" (German for "German") and "Dutch" (English for "Dutch") that gives us such terms as "Pennsylvania Dutch."

The Germanman in question is one Jacob Waltz (various spellings of his name abound), though a second Germanman with a suspiciously similar name, Jacob Weiser, is often included in the tale. In a version of the story related by True West magazine, Waltz and Weiser were prospectors who hadn't yet found their big score until one night they saved a man's life in a cantina brawl. That man turned out to be (wait for it) Don Miguel Peralta, who, in gratitude, told the two men the location of his family's bountiful mine in the Superstition Mountains.

Weiser disappeared under mysterious circumstances — in some versions killed by Apaches, in others killed by Waltz — but Waltz would return to the mine whenever he needed money and then pop back into town, making it rain (hail?) gold nuggets, reportedly of the richest ore anyone had ever seen. Waltz allegedly died of pneumonia in the winter of 1891 with a sack of gold under his bed. Since that moment, the search for the Lost Dutchman's Mine has been on.

Much of what we've discussed here is pretty deep into legend territory, even though there really was a Jacob Walz/Waltz whose grave you can really visit and there really was a Julia Thomas, as True West magazine will attest. But the event that really spurred interest in the Lost Dutchman's Mine, before the movies, before Barry Storm, was the real-life disappearance and death of treasure hunter Adolph Ruth.

According to AZ Central, Ruth was "a 66-year-old veterinarian employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal Husbandry, who had a longstanding obsession for locating the fabled Lost Dutchman Mine." When he acquired a number of maps to old mines, Ruth became something of an amateur treasure hunter, and in an attempt to find a mine in California, had fallen down a ravine, permanently injuring one of his legs.

By 1931, Ruth became convinced that one of the crudely drawn maps in his possession would lead him to the Dutchman's mine, but his luck wasn't any better than it had been in California. Within days, Ruth had disappeared without a trace. It wasn't until later that campers discovered a note in a bottle written by Ruth saying that he had (again) broken his leg and needed help. But perhaps of more interest was the note's casual postscript: "P.S. Have found the lost Dutchman."

When Ruth's body was found in a gold-lust-fueled search in December 1932, the mystery only deepened.

If you know anything about human nature, you know Ruth's disappearance and mysterious death did not dissuade others from following in his footsteps, and, in fact, the headlines brought on by his story only inspired thousands of imitators.

Author Tom Kollenborn reports that a prospector by the name of James A. Cravey thought he could beat the odds of finding the mine by using a helicopter in 1947. His headless body was found months later, tied up in a blanket with his skull 30 feet away. The coroner reported "no evidence of foul play."

The Phoenix New Times relays the story of Jesse Capen, a 35-year-old Denver resident who disappeared searching for the mine in 2009. AZ Central reports on the bodies of three more men found in 2011 who had been lost in 2010 while seeking the mine, one of whom had been lost and rescued the year before in the same search.

As George Johnston from the Superstition Mountains Museum suggests, there are a great number of tragedies linked to the Superstition wilderness, and the Prairie Ghosts website lists a large number of disappearances and deaths in the area surrounding the mountain and mine over the last century, though some of those may be as legendary as the mine itself, so take them with a grain of salt, even if (i.e., especially since) a shocking number of them involve headless bodies and mysterious gunshots.

So, is there gold in them thar hills? Should you load up a backpack with Slim Jims and novelty colored Mountain Dews in an attempt to uncover gold that has variously belonged to a non-Dutch Dutchman, a blindfolded doctor, a Mexican mining family, a tribe of Apaches, the Thunder God himself, and some soldiers we didn't have room to mention before? Well, no. Almost certainly not.

Tom Kollenborn, who is by far the most prolific author on the Superstition Mountains and its surroundings, says, "I have never found any evidence that really suggested the mine existed. Everything is based off subjective hearsay. Actual facts about the lost mine just don't exist."

If the word of the world's leading expert on the area isn't enough for you, Thinking Muse points out that the geology isn't there: the Superstitions are volcanic, and volcanic rock does not tend to have a lot of gold in it.

OK, what if, as some say, the mine isn't really a mine but rather a cache in which the Peraltas hid their vast wealth? As Skeptoid and others point out, there's no evidence that the Peraltas ever mined the Superstitions or indeed ever even lived in Arizona. The Peraltas only ever mined in California, and anything different was a contrivance of later authors looking to build up the legend.

One thing there is evidence for is that maybe the Lost Dutchman's Mine is safer left to the realm of myth.