Legends, Lore and Lost Treasure provide the landscape with a story, which compels us to explore and venture out, perhaps into the the Legend itself. These as the stories are passed around campfires, between friends and family members, or prospectors, and get rich scheme artists. With each telling, the stores get bigger, bolder and richer. Most of the really good legends are stories of lost gold mines, cash boxes, mining shipments, etc.. All of these stores have the lost items just out of reach.
Books, magazines and internet websites all publish and profit off of these legends. People create movies, Youtube videos and use all sorts of platforms to publish their theories. Some people are content to just share the stores of Legends and Lore. Others investigate to learn more about the story or simply want to be entertained. While still others become compelled to seek out the legend and in doing so, just may, add themselves into the Lore of the desert southwest.
The Ultimate Legend – The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine
The Lost Dutchmans Gold Mine is perhaps the ultimate legend in the Desert Southwest. At its core, the story is a dying old man who tells the tale of having a rich lost mine the location of which he shared with a select few people. None of the people with whom he shared the location with saw fit to document the tale, the mines location, or really do anything to help themselves practically locate the lost mine.
The origin of the story quickly becomes a convoluted mess, as different parties, share, publish and sell different clues to various other treasure seekers. The woman at the heart of the legend, Julia Thomas went so far as the sell exclusive hand drawn maps to the mine, which she never found.
Adolph Ruth, a government employee found himself searching the the Lost Dutchman in June, 1931. Unexperienced with the terrain and extreme heat of the Arizona Desert, Ruth perished in the back country near Weavers Needle. When his body was discovered, his skull had a hole which could have been caused by a bullet. From this point on, no telling of the Lengend of the Lost Dutchman Mine is told without the name, Adolph Ruth.
The Kokoweef Mine
A mysterious underground River of Gold is the root of this story of the Kokoweef Mine located in Mountain Pass, California near the border of Arizona. The Legend of the underground river of gold was a subplot in the novel Inca Gold by Clive Cussler.
The Lost Silver Shipment in Owens Lake
The dry lakebed of Owens Lake is said to contain a lost shipment of Silver Ore from Cerro Gordo, California. According to some, a steamship was hit by a wave during a storm and a wagon load of 75 lb silver ingots was lost overboard. It seems so easy to walk across a dry lake in the desert with a metal detector and pick up the silver ingots.