Choral Pepper - Western Treasure Tales

Cover

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by
CHORAL PEPPER

University Press of Colorado

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Copyright J 1998 by Choral Pepper
International Standard Book Number 0-87081-489-3

Published by the University Press of Colorado
P.O. Box 849
Niwot, Colorado 80544

All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Mesa State College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, University of Southern Colorado, and Western State College of Colorado.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1984

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pepper, Choral.

Western treasure tales / Choral Pepper.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-87081-489-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Treasure-troveWest (U.S.) 2. West (U.S.)Antiquities.

3. Gold mines and miningWest (U.S.)History. 4. Silver mines and
miningWest (U.S.)History. 5. West (U.S.)History, Local.
6. LegendsWest (U.S.) I. Title.
F591.P423 1998
978dc21

97-48731

CIP

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For my dear Norby, who went
where many fear to tread and shared the wrath
of desert winds.

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In the wake of Captain De Anza
Rode too many a man
Who hastily hollered, "Bonanza!"
When he had but a Flash in the Pan.

Victor Stoyanow

Back in the sixties when I was editing Desert Magazine, we ran a story about a lost treasure buried near the ruins of William Rood's old Rancho de las Yuma located near Cibola on the Arizona side of the Colorado River. Readers must have been waiting with shovel in hand, for barely had the magazine been mailed when a Mr. William Ballantine from Hinkely, California, rushed out to dig it up, but he was too late. A rancher in the area had observed a man about sixty years old canvassing the area with a metal detector two days earlier.

Ballantine wrote to complain that all he found was a freshly dug hole about three feet deep, two feet wide, and a little over two feet long with marks left on the edge of the hole from ropes used to remove the heavy load. I published the letter on our "Letters from Readers" page. His was not the only lament. A host of other treasure seekers called my office to report a similar result.

A few months later another letter arrived, this one from the anonymous finder of that treasure who signed his letter "A Subscriber." He claimed to have found the treasure in less than

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half a day. Aware that he was being watched, however, he wandered away when his metal detector and a probe with a shovel indicated the site promising and went on "prospecting" as if nothing had happened. At nightfall, he returned to lift out the old cedar chest buried in the hole.

The "treasure" he found secreted among old lamps, pots, a bag of marbles, and fifty pounds of molded lead bullets consisted of a decayed sack of coins-gold, silver, and copper, U.S. and foreign. He eventually sold them to a coin dealer for over $10,000. Today they would be worth considerably more.

Such incidents prove that all hunts for lost treasure are not in vain. Another instance was the discovery of Pegleg Smith's black gold nuggets, lost for over a century until stumbled upon by a nature lover out enjoying desert wildflowers in the spring. I often wear one on a chain sent to me by the anonymous finder who believes more still lie on the desert. His story is told in this book.

Early settlers and prospectors who left us these legends were not all noble. For every upright, God-fearing member of the Donner Party whose treasures fell to the devastation of Utah's salt flats, stagecoach robbers like Bill Brazelton buried quantities of stolen booty too heavy for a getaway horse to carry. Relatively unknown in the sagas of outlaws, Brazelton's half million dollars worth of gold lay buried in five caches on the southwestern desert, one of which has been found. His plight, too, is recounted in this book.

Still, as Victor Stoyanow so aptly put it, one must be wary. I have friends in Utah who still remember grandparents bewailing their losses in the infamous "Dream Mine." Conceived around the turn of the century by a Mormon bishop named Koyle, the funds raised by his "revelation" subsidized numerous tunnels into a mountain near Spanish Fork, none of which materialized into a pot of gold.

This book, like my earlier Treasure Legends of the West, avoids such tales and confines its pages to treasure legends substanti

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ated by enough factual evidence to make them credible. Although some have been lost for over a century, that does not discredit their existence.

Metal detectors are a comparatively recent invention, as are today's recreational vehicles that provide motorized access to areas that were formerly restricted to one-blanket prospectors. Years of erosion and drifting sands also work in our favor.