Barry Storm - Thunder Gods Gold

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Text originally published in 1945 under the same title.

Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publishers Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THUNDER GODS GOLD

BY

BARRY STORM

Contents

Barry Storm is himself an expert prospector and confirmed treasure hunter.

Traditions are those intimate glimpses of history too personal to their makers, too unbelievable to anyone else, to be recorded like more normal occurrences.

JAY C. HENSON

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

NAPOLEON

To The Prospector

Whose Dining Enterprise On Lonely Trails Has Built And Will Forever Sustain The Destiny Of A Metallic Civilization, Thunder Gods Gold, His Timeless Dream,

Is Dedicated

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.

SHAKESPEARE

In the turbulent backwash of centuries since California was thought to be an island often prove the truth of Western traditions!

More than four centuries ago the first bearded adventurer set foot upon a wild, new world in a frenzied search for gold. And hard upon his trail came sanguine thousands of every race and color who marched and counter-marched through incredible, high-handed treasure hunts. Today in the vast, fabulous reaches of our American West the daring ones are marching still not only after new mineral wealth but after, too, all those golden promises of hidden mines and treasure troves long since lost in the turbulent backwash of time!

And there are clues for the hardy, roseate visions for dreamers. For endlessly with each fresh sigh of the nightwind there come vague whisperings of half-remembered tales and exciting traditions which somehow fall just short of being accredited history or discredited legend, traditions of all those phantom bonanzas forever hidden beyond the purple horizon mistsyet, strangely, nowadays occasionally refound!

Refound like one of the eight Lost Peralta Mines actually found stuffed with gold, silver and copper ingots!

Indeed, the adventures of a Coronado who discovered gold mines in 1852 are well enough chronicled. But what of those uncounted others who trekked into unexplored wilds and prospected, mined or looted there as opportunity offered? Sometimes we hear of them by chance when an ancient treasure map comes to light among the heirlooms of some pioneer family, when an antigua mine is suddenly stumbled upon where no mine had been known, when the cabalistic lettering of explorer-priests or the mysterious treasure signs of long forgotten miners are found cut into rock, trees, cacti. And what human can sleep soundly beneath Western stars when the subtle jingle of lost gold rings so persistently over the land!

If then the first flaming facts of Cortes fantastic plunder, before and since of bonanza lodes found, lost, rediscovered and hiddenand the secret treasures each had produced!will forever exemplify in those wide, frontier lands dreams as paradoxically old as time itself yet as perpetually new as tomorrows golden dawn.

That eternal, ever-recurring vision was set forth in these exquisite words by Casteeda who recorded Coronados sanguine hunt for a Seven Golden Cities Of Cibola: Granted that they did not find the riches of which they had been told, they found a place in which to search for them.

And that place is still there with its ever-accumulating traditions of long lost treasure trails to be heard about in every crossroad tavern and village store, in every cow-camp and mining town and wherever desert dust and mountain haze obscures still-wild distance. That place is still largely a raw, rugged land of endless plains, wide deserts, towering mountains and twisted canyon-chasms. Such ground can never be plowed under for it is too vast, too primeval, too hot or cold or remote. So the wild countryside preserves its treasures well and has given to the whole of America an exciting folklore, a strange flavor from more spacious ages, peculiarly its own.

In fact, when Gonzales, in 1912 an heirloom map to mines once worked in Arizona by his ancestors he merely perpetuated the timeless dream. For if one wanted fortune, one simply set out to find it. If one didnt need fortune, well, couldnt one search anyway?

The adventurer always has little which he accounts of as much value as Adventure. The adventurer always has sublime dreams to discredit fear and mock disaster. And so long as phantom goldhis modern allegory of every misty mirage ever pursued by the high heart of manis somewhere else, anywhere else, he can seek it with an undying faith. But let the gold be found or the treasure counted then gone forever in the fears of possession is an essential way of life that is peculiarly American, a way of life built entirely upon individual achievement, the way of life that has constructed a new world, launched fleets, moved mountains, migrated populations, conquered frontiers. Thunder Gods Gold is of all this compact, epitome of the fabulous fabric of dreams that forever will blend over wild Western lands the romantic flavor of many centuries, many peoples, many traditions.

And if it would seem that these traditions of hidden wealth and boundless treasure all have a certain family resemblance, it must be remembered that there wasand is!a resemblance too in the remote wilderness of Spaniard and American alikeand thereby in the usual causes of disaster. For disaster, in one word, has ever been the story of phantom bonanzas, has always occurred to hide the missing link on a return trail to once-found fabulous mineral wealth. Indeed, had not someone been killed, had not time erased memories or confused directions, had not wars, politics, accident or human greed intervened there would be today none of the hidden tunnels, abandoned lodes or treasures in already-mined riches which are accidentally stumbled upon or purposely sought and occasionally refound.

Occasionally the traditions of these bonanzas had been recorded in great and exact detail by their original discoverers. But far more often they are as intangible as the drifting morning mists because of understandable and very human reasons; because crime had been committed or tax or tithe evaded, because traveling in possession of a known fortune was dangerous or because someone might one day wish to return to its source, because once fortune was obtained at great hazard it was easier and far safer to simply walk off from its source rather than encounter the necessity for explanations to jealous men and greedy governments. Yet, whether whispered tradition or authenticated fact, such little-known, almost incredible history speaks loudly in every Western community in support of a universal theme common to all peoples and all climes. It is a theme most peculiar to a new world in which the minds of men were attuned to the individual pursuit of fortune and of adventure and not that of woman, a theme part and parcel of the westward course of empire, of the sanguine ventures of the frontiersmen and pioneers who pushed ever further into uncharted wilds. Virgin gold or lost gold, furs, free lands, cattle and gushing oil are all one, the lure of adventurous achievement which drew the self-sufficient, individualistic men of the flaming times of the Spanish and Western American conquests into hazardous, irrational deeds by our sophisticated standards but only because of essential motivations and human characteristics which are now fast ceasing to exist in the modern, group-controlled quagmire of cattle-like human herds.