Thinking Sideways: The Lost Dutchmans Mine

am Steve as always, joined by and Wolf Wolf. Yeah, that's my new name, turning a new I want to suthing a little more macho a wolf, so you can all call me Wolf, all right, Wolf, Okay, we'll go with that. Okay, So it's it's Steve Devon and the old Wolf. No bark bark another that. Well, hey everybody, this week, as always, we have a mystery. This mystery was a listeners suggestion. It was suggested by Meredith, So thank you Meredith. I know she said this one in

a while back. I'm gonna say Meredith was the first of many. Oh yeah, we probably just didn't record the rest the first come, first served kind of thing. But what we're going to talk about this week is the Lost Dutchman's Mind. The Lost Dutchman's mind. Crap, I misread it. I thought it was the Lost Dutch Boy paid store franchise. Sounds so similar. Yeah, well, that's actually a legitimate mystery.

They built this franchise and they wrote the address down a piece of paper, and then somebody lost it the piece of paper that is. Oh I thought they lost a little boy. No, no, that's another mystery. Yeah, so we just proved that one. Alright, Well, let's let's focus on this, okay. So before we get started with the mystery, I do want to say that there's several lost Dutchman's minds across the US. So we are specifically talking about the one that is believed to be in the Superstition

Mountains in Arizona. That's it is the big one, but there are others, so I just want to make sure a brief overview before we get into most of it is the legend of the Lost Dutchman's Mind, which says that there is a gold mine with an amazingly pure vein of gold and it was found either by the Apaches at some unknown time in history, by the Spanish in the fifteen hundreds, or a German immigrant in the

eighteen hundreds. The mine is believed to be located somewhere in the Superstition Mountains, and it's believed to be in the vicinity of there's a peak called Weaver's Needle, and that's where everybody thinks it's at. And supposedly the mine is lost. But the funny thing is is that it wasn't lost before gold was pulled out of it and brought back to civilization, possibly along with a map, maybe not. I don't know stories very and that's something i'll preface

this with. There are multiple versions of the story. That's what makes it so fun it is. It's kind of boring if you just say, I know there was a mind, but we don't really know where it is anymore. Yeah, Yeah, an episode over done. No, that's the way it's gonna go. Right. So, since the story came out in whichever time frame it is that it came out, whether it was with the Spanish or with the German minor in the eighteen hundreds, people have since been going out into the desert searching

for the mind. If they're lucky, they just lose their fortunes. If they're not so lucky, they're losing their lives. Happens it does. And part of the reason for that is because people go looking for it and they aren't exactly seasoned prospectors. They didn't know what they were doing, and they weren't prepared. And so you add that in with the weather and the country side, and it's a recipe for disaster, especially if you go out by yourself, which some people, which is a lot of people seem to

have died and anything. You go out in the wilderness by yourself, by the way, you know, you're taking a big chance, a bad idea. Yeah, it is. So let's give a little bit of geographic info here, just what people know where we're talking about. Superstition Mountains themselves are roughly fifty miles or eighty kilometers east of Phoenix, Arizona. The temperatures in the area swing. This is in the summers. They swing from a low of eighty degrees to a high of a hundred and six degrees and that is

the average in that time frame. Yeah, in the winter, it's like also super weird. It's super cold because it's high plains, right, yeah, and it's it's it's desert, and deserts aren't known for being warm in the winter. Actually, even in the summertime, the desert gets pretty damn cold at night. Actually, I would saying, are you talking eighty degrees at night? I'm sure I would take it to get a lot lower than that it can. But this is, you know, I'm this is this is the highs. So

this is a big peak July August. You know, then there's not so much a temperate swing at that part. Okay, So these are highs. Okay. So the other reason, you know, as we said, it's a desert, it only gets a couple I think, what is it, eight inches of rain a year, So it's not as if you're just gonna find pools of water laying around your canteen up with

none of that. So the whole place is it's rock, it's scrub, it's valleys and bluffs, and it's just not the place that anybody should be going wandering into unprepared and most definitely not on their own. I recommend you get a guide if you're gonna go, like five, do they have rattlers up there, the ones that little babies have or the snake? Yeah they do, they have. They have snakes and probably some other creepy crawleys kind of like Australia, not as bad as Australia, and Australia everything

wants to kill you. Arizona is the Australia of America. Let's be probably. I don't know about that, but I'm sure there's some other places that will take Umbridge at that. So I'll let them email us. You're the most poisonous state in America. We want to hear from you New Jersey. Wait, that's around kind of poison. Okay. So there's there's a misnomer in our story that I want to clear up real quick also before we get into it, and that

is the name of the mind. We here in the US were super culturally sensitive, especially in the eighteen hundreds, and so that's where this comes from. Is the mine was found by a man who was called the Dutchman, but he wasn't Dutch. He was Chairman. So Deutsch. Being as like I said, sensitive, it was we are Deutsch Dutch potato potato, they're the same thing. So that's why it's called that. So, as I said before, there are multiple versions of this story, and there are multiple variants

of each version. So what I've decided to do here is kind of what I've done in the past. I've packed each one up into as much of a stories I can without yep, without going veering down every little side alley here. So if you're familiar with the story and this doesn't made up exactly with what you've heard, well that's because it's a variant initially the story. So this is the earliest version of the story of the

Lost Dutchman's mind. It comes from the Apaches, the Indians, American Indians who lived in the area, and they of course were there before Spanish or Europeans showed up. The story that they tell is about a sacred cave that houses the spirits that protect the mountain. The entrance to the cave, according to their legend, is protected by a pair of rattle snakes, one is male and one is female. Between those snakes are two cops, and I believe it's

shell cups if I remember right. To enter the cave, though, you need to walk up to the cups and have a bluestone and a white stone and you need to put those into the cups. The or in some other versions they're blue and a white feather. But you're gonna put him into the cups. It is going to be that the female will get the white stone and the male will get the bluestone, and when you do that, that will prompt the snakes to leave the entrance of

the cave and you can enter it. What's really interesting is when I was listening to when I was reading this, and then I watched UM in Search of the old Leonard Nimoy show, which was a lot of fun. I didn't realize he hosted that show for it just completely evaporated from my head. But the guy was telling the story, and then I was like, Okay, so this is just kind of it is allegory. Is at the right word

to say? Yeah, I think it's allegory. Okay. So I was saying, Oh, it's just an allegory whatever whatever story with a hidden right, And then I started reading on some boards about this, and people are saying that they were interpreting this to mean that the entrance of the cave was protected or covered by two actual rattlesnake stone statues, and that the stone, the blue and the white stone would act as a key to open it, which doesn't mate up at all with what we know of what

the tribes of the American Indians did, but it was an interesting idea to me. No, absolutely sure. This wasn't on web slues. This was on some miners board statues that are closed Indiana jones Es. Yeah, and then you put the stones in and give them a twist and they slide apart. You got it. That's I think that's a little bit beyond a patch of technology to tell you the truth. Well, maybe it was alien technology. I love the idea. Yes, it's pretty cool. It was pretty interesting. Again,

I don't I agree. I don't think it's right, but cool, Yeah, I think. Yeah, alright, well let me finish up just with this bit of story, then we'll keep going. I know you don't think that's right, and that's fine. I just thought it was fun good. I got the feeling from what I read and listened to about the story from the Apache that the cave is not so much you know, this this gold filled thing, but instead was a place to go to commune with the spirits of

the Suspicions Mountains. Um, you know, I think it was a thunder god. I heard it referred to and referred to in one place, so I don't know, but it seems like it's more of a spiritual place for them, not a gold thing. That would make sense. I mean, it's my understanding that historically Native American people's have had more of like a reverence for the space that they're in than the sort of wow, that's gold. Um, let's

take it. They didn't really. Yeah, I'm sure they would have loved to have had the gold if they had been valuable in their economy, but it really wasn't wasn't. Yeah, And it would makes sense that you might look at that and think, yeah, that's a special place that I'm going to talk to somebody important in. But the value is not what's in the walls. The value was in the space itself released on your system. Yeah, yeah, okay,

well let's go on from here. We have our next Actually, we have two versions of this story that revolve around

the Spanish. According yeah, of course, according to this version of the story, about fifteen forty, a Spanish conquistador named Francisco of Vasquez de Coronado, he came to the area and he was looking for the seven Golden Cities of Cibola, and they the Spanish, met the Apache and they told him about the Suspicion Mountains and he immediately interpreted their stories to mean that one of the golden cities of Cibola was there, and he is his men immediately went

to search the area. They obviously they never found it, but while they were in the area, they kept mysteriously losing men. And that's the way you'll see it described as men would just evaporator disappear. And I don't know if really they were deserting or if they're falling off cliffs. I have no idea, although as always possible, the apaches were kidnapping him in murdering him, Yeah, that's absolutely possible.

Um So, so I don't know. That's where the Spanish the actual fifteen forty version of the story ends, and it disappears from there, but it's dovetails quite nicely in with the second part of our story. Here, the last telling of the story, which is probably the most fleshed out because I think it's the most popular, pushing us into the eighteen forties, there's a man named Don Miguel Peralta, and he's the member of a prominent family, and he goes out looking for the gold that de Coronado couldn't

find in the years earlier. He By the way, remember that name, Well, I watched the wire, so yeah, not not not that uh. In this story, his name is peppered all over the place. So the story goes that Don Miguel Perelta went out searching for the gold in the Suspicion Mountains and he indeed founded and he returned to the site that he had found the gold with a whole host of workers and began to mine it.

Being that he was digging in sacred territory, the apache were none too keen with that, and he figured, well, it's probably time to pack up and get out of here. But being unwilling to just leave his gold mine open for any old schmode to just walk in and start working, he somehow covers the entrance of the mine. And I don't know how he does that, Probably a pretty good way, yeah, but it makes it hard to go back can start working. That's that's why I don't know how he did it.

But that doesn't really pay too much into this, because what happens is that he loads his pack animals with gold and his equipment and his men and then they take they go to leave. But he probably shouldn't have spent so much time oh, I don't know, packing up his stuff and blowing up the entrance to the mind because the Apache show up and they kill every last man.

The pack animals, however, are not killed, and they are loaded with gold and they run away, and supposedly, for about fifty to eighty years, people wandering in the area would find the corpses of these pack animals with statchells of gold attached to them, so they were they were above find. Yeah, I my my one issue with it is that I don't exactly know how anybody knows that that's what the what happened to him and the men,

because yeah, they had to be survived. Or there's other people who said they found a whole host of corpses several miles out away from Weaver's Needle, so that must have been the indication that the Apaches. I as, I don't know why you have such a problem with this, because what we're saying is a group of Apache Indians came and killed a bunch of dudes who were messing with their sacred site and survived that attack and left. And I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that they

might have bragged to some people about it. And that's how we got this story, was that they said, yeah, that guy that was digging in there, we killed them all, because that's what happens to people. So you're saying the Apache, we're spreading the story that they had. Okay, Okay, I just making sure I understand who when you said that guy. Yes. So for me, it's like, there are a bunch of there are a bunch of people who left that scene alive.

And it wouldn't be so crazy to me to say, especially if they were trying to disencourage what's the discourage, thank you discourage people from going out there and searching for it anymore? They would say, yeah, you don't happened to Laska who did that? We killed him at all

of his men, We killed them all. And there is an addition to this story which I initially hadn't included, which is that they're supposedly so there was a doctor who was friendly to the APACHE and helped them, and so what they did one day was they said, we're going to pay you back, and we know what, old viable valuable can't say the word valuable all of a sudden, but they blindfold him, put him on a horse, take him somewhere and he picks up as much gold as

he can off the ground from there. So I don't know, maybe maybe you're right, maybe there is that's that's how we spread from there. I don't know. I'm always just always questioned when it's and every man was killed, you know the story. Yeah, but again it's like not literally not everyone was killed, right, just just all of the workers who were digging the minds were killed. There were a bunch of people who did the killing. And actually the workers are probably slated to get killed any because

they knew the where the mind was possible. Yeah. Oh, and by the way, that's the one thing I was going to say, is that story about the guys who were found away from Weaver's Needle that people said must have been the killing ground. That's that's actually it's called Master Grounds. It's actually a known site, so you can find it on the map. And I was all over Google Earth looking at this stuff. No, no, I gotta be honest with you. On Google Earth. This whole place

is really not that fun to look at. It's brown, a little bit of scrubby green and valleys and ravines, but it's a known site as in a known place where there was known historical site where bodies were found, Yes, where bodies were found. Not, there's there's verse. There's accounts that say that some gold was collected at that site, but I I didn't dig too deep in if that was historically true or not. You know, this was one

of those things. It's just it's in that that slide of so many bits of the story that you can only run down so many. Okay, so lastly, let's move on to our most popular version of the story, which is the Dutchman himself. Yeah, so our friend the Dutchman was an actual guy. We've historically know who he is. His name was I'm gonna say it's Jacob Waltz, but it could be Yakub. I'm not sure which it's gonna be, but I'm just gonna refer to him as Waltz because

that's safe. He was born in Germany in the early eighteen hundreds. He came to the America's or came to the US in eighty five, and he made his way in kind of this zig zaggy route south from New York. He went through North Carolina and then he you know, came across towards Texas, always chasing gold. He was always looking for the next place, because you gotta remember, there was a lot of boom towns at this this time in history, and people were mining things all over and

they died out pretty quickly, they did. They would die out super fast. So he was chasing that all the time. And he eventually ended up in Arizona around Phoenix, and he ended up living out his years in that area. He was working his own minds there. And I don't we all have that that mountain man minor idea in your head, where the guy's up in the hills in a hole in the hills, and then he comes out once in a great while to go to town and get his supplies, and that's all you ever see them.

And while it's true that he would spend time at his own minds, he couldn't make a living doing that because he never had a really any kind of profitable claims. So he would go do work for other people. He would work in town. I mean, it was not uncommon to to do that. A lot of these prospectors had to do that to be able to feed themselves. There wasn't actually, you know, all that many rich vines to be had at the things aren't just still did his day aren't very common. I think of it like a

deadwood sort of situation. Do you guys ever watch? Yeah, and how the prospectors were more for higher than anything else and would be you would go work for the rich people who came into town thinking that their claimed that they had just bought was going to be worth a lot of money. And you know, that's kind of what I picture prospecting really like, not you know, down in the mind pulling gold out. I don't know pretty much. Well, there you go two ways to look at it. But yeah,

that's exactly right. They didn't do it full time. So we we reach a little bit of a split in our story here with Mr Waltz. From here, there are variants of the story that he um so he met a fellow German by the name of Jacob Wiser who had been in the area as well. And there's some version of the story, like I said, though, that have him. There's versions that don't. So we're just going to kind of run on. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't exist.

But they showed up in the Phoenix area in seventy and suddenly had a bunch of gold and drank on it for days before they packed up and headed back out into the mountains. And according to the legend the story, Wiser did this for twenty years. He would show up with gold and you know, live high on the hog for a while, and then he'd head back out in the hills. And there are variations that say how he found the gold. So this is some of the difficulty

with the story. Some people say that, uh, he accidentally stumbled onto one of those piles of gold that was attached to a dead pack animal. That would be reasonable and easy. There are others that say that he or he and his heat and or his partner killed two Mexican miners who they took to be apache and then after they had killed and realized they were mining the area,

and then realized they had a valuable mind. Or there are the versions that say that these two were given a map by a Mexican don whose life they saved.

And let's flesh that out just a little bit. The Mexican don, because it it turns out it was a man who was Don Miguel Peralta, Peralta that guy again again, and he was according to this he's a descendant of the man who had found the mind the first time, and the Dutchman saved him from certain death in a knife fight, certain death, and as a reward he let him look at a map he had of the mind, and then eventually he took him and if his partner

Wiser existed out there, and supposedly they started working it, and eventually he was bought out. And then after a while suddenly the partner stop stopped showing up, and people can't decide if he just died of natural causes, if the Apache killed him, or if Wise killed him, Waltz Wise, I don't know who very similar or if Waltz had killed him. So he kind of disappears at that point, Walts himself dies, but not before he meets a woman named Juliet Thomas. And it's really funny when you read

the accountings of her. I've heard that she was a rather young woman. I have heard that she was a rather old widow. Uh. You know, it goes back and forth what she did. But apparently he befriended her and maybe they had some kind of romantic relationship, and he kept dropping hints about where his mind was and telling her that he would take her to it to see it in the spring. Unfortunately, he died in I believe

it was October. It was October of Julia Thomas, perhaps a very young beautiful girl who had found a guy who was promising an older guy who was promising her a lot of stuff. Possibly she is possibly that she could also be a woman of you know, mature woman, so not a twenty year old girl, but at forty or fifty, because she's always described as a widow, So she could have been the widow of a minor at of a man at twenty, or she could be the widow of a man in her fifty You'd never know that,

and her age is never specified anywhere. When they collected his body to take it away, they found underneath his bed a sack of gold, was very pure gold in it. So everybody is excited to say that he got it from the lost Dutchman's mind, and you know, we've we've got to go get that. And then of course since then people have been going out into the hills and digging holes like their gophers and just riddling the area with with pock marks. So that's kind of where our

story ends. There is one thing about this that I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about, and that is the Peralta stones. Course, again, the Peraltas pop up in our story. In the early nineteen fifties. Three stones, I guess technically four stones, three rectangular stones, were discovered in Apache Junction, Arizona, and along with them,

there was a heart shaped stone that was found. The rectangular stones are made of sandstone, and they're called the Peralta stones, and then the heart stone is called the Latin heart. And we're talking things that had been made to be that shaped by men, right. They are man made, yes, so somebody did carve them somehow, right, and they're like bricks about what eight by fourteen inches something like that. I think they're I thought they were more candle to

like eleven by seventeen, but somewhere in that range. Yeah. I mean, I've always seen pictures of them, but I never got good dimensions for scale, no banana for scale.

So on one face, so one of the stones is carved on both sides and on one face of that that's referred to as the pre map, and it shows an etching of a person wearing a pointed hat standing on a rectangle which I believe is supposed to be a block, and it's got eighty seven etched into that block, and they're swinging across the shape of a cross down and underneath that there's a rectangle with a cross in it and a heart, almost like they're falling away from

the cross. Then to the right of that there are several lines of text in Spanish. On the opposite side of the stone is what is called the horse map, and that also has more Spanish on it, along with the engraving of not surprisingly all horse. And then there's

some squiggly lines and some numbers on it. To take the other two stones, which these stones get stacked on top of one another, so there appears to only be carved on one face of each, and they have on their face again this is a series of squiggly line and some numbers, and there is in one of them a depression that has been carved in that is in

the shape of a heart. And by the way, when I say the shape of a heart, I mean, you know, like the the Europpean Valentine heart shape exactly, that's exactly it. The lines that are on the stone run up to the edge of the heart, the part of it that's carved out, and if you take the Latin heart and put it into the spot they made up perfectly, and

those lines continue across the Latin heart. So people interpret this to mean that these stones are a map, that they are reflective of certain geographic features in the area, and so they're trying you see people always trying to make these up to different maps, which depending on how you zoom in or out, you can put it into a thousand places. So one of them definitely looks to me to have maybe some like constellation drawings on it maybe or something like that as well, so you're probably

referring to it. It looks like a series of dots with lines connecting it. No, that's that's what I wouldn't interpret as a trail a cath right. But then there's the squiggly like one that looks kind of like a W and one that looks maybe like you're interpreting them is constellations. I got it, okay, or I mean mountains, because one of them definitely looks like mountains. And then there's a bunch of the sky that looked like constellations to me. I don't know. It's totally up to interpretation.

Those it absolutely is. I mean everybody, okay, not everything. A lot of people are convinced that it is a bath that's meant to lead you to the lost Dutchman's mind. I find it strange that it showed up in the nineteen fifties, But hey, what do I know? Oh? Wait, um, I I do know something, because it turns out that most of the authorities on engraving from the eighteen hundreds and stoneworking have looked at these things and said they're fakes because the faces of the stone owns where they're

the etching is. They're they're rather smooth, and to have done that at the in period in the eighteen hundreds, you have to rub two stones together for quite a while with moist with water between them to wear them down. Doesn't appear to be that way. The lines in the shapes that are cut into them appear to have been cut with a modern power tool, and then somebody took some other implement to them to try to rough them up and make it look real antiquing. Yeah, that's exactly it,

but they don't. For for a lot of of experts from that kind of work that they don't pass must also don't I mean, they don't look for as old as they're supposed to be. Those fine lines have held up remarkably well in the arid wasteland of the desert. So you know, the other problems are, oh, tell me all of them. Okay. So the Valentine's Heart that it's kind of it's a European thing that didn't show up in Latin cultures until the twentieth century, so couldn't be

in era. And the Spanish is poorly assembled sentences that are also using modern words and phrases, So there's a lot of things that call this out as not being truly period. Yeah, I and yeah, the maps, supposedly it's on him, it's just kind of like crude and meanless. That's yeah, it's hard to say. I've actually watched previews.

There's a TV show, apparently reality show of a bunch of guys hiking around in that area using a map similar to this to try to locate the mind, and it is just so funny to watch them do it and overlay it on this and overlay it on that, Like you can put that on whatever you want if you zoom in and out, you'll eventually make it fit something something. So yeah, theory time. Yeah, shall we go down the rabbit hole here and we'll we'll start off let's start off with the whole thing is a fake,

because that's one of this the two very basic theories here. Yeah, so let's start off with is fake. Not long before Waltz showed up in Phoenix in eighteen seventy or so with all of that gold that he was spending around town. Remember I said that he had been working other claims and things like that to make ends meet. Well, it turns out that he had been working at a mind known as Vulture Mind, which was actually a super productive mind. It ran from eighteen sixty three to nineteen forty two,

so years. Yeah, Well, he was fired apparently for stealing. So it is very possible that he simply stole some going from Vulture the folder mind, went out in the superstitions and then came in and said he had totally found it. So that is totally a plausible thing. Money, it's a good way to under your money. It's also a really good way to build trust to open a line of credit. Say, if you come rolling into town, with a bunch of really pure gold and you spend

it all. But you've said that from that one, that thing, you know it's out there, there's a mine out there. It's super productive. You've seen it. I'm going to go out in a couple of days. I just need, you know, a couple more drinks, one more night in the hotel, and then I'm good. I mean, I know that's not attached to the story necessarily, but yeah, I know that that stuff did happen, and maybe he did it several times, came back several times, and that's how he built up

that kind of trust me. Yeah, it could be. I don't know, he could have hit a bunch of Actually, in those days, you probably didn't want to walk around with your entire fortune for disaster. Yeah. These days even too. Yeah, but you know, stealing a bunch, getting fired for that, and then needing to build up a name for yourself somewhere else. It's not unreasonable to think this is a

good way to curry trust from people. They'll think that I have a lot of money, they think I have a productive claim, and then when I run out of this money, they'll trust me. Yeah, I do what I gotta do, and maybe he intended town but he had enough stretched it out. I don't know. Let's go and quickly talk about his dear lady friend, Julia Thomas. Julia took care of him and his last his later years, right, according to versions of the story, yes, at least in

the last year. Do we know how he died was an old age. I believe he just died of old age. It wasn't as if he died of a mysterious knife wound to the back, right, But I didn't know if it was an injury or an illness or something. As far as I can tell, his seventies. Yeah, yeah, I've been working out the mountains his entire life. So she though, Julia Thomas, she might actually be the reason that we

know this story and that it's so popular. And that's because after Waltz died, she and two other men went out into the Suspicion Mountains looking for the mine, and after they couldn't find it, they came back and she started selling maps to the mine. So now she's making money by saying this is this is a map based on what he told me or gave me, which is suspicious. It's almost a gold mine and of itself well played there.

In eight two, she spoke with a writer named Pierre pont Ce Bicknell, and he wrote, he wrote several stories over the years about this, and not surprisingly that the details changed from addition to addition. He was writing his articles. At least the one that we're going to cite came from the San Francisco Chronicle, which actually had a pretty decent circulation for the time. Yeah, and there's no internet archive very easily. Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's the only

way to go. So it's easy. It's easy to just print a bunch of different stuff. Just do what you want. Okay. So we're gonna take an excerpt from an article that he put A wrote and it was in the January thirteen, eighteen edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. Joe, can you do your best eighteen nineties newsman voice for us? Oh? Yeah, let's see, I'm gonna do a gruff mountain man voice here. Well, that's not very imaginary circle, it's not more than five miles.

I don't think that's gonna I think that's gonna work. Alright, let me let me start over again. Okay, Okay, let's just do it this way, just a flat Midwestern accent. The mind lines within an imaginary circle whose diameter is not more than five miles and whose center is marked by the weaver's needle, which is about feet higher. I'm like a confusion of lesser peaks and mountain masses of basaltic rock. The first orige. On the south side from the west end of the range, they found a monument

structure a little weird night. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're missing We're missing a verb there. Uh. They found a monumental trail which led them northward past Sombrero Butte into a long canyon, traveled northward in the gorge, and up over a lofty ridge, hence downward past the needle, into a canyon running north, and finally into a tributary canyon very steep and rocky and densely wooded, with the continuous thicket

of scrub oak. Reads like a legal description. Yeah, so it's not exactly and where he got all these details is really really confusing to me. Uh. The only thing that I can guess, and I know a lot of people think, is that he gave an interview to Julia or Julia Thomas gave an interview to him, I should say, and then he ran with it and he added things.

He changed the name of Weaver's needle to uh so, like it says in here, I thinks Sombrero beaut He used to call it Sombrero peak, like the name's always kind of got shuffled about. Is that what that is? Okay? Here's the thing about about this description, and and of course the map that Julia Thomas says was selling, is that Walts did drop some hints. Apparently he was known for dropping some hints about where the mind was, But nothing anywhere seems to lend me to believe that it

was as such a detailed description as this. There were people who tried to follow him. It's according to the legend he would go out and people say, I'm gonna follow him, I'm gonna knock him over his head when I find his mind. I'm gonna take his claim, except that he would always shake who was ever following him. So I sometimes wonder if if that is true, that

bit about him shaking people. Maybe people he Bicknell talked to people who gave bits and pieces that then Bicknell assembled al on with the stuff that he got from Julia Thomas. I don't know. I mean, that's that's a complete guess on my part as to where this fantastic word problem of a description comes from. Okay, let's move on to the other thing that makes me think that possibly this whole thing is a fake, and that is the Peralta's. Once again, we're gonna talk about those folks.

They did. The first mention of them comes from documents that were filed in two and that documentation was from a scam that was made up by him hand named James Rivas. Supposedly, the Peraltas were actually in the area for a long long time before that, right according to the lineage that Vas made, Yes, the name Peralta is a very common name, so there were it is very possible that there were people with that name in the area.

But it seems that the lineage that is assigned to this may have actually been taken from this scam that that he was doing, because he's trying to do it in a in a land grab bid. He claimed to be related to the family, and he claimed that he was working with the family or they had they had given him this and there was some land claimed deed deed stuff going on. He pulled this at least one other time, um, and he he would double down on it and then he get caught and he'd go to

jail and he'd start a different scam. But then from there the name didn't show up again until the Big Nail article. So it may be that McNeill heard, oh, well, there was the Peraltas, Well, let's go ahead and pull that into the story, and maybe that's where the seed of that part came from. I don't know this part of the story, and that there's variants on that I believe it was. One is that the Peraltas had a minor two or another one is that they just had a but little gold that they hid up in the

Superstious Mountain. There was also that they were rich cattle ranchers. There was also that that controlled a huge swath of the area, although I think the cattle rancher one is from the Reeva's scam. Probably. Yeah. The last thing that I have for this theory is that, you know, people have been scouring the Superstition Mountains and especially in the area around Weaver's Needle for over a hundred years and

nothing has been found. Nobody has found a thing. Um and if indeed the thing is truly there, the chances of anybody finding it, well, they're they're amazingly fantastic, and they're very low. And I say they're very low because the area has been closed to mining. Uh. It was closed in four under the Wilderness Act of nineteen sixty four, which said you can't go in and do this stuff. Prospecting today is allowed, and that is wander around, pick up rocks off of the ground and then take them

home and figure out what they are. No dig. If you want to dig, that is considered mining, and you've got to get a permit to mine. You can also do what is called treasure trove hunting, which as you go along and you try to find some kind of treasure that's just sitting around, but you've also got to get a permit for that. So it's a real The act is set up with a real catch twenty two. You can't show a fine unless you did for it, but you can't did for it to have a claim

to show. And if you did for it you suddenly show up with this claim, they're gonna put you in irons and lock you away for digging unprotected layers. I love a bureaucracy. I know, is I knew. I used to work with somebody in her husband was a scuba diver and he and a friend discovered this treasure trove of cars at the bottom of the Lamor River because people back before they closed the ramp by the Cellar Bridge,

people would just like shove their cars out of the river. Yeah, and so they wanted to salvious these cars and say. It was like, well, you can't. You can't salvage those cars. Let's you have title to them. And they were like, well, how are we going to get title unless we pull

them out of the water. Well, we don't care. Actually they worked it out, but yeah, it took him a while bereacratic mindset, and yeah, I don't even want to know how they had to go about that, but yeah, awesome, Okay, ok, let's go on to theory section number two, which is it's real you like how they put a little bit of feeling behind that. I mean, I guess, yeah, you

are you giving me a C minus on my my acting? Still, I am no. I was more going to say, to the point of nobody's found it, you know, for me, it's kind of like, well, okay, you can't mind right, So even if there was this mine, and also, what's what's to say that it wasn't just totally mind dry, it's actually very possible, you know, that would account for nobody having found it. But well, and people have said

they found it. So if we're going to start and this isn't something that I got on what you guys are looking at. But there is a guy who in the late seventies, I believe it was maybe it was the sad said he, I believe it was that age. He said he had met some men who had known the Dutchman and they had told him what the Dutchman had told them, and he went out and he found

the Dutchman's mind. But it wasn't around Weaver's needle. It was in another area, in a valley, up a hill, up a mountain, and it was a pit mine and he pulled out, you know, a couple ten or twenty thousand dollars worth of gold at the time, and the thing ran dry. So it is possible that somebody else found it, not knowing it was the Dutchman's mind. You're okay, so no, that's fine, because this is this is right along the lines of the fact that, yes, lots of

people have been finding gold in and around the Phoenix area. Mean, we just we talked about the Vulture Mine, almost a hundred years in operation for for God's sakes, um although I've I've heard too, though that geological surveys of the Superstition Mountains indicate there isn't likely to be any gold there. Well, that's yeah, that's I've heard that. I've also heard people say, well, you've got to find the vein. There are precious metals. I mean, there's a huge copper mine right just to

the east of the Superstitions that is being mined. So there is stuff in the ground. I mean, I I don't know. And well, is it the mercury vapor test? Is that what you're talking about? Is that the one you're referring to that was saying that there wasn't probably a lot of golden area. I don't know. I just rather as they did a survey. I'm not sure exactly how that A chairman who if it was just geological, It's like this is a kind of rock where you're

just not you know, it's like igneous rock. Volcanic in origin. My understanding is that gold veys comes from things like meteor impacts. Yeah and so, but a lot of the volcanic activity in the West is actually pretty recent in geological terms, and so and so there probably are some rich gold veins, but they're buried underneath a huge slab of lava. True. Yeah, and but you know, I mean again, there there were gold fields found. I mean, there's a

place called Goldfield. There was not too far away from where people think the Lost Dutchman's Mind is. There was the Black Queen minds, which were super productive minds for a while. So, I mean, there is gold, There is gold in the area. Getting to it and finding it

is the problem. And you know then that's that's part of the reason that like the Wildlife Act of nineteen sixty four was used to close the area because you know how people used to go prospecting dynamite dynamite just blow stuff up until something sparkles, so it looked like the whole area started looking like the surface of the moon. And that's one of the reasons they did it because people were just going crazy because they could because it was who cares, it's the middle of hour. So but

people did find gold. I mean it did get found. Now does that mean that the lost Dutchman's mind is real? I don't know. I mentioned to briefly a second ago was the I used the term pit mine. We I, at least in my head, always had this idea that the Dutchman's mind must be your typical mind. That is just a hole cut in the side of a mountain and it burrows straight down and slowly slopes down. But there's there's our minds where guys just dig straight down.

It's literally just a pit in the ground. You dig a hole and you put timbers around it so it doesn't collapse on you, and eventually stopped getting anything out of it, and then you just walk away and nature fills it in. So that's why we talked about the It could have been mined out or maybe he minded out and it just over time filled in. We don't know. I don't know how often they fill in. They fill in with dead bodies because people keep falling into well.

You know, actually the landscape in the area has changed in the last hundred years, not just because of bozos out there with dynamite, but there are there have been earthquakes. I think there have been a half dozen strong earthquakes in the last hundred years, enough that collapse of mind shaft cause rock slides. So it could be that the pit was filled in with material, or the entrance collapsed, or it was covered in a rock slide, and this is these are things It very easily could have happened.

And so that's why we don't see anything. You know, everybody's like, oh, well, that's obviously just a bunch of stuff that's sloughed off. It can't be behind that. You just keep going, Yeah, I don't know. It's it's a total guess. I do want to say as a public service announcement here that if you do decide to go out and mind for the Lost Dutchment on your own, you want to go dutching, because that's what it's called.

I want you. You need to get a guide, You need to take the right provisions because it is very easy to get lost and to suffer great injury, if not die. If you really want to do this, you can actually join the Lost Dutchman's Mining Association and for a small fee of just under five thousand dollars, they'll let you go to their site, which is right near where they say the Lost Dutchman's Mine is and you can dig for gold. Dare. Yeah, I think that's probably

a better way to invest your I agree. And five dollar one time fee. That's if you pay all up at once. You they've got payment plans you could you could spread it out as long as you want. You don't get the discounts if you don't pay up front. But well, I mean, I guess you know. For me, one of the things is it's all circled around the needle, right, we're seeing it's weavers needle. It's all weaver's needle. But

I've been hiking before. It's cool. And we live near the Cascades, so you go in the Cascades and you can tell the difference between that's the mountain and this is all of the other little er mountains combs things around it. But I don't know that I can necessarily, and granted I'm a layman, right, but I can't necessarily when I'm standing next to a thing, say oh, this is the tallest peak in this area versus that's the tallest peak in this area, versus that thing that's twenty

miles away. The tallest peak in this area. So I don't know how much room for error there is on saying yeah, it was the biggest thing around because we were it was very distinct. It is a very distinct. It's almost looks like an obelis and it has been, yeah, throughout all of the earthquakes and stuff, and you know, it might just be one of these one of those things that's like the guy who's looking out of the of the street light for his car key's even though

he didn't drop them there. You know, it's kind of like that weaver's needle is such a distinctive landmark that how could you leave it out of your story? You know? That's great? Wow, this is this fabulous landmark that's easy to find. Everybody knows what it is, very recognizable. Yeah, and so yeah, so not surprising, I guess. So, but that sort of leads me towards a fake part of things.

I guess. Okay, Well, although I for me, if I'm trying to hide a mind and people are really pushing me for info, and especially especially if this is the sort of situation where I've got a mind and I just want to line of credit for a couple of drinks and they're like, okay, Joe, I'll pour you another drink if you give me like one hint as to where your mind is. And you say it's near Weaver's Needle, and they'll go, okay, yeah, I know where that is. Okay, cool,

here's your you know, here's your thing. Yeah, versus saying you know that fourth biggest peak on the east side there that area you I mean, that's not what you're gonna say. You might know in your brain that's where it is. But I think, especially if you're trying to sell maps like Julia Thompson, you're just gonna say it's there.

But I think it exists. I do. I would like to think it does, but I also have a feeling that if it did, it's it's been leaned out long ago, and it's just it's a story as always, it's it's the story is snowballed, and the mind is now in telling is much greater than it ever was. An actuality. Yeah, I think there's definitely a nugget of truth here. Oh god,

oh wow wow. Well. The last thing I was gonna tell you guys I really found interesting is there was a book called Earthcore that I listened to several years ago,

and it had. When I was listening to it, all these features that were described and about these guys were mining and YadA YadA, And as I was researching the Lost Dutchman's Mind, I realized I was like, Wow, a lot of this sounds like the terrain around Weaver's Needle and makes me wonder if this is what was the foundation of the story or the inspiration for stories set somewhere else. But it was just really interesting. It's like, Oh, I'm gonna have to go pick up Earthcore again, damn

it and find out if that's it. Um. Yeah, I'm kind of I'm kind of tending to think that if I found a great vein of gold and I'm going to the town that people are asking me about it, I would send them totally in the wrong direction. So there might be a lost mine or a great vein of gold, but it's probably not in the superstitions at all. Yeah,

it's right along the same thing as what Devil was saying. Yeah, you might you might walk out towards Weaver's Needle knowing that you can easily ditch the guys that are following you and then hang it right and start heading east to your real site, which is not even in the mountains, which is not even there. Yeah, exactly exactly. That's uh so, Yeah, I'm thinking that probably it might have been a rich vein somewhere, but not in the Superstition Mountains. Yeah, I

don't know. It's it's hard to say. I mean, like I said that, there are minds right in that area, right around where everybody thinks it. And I think that's part of why the legend is so solid and built in. It's just because there was actual productive minds. Well, it's a cool legend. I mean, I've liked I've enjoyed reading about this onceince I was a kid. Yeah, it's been around a long time, it has, and I think we've probably sunk enough time into this one. So let's go

dev it. Devin started it. Let's go ahead, and so we should probably go ahead and give everybody their favorite bit of information because and she already used that one. You got to come something better. You're really you're minding for something now that was just as bad. Well, we have a website if you want to go see that website. It is thinking Sideways podcast dot com. We'll have some links for research on this episode, along with all of our other episodes, so you can listen to and download

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Anybody who's listening. Disregard what Joe said, except for the part of sending us cash. Yeah, yeah, the drugs not so much. Okay, okay, we are going to go ahead and wrap this one up and call it a night. So thanks a lot everybody, and we will talk to you next week. Bye. Uys. I was waiting for a better pun. I got nothing. Mind out, tapped out at the bottom, nothing more in there? Really run this vein dry? Yeah? I, Like I said, keep digging next week.