[tense music] [footsteps]
- Tonight, the most famous lost mine in the old West.
- The quantity of gold in the Lost Dutchman mine
is over half a billion dollars.
- People have been searching well over a century,
but no one's found it.
- The clues to its whereabouts are intriguing,
but some say the land is cursed.
- Anybody who trespassed against this sacred land
would face death.
- The Superstition Mountains are unusually dangerous,
they're rugged and unforgiving.
- Now, we explore the top theories
surrounding the Lost Dutchman's mine.
- Lo and behold, they have these cryptic symbols on them.
- The heart on the stones is the key to the entire puzzle.
[explosion] - As legends suggests,
is it possible the gold and the land it's hidden on
are somehow cursed?
- Many people have died
trying to find the Lost Dutchman mine
and there are people that are still willing
to risk their lives to find it.
- Where is the Lost Dutchman's mine?
[dramatic music]
Spring 1891.
On the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona,
83-year-old German immigrant Jacob Waltz
is having a string of bad luck.
- Jacob Waltz is a prospector
who has come to Arizona
during the Gold Boom in the 1860s.
- By 1891, he is a farmer
and his farm home has been basically ruined
in a massive flood.
- Some accounts have him spending
as many as two nights in a tree to avoid the water,
contracting pneumonia in the process.
- Jacob is nursed back to health
by a woman named Julia Thomas, who's 29 years old,
so she's much younger than Jacob.
Now she runs a boarding house
that Jacob eventually moves into,
and since they both speak German,
they eventually develop a rapport.
- What happens next
is Jacob is visited by some of his friends,
who bring five sacks of gold
that they recovered from his farmhouse.
- Julia perks up as anyone would,
and she starts to realize, you know,
maybe there's more to this scruffy looking man
than she first thought.
- [Fishburne] Julia plays nurse for several months,
taking care of Waltz,
and they grow close.
- With that growing trust and friendship,
Jacob could find some Julia
where the gold his friends brought, is from.
- He tells her that the gold is from a mine
that is hidden in the Superstition Mountains nearby
and that it's filled with gold.
- [Scott Wolter] Jacob confides in Julia,
this mine has over $20 million in gold,
which in today's dollars would be around 700 million.
- The Superstition Mountains
are sacred territory to the Apache Native Americans
who are indigenous to this area.
- So according to Apache lore,
the Superstition Mountains are named as such
because it's the hum of their thunder god,
who lives in the mountain.
And according to their legend,
he will kill anyone who trespasses there.
- The historical root of this tradition
seems to lie in events from the 1840s.
- There was a family from Mexico City called the Peraltas,
and they made it a point to mine the gold in there.
And the Apaches told them
that they should not be in the mountains.
So one day, the Peraltas got tired of the harassment
and so they decided to pack up and leave
and take their whole operation back to Mexico,
but they only got so far.
When they were exposed in the clearing,
that's when the Apaches swooped down on the whole party.
- The Peralta family don't have a lot of history
on what happened next.
One version of the story is that
there was a big fight with the Apache
and that a lot of people died.
The other story is that they were all massacred,
but one or two people,
who managed to escape back to the family.
- The last thing the Apaches did
was to go and take mules
with saddlebags full of gold ore,
and they took them back into the mountain.
[explosion]
- The Apache's dynamite some of the mines closed,
but according to legend, one of them stays open.
- Waltz claims that 10 years later,
while prospecting on his own,
he comes across the last Peralta mine.
- [Gottlieb] Waltz goes inside and what does he find?
Gold everywhere.
So much gold, he can like cut it off the walls.
It's embedded in quartz, it's gold ore,
there's veins of gold everywhere.
- Then, many years later on his deathbed,
he makes something of a confession
to what might have been his only friend.
- He says that when he recovers,
he's going to take her to this mine,
but his situation only gets worse.
And so he develops a stroke,
he's partially crippled,
but he's still able to draw this map
and it has these cryptic clues
to the location of this mine.
One of the clues that Jacob leaves behind for Julia,
is he says that at the entrance of the mine,
it looks like an upside down funnel.
- One of the other clues is that
from the mine's entrance,
you can see what he calls a military trail.
- Another clue says that a particular shadow
would be cast from Weaver's Needle,
which is a distinctive geological formation
in the Superstition Mountains.
- The entrance to the mine
is within the shadow cast of Weaver's Needle,
and the sun will shine into the mine's entrance
and the mine is located on a north-south running canyon;
with a rock face near the entrance.
- [Fishburne] Waltz also tells Julia
that from the mine, you can see four peaks
that appear to be lined up as one.
- The four peaks landmarks
is about 40 miles outside of Phoenix.
It's part of the Tonto National Forest.
- But did he mean they line up
and look like one peak,
or can you see all four peaks at once?
No one knows quite exactly what he meant,
and where to start from.
- [Fishburne] Waltz dies on October 25th, 1891,
taking the mine's exact location to his grave.
- Julia immediately determines
to go and find the lost mine.
But after months of searching,
using the clues in the map that Waltz had left,
they are unable to find anything.
No gold, no mine, nothing.
- She gets to the point where
she becomes financially destitute,
and eventually she has to give up
because she can't find it.
But she does decide to tell a newspaper
everything that Jacob had told her.
- And the story begins to spread
and this is how this whole new fervor starts,
looking for gold in the Superstition Mountains.
- With these articles,
the term "Lost Dutchman's mine" is invented.
Interestingly enough, Waltz is not Dutch, he's German.
A lot of German immigrants during this period,
and the Americans hear Deutsch,
which is German for "German,"
but the name Dutch sticks;
and so they become known as Dutch immigrants.
- People now pour into the Superstition Mountains
in search of the hidden treasure.
- [Fishburne] Initially,
many of these fortune hunters alight on one spot.
- Weaver's Needle is a very unique land formation.
It is the remnant of what used to be a prehistoric volcano,
on the very eastern part of the Superstition Mountain.
It eroded throughout time
and all that's left now is a huge, tall pinnacle
and it looks like a real tall skinny mountain.
- [Fishburne] It's named after Pauline Weaver,
a mountain man and scout
who explored the area in the 19th century.
- You can see from it, a military road.
And if you remember,
Jacob Waltz refers to being able to see a military road
from the entrance of the mine.
- But, there's a size problem.
Weaver's Needles very big, it's like a thousand feet high,
so it casts a very big shadow.
Doesn't make finding the actual mine very easy.
- [Fishburne] Even before Jacob Waltz
makes his deathbed confession
and the Lost Dutchman's mine gets its name,
the area around Weaver's Needle
earns a sinister reputation.
- In 1880, two former soldiers travel into Phoenix
and they approach a silver mine
and the manager there looking for work,
and they have gold ore with them.
Remember, at this time, Phoenix isn't very big.
It's a small rural community, about 2,500 people.
So if someone rolls into town with a bunch of gold,
people are gonna notice.
- They sell some gold ore
and the person buying the ore
is struck by the quantity,
as well as the quality of this ore.
And he asks these two soldiers,
where did you find this gold?
- And they said, well,
there's tons of it laying around this mine.
So he tells them, well,
if you guys think there's that much gold,
I'll outfit you and you bring back some more samples,
and I'll invest and back you on this venture.
So the soldiers then leave, outfitted.
- [Fishburne] After two weeks,
the soldiers failed to return.
Hoping the men haven't run off with the gold
or been taken by the Apache,
a search party is sent out.
- And they eventually find the two men,
naked and dead, each shot in the head.
Murdered for the gold?
We're not sure.
- The reality is that
this is a really treacherous landscape
and mining is a very dangerous, cutthroat business
and people are afraid.
- It lends credence to the curse.
It makes it more real.
- [Fishburne] Well into the 20th century,
People searching for the Lost Dutchman's mine
close to Weaver's Needle,
have met with tragic ends.
- Some people are murdered.
You have dehydration, starvation.
These are very treacherous conditions in these mountains,
so there's a lot of mystery and legend tied to this.
- But with so many deaths and so little gold found,
treasure hunters are now beginning
to search other locations for the mine.
- [Fishburne] Numerous lives have been lost
in Arizona's Superstition Mountains,
in the hunt for the Lost Dutchman's mine.
Some swear an Apache curse is to blame,
but that hasn't stopped prospectors
from carrying on the search.
- And along with Weaver's Needle,
there is another location
that's long been associated
with the Lost Dutchman's mine.
- This spot isn't without its tragedy as well,
and it's home to one of
the most well known and puzzling
attempts to find the lost goldmine.
- In 1914, Erwin Ruth,
the son of an amateur treasure hunter named Adolf Ruth
travels to Mexico on business.
- While he's in Mexico,
one version of the story is that
Erwin saves the life of a government official.
- The official learns about
his father's interest in Western folklore and treasure,
and it so happens that this Mexican
has some connection to treasure in the American West.
He is in fact a distant relative of the Peraltas,
and he gives to Erwin some maps;
maps of the fabled Peralta mines
somewhere in the Superstition Mountains.
Erwin is not especially interested in the maps,
but his father certainly is.
He has them inspected and dated
to around the time of the Mexican revolution,
which seems to provide some sense of authenticity.
The maps are in some ways legible,
in that they seem to denote a particular area;
the Superstition Mountains,
but other things about them don't make sense.
- He's studying this map
and he's looking at the geography,
and it doesn't quite match up.
- Ultimately, Ruth concludes that
people have been looking
in the wrong place the whole time.
Weaver's Needle is not the key.
It's, in fact,
another equally distinct geological formation:
Blacktop Mesa.
- So Adolf Ruth decides to go
on this solo expedition to blacktop Mesa,
using these maps to try to find
this secret hidden mine
that it supposedly holds the clues to.
- [Fishburne] Adolf Ruth arrives in Arizona
in the spring of 1931;
a 66-year-old with chronic pain and a limp.
- Adolf Ruth is about five feet tall
and just about a hundred pounds wet,
so he's not the guy to be
going into the mountains at that time.
What happens is, Ruth finds some ranch hands
that are willing to make a few extra bucks
to take Ruth in and set him up in a camp.
- So June 14th, 1931,
they take him to a place called Willow Springs
and that's where they leave him.
- After about a week, they don't hear from him,
so they go into the mountains looking for him
and they don't find him.
His camp has been abandoned.
- Nothing more is heard about Adolf Ruth for several months
and then some campers eventually make a discovery.
- Over near the Salt River,
some campers end up finding a message in a bottle
and it's allegedly from Ruth.
And it says, I'm under a tree, I'm injured,
PS: I found the Lost Dutchman's mine.
- Fast forward to December,
they eventually do find Ruth's skull;
just a skull, no body,
and there is what appears to be a bullet hole in it.
- About a month after they discover Ruth's head,
his body is found.
And none of his belongings are missing,
except for the maps.
- In a bag, he has a checkbook
in which he's written some notes.
One of the most relevant notes is the Latin phrase,
Veni, vidi, vici, which is Julius Caesar's words,
I came, I saw, I conquered.
- Does that mean that Ruth found
the fabled Lost Dutchman's mine?
Well, some of his other scribbles
suggest that maybe he did.
- Unfortunately, most of what he writes doesn't make sense.
The only thing he does leave that you can read,
is something about a mysterious circle
and then fields of black basaltic rock.
- [Fishburne] The Ruth story
grabs headlines around the country
and the public becomes obsessed.
- All of these elements add up to a media sensation,
which is attractive to audiences
in the depths of the Great Depression
where their eyes look west
to a place where most Americans will never go,
except in their imaginations.
A place where they can imagine themselves
leading more authentic, more exciting,
more dangerous lives.
It reignites interest in the Lost Dutchman mine,
interest that has not abated to this day.
- Initially, they rule Ruth's death a suicide,
but then they realized he never fired his gun.
So now they believe that he died
because of natural causes, the harsh conditions,
dehydration, starvation,
and they believe that the holes are from a predator
and happened after he died.
- [Fishburne] But even after all these years,
many people theorize that Ruth was murdered
by someone who wanted the Lost Dutchman's mine
all to themselves.
- Ruth's argument for Blacktop Mesa
being the locale of the lost mine,
is persuasive to him and has been to other treasure hunters,
but it doesn't line up
with all of the clues that Waltz left on his deathbed.
- Blacktop Mesa is not
within the shadow of Weaver's Needle,
so that clue is kind of outta play.
- However, it is geographically sort of close
and the black basalt sort of fits in
with the note he left in his checkbook.
- There are other points
that are in favor of Blacktop Mesa.
It gets its name from its top of basalt,
which is also more impervious to erosion,
that gives it its flat top.
We also know that volcanic eruptions can,
under the right circumstances,
help to produce precious metals.
- [Fishburne] Could the blacktop
sit on top of a layer of gold?
- Blacktop is also located above the canyon floor,
so you can see a military road from there.
- Because Blacktop Mesa
is relatively close to Weaver's Needle,
the rest of the clues left behind by Jacob Waltz
line up about as well as they do for Weaver's Needle.
- Whatever Ruth did or didn't discover,
whatever did or didn't happen to him,
those are secrets he took with him to his grave.
- [Fishburne] The 1950s and sixties
brings new types of gold hunters
to Arizona's Superstition Mountains
in search of the Lost Dutchman's mine.
Some are meticulous researchers
with intricate plans forged over years.
Others are professional businessmen
with the money to invest whatever it takes.
- With the 1950s and sixties
comes a new breed of treasure hunter.
Taking advantage of new surveying
or geological tools that can not only
look at the land but look into the land,
in ways that haven't been possible before.
- In addition, they aren't just looking
at Weaver's Needle and Blacktop Mesa,
they're looking elsewhere.
- [Fishburne] But there's one fortune hunter
who's convinced Adolf Ruth was onto something.
- In the 1960s, a private investigator from Oklahoma City
by the name of Glen MaGill
becomes interested in Ruth's story.
- He's a respected man in his community
and he's actually interested
in debunking myths and mysteries.
- MaGill reads about Ruth's maps
and he concludes that there's no way
he would've brought the original map that he had,
into the Superstition Mountains when he was prospecting.
He concludes that the original maps
had to still be at Ruth's original home.
- [Fishburne] To test his theory,
he tracks down Adolf's son, Erwin Ruth,
and arranges a meeting.
- MaGill learns from Ruth's son, that yes,
his father had taken the originals.
- But, and Erwin says,
he did make copies and I have one.
- MaGill and Erwin strike up something of a friendship
and so Erwin eventually gives MaGill a copy of the maps.
- Being the good private investigator that he is,
MaGill also contacts and speaks with
members of the Peralta family
to see what they know.
- MaGill eventually concludes
that all of Jacob Waltz's cryptic clues
lead to a spot called Cañon Fresco,
which translates to the cool or fresh canyon.
- This is a good spot to look, why?
Because it's in the shadow of Weaver's Needle,
you can see the four peaks from it
and you can see the military road.
Incidentally, you can't see
from the military road, up to the area.
- MaGill is a private eye,
he's not a mountain man.
So what he does is in December of 1964,
he hires a helicopter
so he can look at the location from the air.
He takes hundreds of aerial photographs
of the Superstitions,
hoping to correlate those to the copies of Ruth's maps.
- Based upon the aerial photographs in the flyover,
he finds this green area
which he decides to investigate.
- MaGill identifies a hidden green canyon
atop Bluff Springs mountain.
He thinks this is Cañon Fresco.
He heads out to investigate.
- And when he is able to make it there,
he finds mule shoes in the ground
purportedly from the Peralta's stock.
- [Fishburne] MaGill assembles a small team
and returns for a closer look.
- He and a team decide to go into the mountains,
in this particular area.
And in the process,
they find this hidden vertical mineshaft,
which matches the description
of the entrance to the mine
that Jacob Waltz had reflected on
in his cryptic clues that he relayed to Julia.
They end up going into that mine shaft
and find even more clues.
- You find some rough hewn timbers,
exactly of the type
that the Peralta said that they used in their mines.
So, all this is coming together.
He's super excited.
- MaGill is so confident
that he has found the Lost Dutchman's mine,
that he files a claim to start excavating;
which is huge national news.
Only trouble is, there's no gold.
- He spends thousands and thousands of dollars
going in to the mountains
and going to this specific spot in Cañon Fresco.
- But, he finds no gold;
but he doesn't give up.
He really believes he's in the right spot.
- [Fishburne] References to MaGill's expeditions
slowly fade from the news,
but his work breathes new life
into the search for the Lost Dutchman's mine.
- Even though it turns out
that MaGill didn't find the treasure,
he did find this green area, Cañon Fresco,
that none of the other treasure hunters
before him had discovered.
- But I think what a lot of people don't understand
is that in desert regions,
climate can change very quickly.
This can wreak havoc with some of these older maps,
because the terrain changes.
- It's hard to say if MaGill
found Cañon Fresco from Ruth's maps,
or he found a different spot.
The original clue from the maps might still be valid.
- The tale of Jacob Waltz
and the Lost Dutchman's mine
has been told and retold so many times over the years,
it's impossible to know where the truth ends
and the legend begins.
Hundreds of treasure hunters
have ventured into the supposedly cursed land
of the Superstition Mountains,
only to come up empty time and time again.
But what if the tale of an accidental discovery
of a relic on the desert floor
could be the key that finally unlocks the mystery?
- Throughout the 20th century,
Adolf Ruth's maps, as complicated as they are,
were considered the only legitimate maps
to the Lost Dutchman's mine.
But it is possible
that there is another guide out there
just waiting to be decoded.
- [Fishburne] One local legend
goes back to the late 1940s.
Oregon police officer Travis Tumlinson
is vacationing in Arizona.
On the long drive,
he pulls off the side of a highway
some 10 miles from the Superstition Mountains
to stretch his legs.
- He's walking along Highway 60,
outside Apache Junction in Arizona,
and he trips on what appears to be four stones.
He picks them up.
They have these cryptic sketches and carvings on them.
- One has a carving of a priest and a cross,
one has a horse, another has a heart with an inscription.
- He's curious.
He thinks he's found some southwestern art,
so he sells it to a local collector.
- But then, the Dutch treasure hunters come in
and what they see is something very different.
They see stones that can be put together
in such a way is to reveal a map.
A map to what? The Lost Dutchman mine.
- What could be the real clue on the stones,
is that there seems to be
an inscription of a name, Miguel.
Miguel is a Peralta family member.
- There are also words that translate to,
I pasture north of a river.
There's also this phrase,
18 places to get to El Corazon.
It does sound like a cryptic treasure map.
- And one of the stones has a shape of a heart
with the year 1847.
Well, that is a year before
the Peralta family is massacred.
- Decades have gone by,
no one can decode these stones,
not for a lack of trying.
- One of the things
that the stone maps have going for them,
is that unlike their paper counterparts,
they're unchanged by the passage of time.
They're not as easy to manipulate
and they can't be redrawn
like the paper maps may have been.
- Eventually, the stones end up in a Phoenix museum.
- Decades later, they become
very interesting to a couple,
Robert Kesselring and his wife Linda.
- He's a missile systems engineer,
she's a computer scientist.
They spend a lot of time and energy
trying to decode those stone carvings.
- They take the stones
and they compare them to topography maps
and they really focus in on one part of the stone,
which is this heart indentation in the stone.
- [Fishburne] Starting in 2009,
the Kesselrings spend years
trying to decode the clues.
Finally, in 2013,
they think they've cracked the mystery.
- Robert Kesselring seems to believe
that the heart is one of many mining symbols
that date back to the time of the Peraltas;
and to Kesselring,
the heart along with other symbols
like crosses and circles are part of what is
kind of like a secret code.
For Kesselring, the heart is
almost like an arrow pointing to the mine.
- The Kesselrings head out to the Superstition Mountains
to narrow their search area.
- Using a combination of aerial photography
and on the ground observation,
they determined that the place we should be looking
is somewhere else in the Superstitions.
- The Kesselrings think the mine
is in a spot called Deering Canyon.
They also think this area lines up to Waltz's clues.
- Having concluded that Deering Canyon
is where Waltz's mine is,
they set out to search the area.
- In route, they pass by some tribal remains,
which make them think of the curse of Superstition Mountains
so they really think they're on the right track.
- [Fishburne] The Kesselrings setup camp
and search the area for signs of the lost gold mine.
- Against a cliff face,
Kesselring finds what he believes was once
the entrance to a mine shaft.
- He says he sees
what he believes are Spanish mining symbols
around the entrance to the shaft,
and he believes that this is evidence
that the Peraltas once mined in this area.
- They think this could be
one of these sealed Peralta mines.
- According to Kesselring,
the entrance to the mine shaft looks like
it's been filled up through natural erosion.
- Next to that first caved in mine,
they find a series of others
and that aligns with legend
that the Apaches sealed up the mines
after trespassers had come through.
- As they continue to survey the area,
they notice a distinct patch of very tall grass
suggesting that at some point in the not too distant past,
that ground had been disturbed;
that its composition is different,
enabling a different type of vegetation.
- Kesselring uses a piece of tech
called a ground phase recorder.
It's kind of like radar
and it creates a hologram image
of what is under the surface of this earth.
- And underneath, they seem to see a mineshaft
a couple feet below the surface.
- [Fishburne] What the Kesselrings think is a mine
is covered with two feet of dirt and overgrowth.
- Looking at the cliff face,
Kesselring believes that he could see cracks
that are known as fault gouges.
These cracks are pinkish-white.
- Kesselring believes that this pinkish color
comes from rhyolite lava,
which sometimes can be an indicator of gold.
- For Kesselring, this is the moment of truth,
the moment of proof that the mine exists.
I know where it is, here it is.
But as with his predecessors, that isn't enough.
There's something that's going to stand in his way.
Now fortunately for Kesselring it isn't death,
it's the federal government.
- Deering Canyon, like the whole Dutchman search area,
is part of the Tonto National Forest.
- There's this thing called the Wilderness Act.
They're in a national park
and you can't dig and mine in a national park,
without permission.
So until the government gives permission
for people to excavate this area,
they could have found the Lost Dutchman mine,
but no one's gonna know.
- [Fishburne] Some find reason
to question the Kesselrings' findings
and the validity of the Peralta stones themselves.
- Many have argued that the Peralta stones are fakes,
that they aren't ancient stones,
that they're the product of more contemporary hands.
- The heart in particular seems like machine cut;
like it seems too perfect of a heart
to have been carved in the mid 19th century.
- So whether or not the Peralta stones
actually relate to the Lost Dutchman mine
and whether they are real or not,
it matters, but it sort of doesn't.
Why? Because it really brings the idea of the lost mine
front and center.
- [Fishburne] Stories of the Lost Dutchman's mine
continue to echo throughout the Superstition Mountains.
And in the early 1980s,
a new treasure trove of information about the mine
comes to light.
- Ted Cox is a local, born in the 1920s.
Very interested in a lost mine.
Cox has been looking for the Lost Dutchman's mine
his entire life, and based upon his notes,
he thinks he found it.
One of the important things about Cox
is that his father was a contemporary of Waltz,
so he's a little more closely connected
than other people who've been looking for the mine.
- Like many Arizona miners,
Cox is raised with the stories
of the Superstition Mountains,
which come to include
the Peralta family legend very quickly.
- When he dies in the spring of 1983,
all of his prospecting notes,
2000 pages worth are uncovered.
- Cox's Widow gives the papers
to a local Dutchman treasure hunter, Ron Feldman,
who begins to go through his papers,
which are the story of his life.
- What Feldman learns from the notes
is that Cox concludes,
partly based on the information he gleans
from his personal connection to Jacob Waltz,
that the majority of
the searches for the Dutchman's mine
have been in the wrong area.
The mine is not in the west side of the Superstitions.
- In 1957, Cox is sure
that he has found the Lost Dutchman's mine.
It's located on the eastern side
of the Superstition Mountains.
The mine that Cox discovered
matches up with Waltz's original clues.
- The mine Cox finds has a funnel shaped entrance,
just like Waltz described.
You can see a military trail from the location,
but not vice versa.
And Weaver's Needle is visible from the mine.
- The mine that Cox discovered
even has a rock in the formation of a horse
that could match one of the Peralta stones.
- From his voluminous records,
it's clear that at this moment Cox believes
that he is on the precipice of a great discovery;
that there is gonna be gold,
so he begins digging.
He digs until he's too old to dig anymore.
And what he does not find, is any gold.
- [Fishburne] According to his notes,
Cox doesn't find the treasure,
but he does dig up what he believes
is the true story of the Lost Dutchman's mine.
- Cox believed that Waltz was working the mine
without any claim.
So Cox, like Waltz before him,
conceals the mine when he's not digging,
not wanting anyone else to find it.
- He does this research
and then discovers that
probably somebody had already swooped in after Waltz,
and taken the gold.
That's why he's not finding anything in the mine.
- A prospector named James Rogers, in fact,
filed a claim in 1875 for the mine and it turned out
to be an incredibly lucrative proposition.
- This would've been roughly 20 years
after Waltz discovered the mine.
- [Fishburne] Rogers files the proper paperwork
and is able to claim the mine as his own.
Naming it, the Silver Chief mine.
- The mine becomes a rich producer for Rogers;
the most bountiful producer in the entire area
during the Gold Rush.
- Rogers and a partner
ended up making a million dollars.
- [Fishburne] If Cox's theory is right,
it means the Dutchman's vast treasure is already long gone.
But science may have a way to prove
if the Silver Chief and Lost Dutchman's mine
are one and the same.
- A year after Jacob Waltz passed away,
a piece of his quartz
that had the gold laced in it
was taken and made into a matchbox.
That matchbox now exists
in the Superstition Mountains Museum.
- The type of gold ore
in the so-called Waltz matchbox embedded in quartz,
looks very similar to some quartz
with some veins of gold running through it,
that was found in the Silver Chief mine.
- Some modern Dutch hunter enthusiasts take the matchbox
and they decided they're going
to do some extreme analysis
to try to match it
to some other locations in the Superstition Mountains.
- Purportedly, the matchbox was tested
against a variety of samples
from different places in the Superstition Mountains,
but the only good match
was the one from Silver Chief Mine.
So if we have direct signature that corresponds,
we have done scientific testing,
process of deduction suggests that
well, maybe the mines were the same.
So, maybe the Silver Chief mine
is the Lost Dutchman mine.
- The most distinguishing feature of the matchbox
is its high concentration of mercury,
which also exists in the Silver Chief Mine.
- Mercury is not very common
to find associated with other mineral deposits.
It doesn't occur very often in mines like this,
so, this is a pretty important clue.
But skeptics argue that the Silver Chief mine
can't be the Lost Dutchman mine,
because the word silver is in the name.
But silver and gold also occur together.
And in this case, who knows why the silver name was chosen?
But obviously gold was there, too, because it's there.
- [Fishburne] But can we really be sure
the Silver Chief and the Lost Dutchman
are the same mine?
- Lots of the clues are matching up
to what Jacob Waltz left behind,
but it's really hard to tell
because he didn't keep any accurate records
of what he discovered.
- [Fishburne] For generations,
Fortune hunters have tried
to decipher Jacob Waltz's clues
and uncover the Lost Dutchman's mine.
People have searched all over the Superstition Mountains,
but the fortune remains elusive.
One man thinks he has a good idea why.
- John D. Wilburn was a miner
and geologist and an author.
In 1984, Wilburn writes a book
and his intervention into
the Lost Dutchman mines saga
is to suggest that we go
right back to the beginning, back to 1892,
and the suggestion is that Julia Thomas' clues
were either intentionally or mistakenly wrong.
That they have effectively misled generations
as to the true location of the lost Dutchman mine.
- Wilburn has studied rocks and their formations
and he really does not believe
that the formations in this particular area
would produce that much gold.
- Volcanic activity,
like the events that created Weaver's Needle,
a volcanic plug doesn't always lead to gold.
It's a sometimes, not an always thing.
- And we have to keep in mind
that Jacob Waltz didn't say
that the gold mine was at Weaver's Needle.
It was in the shadow of the needle.
- Anybody who's been to elementary school
knows that the Earth travels around the sun
and when it does, shadows change.
So really, how good is the direction of a shadow
gonna be for a clue?
You do the math.
- To Wilburn, the logical place to look
is somewhere there is actual gold,
and there are a number of these places
close to the Superstition Mountains.
There were boom towns that arose when gold was discovered
and then vanished after the mine was played out.
- [Fishburne] Nestled at the base
of the Superstition Mountains, sits a ghost town.
- The mountain runs east to west
and there's a place that they refer to as Goldfield
on the very western part of the mountain.
It's like a little, tiny ghost town now.
It's a tourist attraction.
That's the closest mine that they have in that area.
- [Fishburne] It's in the late 19th century
that gold is first discovered there.
And as prospectors rush into the area,
the town of Goldfield is officially founded.
- Goldfield was a boom town.
In its heyday, there were over 4,000 people living there,
hoping to strike it rich in the gold mines.
- Right by Goldfield,
is one of the largest producing gold mines
in the Superstitions area; the Bulldog Mine.
- The story about Bulldog Mine
is that it was first discovered in 1864
as part of the big gold rush in Arizona.
And then perhaps Waltz worked it starting in 1868,
for about 20 years.
- Why does Wilburn think that the Bulldog mine makes sense?
Well, for starters,
we know not only was there gold there,
but there was a lot of gold.
- The Bulldog mine was in an area
of a lot of producing mines.
Over a million dollars in gold was taken out of there,
and there was a military trail
that traveled through the area
which is one of Jacob Waltz's clues.
- Finally, in 1897,
the gold in Goldfield is played out.
The town disappears,
but the legends of the Lost Dutchman mine remain
and even grow stronger.
- [Fishburne] Some of the evidence supports
Bulldog mine as the possible location
of Jacob Waltz's mine.
But once more, we may never know for sure.
- So in 2003, when some landscaping was being done
by the Bulldog mine,
it collapsed and it was filled in.
So was the Bulldog mine the Lost Dutchman mine?
We may never know.
- But even today, when it rains heavy,
you can find gold in the washes
around Goldfield and the Bulldog mine.
- Even now, the lure of gold
still draws tourists to the area around Goldfield
as well as to the Superstition Mountains themselves.
While digging is prohibited
and many explorers still live in fear
that this area is cursed,
treasure hunters can still be spotted today,
searching for gold with metal detectors.
Is there a billion dollar gold mine lurking underfoot
somewhere in the shadow of Weaver's Needle?
We can only dream.
I'm Lawrence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching "History's Greatest Mysteries."