Kokoweef’s river of gold

Earl Dorr’s 1930s affidavit; a documented legend of the eastern Mojave

Kokoweef Peak rises to 6,037 feet in the Ivanpah Mountains of the eastern Mojave, three miles south of Mountain Pass and about 19 miles from the Nevada line on Interstate 15. It is made of Mississippian and Pennsylvanian limestone, 340 to 300 million years old, and water working along old faults has dissolved three steep caverns inside it, Kokoweef, Crystal and Kin Sabe, a misspelling of the Spanish quién sabe, who knows. Beneath it, the legend says, runs a river of gold.

The story is Earl P. Dorr's. In a sworn affidavit notarized in Pasadena in November 1934, he said that in May 1927 he and a civil engineer had spent four days in certain caverns in San Bernardino County, descending about 2,000 feet to a canyon 3,000 feet deep with a river at the bottom that rose and fell like the tide. At low water, he swore, it left 100 to 150 feet of black sand on either bank, four to eleven feet deep and very rich in gold, and a sample assayed at more than $2,000 a yard. A second version dated December 1934 added a 27-foot stalactite hanging 1,510 feet into the dark, named the engineer as a Mr. Morton, and credited the discovery to three Peysert brothers, one of whom drowned in the river. The first version never names Kokoweef at all.

The tellings shatter from there. In most of them Dorr blasted the passage shut to keep the gold from claim jumpers, then could never find another way back in. Cavers of the National Speleological Society did find DORR smoked onto the ceiling of Crystal Cave in two places in 1948, one above a pile of rubble that may mark an old blast. Investors formed the Crystal Cave Mining Corporation in 1935 and tunnelled for a connection, and found high-grade zinc instead. Dorr died in a mining accident in 1957 with only a few hundred dollars to his name. His nephew Ray said Uncle Earl had either discovered the richest gold deposit in the United States or was the most imaginative liar in California.

The hunt has cost more than money. In 1959 two treasure hunters set an illegal charge deep in Crystal Cavern and died of the fumes; in 1963 the water-softener magnate Emmett Culligan's drill crews nearly came to a shootout with a rival leaseholder. No record has ever confirmed the river, the gold or the caverns as Dorr described them. The caves did give up treasure of another kind in the 1970s: Ice Age bones of dire wolves, camels and horses, collected for the San Bernardino County Museum.