The Lost Dutchman mine

The definitive American lost mine legend

The Superstition Mountains rise out of the Sonoran Desert about 40 miles east of Phoenix, and somewhere in them, the story goes, lies the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine, perhaps the most famous lost mine in American history. One Arizona place-name expert, Byrd Granger, found the tale printed or cited at least six times as often as Captain Kidd's treasure, and counted 62 versions of it by 1977.

The Dutchman was real. Jacob Waltz was a German immigrant, "Dutch" being the old American word for Deutsch, who first turns up in an 1848 affidavit giving his age as about 38. He moved to Arizona in the 1860s and prospected and mined without much obvious luck, and by 1870 he was farming 160 acres near Phoenix. In the legend he found a fabulous mine in the Superstitions, often after helping a member of the Peralta family whose miners the Apaches were said to have massacred, and came down from the mountains from time to time with rich ore that no one could trace. The great Phoenix flood of 1891 wrecked his farm, he fell ill, and on 25 October 1891 he died in the care of an acquaintance named Julia Thomas. Most accounts agree he told her where the gold was. By September 1892 the Arizona Enterprise was reporting her search for it; when that failed, she and her partners sold maps for $7 apiece.

It might have stayed one of hundreds of Western lost-mine yarns but for Adolph Ruth. An amateur treasure hunter with metal pins in his leg from an earlier hunt for California's Lost Pegleg mine, he went into the Superstitions in June 1931 carrying old maps his son had been given, said to show a Peralta mine. He vanished. About six months later his skull turned up with two holes identified as bullet holes, the story went national, and the rush began. By one estimate 9,000 people a year have tried to find the mine, among them a former Arizona attorney general, and some have died looking.

The doubters have strong points. The Peralta mine in the Superstitions appears to be a 20th-century invention, the Superstitions are igneous rock that, by one writer's reading of the geology, hold no gold, and one theory has Waltz fencing gold stolen from the Vulture mine. The legend lives on at Lost Dutchman State Park, dedicated in 1977 at the foot of the mountains, where trails such as the Siphon Draw climb into the Superstition Wilderness toward the Flatiron.