The Spanish gold of the Wichitas

A century of searching; no documented Spanish workings and no supporting ore

The Wichita Mountains rise abruptly from the rolling grasslands of southwestern Oklahoma, a thirty-mile chain of red granite domes and dark gabbro hills topped by Mount Scott at 2,464 feet. They are very old. The granite, rhyolite and gabbro formed in a failed continental rift more than 500 million years ago, were thrust up between 330 and 290 million years ago to heights greater than today's, and were then worn down and buried under river sediment in the Permian, so that the rounded peaks and tors are fossil landforms only recently dug out again by erosion. It is one of only two places in Oklahoma where igneous rock stands at the surface.

Rock like that invites dreams of gold, and the Spanish brought the first. Coronado's wandering search for Quivira may have crossed what is now Oklahoma in the 16th century, and by the 17th century other Spaniards had found the Wichitas and searched them for gold and silver. There is no proof they found any in quantity, the historian David Dary wrote, but they left behind tales of lost Spanish mines and buried treasure in the Wichitas and around Quartz Mountain to the west. Outlaws added their own, among them a Kansas bank gang whose loot is said to lie buried a few miles from Geronimo.

The legends found new life when the land opened. While the mountains lay within Indian reservations and were closed to outsiders, they were rumoured to hold rich gold, and when settlement opened in August 1901 one of the last gold rushes in the United States began, with some twenty thousand miners pouring in. Towns were laid out for bonanzas that never came, and some unscrupulous assayers found gold in every sample they were handed. By 1904 it was over. The Meers mining district, the busiest of them, once claimed 500 residents and had four by the end of the 20th century, and the rush left ghost towns such as Wildman and rusting equipment scattered across the range. The real wealth of the Wichitas proved to be granite, limestone and gravel.

Today much of the range is the 59,020-acre Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, where bison, elk, deer and a herd of longhorn cattle roam, with hiking trails, rock climbing, backcountry camping in the Charon Gardens Wilderness and a scenic road to the summit of Mount Scott. Fort Sill, home of the Army's field artillery school, takes up much of the southeast end.