? Lost Dutchman Mine

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j.smith
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Joined: Wed Apr 01, 2009 10:14 pm

? Lost Dutchman Mine

Post by j.smith »

I had posted this 2009.

The Lost Dutchman Mine

My story of how I found, what I believe to be the Lost Dutchman mine.
I’m not sure of the date, but my last hiking trek through the Superstitions was about thirty five years ago.(now about forty years)
It was some time before then that a friend (Charley Blackman) and I took regular hiking trips through the Superstition mountains, usually one or two weekends a month.
My friend Charley had been hiking the Superstition mountains for many years before I had met him and he had met and befriended an old prospector named Charley. Apparently this Charley (and his donkey) spent most of his life prospecting in the Superstitions but did not live there, which I must say I met a lot of very interesting men who were living in caves and mining gold. They all carried guns and were very suspicious of strangers, but some were friendly and shared conversation and coffee with us.
Anyway back to my story.
My friend Charley had told me that his friend Charley was half Apache and he had married an Apache woman in his younger days. This Apache woman had in her possession a buckskin map to a Spanish mine, this was supposedly a small piece of a larger Indian map.
Charley Blackman had inherited the map from the old prospectors personal affects after his death, as he apparently had no family.
The map as I remember it didn’t have any known landmarks on it except for a flat butte.
Towards the center was a drawing of the left side of a skull lying on its back side, from the eye of the skull a scroll line encircled the eye to the right and then to the throat, at the base of the throat were many crosses, on the side of the skull to the right of the eye, written perpendicular was the word MINA.
Further left of the skull in a canyon and below the cliff of the flat butte was a dark spot, below the spot was written Geronimo cueva.
On a spring day, I think about 1973, Charley and I walked in to the park from the west side parking lot. Normally we walked east a distance before going north or south. This particular day we decided to go SSE. We had walked several hours before coming upon a deep valley, about half way down the valley was a small mountain about 300 feet high and about 900 feet long, resembling a butte but not having a flat top it also looked like a hour.
As we approached the base of the mountain I thought it looked like a horse’s head with the ears cocked back and the nose of the horse pointed to the left.
Not giving it any more thought, we walked through the bottom of the valley SE and climbed to the next mountain peak out of the valley. It was a hard climb so we stopped towards the top to rest. From where we were sitting we decided to use our field glasses to scan that valley, at almost the same instant Charley and I looked at the mountain that I thought looked like a horses head but from the side that we were now that mountain resembled a skull, but in reverse. It was a right side of a skull lying on its back side.
That weekend had gotten late and we took an easier route out of the park.
The very next weekend we went back to that valley and this is what we found.
There was a stone path leading from the side that looked like a skull around the throat and up to where the eye would have been on the other side, unfortunately someone had filed a claim six months before on that site after blasting the face of the cliff down into the large mine shaft.
Because not knowing if the burial grounds at the base of the skull was Indian or Spanish I filed the site with the Bureau of Land Management Parks Department. It’s called the Smith site.
I still have all my old maps.
The reason I am writing this is I’m sure that there are many untold stories on this subject. I am growing old and live in Washington and would like to give my story to anyone that finds it of interest.
Joe Ribaudo
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Joined: Tue Sep 17, 2002 10:36 pm

Re: ? Lost Dutchman Mine

Post by Joe Ribaudo »

j.smith,

Welcome to the LDM Forum.

That is a wonderful story. Thank you for sharing it with us. If you could post any pictures or documents of your claim, I'm sure there would be many here who would be interested.

Thank you again,

Joe Ribaudo
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