Lost Loot of Skeleton Canyon

EGENDS OF THE THE LOST LOOT FROM THE SKELETON CANYON MASSACRE

TEXT BY JAMES BOYER ILLUSTRATIONS BY KATERI WEISS After more than a century, hunters of lost treasure may be closing in on the whereabouts of the legendary Monterrey, Mexico, loot the multimillion-dollar legacy of the Skeleton Canyon massacre said to include a cigar box full of diamonds, dozens of gold bars, several gold figurines, and bucket loads of gold and silver coins.

It all began back in the summer of 1881 in Galeyville, a small town on the eastern edge of the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona. Galeyville owed its existence to the nearby Texas Mine but was known mostly for being a wild and lawless place where Curly Bill Brocius and Johnny Ringo operated cattle-rustling rings.

Legend has it that one of Curly Bill's henchmen, Jim Hughes, learned that some Mexican bandits had robbed both a cathedral in Monterrey and the Chihuahua mint and would soon be smuggling their booty through a tortuous canyon along the Arizona-New Mexico border.

Curly Bill happened to be perpetrating crimes elsewhere at the time, nobody knew exactly where, so Hughes recruited seven cohorts to help him intercept the Mexicans and relieve them of their ill-gotten treasure.

The Galeyville gang, which included Zwing Hunt, a lanky mule skinner, and a young red-faced desperado named Billy Grounds, made the two-day ride to what would soon be known as Skeleton Canyon. They split into two groups, one on either side of the narrow defile, and waited with their rifles atop the precipitous cliffs for the smugglers' train to come through.

The banditos never had a chance. From their hidden perches, the Galeyville boys picked them off like socks on a clothes-line, the crackle of gunfire sending the Mexicans' pack mules stampeding. There were 30 of them, as the story goes, each weighted down with gold and silver. Down the canyon they bolted, stumbling and shucking the packs. The sound of countless coins hitting rocks was drowned out by the roar of gunfire as Hughes and his men shot down the runaway mules.

In later years, human skulls found in the canyon would be used as soap basins at nearby ranches, but, for the time being, the remains of the 15 Mexicans and their pack animals were left to the vultures.

The loot, once gathered, was much more than could be carried to Galeyville on horseback, so the boys filled their pockets and buried the rest, planning to return with a string of mules.

Back in Galeyville, the usual celebrating ensued several days of drunken carousing and raucousness, brawls and gunfights and while this was going on Jim Hughes plotted with Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds to double-cross the rest of the gang (Curly Bill was still out of town on business).

Grounds and Hunt hired a Mexican teamster, and with a horse-drawn wagon they returned to the site of the treasure. Overnight they hauled the loot to another canyon one of hundreds in the area and had the teamster dig a deep hole to rebury it. In exchange for his help, he had been promised a small share of the treasure, but, instead, he received several slugs of lead, then was buried in the hole he'd dug. The wagon was burned.

Instead of returning to Galeyville, as they had agreed with Hughes to do, Hunt and Grounds perpetrated another doublecross, taking refuge in a hidden cave near the treasure. Their plan was to hide out through the winter then haul the treasure to Arkansas in the spring. They paid a man from a ranch near Tombstone $700 to have a heavy-duty wagon and a team of sturdy horses ready for them in March.

What happened next depends on which story you believe, but one holds that when Grounds and Hunt arrived at the Chandler Milk Ranch on March 29, 1882, they were greeted by some of the gang they'd betrayed. Seven hundred dollars was a lot of money in those times, and when people heard that someone with a bag of gold coins was looking for a stout wagon and horses, they knew where the money had come from.

Grounds took a round of buckshot square in the face and died the same day; Hunt got it through the shoulder and was hospitalized in Tombstone. As far as anyone one knew, Hunt was the only living person who knew the treasure's location, but, before anyone got the chance to interrogate him, he disappeared. Some said he escaped with the help of his brother, only to be killed weeks later by the Apache; others said he made it home to San Antonio, Texas, before dying of gangrene.

In any event, he managed to draw a map and give a description of the area to his uncle before he died.

The directions said the treasure was buried near the foot of Davis Mountain, which rose from a winding canyon full of cottonwoods. The west wall of the canyon had trees and bushes; the east was bare and rocky. Near the canyon were two springs, Silver and Gum, about a mile apart. Twenty paces from an obelisk rock with two crosses chiseled into it lay the treasure.

It sounded simple enough, but the clues to finding the fortune, like the legend itself, were confusing and incomplete. To begin with, nobody knew where Davis Mountain was: Hunt and Grounds had named it themselves when they buried a friend with that name at its base the year before.

Current maps of the Chiricahuas include a Davis Mountain north of Galeyville (now a ghost town); but that mountain was named long after the treasure was buried, and isn't even in the right range.

Hunt's uncle, along with countless others, including relatives of Grounds, spent years combing the area of Skeleton Canyon but found nothing more than a few coins that had been scattered by the mules, and a lot of bleaching bones.

The story might have ended there, living on only as another faded and doubtful legend of lost gold, but, years later, it gained new life. In the 1950s, a geologist, pilot, and prospector named F.C. Hamill found a uranium deposit, and, fearing a lawsuit with the owners of the land, hired a Tucson lawyer named William Dees.

The two became friends over the years, according to Hamill, and Dees frequently told him that he had a map and information about a priceless treasure a treasure no one had found because they lacked the information that only he had. Dees kept saying that someday he would take off a couple of weeks' work and the two of them would go and look for the treasure in Hamill's plane. Hamill didn't put much credence in tales of lost gold but agreed to such a trip to humor his friend.

Twenty-five years went by, however, and Dees never got around to taking the time off. Then, in 1978, he suffered two heart attacks. Determined to pass on the treasure information to his old friend, he called Hamill to his house. He said he would never live to find the gold, but he had five letters written by Billy Grounds to his sister in 1881 and a map that Grounds had drawn as well. Dees wouldn't part with these precious things, Hamill says, but did let him copy the map and take notes of the information in the letters.

Grounds had managed to send his sister 19 letters while he hid in the cave, via a postal carrier who rode through the region every couple of weeks on his way to Shakespeare, New Mexico. Fearing they might be intercepted, Grounds put different details in each letter, so no single one could reveal the treasure's location. The letters spoke of a rock the size and shape of a miner's shack at the base of the canyon, about an abrupt narrowing in the canyon where they corralled their horses, and about a hidden cave that had cracks above it forming a cross and a sideways T. They spoke of smoke rising from a smelter in a direction that today is known only by Hamill. The treasure, according to the letters, was marked by a flat rock with a cross chiseled into its underside.

WHAT HE NEEDS, HE SAYS, IS A METAL DETECTOR THAT CAN SENSE GOLD THROUGH 40 FEET OF STONE AND DIRT, AND THEN HE CAN PINPOINT THE TREASURE AND TUNNEL DOWN TO IT.

Hamill was intrigued by the letters and began researching the history of the legend but for several years made no attempt to find the treasure. He was almost 70, still suffering from a plane crash that left him nearly paralyzed and almost broke (not to mention seven failed marriages).

Finally, in 1986, he ran a classified advertisement in the Arizona Daily Star, a Tucson newspaper, offering a percentage of the treasure to parties willing to invest in the search.

Along with two calls that led to a collaboration, his house and car were ransacked. An outraged woman called him from Phoenix and said she was the granddaughter of Billy Ground's sister. She said (according to Hamill) that the letters had been stolen from her grandmother, that they rightfully belonged to her, and if he did not return them she would have him run over by a truck.

Undaunted, Hamill continued his quest. He flew over the search area numerous times, eventually finding the remains of a small smelter. This was the crucial clue because before this he only knew that Grounds had traveled 12 hours by wagon from somewhere in Skeleton Canyon; it could have been anywhere within a hundred square miles.

He went back to his maps and made calculations, finally returning to the area in a Jeep. After several trips and a lot of footwork, he discovered the remains of a burned wagon near a side canyon. Up the canyon, he found a big boulder-shaped like a miner's shack. Beyond that, the canyon narrowed. He knew he was close, but, after searching for hours, he still hadn't found the cave.

But he did notice that there were big slabs of limestone strewn about the lower reaches of the canyon, though there were no limestone cliffs until much farther up. He remembered reading about the Great Sonoran Earthquake of 1887, of how it shook southern Arizona, knocking canned goods and jars of preserves from shelves of Tombstone stores and sending shock waves for hundreds of miles.

Hamill found the cave on his next trip and has the photographs to prove it. Trouble is, he says, the Monterrey loot is now buried under several hundred tons of limestone rubble that fell from Davis Mountain during the quake. What he needs, he says, is a metal detector that can sense gold through 40 feet of stone and dirt, and then he can pinpoint the treasure and tunnel down to it.

No such device exists.

Forty feet may seem an impossible distance to some; to others, like Hamill, it's just enough to keep the dream alive.