Legends of the Lost

A bedraggled stranger stumbled to the door of a Quincy, Illinois, boardinghouse in late 1904, very ill and in need of care. Landlady Madora Chamberlain responded to his knock, took him in, and attempted to nurse him back to health. With this simple act of kindness, her life was changed radically. For Madora Chamberlain was about to embark on a mind-boggling, frustrating adventure: the search for a treasure that would occupy the next 23 years of her life.

The stranger was De Estine Shepherd, a Spaniard, who supposedly had located an ancient Aztec mine near Tucson and grown rich with gold. Madora's nursing efforts, it turned out, were to no avail. The man was dying, and he knew it. The only recourse was to get him into a hospital.

Later, as she sat next to Shepherd's hospital bed, watching life fade, she half listened to his tale of a treasure trove. In the late 1880s, his story went, Shepherd heard rumors about several Aztec mines in southern Arizona, which, he said, had been worked by early-day Spaniards. But no trace of the fabled wealth was ever found by the 19th-century newcomers to the territory.

Shepherd was one of those argonauts, but he was smart; he wasn't about to go traipsing through dangerous, empty desert without a clue as to what he was looking for. Instead, he went to Mexico City to search the archives for leads while learning what he could about the mining tools Aztecs may have used.

Day after day, the probing led him through decaying documents and crusty maps. But one morning, his determination paid off. He found what he was looking for. Now he had an idea albeit a rough one of where the ancient mines were located.

Newspaper accounts report Shepherd's occasional visits to Tucson with bags of gold tied to his belt. The stories also recounted how he plotted circuitous routes to his bonanza to avoid being followed.

By all accounts, it was not long after his strike that he fell seriously ill. Frustrated and depressed, he made preparations to travel to Quincy, where he believed a brother lived. He hid the map to his gold and left Tucson forever, hoping to turn the treasure over to his kinsman.

Shepherd, now on his last legs, unfortunately found no trace of his brother in Quincy and had only strength enough left to make it across town to the Chamberlain boardinghouse, where he fell into Madora's arms.

At the hospital in his last hours, Shepherd told Madora about the mine and the cache nearby where he had hidden his gold.

DASHED HOPES HAUNT SEARCHERS OF SHEPHERD'S AZTEC TREASURE

Then he asked her to marry him, so she could claim his wealth. Madora granted his request. Then he confided to her what she needed to do to find the secreted hoard.

Go to Tucson, he directed, to a boardinghouse where he had stayed briefly. There she was to go into the attic where he had stored a trunk. Inside, he said, was a map to the mine and the hidden gold. Then he died.

Soon after the burial, Madora now convinced that there actually was a treasure somewhere in the wilds of Arizona Territory and her lawyer made the long trip to Tucson. They went to the boardinghouse as Shepherd had directed. But the people to whom he had entrusted his valuables had moved to New Mexico, leaving behind only a short cryptic letter explaining that they had forwarded the trunk to Shepherd inexplicably not in Quincy, but in Omaha, Nebraska! The two searchers at first were at odds about what to do: go in search of the trunk or stay on in Tucson and take a stab at uncovering the lost treasure. At last they decided on the latter, since they were so close to the site. They spent most of Madora's money in a long, hot, and, ultimately, futile search, combing the desert around the Guijas range.

After four months, with just enough cash to get back to Quincy, they called it quits.

Not long after her return home, Madora married a man named Joseph Kelley, who ultimately would rekindle the desire to locate the treasure.

Upon Kelley's insistence, they eventually sold the boardinghouse and moved to Omaha where they poked through warehouses and read shipping records trying to find the lost trunk that held the key to the secret hoard of Aztec gold. It proved to be a fruitless effort. The trunk seemingly had disappeared. Exhausted and discouraged, the couple gave up.

This story of lost treasure might well have ended there had it not been for another strange occurrence: in 1922, one Frank Brubaker of Omaha happened upon an unclaimedbaggage sale where he purchased a tattered and locked trunk inside which he found some old papers, a wrinkled and smeared map that didn't make much sense, and several clumps of what appeared to be plain dirt. Curious, he had the clumps assayed at the American Smelting and Refining Company. They were nearly pure gold.

When the company officials insisted that the true owner of the gold had to be sought, Brubaker agreed and placed a small advertisement on the back pages of the WorldHerald newspaper, describing the trunk and its contents.

By sheer luck, Joseph Kelley spotted the notice and rushed to claim the gold in his wife's name. He also learned the whereabouts of the trunk's purchaser and confronted him. The story goes that Brubaker responded to questions about the map saying it had been mistakenly burned along with other "trash" he'd found in the chest. But that later proved to be a lie.

Late in 1922, Madora and Joseph Kelley returned to Tucson, this time with a map they had somehow extracted from Brubaker. But after four years, the couple again failed to find any trace of the treasure. In 1927 they once more gave up and returned to Omaha where soon after Madora died, almost penniless.

The story picks up again in 1929, when another prospector swept into Tucson with a story of a lost Aztec mine.

E.J. Frellinger let it be known that he had spent months in Mexico poring over old records, which eventually led him to information about a mine in southern Arizona. Once on the ground, he presumed was near the site, he began his search. Just as Shepherd had done, Frellinger, too, found evidence of Aztec tools and weapons.

In an interview with an Arizona Daily Star reporter in January, 1929, Frellinger remarked that "after tracing all court records carefully, no one had ever located or recorded a mine" in the area.

But what he didn't know at the time was that De Estine Shepherd had been there before him.

Through various frontier friends and contacts, Frellinger learned about the Kelleys and their bad luck and decided to contact them. Joseph Kelley, by then an old man in poor health, talked to Frellinger and agreed to a 50-50 split of the still-to-be-found wealth. All Kelley had to do was turn over the map and reveal every step of his past search. Again, the old man agreed. He'd come to Tucson and deliver the map.

Frellinger, meantime, gathered financial support and formed the Aztec Mining and Exploration Company. Within days, mining machinery was delivered to the site Frellinger had located earlier, and with a team of hired miners, he found the mine Shepherd had worked. But an assay showed only a small amount of gold was contained in the ore.

Where was the bonanza? It was obvious much material had been removed from the site. What happened to it? Now his only hope was that Kelley's map would lead him to the answer.

So the wait for Kelley began.

But fate entered the game again. In early July, 1929, Joseph Kelley died, without recording any information concerning the lost mine. And the map was never found.

Shortly thereafter, Frellinger, too, gave up the search for the mystical hoard of gold, which, he felt certain, was still out there waiting to be discovered, somewhere in the desert south of the Las Guijas Mountains.