Legends of the Lost

The desert west of Wickenburg is a silent, seemingly life-less vista of cacti, paloverdes, chaparral, and mesquite in a setting fringed in the distance by low-lying hills. The land is level save for the shallow arroyos that drain the desert during its infrequent rainy periods. At almost all times, given Arizona's vaunted climate, the sun shines brightly over it all.

Into this autumnally warm emptiness, on November 5, 1871, rumbled a stagecoach bound westward from Wickenburg to La Paz, the boomtown on the Colorado River. It bore six men, a woman, and the driver.

The men were Frederick W. Loring, a reporter for the New York Tribune; William Kruger, chief clerk to the assistant Army quartermaster at Fort Whipple, near Prescott; C.S. Adams, a San Francisco businessman; Fred W. Shoholm, a Prescott jeweler; and W.D. Salmon and P.M. Hamel, civilian employees of the Army. The woman was Mollie Sheppard, a Prescott resident variously described in historical accounts as a "notorious courtesan" and "pretty as a spotted pony." The driver was John Lentz, known as "Dutch John."

A short distance from Wickenburg, at the bottom of a large arroyo, the ambush was sprung. Mounted Apache - or people decked out as Apache (the issue was to become crucial in the days ahead) - attacked the stagecoach, gal-loping toward it from both sides, guns ablaze. Five of the seven people aboard were killed. The two survivors: Mollie Sheppard and William Kruger. Both sustained gunshot wounds, Mollie's, apparently, the more serious.

Kruger, a short, squatty man, had with him - or so it is said - a metal strongbox containing $100,000 in Army pay-roll money destined for California. Mollie Sheppard is said to have been pretty well loaded, too. The story has it that she had just sold her Prescott bordello for $40,000 and was carrying the money with her.

Mollie and Willie Kruger were good friends. And perhaps something even more: a shovel mounted on the stagecoach was later found near the scene of the attack. And, of course, a shovel is quite handy for burying something you want to hide until you can come back some-day and dig it up.

The well-publicized crime caused a huge stir in the East. It did so not only because, supposedly, it was yet another in a succession of Apache massacres, but because one of the victims was well-known along the Atlantic seaboard. That would be the newspaperman, Frederick Loring, a Harvard graduate and a published author.

FATE UPSETS HOPES FOR LOOT AT THE WICKENBURG STAGE MASSACRE

In the words of one editor, it was time to treat the Apache "with less Bible and more sword."

And yet, did the Apache really do it? Apache rarely scalped, but one of the victims had been scalped. Apache usually looted, but there were valuables left behind at the scene of the massacre. Round-toed Indian moccasin tracks were found leaving the scene in the direction of the Date Creek reservation where Apache lived, 20-odd miles north-west of Wickenburg. But non-Indians could wear moc-casins, too, if they wanted to pretend to be Indians. Might the outrage, therefore, have been committed by other than Indians, i.e., Mexican bandits? Mexicans riding up from Sonora had been doing all manner of dastardly deeds during that period.

Capt. Charles Meinhold, an Army investigator, found a prostitute who had worked for Mollie in Prescott. She said Kruger had met with some Mexicans at Mollie's bordello a couple of days before the stage began its star-crossed journey. And C.B. Genung, a respected rancher in Peeples Valley, south of Prescott, said he was told that a woman in Wickenburg learned from a Mexican named Parenta that a band of Mexicans planned to rob the stage.

In Phoenix lawmen arrested a Mexican named Ramon Cordova, and the local paper said he was one of the stage-coach robbers. A mob formed forthwith, broke into the jail, and lynched Cordova.

And one more theory: that Mollie and Kruger did the deed, then hid the money, and concocted the story of an Indian ambush.

But the Apache theory was by far the most widely held. And it seemed to have some substantiation. An Indian boy said he was summoned by some Apache to tell them the denominations of some currency they'd acquired. And an Apache chief testified that the killers left the Date Creek reservation and traveled to the Colorado River Indian Reservation where they boasted of what they'd done and flashed their ill-gotten greenbacks.

The commander of Army forces in Arizona at the time was Gen. George Crook. He was under heavy pressure from Washington to get the Apache under control, and he had no doubt that it was Apache who did the dirty work west of Wickenburg. So he enticed suspect Indians to Camp Date Creek, an Army post 25 miles northwest of Wick-enburg, near the reservation.

As he and his men, however, were about to make the arrests, the Indians became suspicious, and a fight broke out on the parade ground. One Apache leveled his carbine at General Crook, but a junior officer knocked the general aside and saved his life. Most of the Indians escaped and fled into the hills.

arrests, the Indians became suspicious, and a fight broke out on the parade ground. One Apache leveled his carbine at General Crook, but a junior officer knocked the general aside and saved his life. Most of the Indians escaped and fled into the hills.

Crook gave chase and killed about 40 of them. Then he announced that the perpetrators of the Wickenburg massacre were among the casualties, and the riddle was now solved. It was a conclusion that might have endeared General Crook to the brass in Washington and the Eastern press, but it is subject to some doubt in light of all the conflicting evidence.

William Kruger was located by reporters at a San Francisco hotel. Asked about Mollie, he shed a tear or two and said she'd died of her wounds in Los Angeles. Reporters there could find no record of her death, but when they went back to ask Kruger more questions, he was not to be found.

In December, 1872, a gunfight broke out in a Phoenix bar. A short, squatty man was killed by a stray bullet. He was identified as William Kruger. At a stable near his hotel were found a horse, a pack mule, and miscellaneous gear that might be useful in a hunt for treasure in the desert.

Three-quarters of a century later, in 1948, the Wickenburg Saddle Club put up a primitive monument to mark the site of the stagecoach robbery, nine miles west of Wickenburg and four miles north of U.S. Route 60.

But is there really a stash of lost payroll and lost bordello money out there? Two history buffs, Bill Smith of Phoenix and Brian Sandwich of Scottsdale, think not. They say documents of the period contain no mention of the payroll.

But details like that don't faze folks looking to find free money. Peter Fletcher, a former dude-ranch manager in the Wickenburg area, is one of them, although he doesn't make a big thing out of it.

"I've been out there and hiked over those hills and kicked over rocks and looked into caves and cavities," says Fletcher. "It's intriguing like playing the lottery. A person's got one chance in a million of finding it, but still the chance is there."