Legends of the Lost

Legends of the Lost_

A 13-year-old girl WRECKED MINDS, kidnapped by Apache raiders. DEATH, KIDNAPPING Her rescuers misHELP CONCEAL sing. A bonanza in gold gained, then THE BELLE MCKEEVER lost as withering heat, the uniformity of the desert, and the passage of time erased all memory of the way back. Tracks obliterated by wind. Lives lost; minds, too. The fabulous Belle McKeever Lode began to slip away even before it had been found, lost in the aimless wanderings of men trapped in an uncharted wilderness.

Only one critical fact about the Belle McKeever Lode is not in doubt: in the summer of 1869, three soldiers, frantic to escape the desert north and west of the big bend of the Gila River, abandoned 50 pounds of solid gold in that infernal country.

That was not their only misadventure. Along the way, the three also forgot Belle McKeever whom they had set out to rescue. They lost all their horses, and, finally, one man died.

The two who survived were found separately, yet each told essentially the same story. Near a spring to the north of present-day Yuma County, they had discovered two seams of gold projecting from a ledge. One vein was 16 feet wide and contained gold soft enough to work with cups, knives, and, in some places, bare hands. They named the lode “The Belle McKeever” to honor the girl they could not find.

Historian James McClintock called the Belle McKeever the best authenticated lost lode in Arizona because the soldiers were credible and because eventually the carcass of one of their horses was found with 50 pounds of pure gold lashed to the saddle. The gold assayed out to an incredible $72,000 a ton! According to McClintock, it was simply the “richest gold ledge ever discovered in North America.” Although several versions of the Belle McKeever story are told, all agree on basic details. In 1869 near modern-day Gila Bend, a band of Apache attacked the family of Abner McKeever and stole their daughter, Belle. The remaining McKeevers sent to Fort Yuma (or perhaps an outpost of Fort McDowell at Maricopa Wells) for help, and a squad of soldiers arrived in good time. They tracked the Apache toward the Harquahala Mountains where the Indians split up; the main body fled north and east, but a few rode off toward the Harcuvar and Buckskin mountains.

The squad's commander sent three men, a sergeant named Crossthwaite and Pvts. Joseph Wormley and Eugene Flannigan, after the smaller band. None of the soldiers knew the country ahead, but Crossthwaite, Wormley, and Flannigan leapt to the chase immediately; the longer they waited, the colder the girl's trail would grow. Still, in retrospect, they would have been wise to wait, for their horses had not recovered from the long march out of the fort, and the men carried scant provisions, especially water.

In fact they were so ill-prepared and unrested that by noon of the second day, two of their horses had died of exhaustion aggravated by thirst. On the third day, Wormley went mad, unhinged by fatigue and by the great furnace surrounding him. When more horses died that afternoon, the men drank their blood. They also cut strips of flesh from the horses' flanks and ate them raw, a mistake that compounded their difficulties because soon they were struck by dysentery.

At midnight their remaining mare led them to a muddy spring now believed to be in the Granite Wash Mountains, a spur of the Harcuvars. The soldiers themselves had only vague notions of their whereabouts, but at least they had water for the moment. Lying by the spring throughout the night, they alternated dozing with sucking water from handfuls of wet sand.

At dawn Flannigan knelt to drink again, but this time he scooped up more than water and mud. Instead of rude gravel, he held gold nuggets as big as buckshot - a few were bigger than blackberries in his cupped hands.

Like most soldiers of his day, Flannigan had learned the rudiments of prospecting. Thus he knew to look for a source for the nuggets and soon found an outcrop containing two veins of gold, one as wide as a wagon road.

Together Crossthwaite and Flannigan built a claim marker, a stone cairn tall as a man. Although their plight was desperate, they could not lose by staking a claim. After all, the two men grimly reasoned, they might survive against all odds. In the same spirit, they loaded the mare with 50 pounds of gold, more than enough to finance an expedition back, supposing they could make it out.

Although they had water at the spring, Crossthwaite and Flannigan figured it was a trap. They would die of hunger there long before anyone at the fort guessed they were lost. By leaving they might reach help. Resigned to their fate, they filled their canteens for the last time. Wormley, on the other hand, was so distraught at the thought of leaving that the others had to tie him across the little mare's back.

By Larry Winter

They started south in the direction of the Gila since they judged it closer than the Colorado. The march did not go well. The mare, staggering under the weight of the gold and the raving lunatic on its back, dropped dead in the afternoon. Flannigan did what he could to nurse Wormley, and the madman improved a bit.

But Flannigan was like the Little Dutch Boy at the dike: another leak sprang for every one he plugged. Next Crossthwaite slipped slipped into dementia. Tortured by the sun, he drenched himself with the water remaining in his canteen. For the rest of that day, Flannigan wearily led his little caravan of bedlamites across the open plain. Finally they found shade under a tree, and they rested awhile. At dusk they started south once more, but soon collapsed again.

Flannigan was alone when he awoke next morning. A flight of vultures circling on the horizon led him to Crossthwaite's body, but he could do no more for his dead comrade than momentarily shoo the carrion birds away. He was too weak to scratch a grave out of the desert floor. In the meantime, Wormley staggered on alone with no deeper idea in his mind than to go south. A band of friendly Indians found him within a few miles of the Gila. They alerted the fort, and once again a rescue party rode out into the desert.

The relief party found Flannigan, hungry but other-wise well, soaking his hurts by the banks of the Gila. Half the party escorted him back to the fort while the others went to retrieve Crossthwaite's remains. In the dead man's pocket, they found a sketch, drawn with a matchstick, of the spring, the outcrop, and the gold, but of course it lacked both distances and directions.

The party continued until they found the dead mare, still saddled with its load of gold. They tried to backtrack the horse's trail, but a combination of hard ground and hot winds had effectively erased it. And they had insufficient water to start a general survey.

No one has come closer to the Belle McKeever Lode than that patrol in 1869. For that matter, no one has come closer to Belle McKeever, herself; she, too, was lost forever when Flannigan, Wormley, and Crossthwaite went astray. Since 1869 many more have sought the gold than ever looked for the girl. Wormley led several attempts to regain the site, but he had come out of the ordeal suffering from amnesia, and he had no success.

Amnesia would have been a blessing to Flannigan who remembered the horror of the desert too well. Although a fortune was at stake, he could not force himself to look for it. The sight of buzzards picking over Crossthwaite haunted him. Nor could he forget the terrible thirst he had slaked with the blood of their dead horses.

Indeed, Flannigan could not stand to be more than a short walk from water for the rest of his life. In the end, he was marooned in central Phoenix, unable to leave the town by train, reluctant even to approach its outskirts and look west in the direction of solid gold he had once held in his hands.