The Mysterious Haunted Wilderness

HAUNTED WILDERNESS

Spooks, Strange Occurrences, and Stranger Deaths Enliven Forays into This Mysterious Outback We hiked to the murder scene about dusk on a chilly fall day. Too late by decades to do the dead bootlegger any favors. Whatever clues the killers left behind had long since vanished. The cabin where they found the body, deep in a canyon above Sedona, was nothing but a scatter of withered timber over a creaking frame. So of course we stepped inside, called a cheery greeting to the spirits, and began

Text by Leo W. Banks Photographs by Edward McCain

Wilson was alive

when the bear left.

He crawled to the water to drink,

Lapsed into unconsciousness,

and drowned.

Poking around. Nothing said we were unwelcome. But that changed fast. A storm roared in. Fat clouds hung so low we could practically reach up and touch them. The switch from light to darkness happened in an instant. It was as if a giant had placed a hand over the canyon's lip. Then the rain started. Photographer Edward McCain peered up from his camera with an expression I'd seen before and understood well. It was time to get out. But the darkness had obliterated the trail. The rain was drenching now, disorienting. Soon we were running, stumbling along on mud-slicked ground, praying for the next second-long burst of lightning to prove we were still on the trail, any trail. We'd been warned about this place. The land on which the bootlegger died marks the eastern end of a rugged swath of northern Arizona known for its abundance of mysteries, impossible legends, and odd happenings. It runs from Oak Creek Canyon west to Sycamore Canyon, and south into the Verde Valley. Most of it is in the Coconino National Forest. At least that's what it's called on modern maps. Early in the century, it was called by a different name: the Haunted Wilderness. We came to this territory to learn what was behind the name. To find out how it got started, dust off its origins, explain it in some manner that makes sense to the logical mind. We had no shortage of material. We must've kicked up and down a dozen lonesome trails, and every one of them brought another story, more questions. There's the one about old man Sterling, the counterfeiter who disappeared after a posse discovered government plates in his cabin at the head of Oak Creek. Or Gerard Vultee, an early aviator and pioneer in aircraft construction whose plane took an unexplained dive into East Pocket Mesa, killing him and his wife. (See Arizona Highways, June '91.) The 1938 crash, still talked about in these parts, is marked by a plaque at Vultee Arch, a 100-foot-long red rock bridge above Sterling Canyon. And from the mists of nearby Wilson Mountain arises a 109-year-old question: how could an expert bear hunter such as Richard Wilson make the mistake of wounding a bear with a light rifle, then tracking the bleeding animal alone into a box canyon? What happened next was recorded by Albert Thompson, whose family found the famed hunter's body. As Wilson followed the

Continued from page 26 blood drippings past a stand of cy-press trees, the bear lunged at him from concealment.

The startled Wilson dropped his rifle and ran, trying to grab onto one of the tree branches. The bear caught him by his hobnailed mountaineer shoes and yanked him down.

Later investigation showed that the thick tree limb Wilson grabbed had nearly been twisted off, evi-dence of how desperately the hunter fought to save his life.

His body was found a short distance away, belly down in a pool of water. Much of his face was gone, taken by a ferocious swipe of the bear's paw.

Investigators theorized that Wilson was alive when the bear left. He crawled to the water to drink, lapsed into unconsciousness, and drowned.

One way or another, the Haunted Wilderness exacts its price.

We moved west on a cold day ahead of a bitter wind. We could hear it coming long before we felt it. Like the sound of a far-off train. The mood was perfect. The map we were reading didn't disappoint either.

Even the place-names offered the flavor of intrigue: Secret Mountain, Lost Mountain, Rattlesnake Canyon, Last Chance, Maroon Mountain, Skeleton Bone, Robber's Roost.

From the first days of Arizona Territory, the Haunted Wilderness has been a kind of outlaw paradise, a wild Eden for men on the run. Posses entered at their own risk. In places the vegetation is so thick and the ter-rain so demanding that lawmen often quit the hunt in frustration. No reward was hand-some enough to brave these canyons.

In a kind of twisted reasoning that befits this land, some say that only two forces were strong enough to keep a lawman on the trail: a personal grudge or powerful whiskey.

Horse rustlers were as common as sage here years ago. Robber's Roost, east of Sycamore Pass, got its name from a gang of thieves known as the Phantom Band. During the day they lived ordinary lives, but at night they raided ranches, making off with valuable horseflesh.

The band's name derives from the out-laws' ability to slip back and forth, undetected, from their hideout to their homes, from crime to respectability.

The Phantom Band included experts said to be so clever at disguising well-known brands that they fooled even the most diligent livestock inspectors.

When frustrated posses called off their hunt, as they inevitably did, the stolen horses were driven to Colorado and Utah and sold. The leaders of the Phantom Band ultimately retired as wealthy men with little more than whispers as proof of their deeds.

In an empty forest at twilight, far from everything and glad of it, we heard sounds we couldn't explain. Quick, small noises that wouldn't merit notice if it weren't for the crazy way the light falls through the juniper trees, opening the imagination to what the eye cannot see and the hand cannot touch.

It was undoubtedly within this magical realm, in the split second of fear following the unexplained snapping of a twig, that the story of the Lost Hunter was first told more than a century ago.

He shows himself to intruders, appearing through the thickets, almost out of no-where; and he is grinning. It's a cold smirk. Then he raises his rifle and steadies it as if to fire. His supposed victim is paralyzed by fear, the anticipation of seeing the muzzle blast.

But the shot never comes, and the Lost Hunter vanishes again as quickly as the mountain lions and cougars that ramble through the draws and along the creek beds.

The Outlaw Preacher is said to walk the same trails. His resemblance to Abraham Lincoln has led to speculation that the preacher's story was born in the wake of the Civil War, although it's impossible to know.

He is a tall mournful-looking man of about 50 years, always dressed in a frock coat and stovepipe hat. His day job was robbing banks and stagecoach-es. But after a few weeks of hiding from the law, guilt would overcome him, and his only means of salving it was to travel to the nearest town to preach.

The manner in which he departed the wilderness never varied. First the preacher got drunk. Then he bel-lowed quotations from the Bible until the booze overwhelmed him, and he couldn't go on. In the morn-ing he mounted his roan horse and rode off to spread the good word of salvation.

Who could believe such wild yarns?

The only thing George Casner wanted when he came to this land from California in 1876, fleeing drought, was a patch of cool timber and some good grass for his sheep. What he got was an eternity of won-der about his considerable wealth and his unusual love for gold coins.

They say that Casner had a powerful aversion to banks, which forced him to find another repository for his money. His solu-tion was to drill deep holes in pine trees in the precise dimensions of a $20 gold piece.

His ranchland, 25 miles south of Flag-staff on what is now Casner Mountain (a designated Wilderness Area), is said to be a kind of natural vault, with many of the tallest pines still jammed with gold coins.

"Ridiculous!" I called into the phone in a voice loud enough to be heard by an 89-year-old man at the end of a long-distance connection to Clarkdale.

"Could be," he responded. "But I know'd fellows gone up that mountain with saws and set to cutting. It's gold that does it. They got gold on the brain up here."

Fact or fantasy, it doesn't matter. These legends possess power. They burrow into the brain and take hold. It's how the Haunt-ed Wilderness draws you in. Whether it lets you leave is another matter.

Sycamore Canyon, on the far west end of

the wilderness, is a rugged, nearly impenetrable gorge that may have swallowed more dreams and more men than any other spot in Arizona. Dreams of gold, of course. Men seeking the deliverance of precious metal still come to this place, sniffing after a 400-year-old fable about a lost Spanish mine. A veteran Forest Service hand told us about two old miners he befriended who scratched at a shaft in Sycamore for longer than 20 years, rears, chasing a golden shadow. Up until 10 years ago, the men were still working. The place was called Geronimo's Cave, so named because the face of the great Apache chief is said to be etched on the rock above its opening. At one point in the early 1980s, barrooms up and down the Verde Valley were alive with word that the men had hit the mother lode. Rumor had it they were hauling tons of Spanish armor out of the cave and making midnight shipments to California to conceal their discovery. An outrageous tale, campfire stuff. But maybe not. Geronimo is believed to have used Sycamore Canyon as a hideout several times prior to 1876, and the Spanish did mount expeditions through here in the late 1500s. Tantalizing evidence of their presence still exists in the form of several Maltese crosses, similar in design to those that adorned the sails of Columbus' ships, etched on a ledge along the Packard Trail. It's tempting to speculate how many treasure hunters have used those crosses as proof of the existence of a great Spanish mine and trekked into Sycamore to find it. A few years back, the two miners inexplicably abandoned their stake at Geronimo's Cave. Before leaving they dynamited the opening. It didn't stay closed for long. Now the word from Sycamore is that the cave is open again, leading to speculation that someone is back working it. (See Arizona Highways, August '93.) The fable refuses to die. I thought of a comment written about this wilderness nearly 50 years ago that applies as much today as it did then: "It belongs to God, the government, and the ghosts of yesterday."

Photographer McCain and I headed back to the bootlegger's cabin to get the picture we missed the first time. In our travels we'd uncovered no firm pedigree for the Haunted Wilderness. Perhaps there is none. Perhaps the name and the legends sprang from the nature of the land itself. The way the canyons hypnotize and confuse, the deepness of them, which makes the sun useless as a guide; the way the thick vegetation obscures trails and tortures hikers trying to find the way back. It's almost as if there is no way back, as if the trails are rolled up in your wake and tucked away somewhere. Dusk again at the cabin. This time it was windless and painfully quiet. While McCain fiddled with his camera, I spoke about the man who died there many years ago. He was very short, less than five feet tall, and he had a humped back and a funny wobbling walk, the aftereffect of a bout with frostbite that took most of his toes. He was a moonshiner, one of the hundreds to set up shop in these hills during Prohibition and afterward, and he rode a black and white pinto. "But that's just another tale, right?" McCain asked. "No, it's true," I said. "I talked to a fellow who knew him." "Why was he murdered?" "No one's sure. But there were rumors he had money stashed up here. The killers tore up the floorboards looking for it." At our feet we had ample evidence of that, planks jerked up and tossed around. McCain got his picture. The sun was disappearing, and a hard chill was on my bones. I waited until he was packing up to tell him the kicker to the story: the killers were never caught; the case is still open. "Well, that explains it," he said. "Explains what?" "What happened the last time. It was the killers' ghosts. They're still here." We got a good laugh out of that and didn't give the matter another thought as the darkness deepened to raven black and we hiked out of the Haunted Wilderness, quickly.

Tucson-based Leo W. Banks also wrote about Doc Holliday in this issue. Edward McCain, also of Tucson, says he can understand why the eerie Haunted Wilderness inspires ghost stories.