Legends of the Lost

Legends of the Lost Some Say a Buried Treasure Could Be Unearthed at Dos Cabezas by the Next Heavy Rain

The tale has been heard for more than a century now, from the sloping mountains and chilly canyons of southeastern Arizona, down to the crackling hot desert, where every hard rain brings new hope that the great treasure will finally reveal itself.

Scoff at this if you will. But one thing the doubters have never been able to explain is the endurance of the legend. It has long outlasted the town for which it is named: Dos Cabezas, now a near-ghost town with a scatter of rubble and brokendown adobe huts which whistle in the wind.

Wouldn't a patently false story eventually die of its own feebleness? Or is human nature such that any aspiration of wealth unearthed, no matter how slight, is enough to keep standing an obvious fiction?

People love money, to be sure.

But they also love a mystery. This particular one is called the Dos Cabezas Church Treasure. Like most legends, it cannot be traced to a specific year, although most accounts place these events sometime between 1850 and '70.

The Mexican government, short of money and seeking a source of revenue, decided to plunder the huge gold holdings of the Catholic Church. But the church's high standing among the Mexican people required that the theft appear to have been committed by bandits, and that the plunder be stored at some location outside the country long enough to allow passions to cool. The site chosen was Santa Fe, New Mexico. But getting the treasure there required an arduous trip by wagon train over terrain filled with ruthless robbers and hostile Indians.

Under the best of circumstances, such a trip was a risk. And those who undertook it knew that the prospect of not returning was high.

But the men were well-paid and well-armed. Some say they gathered in morning prayer before every day's travails, asking for safety and luck from the same God they'd just plundered.

After crossing the Mexican border into Arizona, the men camped for the night at Ewell Springs, just below twin-mountain peaks called Dos Cabezas, in English, “two heads.” To keep the treasure safe, every night the men unloaded the cargo and buried it near the campsite. With this task accomplished, the men passed a calm night at the springs. Then at dawn they prepared breakfast near the campfire, mumbling their customary prayers for safe passage.

The first indication that trouble was afoot came with the swoosh of two arrows that thudded into the soil around the fire. There was a brief pause, then more arrows came. Soon they were raining down on the men, and the blood-chilling whoop of Apache warriors filled the air.

A riveting 25-year-old story in Treasure magazine, written by the late Roman Malach of Mohave County, described the battle as a massacre, so sudden that the wagon train's crew had no time to react.

No one knows the number of dead, but it is certain that only one of the party managed to get away, a seven-year-old boy who crawled through the chaos to some brush, where he remained until the Apaches had taken their scalps.

In most versions the boy is unnamed, but one account refers to him as José. Whatever his last name, José kept his wits and lived. Dazed and distraught, he made his way on foot across the Willcox Playa, a 60-squaremile patch of sand, which, in prehistoric times, was covered with water.

On the other side the boy was found by a vaquero, who received an earful about the dreadful attack and the nature of the cargo the train was hauling. The friendly cowboy naturally perked up when he learned that the wagons held a tremendous number of hollow bricks filled with gold dust and nuggets stamped with the mark of the church, which owned the mines.

But that wasn't the end of it. The wagons also carried a huge gold crucifix, and a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary, arms stretched out.

Frightened by talk of what he swore never to reveal, José clammed up and there the story ended. Yet for those who would move to Dos Cabezas in the coming decades, it was just the beginning. A fertile seed had been planted from which the legend of the church treasure would sprout.

Malach quoted one old-timer Named Ken Judson, a prospector and treasure hunter who moved to Dos Cabezas in 1951 and was known as a lover of a good yarn. "The treasure would undoubtedly be worth millions if it were found," said Judson. "And it probably will be found someday."

As for little José, he made his way back home to Mexico. But thoughts of the treasure never left him. Some 45 years later, he returned to the massacre site and was seen hunting between two hills where the dry lake bed could be seen to the west.

José was unsuccessful. But his trip, coming between 1895 and 1915, served to excite the residents of the new town of Dos Cabezas and generate a fresh round of interest in the treasure.

Meanwhile the town grew in the late 1800s and into this century as the mines turned out impressive quantities of gold, silver, and zinc. At its peak, Dos Cabezas' population reached several thousand. But it declined steadily as the mines played out, and by 1926 fewer than a hundred souls remained.

Even after the community's fortunes fell, the legend of the church gold grew, usually passed on by treasure-seekers drawn to Dos Cabezas by the story and other tales in which the nearby mountains were said to be glistening with the precious metal.

Ken Judson was one of those who came to get rich. In 1971 he told the Arizona Republic that there were "veins of pure gold" in the mountains. "The country is full of it," he said.

When he wasn't panning for color, Judson was searching for the buried contents of that long-ago wagon train. He made his home in an abandoned stage-coach station, built in 1857, on the theory that the wagons must have followed the stage route up from Mexico, and the fortune had to be buried nearby.

Judson was either wrong, unlucky, or both, a combination that afflicts the legend's believers to this day. Even so, the story hasn't been forgotten. Longtime Dos Cabezas residents say they still find fortune-seekers at their doors asking about the treasure, some claiming to have maps detailing its location.

"There's been people down here who've taken great interest in that old story," said 78-year-old Helen Hurtado Foster, a member of one of Dos Cabezas' pioneer families. "But all that looking hasn't led to a thing."

Foster's brother, Tiny Hurtado, a 70-year-old rancher, remembers his father recounting the treasure story "with a wink of his eye," but in that version the train was traveling down from Santa Fe, not the other way around.

"If there's nothing to them, I don't know how these stories keep getting passed down," said Tiny Hurtado. "But I suppose it could be just wishful thinking."

But for one Willcox rancher, who asked that his name not be mentioned, it's a good deal more than that. "Every morning after a hard rain," said the rancher, "I ride the sand washes looking to see if the Virgin Mary's arms are reaching out to me. Wouldn't it be something if I found her?"