Legends of the Lost

egends of the Lost There May Have Been Gold in Daniel's Canyon but the Canyon's Location Remains a Mystery

Large portions of Arizona, especially the seemingly end-less miles of cliffs and rocky plains south of the Grand Canyon, are as dizzying and impenetrable today as they were 100 years ago. It's easy to get lost in this terrain because a route that seems well defined and easy to follow in the morning can appear as a completely different place four hours later when the sun has shifted the shadows and changed the shape of a marker you'd made a note to remember. I knew all of this when I headed north to Mohave County in search of the Lost Antler's Gold. Shifting shadows - that was my personal explanation for why no one ever located the gold that a cowboy Supposedly found in a place called Daniel's Canyon in 1905. At least that was one explanation. I soon discovered another: there is nothing on any Arizona map that I could find called Daniel's Canyon. I cursed J. Frank Dobie and pictured him grinning from ear to ear on the Other Side. Dobie was a famous folklorist from Texas who died in 1964. He collected stories about lost gold mines, buried treasures, and related legends. In 1958 he wrote an article about gold fever, a familiar malady in the frontier West, and he included the tale that came to be known as Antler's Gold. According to Dobie, in 1905 a cowboy named Harper was working in the vicinity of Milk Weed Flats, a huge unpopulated landscape that lies between Hackberry on the south and the South Rim of the Grand Canyon on the north. Harper developed a bad case of what he thought was bronchitis and decided to go to a doctor in Prescott. All lost mine stories contain ingredients that don't seem to make sense, and this one is no exception. A look at any map will show that Prescott is a long hard ride from the Milk Weed Flats country, and one that could easily have been avoided.

In 1905 Harper could have found a doctor in Peach Springs or Kingman, either of which would have been much closer than Prescott. It's possible, though, that he thought he'd get better medical treatment at Prescott's Fort Whipple.

Harper traveled alone, said Dobie, and he added: "After passing Peach Springs, he began to feel very weak, and at the third canyon on the left - Daniel's Canyon it is called because it used to be a regular den for mountain lions he turned off to rest. After unsaddling and staking his horse, he saw a buck deer walk out from behind a bush not far away. He thought that some venison might revive him, so he killed the buck, made a fire under a juniper tree, and broiled one of the backstraps."

His meal left him feeling a lot better. After eating he leaned back to rest, and, idly digging his spurs into the ground, he dislodged a small rock that showed gold. Undoubtedly amazed by his good luck, "He used his spurs some more and turned up a good pocketful of the rich ore," Dobie wrote. This was a spot that Harper did not want to forget.

Before leaving the area, the ailing cowboy cut off the buck's head and hung its antlers in the juniper tree as a marker to help him remember where he had found the gold.

Then he went to Prescott. The doctor there diagnosed Harper as having "galloping consumption," what we would call tuberculosis today, and put him in the hospital. Harper sent for his brother - Dobie never says where Harper's brother lived and gave him the gold and told him how to find the lode. In Daniel's Canyon, he said, at the spot where the antlers are hanging in a juJuniper tree.

After the funeral, Harper's brother went up to Daniel's Canyon to look for the deer's antlers and the gold. He didn't find a thing. The brother had even taken some men with him who were more familiar with rocks and mining, and together they explored not only what they believed to be Daniel's Canyon but other canyons along the route Harper had traveled. The gold was never found.

Some 90 years after this incident supposedly occurred, I sat in the old headquarters of the historic Crozier Canyon Ranch, roughly seven miles west of Truxton, and directly south of that Milk Weed Flats country where Harper had been working in 1905. Bill Robinson, the rancher who has owned Crozier since 1970, was in the kitchen with a visitor, Jim Nelson, who was born and raised nearby at Peach Springs.

For about a half hour there was a lot of head shaking.

"I know ever inch of this ranch," Robinson said, "and there's nothing called Daniel's Canyon. Besides, there's mostly limestone all through here, and you don't hear much about any gold."

Nelson said he had explored every canyon in the area from Peach Springs west to Hackberry and beyond, and he had never heard of Daniel's Canyon.

But wait a minute, Robinson interjected. "I never heard of Daniel's Canyon, and I know this is not a heavily mineralized area, but there was an old Indian we used to know who found some gold around here. This old man used to carry these big five-gallon plastic buckets in the back of his pickup, and he'd stop at various washes in the area and fill one up with sand and then go on to another and fill up another, and then when he'd get home he'd pan one bucket at a time over a period of time. Well, in one of his buckets he came up with some decent-size nuggets, almost like small marbles, but he could never remember where he had gotten that particular bucket of sand from, so he could never go back."

If nothing else, this story establishes that gold may be found in the general area, but the location of Daniel's Canyon is anybody's guess. Chances are the name was one used by some cowboys in the area but was never officially adopted. Today most of the area that might have included Daniel's Canyon is part of the Hualapai Indian Reservation.

Before abandoning my search for Daniel's Canyon and the Lost Antler's Gold, it occurred to me that Dobie may have written more about it in one of his books, especially in Coronado's Children, a collection of lost mine stories and related folktales. The copy of the book that I used was at the University of Arizona, and though it contained nothing on Antler's Gold or Daniel's Canyon, it did have an inscription, written by Dobie in 1956, which made me wince. In his inscription, Dobie noted that, 25 years after it was published, he was still getting letters from readers wanting to know how to find a particular treasure.

"I have all the secrets," he wrote, "and they will die with me."