Legends of the Lost

LEGENDS OF THE LOST Somebody Found Captain Capps' Gold Stash in the Heart of Phoenix, So the Story Goes

I was born in Jerome more than three score years ago and raised in central Arizona's Verde Valley. I have heard a number of stories in my lifetime about Arizona's lost gold mines and missing gold shipments.

One outstanding and frus-trating trait characterizes all of these lost gold tales: no one ever seems to find the precious missing loot. A skeptic might say that the stories are all foolish flights of fancy. I don't agree with the skeptics and for good reason. There is one story I heard many years ago that distinguishes itself by deviating from the typical legend: the gold in this story, eventually, was actually found.

Moreover, the main events of this lost gold tale did not occur in a rugged mountain range or a remote desert setting; they took place more than a century ago near what is today downtown Phoenix.

In the mid-1870s, when Phoenix was no more than a dusty infant village, Andrew Capps, an old Arizona prospec-tor, trudged into town, sick and crippled and friendless. Mercurio Maldonado and his family saw the troubled old miner and befriended him. The kindly Maldonados, who lived in a small adobe house on the south side of town, invited him into their simple home, where they nursed the old man and restored his health.

While under their care, Capps told the family he had Come to Arizona in the early 1850s after prospecting for several years in Mexico. While there he gained the sobriquet "Captain," or "Cap," for short. He said he had spent the next 20 years searching for valuable minerals in central Arizona's Mazatzal Mountains, a region not known for many important pay-dirt discoveries. In recent times, he said, he had come into Phoenix about two or three times a year. Upon regaining his health, Capps returned to the Mazatzals. In due time, his age and the lifelong ordeals of the old prospector caught up with him, and he again became quite ill. Knowing that his remaining days were small in number, he went back to the house of the Maldonados, who had been so gracious and comforting to him. This time, however, he refused their offer to stay with them. Instead, as a reward for their earlier kindnesses, Capps drew a map for the family showing the location of a dried-up well that was situated right in town not far from their house.

He told them that a few years earlier he had hidden in this well an old iron bucket containing his lifetime accumulation of gold, made up of nuggets and small bags of gold dust. He had then filled in the well with rocks and dirt. Capps said he wanted the Maldonados to have the gold.

Shortly afterward Cap Capps died, and the Maldonados saw to it that he had a suitable and dignified burial.

For some reason, the family did not immediately try to find the buried gold, and, later, they apparently lost the map. While they attempted to keep their knowledge of the gold stash a secret, Capps' account was handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation within the family. But, as one might expect, a rumor about Andrew Capps' lost gold cache soon leaked out into the Phoenix Hispanic community.

One version of this story says that Capps had originally buried the gold on a vacant lot at the southwest corner of Second and Monroe streets. In the late 19th century, searchers dug everywhere at this location without success. During this time, someone built an adobe house on the property, and for a time the George Coats family lived in it. One morning Coats found a deep hole in back of his house. Obviously in the night someone had done a lot of quiet digging. In the bottom of the hole, pressed into the dirt, was the outline of a metal box or bucket.

According to another account, in the early 1920s, John Bonner one night went to visit a small unoccupied house on a piece of land he owned on Seventh Street near Buckeye Road, about a mile south of downtown Phoenix. When he got to the place, Bonner found five Mexican men digging a large hole near the house's foundation. When they saw him the men fled. Bonner called the sheriff's office.

When the deputies arrived, all they could see at first was a 12-foot-deep hole. Further investigation led them to realize that the excavators had been using a "witch stick," or divining rod, to locate whatever it was they were looking for. In a short time, the deputies found the men and questioned them intensively. The diggers said they were sure that a buried treasure of gold worth $8,000 left there many years before by an old prospector named Capps was located near or under the house. Eager to join in the effort, Bonner said that, house or no house, they could continue to dig if they would restore the building to its former condition and share the gold with him when they found it. Agreeing to his offer, they went back to work with relish. But many more days of hard work brought them no fortune.

Actually, however, Bonner had been too late. Several years before, another version of this story contends, two Mexicans had found the old map drawn by prospector Cap Capps. The map indicated that Capps had buried the treasure in another part of the city, in the neighborhood of Ninth Avenue and Lincoln Street. The two men contacted the owner of the property, a local Anglo businessman, and the three went to the site. A number of witnesses later stated that these men, using a divining rod, walked to a point where the Arizona Eastern Railroad track crossed Ninth Avenue. All this was done in broad daylight with very little attempt to be secret about it. In fact the men invited the spectators to join them. Proceeding west along the railroad right-of-way, the trio finally stopped approximately 150 feet from the crossing. There, after a careful examination with a divining stick, they began to dig at a spot several feet away from the track on the north side. When they had dug down about nine feet, they found the old iron bucket and hoisted it out of the hole with considerable difficulty. Numerous witnesses affirmed that the bucket contained at least $5,000 in gold. The businessman and the two Mexicans quickly left the scene with the gold, but the gathering crowd could see that the treasure site was clearly an old dry well that had been filled up with rocks and dirt many years before, just as Cap Capps had described to the Maldonados.

Some people subsequently claimed that the whole Capps gold "discovery" had been staged. But envy often prompts such sour statements. Naturally everyone, myself included, would liked to have known the name of the lucky "local busi-nessman." But when I first heard about this story, I was told that his name, "for obvious reasons," had never been revealed. I still don't know what those "obvious reasons" might have been.