Legends of the Lost

LEGENDS OF THE LOST Somewhere in the Tumacacori Mountains, a Treasure Lay Buried in a Collapsed Shaft

As we rolled south of Tucson toward Tumacacori National Historic Park, I periodically eyed the treasure map sitting on the dashboard of my truck. It was of the well-crinkled roll-up sort (even if it was two photocopies taped together), replete with esoteric symbols and archaic units of measure like varas and leagues.

I had acquired the map from a friend of a friend of a friend an appropriately mysterious source, I reasoned who believes, as many treasure hunters do, that somewhere in the Tumacacori Mountains 2,000 bars of gold and silver are stashed in a collapsed mine shaft. Legend has it that Jesuit missionaries hid the gold and silver, which they had mined themselves, before they were expelled from New Spain by King Carlos III.

I liked the map, liked the air of possibility it lent to the day, but I didn't like it enough to pack a shovel. For one thing, enough people had gone prospecting at Tumacacori over the past 100 years to make the area look like it had been invaded by giant prairie dogs, yet no-body had come home rich (dig-ging on the park grounds has long been prohibited). For another, the historical "facts" sur-rounding the legend are about as solid as the crumbling adobe walls of the old mission, itself.

The map we had in our possession, for example, was drawn from a document called the Derrotero de Tumacacori, which is at once the most allur-ing evidence that a treasure may actually exist, and the most con-demning proof that the entire legend is implausible.

The Derrotero first appeared in the year 1889, when, the story goes, a black-robed priest from Spain appeared on horseback at the Tucson courthouse. The priest had with him the Derrotero (which translates into "course," as in "to set a course"), which he said had directions to a hidden chest filled with old church documents. He enlisted the help of Judge Bill Barnes, and, after recovering the docu-ments he'd come for, he gave the judge the Derrotero. The judge later had the doc-ument translated, and he found that it gave directions to several mines near Mission Tumacacori. The Derrotero tells us the fol-lowing: A mine called The Virgin of Guadalupe lies one league south of the mission's main door, and 1,800 varas (a vara is between 31 and 43 inches) left of "the waters of the San Roman." Two hundred varas north of the mine is a flat black stone, the following marking chiseled on its bottomside: In front of the mine are the remains of two small peaks that were blasted over when the miners sealed thousands of gold and silver bars in the shaft.

Three leagues south of this mine is the Dam of the Janos Trail, below which are two "patios" and twelve arrastras (ore crushers). Nearby is the en-trance to a mine called La Purisima Concepcion, a tunnel running northward for 300 varas, which is sealed by a cop-per door. In this shaft, balls of virgin silver weighing up to 125 pounds have been found.

In the mine of Tumacacori is a copper chest with a key in one corner, beneath a screw. Withdraw the screw, turn the key in the lock, and open the box, which contains all the maps of the great treasure.

The Derrotero also names a total of six mines, and gives di-rections to each of them, but there is a problem. According to the Derrotero, the mines were worked between 1548 and 1648, and then sealed. But the earliest known mission in the vicinity, Los Santos Angeles San Gabriel y San Rafael de Guevavi, wasn't established until 1691 by Father Kino. The Franciscan-built San Jose de Tumacacori, which Kino creat-ed as a visita to Guevavi, did not become an independent mission until 1784.

So by the time the Jesuits were expelled in 1767 the time at which they supposedly hid their vast trove the mines referred to in the Derrotero would have been sealed for more than 100 years.

Either the Derrotero was a fraud, and no mines ever exist-ed at Tumacacori, or the mines it describes weren't worked by Jesuits, or the scant facts in-volved in the legend are so mired in hopeful speculation and fireside tale-spinning that no one will ever know the truth.

Moreover Mount Wrightson. The mountain is named for William Wrightson, who was killed in the mid-1860s. Three years before he died, in a report for the Santa Rita Silver Mining Company, Wrightson wrote that rumors of rich Jesuit mines were widespread, but that he had never seen any direct evidence of these mines.

Newspapers of the time also wrote periodically about Jesuit treasures. "'The Old Mine' - supposed to be the old Tumacacori - has recently been discovered by Henry Allen, and its shafts and tunnels are now being cleaned out preparatory to further development and actual mining," the Arizona Weekly Citizen reported on July 10, 1875.

And in 1890, the Arizona Enterprise claimed that "A cave has been discovered in the mountain that lies west of the old Tumacacori Mission containing a large amount of gold and silver plate, and old Spanish coins."

Still, I had found no verifiable evidence of mines in the vicinity, and Jesuit scholars vehemently deny that early missionaries were in the mining business. But why, if the whole legend was nothing more than an intriguing yarn, had so many people, for so long, believed that mines existed near Tumacacori? The legend has inspired numerous searches, including an elaborate effort by one group that brought in hot-air balloons with triangulating devices and high-tech metal detectors.

In an article in Desert magazine in 1980, Choral Pepper argued that the mines may have been worked by Spaniards who predated the Jesuits. Pepper believed that the mines, if they existed, were to the southeast of the mission in the Tumacacori Mountains. This would place them close to the Planchas de Plata mines in what is today northern Sonora, Mexico, where legend has it a party of Spaniards and Indians found 2,000-pound slabs of virgin silver in 1736.

Hundreds of other old mines, many of them known to be real and once very rich, are scattered about Sonora and Chihuahua. Milton Rose, a lifetime treasure hunter, once published photographs of stamped silver pieces as proof that he had found the lost Tayopa Mine; in another article, author Charles Polzer (a Jesuit) included photos of the same coins as examples of counterfeit treasure. Polzer, who went to great lengths in his article to debunk myths of Jesuit treasure, nonetheless mentioned a 3,500-pound chunk of silver that was supposedly found at Mission Guevavi, 15 miles south of Tumacacori.

From the mission grounds, I had a good view of the sharp, craggy Tumacacori Mountains; they certainly didn't appear to lend themselves to easy travel. I rolled up my map, 15 versions of the legend running through my mind. I was glad I wasn't a real treasure hunter; sifting through legends for tiny fragments of truth seemed like frustrating work. But if all you want is a day's adventure and a bit of historical intrigue, then the legends are treasures in themselves.