Legends of the Lost

LEGENDS OF THE LOST The Buried Treasure of Mission Guevavi May Have Been Found and Lost Again

The old Indian lived a hard and simple life in a shack shaded by cottonwood trees on the east bank of the Santa Cruz River. In the hot summer months he panned for gold, and in the winter he cut wood, loaded it onto his burros, and sold it in Nogales.

How many such scratch miners have passed this realm without ever exiting the shell of anonymity in which they lived. With so many minerals lacing its vast territory, Arizona produced them by the thousands, and still does. Yet their names are forgotten the instant they are gone.

Not so Juan Bustamante, who unwittingly gained immortality one day about 1919 when he led his burros into Nogales bearing a load of rich silver ore.

The reaction at Charley Taylor's assay office was electric. The old miners who hung around there came out of theirchairs with questions about where Bustamante had made his strike.

After Taylor examined the silver ore, he declared it the finest quality he had seen in years. This intensified the interest and the questioning.

Bustamante was a regular at Taylor's business, but he'd never come in with anything like this before. Usually it was a tiny vial of placer gold, enough to earn him a bottle of red wine and a bowl of frijoles.

The gringos who frequented the office had never shown Bustamante much friendship, and he wasn't about to cozy up to them now. He departed with the secret intact.

Taylor went back to his examination of the ore. It contained small pieces of gray quartz, which led him to conclude that it came from the rich silver veins known to exist just north of Nogales.

That opinion fueled suspicions that Bustamante had discovered the legendary lost mine of Guevavi, which had been whispered about in the hills along the border for more than a hundred and fifty years.

The story began in 1691 with the founding of Guevavi as a visita, Jesuit priest Eusebio Francisco Kino's first parish church in what is now Arizona. Legend has it that in order to equip the new church properly, the Spanish priests sent Indian laborers into the mountains to hunt for ore. They didn't have to travel far.

On a high ledge at the southwest end of the San Cayetano Mountains, the Indians unearthed a wide vein of silver ore. The priests deemed the find more than suitable for their purpose, which was to make bells, candlesticks, cups, plates, bowls, and other articles for church use.

This was said to have been done at a small smelter built on the mission grounds, where the raw ore was made into silver slabs called planchas de plata. Some have written that the mountain vein was so rich that But Guevavi's time was short. In 1751 hostile Pima Indians revolted for the second time, murdering priests at neighboring outposts and partly destroying Guevavi itself.

The end came in 1767 with an edict from King Carlos III expelling the Jesuits from Spain and its possessions. The action was motivated, in part, by the Jesuits' failure to send to the crown what was called the Royal Fifth, a 20 percent tax on all the bullion extracted from their mines in the New World.

Prior to their departure from Guevavi, the priests stripped the mission of its silver baubles, including the great bells, and hid them. Some believe they were buried at or near the mission. Others say they were returned to the mine and its opening concealed.

the mining continued long after the needs of the church had been filled.

This treasure of silver was supposedly smelted into bars and stored at a secret repository either at the mission or close by, depending on who is telling the story.

The mine itself was said to be close by, as well. When the wind was right, the Indian workers could hear the melodic peal of the big mission bells which were born from their labor.

The first Anglos who entered the Santa Cruz Valley about a hundred years later reported finding heaps of silver-rich slag at Guevavi and the nearby settlements of Tubac, Cerro Colorado, and Mission Tumacacori. Early miners made sizable profits from the unrecovered silver, and the tale of the Guevavi treasure gradually spread.

But the site of the old smelter remains a mystery even though remnants of the mission, located