Legends of the Lost

LEGENDS OF THE LOST Don Joaquin's Lost Gold Mine May Have Been Found by Accident in the Rugged Estrella Mountains

I was sidehilling one of the big canyons of the Sierra Estrellas, the knife-edged mountain range 15 miles southwest of Phoenix, when I first found it: an ancient man-made trail hacked into the side of a nameless ridge. The discovery amazed — and pleased — me. For once on my arduous two-week hike of the treacherous range, I had an easy, safe place to walk. However, there wasn't supposed to be a trail there. Before making my hike, I had studied maps of the Estrellas and could find no listing of such a trail.

The lack of trails and the incredibly difficult and dangerous slopes found throughout the length of the 25-mile-long range make the Estrellas some of the least visited mountains in Arizona, even though they are on the very doorstep of metropolitan Phoenix and its 2.3 million residents.

It was obvious when I first found the trail more than 20 years ago that it had been made a very long time before then. Many thick-trunked paloverdes and mesquites, slow-growing desert trees, had become rooted in the pathway.

I had struck the trail about two-thirds of the way up on the Rainbow Valley side of the Estrellas. Since the trail led vertically up and down the mountain, and I was more interested in exploring the length of the range, I was able to follow it for only a short way before it left my intended route of travel. At the time, I did not know where the trail began below or its destination above. I had almost forgotten about the old trail until I read the story of Don Joaquin Campoy's lost gold mine in the Estrellas, written by the late John D. Mitchell, who spent most of his life searching for lost mines and treasures in the deserts of Arizona, Southern California, and Sonora, Mexico.

Mitchell wrote that a party of Mexicans from Guadalajara discovered and worked the mine with the cooperation of the friendly Pima and Maricopa Indians who lived along the Gila River east of the Estrellas. Then, in 1847, the Indians told the miners of the approach of Stephen Watts Kearny and his American Army of the West on their way to California. Fearing the Americans, the miners hurriedly abandoned their works and left for Mexico.

Their leader, Don Joaquin, loaded 15 burros with 50 bars of gold and 30 bags of gold nuggets and with the aid of an aged Maricopa Indian buried the treasure in a cave in a box canyon at the southeast end of the Estrellas. Don Joaquin then clubbed the Indian to death and buried his body on top of the gold.

What intrigues me about Mitchell's account is his mention of the burros following "a zigzag trail" on the west, or Rainbow Valley, side of the Estrellas.

Could I have discovered this old trail on my hike? Could I find it once again after so many years had passed?

I didn't know exactly where I was when I stumbled onto the trail. At the time, I was more concerned with trying to find a way through the torturous terrain without breaking a leg than I was with ascertaining landmarks.

Since I hiked them, the Estrellas have been made into a Bureau of Land Management Wilderness Area. The range, which runs northwest by southeast, is shared by the Gila Indian Reservation and the BLM, with the Indian land making up about one-third of the southeast end.

No motorized vehicles may enter a Wilderness Area, so I had to examine the distant canyons and ridges through binoculars while driving the power line road that parallels most of the west side of the range.

While searching I found a dirt road that led toward the mountains and ended at a little parking area where a BLM register proclaimed it to be "Quartz Peak Trailhead."

I was disconcerted. Was this the trail I was looking for, or was it a new BLM recreational trail? A few minutes into the hike convinced me it was indeed my old trail, now christened with an official name.

A BLM spokesman said they, too, had not known the trail existed. A BLM employee accidentally stumbled upon it during the Wilderness study, and it was adopted as a BLM hiking trail.

As I climbed, I found the trail to be as I remembered: wide with easy gradients, well engineered to take every advantage of the terrain, and blocked in places by big trees and shrubs.

Everything bespoke antiquity. There was no evidence that the builders used explosives or modern equipment to carve a path through the rocks and cliffs. Instead it looked as if the workers used just picks and shovels. Rocks small enough to be levered aside became support for the trail. Bigger rocks were left in place and the trail built up around them. Small retaining walls of stone were laid over the bad places. Steep sections had switchbacks.

It was easy to see that the trail was originally intended for the use of heavily laden burros or mules. Men on foot did not require the gentle grades found throughout the trail.

As I climbed, following the trail's twists and turns, I assumed that it would lead into a canyon and eventually cross through a saddle at the top of the razorback ridge that runs the entire length of the Estrellas. Instead the trail zigzagged up canyonsides on a direct route to the white outcropping that gave Quartz Peak its name.

And then another surprise. The trail ended abruptly a half mile below 4,119-foot Quartz Peak at a flat clearing just big enough for a few bedrolls or a string of hobbled burros. Recreational hikers wishing to reach Quartz Peak itself find they have to make a tough climb, bushwhacking through rocks, cacti, and brush, to reach their goal.

Puzzled, hot, and thirsty after the three-mile climb, I sat down and tried to figure out why the trail builders stopped their work at this spot. Why would someone go to all the trouble of building a trail only to leave it uncompleted? Was the trail work interrupted by something? By hostile In-dians perhaps?

The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that the trail ended there because that was the mine site. Not a mine with a mine shaft, but a place where gold-bearing quartz rock lay on the surface of the ground. As I looked around, I could see bits of quartz rock scattered on both sides of the ridge and on the steep slopes below Quartz Peak.

Quartz, as miners know, is often associated with gold. Arizona history is replete with tales of early prospectors finding quartz ledges laced with gold. If my guess is correct and gold-bearing quartz was found on surface outcroppings, all the miners had to do was shatter the larger pieces of quartz with a sledgehammer, pile up the gold-bearing rock, and wait for the string of burros to arrive. Very probably the burros packed water and food up the mountain and carried the ore on the return trip.

There is no reliable water source at all in the entire length of the Estrellas. The miners may have found a pool of water in the network of washes below in Rainbow Valley, or they may have hauled water from the Gila River to the north.

Someplace on the flatland below, if my theory is correct, the miners probably had a base camp where they crushed the ore by grinding it in arrastras (an ancient method in which ore is ground between two large flat rocks, the upper one turned by tethered burros walking in a circle). The pulverized ore is then washed to separate the heavier gold from the waste rock.

The gold could then be melted and formed into bars, or if gold dust it could be packed in leather bags.

But what about Mitchell's account of a treasure cave containing gold bars, leather bags of nuggets, the bones of the murdered Indian?

Consider this: in the 1930s, long before Mitchell's story was published, older residents of Avondale and Litchfield Park at the northern end of the Estrellas had heard of the cave.

Tom Hilton, a former reporter for The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, wrote a story about it. According to his account, during the Depression two Mexican-American cowboys in Rainbow Valley were working cattle in the foothills of the Es-trellas when a savage summer storm struck.

Seeking shelter from the rain, the two saw a small cave in a canyon and dismounted. Inside they found a human skeleton and rotting leather bags filled with gold. As the storm waned, the two resumed their cattle roundup, intending to come back later with the means to carry away the gold.

Yes, you guessed it. When they tried to return, the rain had wiped out their tracks, and they couldn't relocate the cave. Maybe you can.

Author's Note: Before visiting the Sierra Estrella Wilderness, contact the Bureau of Land Management, Lower Gila Resource Area, 2015 W. Deer Valley Road, Phoenix, AZ 85027; (602) 780-8090. Some access is across private land and is not available to the public. When visiting the federally protected Wilderness, leave the area as you find it and leave no trace of your visit. It is illegal to disturb, dig, uproot, change, modify, or extract the landscape, flora, or fauna. There is no water in the Estrellas, so take at least a gallon per person per day, more in the hotter months of the year.