Legends of the Lost

LEGENDS OF THE LOST Look to the Sierra Sinagua for the Padres' Lost Silver Bars

The wind blows coldly across the crest of the cinder cone. The few junipers do nothing to blunt its bite. Shielding my eyes and scanning the horizon, I look for ghosts and try to put myself in their place. If I can, I'll be richer by three tons of silver. But I don't even know who "they" were. Legend has it that they were packing bars of nearly pure silver across difficult country while dodging hostile people. Their vellum map and snippets of a diary surfaced in 1902, and the style of it indicated a time before 1846 when the Spanish still claimed the Southwest. They rated a military escort, and the story identifies them as padres, or working for some padres - or even impersonating padres. The silver was mined in southwestern Colorado, where lodes with names like Silverton were worked even before the earliest Europeans arrived. They were now returning home and taking their bounty with them. From my cone, I can see halfway to tomorrow - landmarks on the skyline stand 100 miles away. A likely route followed the ancient Indian trails that still web the Four Corners country. It may have sliced north of the Hopi mesas and followed Dinnebito Wash before crossing the Little Colorado River near Grand Falls and then gone on to the San Francisco Peaks, the fabled Sierra Sinagua. This trail avoided rocky canyons like Diablo - which had so thoroughly stymied explorer Antonio de Espejo in 1583 that he named it after the devil - and it offered rest, pasture, and clear water at the foothills of Sierra Sinagua, the dominant landmark in northern Arizona. When seen from the Hopi mesa villages such as Oraibi, the snow-tipped peaks appear white in the morning and blue in the afternoon. In 1629 the Franciscans had rechristened Sierra Sinagua as San Francisco to honor their patron, St. Francis of Assisi. What I can't see is why this caravan veered so far westward instead of southward along the Rio Grande to El Paso and then to Mexico City. Was it the Zuni and Hopi rebellion of 1680, which killed or evicted many Spanish clergy and colonists? Or the French looters of the 1750s, who roamed far and wide pirating whatever they could from the Crown? Or Spain's 1767 expulsion of all Jesuit padres from its territory? Or was the pack train just trying to dodge the king's tax man? The story is unclear, and unless additional text is found, we won't know. But someone did ship a pile of silver, secretly, at grave risk, and their misfortune is our opportunity. Much of this country is open, Flat, and nearly treeless, so a pack string would have had lit-tle cover. The “padres “ diary never names the pursuers. Were they highwaymen, In-dians, rivals, soldiers of the Crown? The shadowed pack train made it through the Painted Desert, a land of grand colors but little water, and across the sometimes dry Little Colorado River. I would like to imagine that they came past my crater, but it's only one of 600 in this vast volcanic field near Flagstaff. By the time it reached Bo-nito Park, the pack string started to unravel. It was July, hot and dry. The mules were heavily laden and the terrain open but broken. The column marched onward, suffering re-peated assaults. When a mule was lost, its load had to be repacked. If a man was lost and his horse survived, it became a pack animal.

They moved on slowly, too slowly, so hourly they drew fire from musket balls, arrows, or lances. The end was near. One morning the hostiles attacked in force, killing eight of the party and several of the mules. The survivors straggled onward. Low on food and un-able to pack much water, they weakened. I leave my nameless cone and follow them through Bonito Park south to the tall timber of Mount Elden. Towering basalt cliffs with immense boulders may have sheltered them while they drank from cool springs, but they couldn't linger. They traveled maybe another day, maybe two. They were desperate. They knew they could no longer carry the silver - their wealth had become their curse. So they buried it, trampled the ground over it, and made the vellum map. It depicted a lava dike, a mushroom rock, a mountain with a red blotch, and a flat-topped butte. And a side note proclaiming an unlikely large stash of “96 bars of silver.” It would have been a hurried map, one intended to guide back a survivor who already had the spot in his mind's eye, but not one good enough to direct anyone who hadn't already wagered his life for the silver.

Before sunup the party split into two groups of five and departed, one group with the map traveling light and afoot, the other with the mules to decoy the attackers. They trust-ed their fate to God. At least one of the party must have eventually made it to safety since their map turned up in an archive at Santa Fe. In 1910 a sheepherder found a bar of silver near Bonito Park. The bar, weighing 63 pounds, was displayed in a Flagstaff store window. That's the story.

But it was convincing enough convincing that several Flagstaff old-timers, bitten by the silver bug, spent the balance of their lives shoveling cinders in a mad attempt to unearth the hidden treasure. In 1909, one of them, Benjamin Doney, was hired to guide the treasure hunters who uncovered the original map and diary. After several fruitless and frustrating expeditions, they gave up, but Doney didn't. He made it his life's work to stir every cinder and probe every fissure. The modern names of Doney Park, Little Doney Craters, and Big Doney Crater honor his stubborn quest.

Some believed that Doney looked too far north. One surmised the cache of bars was not at the figure on the map but beyond it, somewhere within a 20-mile arc to the south. He traced a route from Bonito Park to Mount Elden and on toward Padre Canyon, where someone had found old bones of humans huddled beside their horses. But he found no silver.

My breath clouds in the frosty air. Snow crackles underfoot, and ice glazes both pools of a spring. Tall ponderosas stand like sentinels. This is a dark place in deep shade, even though the Gambel oak thickets are leafless. I swing my arms to keep warm, but cold stirs the brain. My mind struggles to reach far back into memory for a story from an old book about how a prospector named Teller shared a campfire with a family of Havasupai Indians that lived west of Sierra Sinagua.

In the firelight, he admired their silver jewelry, and they confided their source: a hole in a mountain on the sunrise side of the peaks, a spot they occasionally visited to find pure silver which needed no fire. Teller persisted, and the Havasupais explained that the mountain had springs, which Teller took to be those of Elden. He never found their supply, and we're left to wonder if they had found the pack train's lost bars.

We may never know. Even though Flagstaff is one of Arizona's most-populous towns, the silver cache has yet to make local headlines. I turn my back to the icy wind and imagine how it must have strewn ash and cinder over those dead “padres” and their horses and mules, burying their mission and their memory. Then I smile. Those same winds may one day sweep clean a corner of a hidden silver bar, leaving it to wink in the sun. Maybe one of us will be lucky enough to smile back.