Legends of the Lost

Harold Weight and the Gold of the Little Horn Mountains

One of the more common themes in South-western legends involves an Indian warrior revealing the whereabouts of a lavishly rich gold mine to an Anglo settler, often as a repayment of some sort. These stories aren't usually the kind that inspire a person to rush out and buy a pick or a gold pan. In the case of the lost gold of the Little Horn Mountains, however, at least one reasonably sane person found the facts of the tale compelling enough to warrant a search in one of Arizona's less friendly desert areas.

Harold Weight was a writer for the old Desert magazine and an avid explorer. In 1954 he learned of the alleged lost gold of the Little Horns from a cattle-man named Jose Alvarado Jr. (Alvarado was the grandson of Juan Bautista Alvarado, a governor of California when the area belonged to Mexico.) According to Alvarado Jr., an elderly Apache named Pancho had traveled halfway across the state to show his father, Jose Alvarado Sr., a rich surface deposit of gold. This was in 1910, or perhaps 1918.

The story behind this favor dated back 20 or 30 years. Alvarado Sr. had come to the Gila Valley in 1878 to homestead and run cattle. The Indian wars were over by this time and the San Carlos reservation had been established, but a few bands of Apaches still roamed the territory. Pancho had belonged to one of those groups. He'd met Alvarado on several occasions and had been given a friendly reception. When Pancho's band was rounded up and taken to San Carlos, they camped along the way on a mesa near Alvarado's ranch.

It was winter, and Pancho's son was very sick. He took the boy to Alvarado and asked his advice. Alvarado suggested that the boy be baptized so that perhaps God could save him.

Pancho took this advice, and eventually the boy regained his health. At the time, Pancho was in the company of a military escort and could not show Alvarado the mine, but he promised himself that someday he would repay the rancher for his friendliness and wisdom.

By the time Pancho returned to the Gila River valley, however, both he and Alvarado were old men. Pancho could still walk well enough, but Alvarado needed a horse to cover any ground at all. They set off from Palomas, Pancho on foot and Alvarado follow-ing on a surefooted pony. Even-tually they managed to relocate the gold ledge, which Pancho had described as “the richest gold mine in the world.” Indeed, the reddish ore was heavy, and when broken, it glittered bright yellow inside.

But that was the only trip Alvarado made to the goldfield. He was simply too old and tired to develop it himself. He did tell his son about it, however, and with considerable enthusiasm, but Alvarado Jr. was dubious. He had a good dairy operation going, and leaving it to tramp around in the desert heat with only his father's vague directions didn't seem prudent. Eventually he did go looking for the gold, but by that time the trails had grown dim. And the arroyos, dozens of them, that his father had carefully described all looked the same. The crucial clue, a manmade cistern near where a trail crossed a wash in the vicinity of Alamo Spring, was nowhere to be found. Almost 40 years passed before Alvarado Jr. related this story to Harold Weight, who found the tale convincing and the gold worth looking for. "The possibility of relocating Pancho's gold fascinated me," Weight later wrote. "It was located in a geographical area that could be pinned down and was limited in extent. It was in a country where gold had been proven to exist. It was near an old trail both Indians and pack trains had followed. It had a permanent landmark the rock cistern. And the story had not passed through so many mouths as to have become distorted." The veracity of Alvarado's story may be open to debate, but there is no doubt that gold had been found in the vicinity. The Sheep Tanks Mine, which was a couple of miles from Pancho's ledge, produced some 1,300 ounces of gold in 1929 alone, and farther north the Harqua Hala Mine, later run by a British syndicate, produced several million dollars worth of bullion in its first three years. With these thoughts in mind, Weight made a trip to the region in 1955 with his wife, Lucile, and his friend Ed Rochester. They had a four-wheel-drive truck and numerous maps, but the maps were not in agreement on the actual location of Alamo Spring. They ended up choosing the official map of Yuma County, which, Weight wrote, "proved incorrect in detail, compass directions, and topography." The Little Horn Mountains are a low-flung range of basalt mesas and rhyolite ridges bordered by wide basins of shattered rock, where stunted saguaros compete with ocotillos for water. Going was slow, and the threesome spent much of their first day grinding along in low gear. They found what they believed was Alamo Spring, but there was no sign of a cistern. They followed a dirt track toward Engesser Pass, dropping into Red Raven Wash and then on to Hoodoo Well. At every wash crossing, they searched for the cistern but found nothing. That night they drove north to the highway for gasoline and then made camp. They were discouraged about their prospects but decided to continue the search. The following morning, they met a man named Ray Hovetter, who was working a manganese claim nearby. Hovetter had lived in the area his whole life and knew the land well. He had known Alvarado Sr., he said, and had even encountered him around 1910 in the area where he knew of a very old cistern the only one he'd ever seen in the area. Using a sharp twig, Hovetter drew a map in the dirt, conjuring with perfect detail the landscape that the official map had so poorly portrayed. Hovetter said the cistern was not near Alamo Spring as Weight had believed, but several miles east in the Little Horns. So the Weights and Rochester piled back into their truck and followed a road Hovetter had made to access his manganese claims. Four miles east of Sheep Tanks Mine, they came to a broad valley with two small cabins built on a hill at the eastern edge. From there they turned onto a vague track and followed it for a mile, checking at each sandy wash crossing for the cistern. Eventually they found it, but Weight later wrote that if they had not known exactly what they were looking for, they would never have seen it: a hole in the hardened conglomerate bed of the wash, 18 feet deep and three feet square, topped with wire mesh so it would not fill with rocks and debris during floods. It was from exactly that point, according to Alvarado Jr., that Pancho had provided explicit directions: A mile and a half upstream was a side wash, and in that wash lay the gold-rich ledge. The Weights searched for a few hours in the midday heat but found nothing. Soon it was time to go home, but Harold Weight, for one, was not discouraged. He felt that everything about the story had fit together too well to be coincidence or a simple yarn spun by an old rancher. "We are not through looking," he wrote later, but it's unknown if he ever returned.