Legends of the Lost

Bones of Murdered Prospectors Litter a Lost Silver Ledge

This is a story about a lost silver ledge, but it began with gold. In 1877 a group of about 80 Mormons, led by a redbearded bishop named Lot Smith, established a small colony along the shore of the largest lake in Coconino county, 20 miles southeast of Flagstaff.

Smith was a tough, hot-tempered man who ruled his followers with an iron fist. At 16 he'd marched to California with the Mormon Battalion, and later made a name for himself in the Mormon War of 1858. In 1876 Brigham Young had chosen him to lead the Mormons' efforts to colonize Arizona because Young felt Smith had the "strong hand" needed to make the mission succeed.

Mormon Lake, as it would come to be known, lay in the shadow of 8,500-foot Longfellow Mountain (later renamed Mormon Mountain). The colonists ran about 100 cattle in the vicinity and made butter and cheese that they sold in Flagstaff. The place became known as Mormon Dairy.

In 1878, according to legend, a Mormon man named Lessa Rogers was exploring the flanks of Longfellow Mountain when he came across a cache of gold coins more than $6,000 worth. He packed them back to the lake, where Smith learned of their existence and promptly appropriated every last coin.

What Smith didn't know was that there might have been even more money cached on the mountain. When word of the find reached Flagstaff, it immediately caught the attention of two prospectors, Jim Taylor and Ike Roberts. These men had prospected in southern and central Arizona, and in their travels had learned about a stage holdup in Yuma in 1872.

The stage robbers had fled to the Mogollon Rim area and then worked their way north into the wilderness, where they planned on hiding out until the heat was off. One day they were jumped by Mexican horse thieves, however, and one of the robbers was killed in the fray. The other, badly wounded, straggled to Camp Verde where he died within days. In a delirious state, he confessed to the robbery, and said he had stashed more than $15,000 in gold at the base of a big mountain up north. What mountain he never said.

Roberts and Taylor, figuring this was the stash found by Lessa Rogers, set off to find the remaining booty. For a week they wandered among the pines, digging in places that looked promising. No gold. What they did find, however, was an outcropping of silver ore. They dug for several days, until their grub ran out, uncovering what appeared to be an extensive lode. They collected the richest chunks, covered their diggings, and headed back to Flagstaff to have their find assayed.

When a metallurgist determined the ore to be of a relatively low grade $100 to $200 per ton the prospectors decided it wasn't worth the effort and moved on to other districts. Over time, as the story of the Mormon Mountain silver mine was passed from one prospector to the next, the value of the ore was inflated considerably, and a number of people went searching for it.

Among the first were John Marshall and his son, Charley. In October, 1892, the Flagstaff Arizona Champion reported, "John Marshall and son Charley returned this week After spending more than a month around Mormon Mountain. John says that assays of ore found in the lost mine assayed $600 to $800 a ton." But the father and son team had not yet managed to locate the mine.

One version of the legend describes the Marshalls as seasoned prospectors who had worked throughout the Southwest, but according to files at the Arizona Historical Society, Charley, who was born in Flagstaff in 1869, was a barber by trade. "The way we used to hunt, mostly," he later said, "was that we'd go hunting or fishing. In those days there were no game laws. We'd go down there hunting, and wind up searching for this silver ore."

Another pair of prospectors, Ed Strom and Mike La Salla, also searched for the silver in 1892. The men supposedly found high-grade ore after drilling a tunnel into the mountain, only to have the tunnel collapse on La Salla. Strom returned to Flagstaff, went on a drunk, and was last seen telling someone he planned on digging out the body of his partner.

The following year, yet another prospector went searching for the silver. Ike Smith located the tunnel bored by Strom and La Salla. In the entrance were human bones, bleached white and half covered with rags of clothes. Farther in he found a human skull with a bullet hole in it. Smith believed the skull belonged to Strom, who'd been tailed to the mine and killed by yet another prospector.

Over the next dozen years, a stream of prospectors continued the search. A homesteader named Al Sims found a pile of blue-black rocks near the mountain. Next to the rocks were the skeletons of four mules, still tethered to the trees by ropes. Something apparently had happened to the mules' owner, and they had died of starvation. According to the legend, however, the rocks Sims collected assayed out at 1,200 ounces to the ton a rich find indeed. But Sims never got the chance to search for more silver. Shortly after his original find, he killed a man in a bar fight and fled the county when he was charged with murder. Sim's place was taken by E.S. Carlos, who, according to the Coconino Sun in 1908, made numerous searches along the mountain. Several years earlier, Carlos had returned from the mountain with another human skull. This one still had a miner's pick stuck in it. The skull was believed to be that of a Frenchman called John Pouchie, whose nickname was Poochey. Charley Marshall later recalled Poochey as one of the most obsessive of the sil-ver's hunters. No one, however, ever filed a claim on the silver, making many people doubt it even ex-isted at least in the quanti-ties and quality of prospectors' tales. Gladwell Richardson, writing under the pen name Maurice Kildare, in 1968, claimed that the silver most certainly did exist. According to his account, published in True West, the trail to the old mine crossed the mesa between Mormon Mountain and Mor-mon Dairy spring. "The old trail struck off south from the mesa point and crossed the first wagon road to Mormon Lake. It is traceable for about three miles before vanishing under erosion and timber growth. It reappears be-tween two unnamed creeks emptying into Lake Mary. Run-ning on south some distance, it swings southeast, only to van-ish again about five miles on; below Newman Canyon, it shows up once more." Charley Marshall, who made a number of trips along this route from 1892 to 1917, found a total of six fist-size chunks of ore, all in different places, as if they had been dropped along the trail. The rocks were dark blue with a greenish tinge, and they appeared to have been broken off from bigger pieces. Robert Coody, an archivist at the Northern Arizona Uni-versity Kline Library, recently made a trip to the mountain after the story caught his curi-osity. Like Marshall he found several blue-green chunks of rock, which he assumed were of the same material. When he had them assayed, however, all they contained in the way of metal was chromium. Whether the silver and the gold - still lie out there awaiting dis-covery is anybody's guess.