Legends of the Lost

legends of the lost We Track the Organ-Grinders' Gold Ledge to Tres Alamos on Date Creek

The three Italian organgrinders weren't looking for a fortune of gold, but they found and lost one, all within a day. They had come to America to work, but - like many others following the cry of "Gold!" - they didn't plan to dig or pan it themselves. They knew that bored miners would splurge their hard-won dust on any amusement, even dancing monkeys.

This trio of entertainers, dressed in circus jackets and fez hats to match their monkeys, likely were brothers or cousins who had struck out together as a team. They had worked around the Mediterranean from port to port when they decided to head to America and boarded a clipper ship for, they thought, the California goldfields. On the voyage, they cranked their barrel organs for the passengers and crew, and they even earned back the cost of their tickets by the time they sailed around Cape Horn.

But they weren't prepared for the landing. When they bought their tickets for the Gold Rush, they envisioned a grand wharf in San Francisco and a secure stagecoach ride to some fancy mining camp theater in the Sierras. It might have been that way in the Gold Rush of '49, but this was 1865, and the new gold rush was in Arizona. Off the tip of Baja California, their sailing ship transferred them to a flat-bottomed here's-smoke-in-your-eye paddle-wheel steamer for the trip up the Sea of Cortes and then the treacherous Colorado River.

After five arduous days, they reached Yuma, where someone told the organ-grinders that the latest strikes were still farther upriver. So the men bought another steamer ticket to La Paz, near modern Ehrenberg. La Paz boomed in 1862, when a prospector named Paulino Weaver found gold in nearby hills. Soon more than 2,000 men were scouring the hills - one even found a nugget worth $800, a king's treasure in those days.

At La Paz, muleand ox-team wagons loaded partially refined gold ore onto the steamers and picked up shovels, stamp mills, flour, and canned peaches for the miners in the hills. Within a decade, the river steamers had carried more than $5 million in ore to be transferred to distant smelters, some as far away as Wales. The town was so prosperous it once was the seat of Yuma County.

By spring the organ-grinders grew restless and yearned for new customers. Back in 1863 gold had been discovered to the east at Antelope Creek, Rich Hill, Weaver, Stanton, and Vulture. Wickenburg and Prescott became hubs of mining activity. The organ-grinders bet that miners in every camp were itching to see their dancing monkeys, so they packed up and set out to find new audiences.

They followed the trail used by freight wagons and stagecoaches from La Paz to Prescott. It wound from one spring or well to another in the broad valley between tween the massive Harcuvar and Harquahala mountains. A modern highway, State Route 60, roughly parallels this route, and this is where, with a few clues from a 1942 story by John D. Mitchell, I picked up their trail.

Their horseback trip was slow but uneventful until they befriended an elderly Mohave Indian who had run short of food. In gratitude for sharing their rations, he offered to show them a place where he had seen gold near a spring several miles north of the trail. They needed water anyway, so they followed him up Date Creek. Several times they had to detour out of the canyon to bypass rock walls where the stream's raging water had eaten 40-foot falls into the red rock and where pools proved too deep for the animals. It took them half a day to reach the spring, now known as Tres Alamos, "three cottonwoods."

I too follow that trail up Date Creek to the spring. Here a tongue of black basalt laps over the red rock below and pushes underground water to the surface. Today as then, the spring bubbles year-round and waters a thicket of cottonwood and mesquite trees. A homemade pipeline carries water to ranches downstream. Tracks of deer, coyotes, and a bobcat dot the mud. It is cool, shaded, and green here. For the organ-grinders, this site must have been a wonderful respite from the dry, dusty trail.

As promised, their guide led them to a ledge nearby, so the legend goes, where they found more gold than they had seen in all their days at Camp La Paz. They were rich! Eagerly they stuffed nuggets into their pockets. In the morning, they would proceed to Prescott, not as organ-grinders but as rich miners. In their wildest dreams, they had never thought they too could call themselves miners.

into their pockets. In the morning, they would proceed to Prescott, not as organ-grinders but as rich miners. In their wildest dreams, they had never thought they too could call themselves miners.

As I sit at the spring, I imagine it as the strangest of Wild West scenes: a backdrop of Joshua trees and red cliffs, three Italian organ-grinders, and trained monkeys holding tin cups overflowing with nuggets of gold.

But as luck would have it, they were all on destiny's chain, and fate cranked cruel music. This is surely one of the prettiest places in all Arizona, but it also was a lousy place to die. A war party of Hualapai Indians perhaps the same group that ambushed Gen. George Crook's cavalry in 1871 tracked the intruders to their spring and shortly before dawn killed the guide and two of the organgrinders. While the raiders took the horses, the lone survivor watched in horror from a thicket. Though unscathed he was dazed with terror. He waited until nightfall, and by starlight he covered his companions with rocks and gravel. At dawn he filled his water bag, set the monkeys free, and staggered back down the canyon toward the main trail. It took him until late afternoon. Exhausted, devastated, and near death, he huddled beside the road. A passing wagoner hauling supplies to Prescott found him, but the organ-grinder was already half out of his mind. He muttered incoherently about a ledge before dying, but a kerchief in his pocket did bulge with gold. The freighter had pieces of a rich puzzle, yet not enough to find it. Where could it be? The ledge was somewhere north of the spring, but the story gave no clue how far. Was the gold near or even at Tres Alamos Spring itself, or was it still farther north? The nearest known profitable gold claims were on Peeples Creek, a full day's march northward.

The imposing citadel of Tres Alamos Peaks looms over the rolling foothills below. The peaks glow radiant with reds, whites, and greens by morning but stand foreboding and distant in the afternoon shade. A white band of tuff rings them with perilous cliffs. But, to a prospector, they don't look nearly as promising as the granites of the Date Creek Mountains to the east or even the schists of the Santa Maria Mountains to the north.

Some take "ledge" to mean a lode in a layer of cliff rock, which could put it on the slopes of Tres Alamos Peaks or of Ives Peak to the north, but maps show few claims in these mountains. In my own mind, the ledge will be a slab of basalt across a creek or side canyon. Like a riffle box, this ledge may have trapped placer gold from one of the rich Date Creek or Santa Maria lodes upriver.Today cottonwoods still stand at the spring. They have been ravaged by floods and drought, but their leaves dance to the music of the wind. I listen for the tune of a barrel organ. I can only wonder what treasure stories the cottonwoods would tell if I knew how to ask.