LEGENDS OF THE LOST

Behind a Waterfall in the Grand Canyon Lie Handfuls of Nuggets Ready for Picking

Gold and the Grand Can-yon. What combination of words carries a great-er thrill? The first holds so much power you believe in it for no good reason. The second you can't believe even when it's before your eyes. Separately, they make the gut dance and the pulse drum. Put them together and you have the essence of legend.

The story probably had its birth long before it reached the ears of Gladwell “Toney” Richardson. Surely it was talked about, swapped over stale beer in some saloon, or whispered through the flicker of a kerosene lantern in a ranch bunkhouse somewhere in northern Arizona. But no evidence of such verbal traffic exists.

So we are left with Richardson, who died in 1980. He was an Indian trader, a true character of Flagstaff who knew the secrets of the Northland better than anyone. He was such a prolific writer that few tales of treasure or adventure escaped the clatter of his typewriter.

This one was a beaut. As Richardson told it in Desert magazine in 1953, it began with this irresistible sentence: “West of the old Tanner Trail in the Grand Canyon is a small slope where gold nuggets can be picked up by the handful.” But for “Long Tom” Watson, described as a bearded, taciturn loner who spent much of his life prospecting, it wasn't nearly that easy.

As he did at the start of every winter, Watson returned to Flagstaff in late November of 1910, found an abandoned shack, and determined to hole up there until spring. In the shack he found a box filled with old newspapers and seed catalogs, perfect to feed the cookstove's firebox.

On a cold day in January, as he was picking through the box, he happened upon a stack of letters, including one that hadn't been opened. The name and address had been obliterated by time. But it bore a postmark from Williams, 33 miles east. He tore open the letter and read it by the firelight.

The letter, scribbled on brown wrapping paper and addressed “Dear Brother,” was written by a prospector suffering gunshot wounds who had just been brought to Williams from the Grand Canyon. In the letter, he told of a fantastic discovery: a stretch of Canyon ground littered with gold nuggets.

The elated prospector had stuffed them into an ore sack and hidden the find under some rocks near his camp. He planned to make his way out the next morning. But, the letter continued, he was joined in camp that night by two men he'd suspected of following him. Uncertain of their intentions, the prospector took the first chance he could to find a better hiding place for his precious gold. He did so, Gladwell Richardson tells, by jumping onto a precarious ledge and heaving the sack into a cave behind a 22foot-high waterfall. On his return, the prospector found the men rifling his belongings. A gunfight erupted, and the two were driven off. But the prospector was shot in two places. He managed to ride his burro to the Bright Angel Trail, where he was found and taken for treatment.

Believing death was imminent, he penned the letter to his brother, describing the location of the gold, and on the back drawing a crude map. He closed his last correspondence by asking his brother to join him in Williams immediately.

But the brother had evidently already departed Arizona when the letter was written and never received it. It was dated May 28, 1904. Six years later, as Long Tom Watson read the letter, he vowed to find the ore sack.

Richardson says that Watson's dogged search went on, amid failure and discouragement, until one day in June, 1914, when he was descending Old Tanner Trail from the base of Moran Point. He crossed the river to Horse Thief Trail and heard the sound of water coming from an area where none was supposed to be. He explored and found a waterfall, 22 feet high, 12 feet wide, and some 700 feet up the wall of the gorge. Richardson says Watson tested the probability of a cave entrance behind the falls by tossing a rock through the thin sheet of water. No sound. With his heart thumping, Watson made the dangerous climb onto the ledge, then leaped through a narrow side opening. "He found himself in a dark, cool recess, Watson slipped on the ledge in front of the cave and plunged into a rock-bottomed pool below. He awoke to find his left leg broken. "By desperate effort and strength due to knowledge that he at last had struck it rich," Richardson tells, "he crawled and pulled himself... from the ravine and down the slope to his stock," and eventually to a ranch on the South Rim.

The injuries put Watson in bowl-shaped and graveled under foot," Richardson says in Desert magazine. "From a waterproof container he took a match and struck it on the rock floor behind the tumbling water. He looked down in the flickering yellow light and found his knees resting on a blanket of golden nuggets."

The leather ore sack had been eaten by rodents and the nuggets scattered. With nothing to carry them in, Watson jammed a few of the largest into his pants pockets. But with his movements hampered by the weight of the gold, or perhaps by his excitement, vivid on paper had simply ceased to exist.

"I have known three other cases where prospectors could not return to the scene of a rich strike," Scanlon told Richardson. "Long Tom simply could not bring his one mental picture of his strike free of a host of other ers. Each new shift of scenery, each turn of the canyon wall, appeared to be the same."

Scanlon supposed another possibility: The waterfall was intermittent, running only after winters of heavy snow. Or, he suggested, maybe a work of nature, such as a landslide above the gorge, had formed a dam, shutting off the water.

Watson trekked into the Canyon one more time with the same result. Upon emerging, he followed the old Flagstaff-Grand Canyon stage route to Deadman Flat, where he made his last camp among the cedars. Scanlon happened to be passing in his buggy two days later when he spotted Watson's horse, then his burro, and finally his body. The old prospector had shot himself.

In some ways, Scanlon wasn't shocked. He knew that men who spend their lives alone, turning soil and rock, often collapse from the weight of their dreams.

A line from Richardson's compelling story says it all: "Four thumb-sized gold nuggets worn shiny by constant carrying reposed in the right pocket of Watson's denims."

Arizona Highways 47