LEGENDS OF THE LOST

legends of the lost The Lost-mine Mystery of Cerro Ruido Involves a Tale Too Good to Ring True

The first and most important fact you need to know before you head out to hunt for a lost mine is this: Is the story true? Too often searchers overlook this little detail and find not gold but a lot of grief if not a heap of expenses.

Case in point: “The Mystery of Cerro Ruido.” This tale is a complete fabrication, but the truth went undiscovered for more than 30 years. Only heaven knows how many poor folks got caught up in this hoax.

HERE'S THE STORY AS IT APpeared in Desert magazine, True West, and in the October, 1945, issue of Arizona Highways.

In the 1930s, a prospector known as Davie was exploring the region near Cerro Ruido, a peak in the Pajarito Mountains north of Nogales. His partner's name was Jim or Bill. They were after high-grade silver.

One day Davie arrived back at camp very excited, anxiously explaining to Jim that while prospecting a new area, he had discovered an old Spanish silvermine. Reaching into his pocket, he drew out several samples of rich silver ore. Also located near the mine, he said, were the ruins of a small mission. Davie had taken his camera with him and took a number of photographs, one of high cliffs near the mission.

The next day, Jim left camp to obtain supplies in Tucson and took the film with him to have it developed. Davie also gave him the ore samples to assay. Jim was to come back in less than a week. Meantime, Davie was to return to his discovery and put up the necessary location papers.

It so happened that as Jim approached his truck to leave camp, he heard a rumble of thunder and looked back. Then adjusting Davie's camera, which still contained the film of the silver location, he took a picture of the storm before driving off.

A week later, Jim returned to camp and found it completely washed away. He presumed Davie was swept away with it. His body was never found.

The pictures that were developed revealed the mine entrance, the mission, high cliffs that were located near the discovery, and Jim's picture of the approaching storm.

But poor Jim never found the site. That's the story in a nutshell.

MY BROTHER CHUCK, MY TREAsure-hunting partners Walter Fisher and Roy Purdie, and I were working the Pajarita Mountains area back in 1965 when we met Charley Bent, a longtime rancher and miner in that country. Charley told us about the Cerro Ruido deception and showed us copies of the published articles.

According to the old man, the instigator of the Cerro Ruido story (he couldn't remember the man's name) had been working at local ranches south of Tucson back in the 1930s. The guy had once been a railroader in Mexico and had photographed much of the country.

The others involved were cowboy friends at the ranch. All thought it would be great sport to pull off a lost Spanish mine hoax. The area they selected was the Pajaritos, at the time quite inaccessible.

Photos of the “site” would make the story believable they knew, and the former railroader had them. They added to that doctored pictures of some nearby cliffs that would serve as guideposts to the mysterious lost mine.

Somehow the story they concocted got into the hands of Norman G. Wallace, a writer and photographer, and it was published in Arizona Highways. Later, in 1950, John D. Mitchell, a prolific author of lost mine stories, got the tale printed in Desert magazine under the title "Lost Silver Mine of the Jesuits." Then in 1958, the story appeared once again, this time in True West by Milton F. Rose, a treasure hunter. He called it "I Found a Lost Mine."

As old Charley Bent explained it to us, the photo of the small mission at the supposed site was actually taken in the San Blas area of Mexico. And the picture showing the mine entrance depicted one of the hundreds of mines that dot the Arivaca area, he said.

But the one shown in the photo appears to be beneath the level of a canyon floor. Were that so, the tunnel would have been destroyed long ago by the monsoons that each year rebuild the canyons in this rugged area.

And then there was the picture of a mystery cliff that was supposed to mark the site of the mine and mission. We discovered it to be a doctored photo. You'll find these cliffs south of the old Ruby Road, near Pena Blanca Canyon, now Pena Blanca Lake and Recreational Area. But at first glance they won't look like the ones in the photograph.

My partners and I had discovered this ourselves. For years we'd driven this route and had noticed the cliffs, but we never paid them much attention.

One afternoon Walter Fisher was returning to our camp and happened to look up at them.

Perhaps it was the way the light struck them. Suddenly he realized he'd seen them before someplace else.

Stopping to study the cliffs more closely, Walter noticed a relationship between the rocks, especially the contour near the bottom, and the photo of the cliffs in the magazine. He made a quick sketch of the outline, and when he arrived back in our camp, we compared it with the magazine photo. To our surprise, they were identical, except the published one was tilted.

Around noon the next day, we drove to the site and took several pictures. Later, after a close inspection of our photos, we discovered that the people who had started this hoax had tilted their negative about 15 degrees and printed only the section near the bottom of the cliffs.

And this had gone undiscovered for all those years.

How many other rigged tales like this one are still floating about, I wonder concoctions created on the back porch of some ranch house in the early hours of the evening.

Who knows?