LEGENDS OF THE LOST

An Indian Woman Found a Rock of Gold but Never Divulged the Site of the Fortune

She'd be long dead by now. She never was famous. We don't even know her name. Some say she was a member of the Yuma tribe, but she may have been Yavapai. By all reports, she would have been far happier never finding the gold now known as the Lost Squaw Mine. Several versions of her legend began appearing in print as early as 1923, but they all agree on some points. In the 1870s or early 1880s, three Indians two men and one womanleft Yuma for Wickenburg, traveling on foot. The 150 miles they walked wound through mountains and across wide, flat valleys. Their desert route would have had several camps and few springs as they followed ancient Indian trails and wagon roads that connected frontier mining camps such as Prescott, Wickenburg, and Ehrenberg.

Somewhere along their route, she picked up a pretty rock, put it in her bag, and kept walking. When she returned to Yuma, she showed the rock to some people who proclaimed that it was nearly pure gold. Such news traveled fast in the frontier West, and several prospectors approached her about the source of the rock. She told them she didn't remember, and she didn't even care.

Later three tough hombres showed up and put the question to her in harsher terms. They abducted her and her two male friends at gunpoint, taking them along the trail back to Wickenburg. The desperados alternately begged and threatened their captives, pausing every few miles to scan the terrain in hopes of freshening her memory. She told them nothing.

After several days and many stops, their patience thinned. They beat her, but still she told nothing. Her friends were killed.

Finally she motioned to the nearby mouth of a canyon. Exhausted and injured, she sat under a paloverde tree and watched as they attacked the ground on hands and knees, trying to rip nuggets from the earth. The murderers found nothing and returned to beat her again.

She escaped during the night after enduring hours of threats to kill her, or perhaps the scoundrels gave up and abandoned her. Either way, they probably thought she'd die in the desert while they rode back to the comforts of Yuma.

But they were wrong. She struggled back home, nursing her bruises, cuts, and a newfound hatred for "civilized" men who would kill for a rock. She refused to speak about the gold, but the rumor persisted that she told her family of the mountains known by the Indian name Ah-haquahala or Hoc-qua-hala, meaning "where running water is high up." This range is the Harquahala with its dozen or so springs high on an eastern plateau.

By driving U.S. Route 95 from Yuma to Quartzsite and then taking U.S. 60 to Wickenburg, I roughly paralleled her route. Flat valleys mark the open country, interrupted by spectacularly rough mountain ranges like the Castle Domes, Kofas, and Plomosas which have all produced rich strikes of gold. Roadside spots include names like Black Rock, Salome, Hope, Timbuktu, and as if to prove that prospecting fever persists - Desert Gold. The gold that the Indian woman found was washed down by thousands ofrains from some secret place above. When enough flecks and nuggets wash to one place, we can find rich placers, but even then we look upstream in hopes of finding its lode, the main vein of rich ore.

Every few miles, I stopped the car to scan the canyons and ridges, to pick up dirt and rocks, hoping to see a glimmer of what the woman found. I did find a tattered shack, a rusted fender, a pile of rocks marking the corner of a mining claim, and an abandoned farmstead. But no gold.

I drove around the north side of the massive mountain and then took Eagle Eye Road southward so I could wheel back along the south edge of the range. I imagined the Indian woman shortcutting through the mountains and following dry washes on the south side. That's the way I would have gone if I had been hiking to Wickenburg.

The Harquahalas filled my eyes. Large, dark, and mysterious, they formed from the giant turmoil of faulting and folding, pressure and heat, cutting and erosion. I was tempted to drive to the summit of the range, but she didn't find her gold there.

I knew it was down here somewhere, like knowing there were fish in a big lake but not being able to catch any. This same feeling must have driven prospectors to spend day after day following hunches and leads. Yet we must remember that experts estimate only one goldseeker in a thousand found a vein or pocket worth digging. I ended up back at Salome and took a dirt road south out Yet we must remember that experts estimate only one goldseeker in a thousand found a vein or pocket worth digging. I ended up back at Salome and took a dirt road south out of town. It went to some scat-tered islands of rock known since the 1940s as the Little Harquahala Mountains. They showed more color than the main range, an indication of more minerals. I saw a coyote in the wash and the track of a deer, though it could have been a bighorn sheep.

I didn't find the Lost Squaw Mine, but maybe somebody else did. At an old cemetery, 1 counted some 35 mounds, but the wooden headboards lacked names or dates. Looking south toward the foot of Martin Peak with its distinctive red rock and banded cliffs, I saw a pioneer mining operation.

My map confirmed it was the Bonanza Mine, discovered in 1888. The mine produced more than $1.6 million in gold during its first six years, and it still yields a small profit. A large arroyo passes the tailings pile and heads out into the desert. Several diggings along the way show that others have tried to mine what placer gold washed downstream.

Hundreds of small mines and prospects, as well as several other large and famous mines, litter the Harquahalas. The claims here started about 1876 as prospectors found gold, silver, copper, and lead in veins and in placers - pockety deposits but widespread. The prospectors looked for quartz and pyrite gold indicators.

Not far from the Bonanza, the Golden Eagle Mine, a rich vein, sits on a ridge that washes to the south. It, too, could have laid the nugget at the Indian woman's feet. A few ridges away are the Socorro Mine, the San Marcos, Hercules, and Alaskan, each with a vein of gold. Prospectors worked placer mines on Centennial Wash and along Tiger Wash, south of Eagle Eye Peak. As recently as 1932, someone found the Hidden Treasure Mine. How many other veins or placers await someone lucky enough to pick up a stray rock?

The Harquahalas produced a gold rush in 1889. Years ending in nine seemed to have held magic for victims of gold fever: In 1849 it struck California; in 1859, Pike's Peak; in 1869, White Pine; and in 1879, Tombstone.

The Harquahala strike of '89 drew miners and camp followers from throughout the West. Even former lawman Wyatt Earp and Nellie Cashman, the "miner's angel," came to the town of Harqua Hala from Tombstone. By 1891 the boom flattened, claims were sold, ore ran out, shafts collapsed, and water dried up. The towns of Oroville, Harrisburg, and Harqua Hala were abandoned.

Sometime in the 1880s, the Indian woman's story was heard by Ed Schieffelin, who had discovered the silver lode at Tombstone in 1877. He visited her many times, using patience and kindness instead of treachery to learn where she found her golden rock.

Eventually Schieffelin extracted a vague location that he took to indicate the southern Harquahalas, but he never found his own strike there. He told a friend that the Bonanza Mine generally fit the description given by the woman. If so, she may have taken her captors to within a few hundred yards of a real treasure.

Is it the place? Who knows? But if the bullies had been friendly to her, maybe today we'd all know the source of the Lost Squaw Mine.