Original subtitles

[tense music] [footsteps]

- Tonight, the most famous lost mine in the old West.

- The quantity of gold in the Lost Dutchman mine

is over half a billion dollars.

- People have been searching well over a century,

but no one's found it.

- The clues to its whereabouts are intriguing,

but some say the land is cursed.

- Anybody who trespassed against this sacred land

would face death.

- The Superstition Mountains are unusually dangerous,

they're rugged and unforgiving.

- Now, we explore the top theories

surrounding the Lost Dutchman's mine.

- Lo and behold, they have these cryptic symbols on them.

- The heart on the stones is the key to the entire puzzle.

[explosion] - As legends suggests,

is it possible the gold and the land it's hidden on

are somehow cursed?

- Many people have died

trying to find the Lost Dutchman mine

and there are people that are still willing

to risk their lives to find it.

- Where is the Lost Dutchman's mine?

[dramatic music]

Spring 1891.

On the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona,

83-year-old German immigrant Jacob Waltz

is having a string of bad luck.

- Jacob Waltz is a prospector

who has come to Arizona

during the Gold Boom in the 1860s.

- By 1891, he is a farmer

and his farm home has been basically ruined

in a massive flood.

- Some accounts have him spending

as many as two nights in a tree to avoid the water,

contracting pneumonia in the process.

- Jacob is nursed back to health

by a woman named Julia Thomas, who's 29 years old,

so she's much younger than Jacob.

Now she runs a boarding house

that Jacob eventually moves into,

and since they both speak German,

they eventually develop a rapport.

- What happens next

is Jacob is visited by some of his friends,

who bring five sacks of gold

that they recovered from his farmhouse.

- Julia perks up as anyone would,

and she starts to realize, you know,

maybe there's more to this scruffy looking man

than she first thought.

- [Fishburne] Julia plays nurse for several months,

taking care of Waltz,

and they grow close.

- With that growing trust and friendship,

Jacob could find some Julia

where the gold his friends brought, is from.

- He tells her that the gold is from a mine

that is hidden in the Superstition Mountains nearby

and that it's filled with gold.

- [Scott Wolter] Jacob confides in Julia,

this mine has over $20 million in gold,

which in today's dollars would be around 700 million.

- The Superstition Mountains

are sacred territory to the Apache Native Americans

who are indigenous to this area.

- So according to Apache lore,

the Superstition Mountains are named as such

because it's the hum of their thunder god,

who lives in the mountain.

And according to their legend,

he will kill anyone who trespasses there.

- The historical root of this tradition

seems to lie in events from the 1840s.

- There was a family from Mexico City called the Peraltas,

and they made it a point to mine the gold in there.

And the Apaches told them

that they should not be in the mountains.

So one day, the Peraltas got tired of the harassment

and so they decided to pack up and leave

and take their whole operation back to Mexico,

but they only got so far.

When they were exposed in the clearing,

that's when the Apaches swooped down on the whole party.

- The Peralta family don't have a lot of history

on what happened next.

One version of the story is that

there was a big fight with the Apache

and that a lot of people died.

The other story is that they were all massacred,

but one or two people,

who managed to escape back to the family.

- The last thing the Apaches did

was to go and take mules

with saddlebags full of gold ore,

and they took them back into the mountain.

[explosion]

- The Apache's dynamite some of the mines closed,

but according to legend, one of them stays open.

- Waltz claims that 10 years later,

while prospecting on his own,

he comes across the last Peralta mine.

- [Gottlieb] Waltz goes inside and what does he find?

Gold everywhere.

So much gold, he can like cut it off the walls.

It's embedded in quartz, it's gold ore,

there's veins of gold everywhere.

- Then, many years later on his deathbed,

he makes something of a confession

to what might have been his only friend.

- He says that when he recovers,

he's going to take her to this mine,

but his situation only gets worse.

And so he develops a stroke,

he's partially crippled,

but he's still able to draw this map

and it has these cryptic clues

to the location of this mine.

One of the clues that Jacob leaves behind for Julia,

is he says that at the entrance of the mine,

it looks like an upside down funnel.

- One of the other clues is that

from the mine's entrance,

you can see what he calls a military trail.

- Another clue says that a particular shadow

would be cast from Weaver's Needle,

which is a distinctive geological formation

in the Superstition Mountains.

- The entrance to the mine

is within the shadow cast of Weaver's Needle,

and the sun will shine into the mine's entrance

and the mine is located on a north-south running canyon;

with a rock face near the entrance.

- [Fishburne] Waltz also tells Julia

that from the mine, you can see four peaks

that appear to be lined up as one.

- The four peaks landmarks

is about 40 miles outside of Phoenix.

It's part of the Tonto National Forest.

- But did he mean they line up

and look like one peak,

or can you see all four peaks at once?

No one knows quite exactly what he meant,

and where to start from.

- [Fishburne] Waltz dies on October 25th, 1891,

taking the mine's exact location to his grave.

- Julia immediately determines

to go and find the lost mine.

But after months of searching,

using the clues in the map that Waltz had left,

they are unable to find anything.

No gold, no mine, nothing.

- She gets to the point where

she becomes financially destitute,

and eventually she has to give up

because she can't find it.

But she does decide to tell a newspaper

everything that Jacob had told her.

- And the story begins to spread

and this is how this whole new fervor starts,

looking for gold in the Superstition Mountains.

- With these articles,

the term "Lost Dutchman's mine" is invented.

Interestingly enough, Waltz is not Dutch, he's German.

A lot of German immigrants during this period,

and the Americans hear Deutsch,

which is German for "German,"

but the name Dutch sticks;

and so they become known as Dutch immigrants.

- People now pour into the Superstition Mountains

in search of the hidden treasure.

- [Fishburne] Initially,

many of these fortune hunters alight on one spot.

- Weaver's Needle is a very unique land formation.

It is the remnant of what used to be a prehistoric volcano,

on the very eastern part of the Superstition Mountain.

It eroded throughout time

and all that's left now is a huge, tall pinnacle

and it looks like a real tall skinny mountain.

- [Fishburne] It's named after Pauline Weaver,

a mountain man and scout

who explored the area in the 19th century.

- You can see from it, a military road.

And if you remember,

Jacob Waltz refers to being able to see a military road

from the entrance of the mine.

- But, there's a size problem.

Weaver's Needles very big, it's like a thousand feet high,

so it casts a very big shadow.

Doesn't make finding the actual mine very easy.

- [Fishburne] Even before Jacob Waltz

makes his deathbed confession

and the Lost Dutchman's mine gets its name,

the area around Weaver's Needle

earns a sinister reputation.

- In 1880, two former soldiers travel into Phoenix

and they approach a silver mine

and the manager there looking for work,

and they have gold ore with them.

Remember, at this time, Phoenix isn't very big.

It's a small rural community, about 2,500 people.

So if someone rolls into town with a bunch of gold,

people are gonna notice.

- They sell some gold ore

and the person buying the ore

is struck by the quantity,

as well as the quality of this ore.

And he asks these two soldiers,

where did you find this gold?

- And they said, well,

there's tons of it laying around this mine.

So he tells them, well,

if you guys think there's that much gold,

I'll outfit you and you bring back some more samples,

and I'll invest and back you on this venture.

So the soldiers then leave, outfitted.

- [Fishburne] After two weeks,

the soldiers failed to return.

Hoping the men haven't run off with the gold

or been taken by the Apache,

a search party is sent out.

- And they eventually find the two men,

naked and dead, each shot in the head.

Murdered for the gold?

We're not sure.

- The reality is that

this is a really treacherous landscape

and mining is a very dangerous, cutthroat business

and people are afraid.

- It lends credence to the curse.

It makes it more real.

- [Fishburne] Well into the 20th century,

People searching for the Lost Dutchman's mine

close to Weaver's Needle,

have met with tragic ends.

- Some people are murdered.

You have dehydration, starvation.

These are very treacherous conditions in these mountains,

so there's a lot of mystery and legend tied to this.

- But with so many deaths and so little gold found,

treasure hunters are now beginning

to search other locations for the mine.

- [Fishburne] Numerous lives have been lost

in Arizona's Superstition Mountains,

in the hunt for the Lost Dutchman's mine.

Some swear an Apache curse is to blame,

but that hasn't stopped prospectors

from carrying on the search.

- And along with Weaver's Needle,

there is another location

that's long been associated

with the Lost Dutchman's mine.

- This spot isn't without its tragedy as well,

and it's home to one of

the most well known and puzzling

attempts to find the lost goldmine.

- In 1914, Erwin Ruth,

the son of an amateur treasure hunter named Adolf Ruth

travels to Mexico on business.

- While he's in Mexico,

one version of the story is that

Erwin saves the life of a government official.

- The official learns about

his father's interest in Western folklore and treasure,

and it so happens that this Mexican

has some connection to treasure in the American West.

He is in fact a distant relative of the Peraltas,

and he gives to Erwin some maps;

maps of the fabled Peralta mines

somewhere in the Superstition Mountains.

Erwin is not especially interested in the maps,

but his father certainly is.

He has them inspected and dated

to around the time of the Mexican revolution,

which seems to provide some sense of authenticity.

The maps are in some ways legible,

in that they seem to denote a particular area;

the Superstition Mountains,

but other things about them don't make sense.

- He's studying this map

and he's looking at the geography,

and it doesn't quite match up.

- Ultimately, Ruth concludes that

people have been looking

in the wrong place the whole time.

Weaver's Needle is not the key.

It's, in fact,

another equally distinct geological formation:

Blacktop Mesa.

- So Adolf Ruth decides to go

on this solo expedition to blacktop Mesa,

using these maps to try to find

this secret hidden mine

that it supposedly holds the clues to.

- [Fishburne] Adolf Ruth arrives in Arizona

in the spring of 1931;

a 66-year-old with chronic pain and a limp.

- Adolf Ruth is about five feet tall

and just about a hundred pounds wet,

so he's not the guy to be

going into the mountains at that time.

What happens is, Ruth finds some ranch hands

that are willing to make a few extra bucks

to take Ruth in and set him up in a camp.

- So June 14th, 1931,

they take him to a place called Willow Springs

and that's where they leave him.

- After about a week, they don't hear from him,

so they go into the mountains looking for him

and they don't find him.

His camp has been abandoned.

- Nothing more is heard about Adolf Ruth for several months

and then some campers eventually make a discovery.

- Over near the Salt River,

some campers end up finding a message in a bottle

and it's allegedly from Ruth.

And it says, I'm under a tree, I'm injured,

PS: I found the Lost Dutchman's mine.

- Fast forward to December,

they eventually do find Ruth's skull;

just a skull, no body,

and there is what appears to be a bullet hole in it.

- About a month after they discover Ruth's head,

his body is found.

And none of his belongings are missing,

except for the maps.

- In a bag, he has a checkbook

in which he's written some notes.

One of the most relevant notes is the Latin phrase,

Veni, vidi, vici, which is Julius Caesar's words,

I came, I saw, I conquered.

- Does that mean that Ruth found

the fabled Lost Dutchman's mine?

Well, some of his other scribbles

suggest that maybe he did.

- Unfortunately, most of what he writes doesn't make sense.

The only thing he does leave that you can read,

is something about a mysterious circle

and then fields of black basaltic rock.

- [Fishburne] The Ruth story

grabs headlines around the country

and the public becomes obsessed.

- All of these elements add up to a media sensation,

which is attractive to audiences

in the depths of the Great Depression

where their eyes look west

to a place where most Americans will never go,

except in their imaginations.

A place where they can imagine themselves

leading more authentic, more exciting,

more dangerous lives.

It reignites interest in the Lost Dutchman mine,

interest that has not abated to this day.

- Initially, they rule Ruth's death a suicide,

but then they realized he never fired his gun.

So now they believe that he died

because of natural causes, the harsh conditions,

dehydration, starvation,

and they believe that the holes are from a predator

and happened after he died.

- [Fishburne] But even after all these years,

many people theorize that Ruth was murdered

by someone who wanted the Lost Dutchman's mine

all to themselves.

- Ruth's argument for Blacktop Mesa

being the locale of the lost mine,

is persuasive to him and has been to other treasure hunters,

but it doesn't line up

with all of the clues that Waltz left on his deathbed.

- Blacktop Mesa is not

within the shadow of Weaver's Needle,

so that clue is kind of outta play.

- However, it is geographically sort of close

and the black basalt sort of fits in

with the note he left in his checkbook.

- There are other points

that are in favor of Blacktop Mesa.

It gets its name from its top of basalt,

which is also more impervious to erosion,

that gives it its flat top.

We also know that volcanic eruptions can,

under the right circumstances,

help to produce precious metals.

- [Fishburne] Could the blacktop

sit on top of a layer of gold?

- Blacktop is also located above the canyon floor,

so you can see a military road from there.

- Because Blacktop Mesa

is relatively close to Weaver's Needle,

the rest of the clues left behind by Jacob Waltz

line up about as well as they do for Weaver's Needle.

- Whatever Ruth did or didn't discover,

whatever did or didn't happen to him,

those are secrets he took with him to his grave.

- [Fishburne] The 1950s and sixties

brings new types of gold hunters

to Arizona's Superstition Mountains

in search of the Lost Dutchman's mine.

Some are meticulous researchers

with intricate plans forged over years.

Others are professional businessmen

with the money to invest whatever it takes.

- With the 1950s and sixties

comes a new breed of treasure hunter.

Taking advantage of new surveying

or geological tools that can not only

look at the land but look into the land,

in ways that haven't been possible before.

- In addition, they aren't just looking

at Weaver's Needle and Blacktop Mesa,

they're looking elsewhere.

- [Fishburne] But there's one fortune hunter

who's convinced Adolf Ruth was onto something.

- In the 1960s, a private investigator from Oklahoma City

by the name of Glen MaGill

becomes interested in Ruth's story.

- He's a respected man in his community

and he's actually interested

in debunking myths and mysteries.

- MaGill reads about Ruth's maps

and he concludes that there's no way

he would've brought the original map that he had,

into the Superstition Mountains when he was prospecting.

He concludes that the original maps

had to still be at Ruth's original home.

- [Fishburne] To test his theory,

he tracks down Adolf's son, Erwin Ruth,

and arranges a meeting.

- MaGill learns from Ruth's son, that yes,

his father had taken the originals.

- But, and Erwin says,

he did make copies and I have one.

- MaGill and Erwin strike up something of a friendship

and so Erwin eventually gives MaGill a copy of the maps.

- Being the good private investigator that he is,

MaGill also contacts and speaks with

members of the Peralta family

to see what they know.

- MaGill eventually concludes

that all of Jacob Waltz's cryptic clues

lead to a spot called Cañon Fresco,

which translates to the cool or fresh canyon.

- This is a good spot to look, why?

Because it's in the shadow of Weaver's Needle,

you can see the four peaks from it

and you can see the military road.

Incidentally, you can't see

from the military road, up to the area.

- MaGill is a private eye,

he's not a mountain man.

So what he does is in December of 1964,

he hires a helicopter

so he can look at the location from the air.

He takes hundreds of aerial photographs

of the Superstitions,

hoping to correlate those to the copies of Ruth's maps.

- Based upon the aerial photographs in the flyover,

he finds this green area

which he decides to investigate.

- MaGill identifies a hidden green canyon

atop Bluff Springs mountain.

He thinks this is Cañon Fresco.

He heads out to investigate.

- And when he is able to make it there,

he finds mule shoes in the ground

purportedly from the Peralta's stock.

- [Fishburne] MaGill assembles a small team

and returns for a closer look.

- He and a team decide to go into the mountains,

in this particular area.

And in the process,

they find this hidden vertical mineshaft,

which matches the description

of the entrance to the mine

that Jacob Waltz had reflected on

in his cryptic clues that he relayed to Julia.

They end up going into that mine shaft

and find even more clues.

- You find some rough hewn timbers,

exactly of the type

that the Peralta said that they used in their mines.

So, all this is coming together.

He's super excited.

- MaGill is so confident

that he has found the Lost Dutchman's mine,

that he files a claim to start excavating;

which is huge national news.

Only trouble is, there's no gold.

- He spends thousands and thousands of dollars

going in to the mountains

and going to this specific spot in Cañon Fresco.

- But, he finds no gold;

but he doesn't give up.

He really believes he's in the right spot.

- [Fishburne] References to MaGill's expeditions

slowly fade from the news,

but his work breathes new life

into the search for the Lost Dutchman's mine.

- Even though it turns out

that MaGill didn't find the treasure,

he did find this green area, Cañon Fresco,

that none of the other treasure hunters

before him had discovered.

- But I think what a lot of people don't understand

is that in desert regions,

climate can change very quickly.

This can wreak havoc with some of these older maps,

because the terrain changes.

- It's hard to say if MaGill

found Cañon Fresco from Ruth's maps,

or he found a different spot.

The original clue from the maps might still be valid.

- The tale of Jacob Waltz

and the Lost Dutchman's mine

has been told and retold so many times over the years,

it's impossible to know where the truth ends

and the legend begins.

Hundreds of treasure hunters

have ventured into the supposedly cursed land

of the Superstition Mountains,

only to come up empty time and time again.

But what if the tale of an accidental discovery

of a relic on the desert floor

could be the key that finally unlocks the mystery?

- Throughout the 20th century,

Adolf Ruth's maps, as complicated as they are,

were considered the only legitimate maps

to the Lost Dutchman's mine.

But it is possible

that there is another guide out there

just waiting to be decoded.

- [Fishburne] One local legend

goes back to the late 1940s.

Oregon police officer Travis Tumlinson

is vacationing in Arizona.

On the long drive,

he pulls off the side of a highway

some 10 miles from the Superstition Mountains

to stretch his legs.

- He's walking along Highway 60,

outside Apache Junction in Arizona,

and he trips on what appears to be four stones.

He picks them up.

They have these cryptic sketches and carvings on them.

- One has a carving of a priest and a cross,

one has a horse, another has a heart with an inscription.

- He's curious.

He thinks he's found some southwestern art,

so he sells it to a local collector.

- But then, the Dutch treasure hunters come in

and what they see is something very different.

They see stones that can be put together

in such a way is to reveal a map.

A map to what? The Lost Dutchman mine.

- What could be the real clue on the stones,

is that there seems to be

an inscription of a name, Miguel.

Miguel is a Peralta family member.

- There are also words that translate to,

I pasture north of a river.

There's also this phrase,

18 places to get to El Corazon.

It does sound like a cryptic treasure map.

- And one of the stones has a shape of a heart

with the year 1847.

Well, that is a year before

the Peralta family is massacred.

- Decades have gone by,

no one can decode these stones,

not for a lack of trying.

- One of the things

that the stone maps have going for them,

is that unlike their paper counterparts,

they're unchanged by the passage of time.

They're not as easy to manipulate

and they can't be redrawn

like the paper maps may have been.

- Eventually, the stones end up in a Phoenix museum.

- Decades later, they become

very interesting to a couple,

Robert Kesselring and his wife Linda.

- He's a missile systems engineer,

she's a computer scientist.

They spend a lot of time and energy

trying to decode those stone carvings.

- They take the stones

and they compare them to topography maps

and they really focus in on one part of the stone,

which is this heart indentation in the stone.

- [Fishburne] Starting in 2009,

the Kesselrings spend years

trying to decode the clues.

Finally, in 2013,

they think they've cracked the mystery.

- Robert Kesselring seems to believe

that the heart is one of many mining symbols

that date back to the time of the Peraltas;

and to Kesselring,

the heart along with other symbols

like crosses and circles are part of what is

kind of like a secret code.

For Kesselring, the heart is

almost like an arrow pointing to the mine.

- The Kesselrings head out to the Superstition Mountains

to narrow their search area.

- Using a combination of aerial photography

and on the ground observation,

they determined that the place we should be looking

is somewhere else in the Superstitions.

- The Kesselrings think the mine

is in a spot called Deering Canyon.

They also think this area lines up to Waltz's clues.

- Having concluded that Deering Canyon

is where Waltz's mine is,

they set out to search the area.

- In route, they pass by some tribal remains,

which make them think of the curse of Superstition Mountains

so they really think they're on the right track.

- [Fishburne] The Kesselrings setup camp

and search the area for signs of the lost gold mine.

- Against a cliff face,

Kesselring finds what he believes was once

the entrance to a mine shaft.

- He says he sees

what he believes are Spanish mining symbols

around the entrance to the shaft,

and he believes that this is evidence

that the Peraltas once mined in this area.

- They think this could be

one of these sealed Peralta mines.

- According to Kesselring,

the entrance to the mine shaft looks like

it's been filled up through natural erosion.

- Next to that first caved in mine,

they find a series of others

and that aligns with legend

that the Apaches sealed up the mines

after trespassers had come through.

- As they continue to survey the area,

they notice a distinct patch of very tall grass

suggesting that at some point in the not too distant past,

that ground had been disturbed;

that its composition is different,

enabling a different type of vegetation.

- Kesselring uses a piece of tech

called a ground phase recorder.

It's kind of like radar

and it creates a hologram image

of what is under the surface of this earth.

- And underneath, they seem to see a mineshaft

a couple feet below the surface.

- [Fishburne] What the Kesselrings think is a mine

is covered with two feet of dirt and overgrowth.

- Looking at the cliff face,

Kesselring believes that he could see cracks

that are known as fault gouges.

These cracks are pinkish-white.

- Kesselring believes that this pinkish color

comes from rhyolite lava,

which sometimes can be an indicator of gold.

- For Kesselring, this is the moment of truth,

the moment of proof that the mine exists.

I know where it is, here it is.

But as with his predecessors, that isn't enough.

There's something that's going to stand in his way.

Now fortunately for Kesselring it isn't death,

it's the federal government.

- Deering Canyon, like the whole Dutchman search area,

is part of the Tonto National Forest.

- There's this thing called the Wilderness Act.

They're in a national park

and you can't dig and mine in a national park,

without permission.

So until the government gives permission

for people to excavate this area,

they could have found the Lost Dutchman mine,

but no one's gonna know.

- [Fishburne] Some find reason

to question the Kesselrings' findings

and the validity of the Peralta stones themselves.

- Many have argued that the Peralta stones are fakes,

that they aren't ancient stones,

that they're the product of more contemporary hands.

- The heart in particular seems like machine cut;

like it seems too perfect of a heart

to have been carved in the mid 19th century.

- So whether or not the Peralta stones

actually relate to the Lost Dutchman mine

and whether they are real or not,

it matters, but it sort of doesn't.

Why? Because it really brings the idea of the lost mine

front and center.

- [Fishburne] Stories of the Lost Dutchman's mine

continue to echo throughout the Superstition Mountains.

And in the early 1980s,

a new treasure trove of information about the mine

comes to light.

- Ted Cox is a local, born in the 1920s.

Very interested in a lost mine.

Cox has been looking for the Lost Dutchman's mine

his entire life, and based upon his notes,

he thinks he found it.

One of the important things about Cox

is that his father was a contemporary of Waltz,

so he's a little more closely connected

than other people who've been looking for the mine.

- Like many Arizona miners,

Cox is raised with the stories

of the Superstition Mountains,

which come to include

the Peralta family legend very quickly.

- When he dies in the spring of 1983,

all of his prospecting notes,

2000 pages worth are uncovered.

- Cox's Widow gives the papers

to a local Dutchman treasure hunter, Ron Feldman,

who begins to go through his papers,

which are the story of his life.

- What Feldman learns from the notes

is that Cox concludes,

partly based on the information he gleans

from his personal connection to Jacob Waltz,

that the majority of

the searches for the Dutchman's mine

have been in the wrong area.

The mine is not in the west side of the Superstitions.

- In 1957, Cox is sure

that he has found the Lost Dutchman's mine.

It's located on the eastern side

of the Superstition Mountains.

The mine that Cox discovered

matches up with Waltz's original clues.

- The mine Cox finds has a funnel shaped entrance,

just like Waltz described.

You can see a military trail from the location,

but not vice versa.

And Weaver's Needle is visible from the mine.

- The mine that Cox discovered

even has a rock in the formation of a horse

that could match one of the Peralta stones.

- From his voluminous records,

it's clear that at this moment Cox believes

that he is on the precipice of a great discovery;

that there is gonna be gold,

so he begins digging.

He digs until he's too old to dig anymore.

And what he does not find, is any gold.

- [Fishburne] According to his notes,

Cox doesn't find the treasure,

but he does dig up what he believes

is the true story of the Lost Dutchman's mine.

- Cox believed that Waltz was working the mine

without any claim.

So Cox, like Waltz before him,

conceals the mine when he's not digging,

not wanting anyone else to find it.

- He does this research

and then discovers that

probably somebody had already swooped in after Waltz,

and taken the gold.

That's why he's not finding anything in the mine.

- A prospector named James Rogers, in fact,

filed a claim in 1875 for the mine and it turned out

to be an incredibly lucrative proposition.

- This would've been roughly 20 years

after Waltz discovered the mine.

- [Fishburne] Rogers files the proper paperwork

and is able to claim the mine as his own.

Naming it, the Silver Chief mine.

- The mine becomes a rich producer for Rogers;

the most bountiful producer in the entire area

during the Gold Rush.

- Rogers and a partner

ended up making a million dollars.

- [Fishburne] If Cox's theory is right,

it means the Dutchman's vast treasure is already long gone.

But science may have a way to prove

if the Silver Chief and Lost Dutchman's mine

are one and the same.

- A year after Jacob Waltz passed away,

a piece of his quartz

that had the gold laced in it

was taken and made into a matchbox.

That matchbox now exists

in the Superstition Mountains Museum.

- The type of gold ore

in the so-called Waltz matchbox embedded in quartz,

looks very similar to some quartz

with some veins of gold running through it,

that was found in the Silver Chief mine.

- Some modern Dutch hunter enthusiasts take the matchbox

and they decided they're going

to do some extreme analysis

to try to match it

to some other locations in the Superstition Mountains.

- Purportedly, the matchbox was tested

against a variety of samples

from different places in the Superstition Mountains,

but the only good match

was the one from Silver Chief Mine.

So if we have direct signature that corresponds,

we have done scientific testing,

process of deduction suggests that

well, maybe the mines were the same.

So, maybe the Silver Chief mine

is the Lost Dutchman mine.

- The most distinguishing feature of the matchbox

is its high concentration of mercury,

which also exists in the Silver Chief Mine.

- Mercury is not very common

to find associated with other mineral deposits.

It doesn't occur very often in mines like this,

so, this is a pretty important clue.

But skeptics argue that the Silver Chief mine

can't be the Lost Dutchman mine,

because the word silver is in the name.

But silver and gold also occur together.

And in this case, who knows why the silver name was chosen?

But obviously gold was there, too, because it's there.

- [Fishburne] But can we really be sure

the Silver Chief and the Lost Dutchman

are the same mine?

- Lots of the clues are matching up

to what Jacob Waltz left behind,

but it's really hard to tell

because he didn't keep any accurate records

of what he discovered.

- [Fishburne] For generations,

Fortune hunters have tried

to decipher Jacob Waltz's clues

and uncover the Lost Dutchman's mine.

People have searched all over the Superstition Mountains,

but the fortune remains elusive.

One man thinks he has a good idea why.

- John D. Wilburn was a miner

and geologist and an author.

In 1984, Wilburn writes a book

and his intervention into

the Lost Dutchman mines saga

is to suggest that we go

right back to the beginning, back to 1892,

and the suggestion is that Julia Thomas' clues

were either intentionally or mistakenly wrong.

That they have effectively misled generations

as to the true location of the lost Dutchman mine.

- Wilburn has studied rocks and their formations

and he really does not believe

that the formations in this particular area

would produce that much gold.

- Volcanic activity,

like the events that created Weaver's Needle,

a volcanic plug doesn't always lead to gold.

It's a sometimes, not an always thing.

- And we have to keep in mind

that Jacob Waltz didn't say

that the gold mine was at Weaver's Needle.

It was in the shadow of the needle.

- Anybody who's been to elementary school

knows that the Earth travels around the sun

and when it does, shadows change.

So really, how good is the direction of a shadow

gonna be for a clue?

You do the math.

- To Wilburn, the logical place to look

is somewhere there is actual gold,

and there are a number of these places

close to the Superstition Mountains.

There were boom towns that arose when gold was discovered

and then vanished after the mine was played out.

- [Fishburne] Nestled at the base

of the Superstition Mountains, sits a ghost town.

- The mountain runs east to west

and there's a place that they refer to as Goldfield

on the very western part of the mountain.

It's like a little, tiny ghost town now.

It's a tourist attraction.

That's the closest mine that they have in that area.

- [Fishburne] It's in the late 19th century

that gold is first discovered there.

And as prospectors rush into the area,

the town of Goldfield is officially founded.

- Goldfield was a boom town.

In its heyday, there were over 4,000 people living there,

hoping to strike it rich in the gold mines.

- Right by Goldfield,

is one of the largest producing gold mines

in the Superstitions area; the Bulldog Mine.

- The story about Bulldog Mine

is that it was first discovered in 1864

as part of the big gold rush in Arizona.

And then perhaps Waltz worked it starting in 1868,

for about 20 years.

- Why does Wilburn think that the Bulldog mine makes sense?

Well, for starters,

we know not only was there gold there,

but there was a lot of gold.

- The Bulldog mine was in an area

of a lot of producing mines.

Over a million dollars in gold was taken out of there,

and there was a military trail

that traveled through the area

which is one of Jacob Waltz's clues.

- Finally, in 1897,

the gold in Goldfield is played out.

The town disappears,

but the legends of the Lost Dutchman mine remain

and even grow stronger.

- [Fishburne] Some of the evidence supports

Bulldog mine as the possible location

of Jacob Waltz's mine.

But once more, we may never know for sure.

- So in 2003, when some landscaping was being done

by the Bulldog mine,

it collapsed and it was filled in.

So was the Bulldog mine the Lost Dutchman mine?

We may never know.

- But even today, when it rains heavy,

you can find gold in the washes

around Goldfield and the Bulldog mine.

- Even now, the lure of gold

still draws tourists to the area around Goldfield

as well as to the Superstition Mountains themselves.

While digging is prohibited

and many explorers still live in fear

that this area is cursed,

treasure hunters can still be spotted today,

searching for gold with metal detectors.

Is there a billion dollar gold mine lurking underfoot

somewhere in the shadow of Weaver's Needle?

We can only dream.

I'm Lawrence Fishburne.

Thank you for watching "History's Greatest Mysteries."