MORE LEGEND OR LIE
——
It is a story of untold riches---lost somewhere in Arizona’s Superstition Mountains. But what is the truth about the Lost Dutchman Mine?
This is anything but a get rich quick story. The story of the Lost Dutchman Mine and its supposedly limitless stores of gold is full of danger, death,and mystery that lives on to this day.
This story lives in the Superstition Mountains: rough---forbidding---a place for treasure hunters where as far as anyone’s letting on it’s been all hunt and no treasure.
Clay Worst is 92 now. One of his photos shows him 74 years ago ready to use dynamite to make the mountains give up their secret.
He survived to talk about his quest. Not everyone did.
“People that went into a remote wilderness that were hopelessly unqualified to do so. And they go back there in August with a bottle of Coca Cola and a ham sandwich. You end up dead.”
No one’s sure what the Dutchman looked like. Historians think they have one photo of him at a bakery in Phoenix. Whether it’s really him is just part of the mystery.
Jacob Waltz wasn’t really Dutch. He was Deutsch, as in Deutschland---Germany. In the Old West, Dutchman was close enough.
Clay Worst says the Dutchman bounced all over America obsessed with finding gold---and found nothing.
He joined an expedition looking for a rich Native American mine.
The expedition failed, so he went back on his own.
Worst says the Dutchman found some Mexicans working a mine with a vein of gold a foot and a half wide.
“The Dutchman lay awake all that night.”
Worst says the Dutchman decided he could have found that mine and he deserved to have it.
“The Dutchman shoved the muzzle of his shotgun into his bedroll to muffle the sound. He shot the first Mexican in the back. The second Mexican barely whirled in wide eyed astonishment when he took the second charge of buckshot at the chest.”
A third man came back later. Worst says the Dutchman murdered him too.
To preserve his secret and avoid vengeful relatives Jacob Waltz covered the mine opening and stayed away for two years.
Clay Worst says another man found and worked the mine. He died in quicksand without revealing it’s location.
“They looked through his outfit to try and find names or addresses of friends or relatives to notify of his death. What they found was two one pound baking powder cans, completely filled with pure hand cobbed gold”.
Years later Jacob Waltz became friends with Julia Thomas---an African American woman who had grown up speaking German.
As he neared death, he agreed to tell her how to find the mine. Julia Thomas found one of the Dutchman’s friends who introduced her to Dick Holmes, a man who knew the Superstition Mountains and knew mining.
But it was hard for Jacob Waltz to give Holmes directions. In 1891, most of the landmarks in the Superstitions had not been named yet.
“So all he could do really was describe what the country looked like as he traveled around one of the roughest pieces of wilderness terrain on the North American continent. It simply wasn't good enough.”
Dick Holmes' son became Clay Worst’s partner in his search for the Lost Dutchman Mine.
He’d seen something special to drive him: a matchbox made of gold---gold from a box under the Dutchman’s death bed.
“It was heavy. The Dutchman said ‘Open it’. Holmes opened it and in that box was almost 50 pound 48 and a half pounds of incredibly rich hand cobbed gold.”
Clay Worst says jewelers records confirm gold for the matchbox came from under Jacob Waltz bed but they don’t prove where that gold came out of the Earth.
One treasure we can confirm is how the story fascinates so many people. People from around the world come to the Superstition Mountain/Lost Dutchman Museum asking about the gold, and the mystery.
Phil Staley with the museum says, “We have a lot of visitors who come here from Europe, a lot from Eastern Europe, that come to visit here, and some of them have known of the legend before they got here.”
But Phil Staley wonders if the mine was never in the Superstition Mountains---that maybe the cagey old Dutchman found gold somewhere else and lied to throw us all off the track.
But Clay Worst is a believer and does not regret a minute of the years he’s spent trying to find the lost mine.
“And I tell you, those are the most precious memories of my life. And today if I could turn the clock back to 1947, and absolutely know then that I would never find it with God as my witness, I would do it all over again.”
----
STAY IN TOUCH WITH US ANYTIME, ANYWHERE
- Download our free app for Roku, FireTV, AppleTV, Alexa, and mobile devices.
- Sign up for daily newsletters emailed to you
- Like us on Facebook
- Follow us on Instagram
- Follow us on Twitter
