Lost Treasure Tales

As a general assignments reporter for The Houston Post in the 1970s, I was always on the prowl for interesting stories. When I stumbled across a magazine about lost treasure stories and noticed it was published in nearby Conroe, Texas, I decided to write a newspaper article about the subject of lost treasures in Texas. Then, a few years later as a freelance writer, I revisited the idea and developed a larger piece that was published in the December 1983 issue of Muse Air Monthly.

The result was an article that is both a compilation of adventure yarns as well as the story of a publishing entrepreneur. A cursory review of the Internet indicates that all of these treasures likely remain lost. But, if anyone has updated information about any of them, please leave a comment. Now, here’s my article from 1983.

Tales of Hidden Treasure

John Latham built a publishing firm on rumors of gold, silver and other treasures hidden in the Southwest. Or, so the story goes.

From the air, the region looms lost and desolate, a no-man’s land in the northwestern corner of New Mexico pockmarked by mesas, arroyos and sagebrush.  It’s the kind of place no one would visit on purpose. And, for that very reason, the region has captured the undivided attention of one of the last colorful breeds of American adventurer: the treasure hunter.

Somewhere among Mother Nature’s collection of wind-sculpted architecture stands a 7,000-foot monument to enterprise and greed, the final resting place for what has been called the world’s greatest modern treasure. Buried atop one of those mesas is $17 million worth of gold, 17 tons of the precious substance divided neatly into bullion bars.

Or, so the story goes.

It’s lain there undisturbed more than 50 years, the legacy of a group of Depression-era profiteers who perished one by one before they could make their scheme pay off. They smuggled the bars out of Mexico in 1933 with the help of a Hollywood stunt pilot who flew the cargo to the mesa to be hidden. They wanted to gamble with the fluctuating price of gold and on their belief the US government would soon devalue the dollar. They had canvassed the Mexican countryside, quietly buying all the gold they could find at $25 per ounce. One of the conspirators operated a gold mine in Mexico and he, too, had hoarded the product of that enterprise. They had employed a dilapidated hacienda in Puebla to melt down their treasure and prepare it for transport into the states. All that had remained was for them to await a significant rise in the price of gold. Then, they’d sell to the United States and collect a fortune.

Or, so the story goes.

With passage in January, 1934, of the United States Gold Reserve Act, the price of gold shot to $35—up $14.34 from the price the syndicate had paid. They prepared to cash in. But one of their number convinced them to wait for even higher profits, predicting a devaluation of the dollar by 1943, as provided in the Gold Act. Greedily, the gang agreed. But they had failed to consider one provision of the law. It had established a grace period during which private owners of gold could surrender their holdings. When that grace period expired, the group suddenly found itself facing criminal penalties for sitting on their cache. In desperation, they searched the world for private buyers, an odyssey with all the dramatic trappings of the finest Hollywood script complete with forays into Nazi Germany. One conspirator died of a heart attack, while another was gored by a charging bull. Another died in a car crash. The American stunt pilot joined the Army Air Corps and took the secret location to his grave in a fiery crash during a bombing run in Germany. Finally, one survivor remained to collect on the scheme.

Or, so the story goes.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government had gotten wind of the scheme. The survivor, a Mexican businessman, hired a lawyer to negotiate. He offered the hoard to the U.S. government for $35 per ounce. The Treasury Dept. countered with a different plan: immunity from prosecution for Gold Act violations in exchange for all the gold. A federal grand jury in Los Angeles investigated the facts in 1952, making no recommendation to break the stalemate. And the surviving conspirator passed into anonymity about 1962, closely watched, yet apparently never having retrieved the cache.

Or, so the story goes.

“Yes,” says John Latham, a former publisher living in Conroe, Texas. “I think that if I had the time and inclination, that’s the one story I’d go after. It’s certainly the best-documented I’ve encountered.”

And Latham, 65, is one guy who should know. Fortunately—for him—he’s never been a treasure hunter himself. Instead, he found his pot of gold at the end of the publishing rainbow, investigating, writing, editing and reporting such tales for the 120,000-plus monthly readers of a trio of treasure-hunting magazines. The enterprise made him a millionaire in the later 1960s and early 1970s. It also made him an expert on the subject of treasure tales. Before the magazines were sold in 1979, Latham had chronicled more than 2,000 yarns about the bounty allegedly stashed in hidden corners of Texas and the Southwest.

Recognizing that a good story is always worth its weight in gold, Latham nonetheless insisted on evidence that an alleged treasure did indeed exist—plus indications that it remained as defined, “lost or buried wealth”—before he’d publish a story about it. Thus, he feels the Southwest’s most fabled lost treasure tale, that of “The Lost Dutchman Mine” in Arizona’s Superstition Mountains, is a fabrication. In contrast, his favorite is the legend of the Great Depression Gold Profit Hoard.

“I got a call from some airline pilot last year,” Latham chuckled recently, “and he said he thought he had spotted the mesa where that gold is buried. He promised to call me back but he never did.”

Treasure tales are as native to Texas as the longhorn and the armadillo. Geographically positioned to stand as the buffer between two former empires, a crossroads of wilderness and challenge, the Southwest probably serves as the resting ground for many a missing cache. And the stories generated by those who would search for such wealth occupy a significant place in the region’s literature.

Treasure tales usually fall into one of three categories:

·       Lost treasure—that which is truly lost; a mine whose location is forgotten or a valuable gem which was dropped during travel.

·       Buried treasure—that wealth which was illegally acquired and hidden without the culprit returning to claim it.

·       Sunken treasure—this refers to fortunes hidden by some natural disaster, as when a hurricane destroyed a fleet of galleons bound from the New World home to Spain, laden with riches.

The Southwest boasts a fortune in examples from all three groups. Latham never lacked a story. He had started in the business as a writer of western novels just after World War II. With a grubstake of $3,500 in the 1950s, Latham launched a magazine about the offshore drilling industry entitled Offshore. Twelve years later, he sold it for $350,000 and began looking for a new arena in publishing.

With no background in treasure hunting at all, Latham decided in 1966 that magazines about that subject might be worth a chance. And besides, he confesses, “I was fascinated by the subject.” He dropped a little classified ad in one edition of Writer’s Digest seeking solid treasure tales and then made a deal with a firm to help distribute the publication he planned to call True Treasure. Almost overnight he had enough stories to operate for several months. He pumped $60,000 into the venture before it started making a profit six months later. Soon, True Treasure had spawned a pair of sister publications—Treasure World and Treasure Trails.

They all offered a similar format. Articles carried a western flavor and enough authentication to at least demonstrate some credibility. Besides attracting readers from a previously untapped mother lode of interest, the magazines proved a hit with advertisers from a long-neglected industry. While a colorful parade of prospectors and profiteers marched through the editorial columns, an equally intriguing gang of pitchmen stood their ground along the edges, hawking everything from books and maps to metal detectors and coin collections. And the magazines’ classified sections served as a networking device to unite the far-flung empire of treasure hunters which apparently dots the landscape of the Southwest.

Noting that metal detector manufacturers measure annual sales in the millions, Latham says the audience for treasure stories is considerable. The folks who buy all those devices routinely employ them to scour pastures of deserted farms once owned by crusty old men who reportedly distrusted banks and responded by burying their money. Items of value are lost every day and there’s a whole industry out there dedicated to finding them. But these same weekend fortune hunters also liked to read about the real glamour yarns served up monthly by Latham and his correspondents.

Many treasure hunters cultivate an image of failure and poverty.

The real buried treasures, those worth the time and effort to locate, would probably never be reported in magazines. Once a treasure is converted into money, the government tags it as fair game for tax collection. So, many treasure hunters actively cultivate an image of failure. Occasionally, some of these mysterious adventurers wandered by Latham’s Conroe offices to flash a few old coins and brag about digging in some old barnyard. Usually they refused to even give their names. No matter, Latham stalked larger game.

The magazines hit their peak in the early 1970s. But growing competition, complex distribution problems and rising costs forced a sale of the publications in 1979 from their small operation in Conroe to National Reporter Publications in Bixby, Oklahoma.

The new owners dramatically changed the format of the consolidated magazine dubbed Lost Treasure, says Managing Editor Andre Hinds. Its focus now centers on a “how-to” for treasure hunting hobbyists, but it still sells well—65,000 issues per month to make it the nation’s top-selling treasure magazine.

“And we still get at least one letter a month,” grins Hinds, “asking about Long John Latham.”

With his profits, Latham has bought a series of campgrounds scattered about the treasure-hunting regions covered for a decade in articles he edited. While the magazines may be gone, the stories will never die. And the elements of a good treasure tale remain universal

“You know,” Latham philosophizes, “it’s really not the money. For these people, it’s the high adventure in the search for a mystery. I learned early I had to be careful. I started out telling people they were wasting their time looking for the Lost Dutchman Mine. What makes one tale more popular than another is not so much the money but the way it was lost.”

Latham recalls three other favorite treasure yarns from his years as the Southwest’s guardian for such stories. They all contain the common thread of men who gambled their entire existences for fabulous riches, only to lose. Motivated by the same desires which affect us all—greed, love or power—those men have left a legacy in the form of a promise. Great wealth may yet lie hidden awaiting only the tenacity of tome modern investigator.

Ben Sublett’s Lost Mine

According to the Apache chief Geronimo, the world’s richest gold mine lay hidden in the Guadalupe Mountains, which form the border between Texas and New Mexico. Nuggets from the hidden mine allegedly helped fuel Indian war chests in the 19^th Century and their allure even attracted a scouting expedition from one famous treasure-hunting hobbyist, General Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur. The legend also interested an old “jackleg mineral man named Ben Sublett. His obsession with the search kept his family impoverished and made him the laughing stock of Odessa. But the laughter stopped one night when he hitched his creaky old wagon outside a saloon and started buying drinks for the house with a supply of gold nuggets from a buckskin bag.

His wife had supported his treasure-hunting habit by washing clothes. And he had done odd jobs when time allowed. All that changed dramatically after that night. Whenever Sublett needed money, he just disappeared into the mountains and returned with more nuggets. This routine naturally made him the center of attention. Although many tried to trail him to his cache, he always managed to vanish at the last moment, emerging almost from the rocks with another installment of his unique salary, the payroll from years of searching.

He even refused to share the secret with his son Ross, who died in 1953. While Sublett himself lingered on his death bed in 1892, his son-in-law begged for the secret. The crusty old adventurer snapped: “Go out and look for it like I did.” Two of Latham’s correspondents speculated in articles that a Sublett confidante named Abijah Long may have hung around the death bed long enough to learn about the mine.

One of those writers found a witness who claimed to have seen Long carry a strongbox out of a canyon in the Guadalupes about 1916. And, Wells Fargo investigators even tracked Long to a ranch in Oregon where he admitted finding a gold-filled box in a Pine Canyon cave. But the question remains: Was this the secret stash of old Ben Sublett? Pine Canyon was a stop on the Butterfield Stage Route, so perhaps Long found a hidden treasure of his own. Sublett’s treasure may still be hidden in another canyon, waiting just as he described for some fortunate successor: “on the floor of a cave and all you have to do is pick it up.”

Maximilian’s Royal Treasury

Politics, as the old cliché explains, make strange bedfellows. In the case of Emperor Maximilian’s downfall from the Mexican throne in 1867, it also made for the creation of a fabulous treasure legend as ambassadors, outlaws, marauding Comanches, Confederate soldiers and Mother Nature herself battled one another to wipe out any trace of the emperor’s fortune, still allegedly hidden somewhere near Castle Gap, Texas. But death has followed all who touched it.

The intrigue began in 1867, when Maximilian realized his short-lived French empire in Mexico was crumbling. He summoned a trusted Austrian aide to spirit his gold and silver treasure from the country overland into Texas, where it could be reclaimed after an escape. In northern Mexico, the aide hired some bodyguards to escort the wagons through Indian country. They turned out to be renegade Confederate soldiers from Missouri who just didn’t believe the Austrian’s explanation that his wagons held barrels of flour.

As soon as the wagons crossed into Texas, the bodyguards attacked the Austrian and his cohorts, cut their throats and seized control of the treasure. They hid it in the sandy flats and rock hills which now make up Pecos and Crane counties in southwest Texas and then set out for San Antonio to find a buyer. One of the group fell ill on the trip and stayed behind at Fort Concho. Recovering and traveling on, he encountered the bodies of his comrades where Comanches had killed and scalped them. He decided to flee to Missouri and enlist the aid of outlaws there.

Mistaken for a horse thief in Denton, he lay suffering in a jail cell, stricken again with the malady that sidelined him before. He shared his secret with a doctor and a lawyer who visited his cell. They immediately left for the Pecos country to dig for treasure. They arrived to find, however, that summer heat and sandstorms had battered the region, disfiguring landmarks described by the outlaw who was still languishing in the Denton cell. The only metal they found came from remnants of the treasure wagons burned by the Confederate renegades.

Steinheimer’s Millions

The same emotion which once launched a thousand ships served as the driving force behind the lost treasure of Karl Steinheimer: Love. This German-born adventurer and pirate risked his life and fortune—30 jackloads of silver—to travel across Texas in 1839 toward a rendezvous in St. Louis with a long-lost love. Like the others, he lost, and his treasure reportedly lies buried somewhere near Bell County.

Born in 1793, Steinheimer had run off to sea as a youngster and joined pirates running slaves out of Galveston. When the Lafitte brothers seized control of activities there in 1817, he returned to a life as a bachelor miner in Mexico, living peacefully and growing prosperous for the next 20 years. During all that time, he secretly carried a torch for a sweetheart in St. Louis. It took the Texas Revolution to fan the flames into action.

Despite their defeat in that war, the Mexicans harbored dreams of reclaiming the territory. History books have recounted a number of ill-fated expeditions dispatched to those ends. In 1839, Steinheimer was offered a chance to join one of them, commanded by Manuel Flores. Seeing his youth slip away and still dreaming of his lost love, Steinheimer viewed the invitation as an opportunity to cash in his wealth and finally claim the woman he loved.

The Flores expedition had been designed to stir trouble between the Indians and the Texans guarding the frontiers of the young nation. Besides a small force of 25 men, weapons and ammunition, Flores carried Steinheimer and 10 mules loaded with boxes of silver. Somehow this expedition marched 300 miles around Texas before a surveying party spotted them between San Antonio and Seguin. The surveyors were murdered and within days a detachment of Texas Rangers rode in hot pursuit of Flores.

History records that the chase ended on a high bluff over the North San Gabriel River, where Flores and two of his henchmen were killed. The Rangers discovered documents outlining the expedition’s purpose, Flores’s passport, 114 horses and mules, 300 pounds of powder and other baggage. But they recorded no recovery of mules laden with Steinheimer’s millions.

Steinheimer, however, had managed to escape during the two-day chase. He was discovered dying alongside a trail near present-day Marlin, victim of a shootout with Indians. With his last breaths, Steinheimer shared his tale with a band of travelers. He surrendered some coins and told of burying his fortune at the conflux of three streams 60 feet from an oak tree into which he had hammered a large brass spike. In return for his information, he begged a favor. He asked them to a post a letter to his sweetheart in St. Louis.

In the true tradition of the West, they kept their word. A year later a woman showed up in Bell County from St. Louis and began poking around the hills, one of the first to begin seeking Steinheimer’s millions.

Love, politics and greed—they all play a role in the legends of treasure. Latham is still smug about managing to ignore the lure which could have tempted him daily while editing such tales. He insists joining the search is not worth his time.

But ask about that 17-ton cache of gold in New Mexico and catch him in a weak moment: “How could you find it? You’ve got a plan, don’t you?”

“Well,” he grins and stares into space. “The first thing I’d do is hire an airplane to fly over the place and see if I could spot the mesa where they hacked out a landing strip. Then I’d…”

But then, his voice trails off to laughter.