In regards to the below Scrooge McDuck illustrated story The Dutchman's Secret, the editors of Wikipedia, in their review as it is written and presented in comic book form, and of which what they wrote I have extrapolated and edited for our purposes here, write:
This is one of the most historically accurate Uncle Scrooge stories. Jacob Waltz, the Peralta family, and Eusebio Fransesco Chino, mentioned in the story, are all real historical characters. The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine is, of course, a real legendary lost mine, and Gonzales Peralta's markings really exist. The only things invented are the deciphered meaning of Peralta's markings and the connection between Eusebio Fransesco Chino (Jesuit missionary Father Kino) and the lost mine.
In any case, with the map in their hands, or more literally ON Donald's hand, the boys are off to Apache Junction, Arizona, the gateway to the Superstition Mountains and the Lost Dutchman Mine. There they are inundated with map sellers and mine hawkers of which one says he will sell them a true verbal story to the mine, it's legend and history for five bucks. Donald bites Clicking the images below will take you to Scrooge's story of The Dutchman's Secret :
THE DUTCHMAN'S SECRET, UNCLE SCROOGE, JULY 2003, ISSUE #319 -
With the verbal story and the real Dutchman's map found in the scrapbook, Uncle Scrooge, Donald, and Scrooge's three nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, head out on their journey in search of the Lost Dutchman Mine and are soon coming across actual clues as described by the map.
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FOR THE MUCH LARGER STORY PLEASE CONTINUE
"As far as my dad was concerned my older brother, my dad's first born, was like a prince. In my young mind as I saw things, or how I felt it in my bones, my dad lavished, if not all, an inordinate amount of his time, affections and care towards him, leaving me feeling shortchanged in the bargain. In order to counteract that lavishness and have my dad aim some of that affection in my direction, I did everything I could to gain or establish an equal level of worthiness. The difference was that my older brother received his worthiness, at least as I saw it, with no effort on his part, but I had to continuously prop up mine diligently, making any outcome dubious or short term without my constant input."
The above quote from the source so cited pretty much sums up how I viewed my father most of my life. Don't get me wrong, he was always a good provider and hard worker. Even after my mother died and the family split up with my two brothers and myself being sent off in the directions of the four winds, he always made sure we were taken care of. Within his means that meant us living with couples or families who would provide good health care, clothing, meals, schools, and safety, making sure his payments for upkeep and such were on time or at least current.
There was just a big gap between my father and I in the closeness level. Not so with his brother, my Uncle, it was like we were made for each other. At least he was in my life at the right time it seems and during the years we were together we were a good match It was more of a Batman and Robin thing, a sidekick, than a nephew put into a son role.
My dad though, when he was around, it was good times, but always as a group. He had a tough time, except with my older brother, identifying with each of us individually. He would set up big, all summer long campgrounds for us, first at Big Bear Lake until it got, as he said, to civilized or urban, then in the High Sierras, overseen by my godfather and uncle. He would come in and out of camp all summer for two or three days to a week to fish and camp with us as time permitted between the times he worked and was off. It was then, during the nights around the campfire that he would regale us kids with stories of him riding the rails, being a carny and roustabout in circus sideshows, and working the gold fields on both sides of the High Sierras and the Lost Dutchman Mine.
Although my dad had any number of gold related experiences and adventures he talked about when I was a kid, one of the ones that stuck with me the most was about the Lost Dutchman Mine, and as indicated in the above two illustrated stories, located somewhere in the far reaches of the mysterious Superstition Mountains of Arizona. He always said he was not only going to search for it one day, he was going to find it. I remember he even had a book, Thunder Gods Gold (1945), that devoted several chapters giving all the clues and directions on how to find it, but, to my knowledge, he never went looking for it. A few years after the book came out a movie based on the chapters in the book devoted to the Lost Dutchman Mine was released titled The Lust For Gold (1949) going over the same basic clues albeit in a narrative or story-like style. I must have seen the movie a 100 times, or at least more than once, and have to admit the mine and the treasure of gold it is said to hold has a certain inexplicable draw to it.
One day my uncle brought a certain Captain Midnight TV episode to my attention because of how surprised he was to see that within the plot line of the otherwise dumb story was the accurate mention of a clue to locating the lost Peralta mine, the mine that by all later accounts, morphed into being one and the same as the Lost Dutchman mine. That clue, about a saguaro cactus that had two rocks embedded in it at a certain level in a certain direction thought to be pointers as mentioned in the story figured quite prominently in the book Thunder Gods Gold and of which he knew I was quite familiar with (Part III, 3. Clues To Fortune, page 131). The cactus scene in the Captain Midnight video shows up around the 14 - 15 minute mark. The exact same scene, filmed five years before, shows up in the Lust For Gold movie around the 9 - 10 minute mark (both linked below).
The following quotes, about a saguaro cactus that has two rocks embedded in it at a certain level in a certain direction and thought to be a clue to finding the Lost Dutchman's Mine, are from the book Thunder Gods Gold and appear, as previously mentioned, in both the Captain Midnight video and the Lust For Gold movie, and again, why my uncle brought the TV episode to my attention, in turn underlying the date the video was first shown:
Then one afternoon Snell and Splichal, who had been ranging ahead, came back to report that they had seen nothing but an axe blade sticking in a cactus.
"An axe blade," I almost yelled. "And did you think the thunder gods stuck it there? I want to personally see everything that isn't exactly natural. Take me to it."
I went back up canyon with them to where a lone, huge saguaro stood upon the end of a rocky ridge jutting into the canyon. From the canyon bottom the cactus stood up in bold, spiny outline against the sky as though it had purposely been planted there for just that reason. And it did look like an axe head alright. Then as I moved around another came into view.
"Axe head, hell!" I yelped excitedly. "It's a marker! Made to be skylined for anyone traveling up-canyon."
And we all scrambled up the slope in a wild rush at the cactus. Then I saw that what were sticking out were stones which someone had inserted there purposely. Two of them.
THUNDER GODS GOLD Part III, 3. Clues To Fortune, page 131
The 1949 black and white movie Lust For Gold will probably give any potential hunter seeking the lost mine the quickest most comprehensive and thorough historical starting point of almost anything you could come across. See:
LUST FOR GOLD (please click image)
ALSO AVAILABLE HERE
SECRET OF SUPERSTITION MOUNTAIN
SEASON 2, EPISODE 7, DEC 10, 1955
ALSO AVAILABLE HERE
My dad's own prospecting, both panning then into using sluice boxes in the gold fields of the High Sierras, got him really close to being rich. That is until one of his two mining partners ran off with most of the gold, only to die trying to bury it. If my dad hadn't caught him in the process it could have ended up being one of those infamous lost treasure stories of the old west like the Lost Dutchman The thing is, my dad, close to being trapped in the same oncoming snow storm, because of the weight of the gold and facing the same circumstances as his partner, had to bury it somewhere along his route trying to get up to the Tioga Pass road. The road itself was a notorious and onetime dangerous cut through route over the rugged High Sierras out of Yosemite to the vast open desert and the Great Basin on the east side. Later, considering what he and his other partner got for the amount of gold he was able to carry out compared with what was left behind, the left behind gold would be worth around $7,000,000 in todays market. Far as I know it's still there. He never drew a treasure map and other than his stories over our campfires at night that I heard most of my growing up life --- along with a five-line limerick he taught me that was a clue to finding the treasure, that's about it:
The key to the location of the treasure is in that five-line limerick, intended as a mnemonic for both my dad and his partner to have a mental map where the gold was stashed without having a physical map that anybody could understand. Although the limerick was intended to have meaning only between the two, my dad not only explained the meaning of the words of the limerick to me. He also showed me where the general physical starting point along the Tioga Pass was telling me where we stood we were only 800 to 1000 feet above millions in gold. When I told him lets go get it he shrugged me off telling me we would talk about that later. See:
LOST GOLD OF THE SIERRA PROSPECTOR
Around the same time I was camping in the High Sierras with my brothers was around the same time my Stepmother bought a ranch in what is called the high desert in California which is really part of the Mojave. My brothers and I lived on the ranch long enough to go to school there a couple of years and when school was out one of the reasons we camped in the Sierras was to beat the heat of the desert during the summer.
Some distance from the ranch, on the north face of the mountains south of us, was a year around fresh water creek called Little Rock Creek that fed into a man-made concrete-dammed lake called the Little Rock Reservoir. Sometimes on really hot days we would take the ranch jeep and go to the reservoir just to splash around in the water to cool off. Not far from the dam was the remains of an old adobe structure originally dating back to the 1860s or before that was at onetime called the Garcia Adobe. As the story went, what was left of the adobe after it was abandoned and fell into a certain disrepair it was destroyed by treasure hunters. Apparently back in the old days there was a semi-notorious highwayman who operated in the general area by the name of Llargo. One day there was a fairly good size gold shipment going by stagecoach to San Francisco from Los Angels and Llargo, who had taken up residence in the adobe, held up the stage, got the gold, and made a clean getaway --- for a short time. He was killed in an attempted capture, but the gold was never found. Most people figured he hid it in or around the adobe and since then, over the years, a stream of treasure hunters have torn the place apart and dug holes all around the surrounding area.
One day my dad showed up at the ranch with an Army surplus mine detector saying he wanted to trace out some waterlines. I had only just finished reading a story in a comic book on how a mine detector was used by a number of nefarious characters to try to and then located lost buried treasure, in this case, stolen loot. When I read the story and my dad showed up with a surplus mine detector, I put two and two together and off my brothers and I went to find the stolen stagecoach gold said to be buried not far from the ranch. My Uncle, liking the idea went along. While we were searching we noticed fire trucks heading up toward the top of the mountains and not long after that we could see smoke and then fire along the ridge line. Although the fire was still some distance away my uncle suggested we should probably get out while we could. Before we had a chance firefighters or forest rangers stopped us and requested the use of the jeep and recruited my uncle and the two older boys to fight along the fire line, taking me and the rest of the kids up to the main operations base. I guess they thought the whole thing would be over in a matter of hours. Instead it took three days before in was under control enough for us to leave. In the meantime me, my younger brother and the other kids joined in serving food, cleaning equipment, and generally did whatever we were asked. On the third day I was serving chow and my uncle, brother, and cousin came through the line and none of us could believe each others eyes. They were all dirty and ragged and so tired they could hardly stand up. Eventually the jeep was returned and we made it back to the ranch. As it was, we never found any gold and I'm not sure what happened to the mine detector. The comic book story I read was titled The Robotman Detector, appearing in the No. 72 issue of "Star Spangled Comics," dated September 1948. See:
THE ROBOTMAN DETECTOR
In an interesting side note, notice the pistols being used by three of the miners depicted in the first illustrated story. The pistols look an awful lot like the 1847 Colt Walker revolver, the largest, heaviest black-powder revolver Colt ever produced. In real life it's not likely that the two people involved in the shooting would have Colt Walkers, but it's just that those who write about and depict the old west happen to love Colt Walkers. As you can see, drawing-wise they are quite impressive. One of the strongest supporters of the weapon in the old west through his tales and such was Louis L'Amour, the author of over 100 cowboy and western related novels. The Colt Walker was his weapon of choice and anytime anywhere he could squeeze one or more Colt Walkers into his story line he did.
The third graphic showing a man in a black hat wielding what appears to be a Colt Walker depicts a bounty hunter attempting to obtain information on the whereabouts of the Lost Dutchman mine from the Marshal Blueberry graphic illustrated novel simply titled "BOOK ONE: The Lost Dutchman's Mine" published by Epic in 1969. The whole illustrated story can be accessed by clicking the below:
THE LOST DUTCHMAN'S MINE, MARSHAL BLUEBERRY BOOK 1, EPIC GRAPHIC NOVELS, 1969 ---
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1847 COLT WALKER PERCUSSION REVOLVER, DAISY'S RED RYDER GUN BOOK, 1955 ----
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Only 1000 Colt Walkers were made, less than 50 of them are accounted for. Just by that fact alone they are very rare with one in "regular condition," albeit fully documented, having sold sometime back for $920,000. A very special conditioned Colt Walker still in the presentation box it came in sold sold recently for 1.8 million dollars. My stepmother had a Colt Walker when I was a kid growing up and I used to run around playing cowboys with it even though it weighed almost five pounds and was nearly as long as I was tall. When a good part of her ranch house facilities mysteriously burnt to the ground the gun was caught in the fire but escaped for the most part unscathed except for the wooden pistol grips. She had them replaced with exact duplicates from a similar age and style Colt. The pistol did not show up among her effects when she died, apparently having disappeared. Since I was so fond of the pistol as a kid some say she gave it to me for safe keeping and that I still have it. Such is not the case. The whereabouts of the Colt Walker formally owned by my stepmother is not known, at least by me.
THE 1847 COLT WALKER REVOLVER
A COMPLETEY FREE, ONLINE PDF COPY
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DON'T FORGET SCROOGE AND THE DUTCHMAN'S SECRET
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THE FLYING FRONTIERSMAN
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BILLY THE KID
COWBOY CODE OF THE WEST
THAT PACKSADDLE AFFAIR: STAGE WEST
MYSTIC AZTEC SUN GOD
TIME TRAVEL, THE CURANDERO, AND MEETING QUATU-ZACA
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THE WANDERLING
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As to the subject of donations, for those of you who may be interested in doing so as it applies to the gratefulness of my works, I invariably suggest any funds be directed toward THE WOUNDED WARRIOR PROJECT and/or THE AMERICAN RED CROSS.
THE DESERT SHIP: A LEGEND OR TWO. THE WESTERNER, DECEMBER 1950 ISSUE #31
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THE CONQUISTADORS LOST TREASURE OF THE GRAND CANYON, SEA HUNT, OCTOBER-DECEMBER 1961 #11 ---
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SHIP IN THE DESERT, GENE AUTRY COMICS, JUNE 1951 ISSUE #52
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THE SECRET OF THE AZTEC TREASURE, GENE AUTRY COMICS, NOVEMBER 1942 VOLUME 1, ISSUE #3 --
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THE LOST DUTCHMAN'S MINE, MARSHAL BLUEBERRY BOOK 1, EPIC GRAPHIC NOVELS, 1969
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