The prospecting past of Arizona has been kept alive through the notorious tales included here.

Join the Search for Lost Treasure First popularized by folklorist and author J. Frank Dobie in his book Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver in 1928, the legend of the Lost Adams Diggings is one of the most mythologized tales of lost treasure on the continent. In the 1860s, Gold was taken from Adams’ canyon in enormous quantities, with nuggets ranging from dust-size to some as large as hen’s eggs, all being plucked from the bottom of a shallow stream. This true story of the Lost Adams Diggings starts with the discovery of the rich deposit of gold in a remote mountain range, and ends with the author’s own story of search and discovery in the twentieth century.

W.C. Jameson was an active treasure hunter for more than fifty years. He has fallen from cliffs, had ropes break during climbs, been caught in mine shaft cave-ins, contended with flash floods, been shot at, watched men die, and had to deal with rattlesnakes, water moccasins, scorpions, and poisonous centipedes. He has fled for his life from park rangers, policemen, landowners, competitors, corporate mercenaries, and drug runners. He has also discovered enough treasure to pay for his own house and finance his and his children’s education. With his enigmatic treasure-hunter partners, Slade, Stanley, and Poet, Jameson's stories are worthy of an Indiana Jones film—except that they are all true.

Searching for hidden treasures in the Tubac and Tumacocori mountains, few have ever heard of, we discovered places that have never been visited by others to this day. The four of us finally unearthed a medium-size buried treasure south of Tucson, Arizona, which consisted of 82 pounds of Spanish gold bullion.

The twenty-four tales in this book are of the most famous lost treasures in America, from a two-foot statue reportedly made entirely of silver (the “Madonna”) and a cache of gold, silver, and jewelry that was rumored to also contain the first Bible in America to seventeen tons of gold—its value equal to the treasury of a mid-sized nation—buried somewhere in northwestern New Mexico. What makes these tales even more compelling is that none of these known-to-be-lost treasures have been discovered, although modern detecting technology has made them eminently discoverable.

This large, easy-to-use volume lists the works of more than eleven hundred different authors, covering thousands of stories of lost mines and buried treasures supposedly located in fifteen Western and Southwestern states and in Mexico. In addition to being a boon to those adventurers who are tempted to search for lost mines and buried treasures, it will be an important basic research tool for historians, geologists, geographers, anthropologists, archaeologists, and folklorists, and it will be useful in identifying the man treasure hoards and mining claims all the way from the Lost Adams Diggings in Arizona to the Stagecoach in Wyoming. The information given in this important bibliography was acquired through perusal of an unusually large number of books, newspapers, magazines, unpublished manuscripts, deposits in private and public libraries, holdings of various historical foundations, and governmental records and archives. The task took Mr. Probert three full years of steady, patient work. Many of these stories of lost mines and buried treasures have resulted in the discovery of some that are rarely acknowledged, largely because, as Mr. Probert points out, "those who have been so fortunate as to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow have deemed it wiser and much safer to keep their own counsel" -- Book jacket.

Throughout the Southwest, stories of hidden, lost, stolen, and unreachable gold and other treasures fill curious minds. But where are they? And what exactly did happen? This book not only tells the tales, it includes a map to show the way.

This book provides information on where gold, and silver were mined in the Western United States. The book provides various map references locating the mineral sources, the amount that was mined from each district, what minerals are associated with that district and any history on that district.

The 32 tales from the area containing the backbone of America include The Gold Behind the Waterfall (Arizona), The Treasure of Deadman Cave (Colorado), Lava Cave Cache (Idaho), Henry Plummer's Lost Gold (Montana), The Curse of the Lost Sheepherder's Mine (Nevada), Lost Train Robbery Loot in Cibola County (New Mexico), Eighty Ingots in Spanish Gold (Utah), and Lost Ledge of Gold (Wyoming). As Jameson points out in his introduction, the Rocky Mountains still have many remote areas, ....