Lost Mine Found! - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

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to the place she had earlier taken Valencia
and he told her that there were great
mines there now and all of it was
claimed.
But Cachie was aware of this. The
place she wanted to take him to was not
on the north side where she had taken
the others; it was on the south slope
where no mines had yet been located.
She then went on to explain that her
father had taken her there when he was
alive and had told her to reveal this place
to no one, but to save it until she had a
child of her own. Now Cachie was old
and sick. She was childless and alone.
Pete had been good to her and had
brought her medicine. She would adopt
him as a child of the spirit, as was sometimes
a custom with her people.
Pete looked at the shriveled old squaw
with her twisted limb and felt only pity.
It was hard for him to imagine that she
was the daughter of a once-great chief
and had ever been hard enough to explore
the sheer Harquahala. However,
the stories of her efforts to lead earlier
friends to a bonanza in gold were now
legend, so he promised to return in two
weeks with supplies and a buckboard so
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they could make the trip more comfortably
for her.
That was the last time Pete saw Cachie
alive. When he returned two weeks later,
it was too late.
At first Pete confided Cachie's secret
to only his mother and his elder brother,
but after several years of fruitless searching,
they engaged the help of friends
who were experienced prospectors. Still
they met with no success. Cachie had
given Pete an impression that there was
something unusual about the appearance
of the gold and this was borne out when
he picked up some rusty quartz with gold
from arroyos in the foothills on the southern
slope of the Harquahalas, but he was
never able to trace it to a source. Forty
years later, Pete, like Cachie, was dead.
Now, three generations later, his grandson
is looking for it.
Other reports have told of an "odd
looking, rusty gold in quartz" found in
washes in the area, but probably the
most likely evidence of gold appeared in
a story in the Yuma Sentinel in 1892. It
concerned two Frenchmen who, some 20
years earlier, had unloaded a large amount
of rough gold from their pack mules in
Yuma, purchased supplies at the Hooper
Company general store and deposited
the remaining $8000 worth of gold to
their credit. The rough gold had been
hammered from a rusty looking quartz,
bits of which still clung to the larger
pieces of ore.
After spending a few nights celebrating
in local saloons, the Frenchmen then
headed back into the desert toward Agua
Caliente, east of Yuma. Some barroom
acquaintances tried to follow them, but
after their first night's camp at Agua
Caliente, the Frenchmen turned northward
and eluded the pursuers. The
southern slope of the Harquahalas lies
directly north of Agua Caliente.
Although the Frenchmen were never
heard of nor seen again, their deposit
of gold remained at the Yuma store until
it changed hands 20 years later.
Another account of "rusty gold quartz"
was reported by old-timer George Sears,
an Ajo mine owner, who picked up about
25 pounds of it from a prospect hole in
order to balance the pack on his jack. He
had detoured into what he thought were
the Eagle Tail Mountains to do a little
prospecting en route from Ajo to Phoenix,
but a flash storm on the desert had