desert calendar - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

Apaches swooped down on the Papago miners, killing many men, women and
children and leaving the mission settlement a smouldering ruin.
Lost Mine With
the Iron Door
N A RECENT outing in the Santa
Catalina Mountains near Tucson,
Arizona, two employes of nearby
Monton Air Base discovered the rusty
parts of a blacksmith forge made in
Madrid, Spain, and carrying the date,
1757.
The two men knew little about mining
and had heard nothing about the
Lost Escalante Mine made famous by
Harold Bell Wright in his novel, The
Mine with the Iron Door. But their
find may be the clue which someday
will lead to the rediscovery of lost
Spanish treasure.
The Mine with the Iron Door, as
the Escalante has come to be called,
is believed to have been found and
worked for many years by Father Silvestre
Velez de Escalante, a Jesuit
By JOHN D. MITCHELL
Illustration by
Charles Keetsie Shirley
Navajo artist
priest who at one time was assistant
to Father Eusebio Kino at Mission
San Xavier del Bac near Tucson. Although
the principal occupation of the
Jesuits was to store up treasures in
Heaven by spreading the gospel among
the plains Indians and the wild pagan
tribes of the northern hills, the good
fathers were not averse to storing up
treasures on earth against the proverbial
rainy day. In doing so, their treatment
of the neophytes under their
charge occasionally caused the Indians
to rise in revolt.
According to old church records,
the Escalante Mine was in full operation
in 1767 when Spanish King
Charles III issued the edict expelling
the Jesuit Order from Spain and all
her possessions. The Jesuits fought
When two employes of Monton
Air Base near Tucson, Arizona,
found the rusty remnants
of an ancient Spanish forge high
on a ridge of the Santa Catalina
Mountains, they considered it
only an interesting reminder of
Conquistadore days in the
Southwest. But John D. Mitchell,
an authority on lost mines and
buried treasure of the West,
thinks it is a clue to one of the
most fabulous of lost treasures—
The Mine with the Iron Door.
the expulsion decree for a number of
months, meanwhile continuing to recover
gold from the fabulous mine
high in the Santa Catalina hills and
from placer operations along the Canada
del Oro. But they were not permitted
to take any of their treasure
out of the country.
The Jesuits undoubtedly had foreseen
the possibility of their being unable
to remove any of the treasure
from the country, and they decided to
hide it in some secret place until they
could return for it in safety. Old Spanish
records in possession of Tucson
citizens, and Papago legends handed
down by word of mouth from father
to son, indicate that a large number of
Indians were employed in building a
hiding place for the treasure. Accord-
JULY, 1952 25