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hello and welcome to another edition a very special edition of Mysteries of the
Superstition Mountains today once again we're going to be talking with Jack San
Felice about the area of the Silver King and Pinal City but it all ties in with
a mystery of the Superstition Mountains now the reason I'm wearing this hat here
is because this is going to be the story of two soldiers now you may have heard
this story before but it is a real mystery and I'm wearing an authentic hat here
like the soldiers wore back then so let's get to Jack where he tells us the
story they found a mine dump with some more on
it but they were soldiers but wait a minute what did I say about soldiers
cowboys and soldiers made dollar a day miners made 4 times as much so they
wanted to come to Silver King to get a stake to go to California or whatever they wanted to do
and so they thought a short cut they wanted to do now they could have
ridden a stagecoach out of McDowell and come around the mountain to Pinal City
a round of southside Superstitions the stagecoach and then could have come
up this way but that cost a minimum of five dollars okay that's ten dollars a
piece well ten dollars and five dollars was a lot of money they didn't have the
money they didn't can you believe that they didn't have five dollars to ride a
stagecoach so they said well the weather's nice and we'll hike through
the mountains and they followed part of the old.. they called military show there
was no military trail through the superstitions
people say this was the
military but there is none there is no trail that was called the mil.. there
were trails that the military took
the the most often trail used that went
through the mountains actually was used by Crooks Army, Crooks soldiers and they
have actual records of that and I have those enough I followed that trail to
get to some high-grade mines where gold was and silver was in the
superstitions hiking through the mountains at a location they found what
will they thought was an abandoned mine
and I figure the year to be 1883 okay
and about 1883 they're coming through the mountain they find us old mine
that's got stuff and they don't know what the stuff is I mean it probably
looked what like Larry got it probably look like copper but that mixture of
copper gold maybe some silver and whatnot
and so they put it in their backpack and they come on to Silver King
looking for Arron Mason the first superintendent here well by then
Arron Mason was the mine manager he was no longer the first superintendent they
had a real engineer that went to an engineer college as an engineer
here so that was 1883 so about that time Mason became the mine superintendent he
was in charge of the mine and the mill what other words he could cut what he
wanted out of here and cut what he wanted out of there he was the big maja
and he became a millionaire Multi...four guys out of Silver King became
multimillionaires
Jim Barney was the first president
Mason
Charley Mason
became a multi-millionaire Chuck Fraser became a multi-millionaire Bowen Robert
Bowen who's the underground Foreman and so those four guys became
multimillionaires
nobody else was making that kind of money okay
so they find this ore they come here to looking for Mason at silver King he's
not here is that he's down at Pinal City at the mill so they walk down the
five miles it was nothing for them on a road piece of cake going downhill
piece of cake so they walk down there and hook up with Mason and he's down
there with the assayer and and talking about some ore and they wouldn't they go
up to him and said we want a job here and they're talking to him about a job he
said well I can put you on as muckers up at the mill and you'll get paid
four dollars a day four dollars a day okay and we work I think they were
working seven days a week then but there was some fluctuation of getting time off
okay some fluctuation because they would they would when they had a breakdown
they could stop okay and like I say they work ten our two shifts fifty men apiece
okay and then worked the various levels of the mine various level the mine
became seven, eight, nine working levels okay nine there are seven main levels to
auxilary levels and it went down to almost eight hundred feet and then below
that was a huge sum because they at that time we're getting in two hundred
gallons of water a day and they couldn't use that water up here well anyhow and
they said by the day after they talked to him he actually hired him on as as
muckers they said by the way we were going through them superstition
mountains and and I think actually they in those days I don't know if they call
it superstitions or if they called them the gold field mountains or they called
them there was another name that they were called that the mountains had
different names superstition name really didn't catch on until the story of the
Lost Dutchman so they were called different things.. they were called
the Salt River mountains part of them was Salt River part of them gold field
and the other part was Superstition Mountain was only the one mountain
out there the whole superstitions weren't that
which became the forest and a Superstition that whole area now is the
Superstition but that day it wasn't it was different it had three different
names or so anyhow he they pulled this ore out of the sacks
and Mason said wow
I don't know that looks like gold I'm gonna have my assayer retort it for you
whoa whoa whoa what does retort me a retort it means that they they break it
up and they they use mercury and they use a process where the mercury is heated up
and it goes through where the fine powder the gold is a powder they make it a
powder little pieces in the mercury adheres to the gold when they heat it
and the mercury goes back through the tubes it drops out and into another
container and it's used again but the gold pieces and all that is what's left
okay and he said Wow he said I'm gonna pay you guys $800 for this gold yeah
Gold this is high grade you don't want to be miners you want to go back and
relocate that and I'll I'll help you get started and show you how to locate it
file a claim
I figured he'd be back here in two weeks
they bought mules they bought long guns he said now the
Apache's are still out you want to buy some long guns
and so they bought long
guns they bought food they bought steaks and kind of things that they would need
to set up a mine, paper, pencils things like that just how to found how to set
your steaks and a mining claim in those days is basically what it is today
unless you have a Gulch claim or a River claim on a river or a creek it was
actually 1,600, 1,500 feet by 300 feet... 600 feet I'm sorry 300 feet is the
center post and then it and then it's 300 each side and that's 1500 feet long
so it's 600, 600, 600 so that's 600 x 1500 it's 20 acres to make it it's simple
it's 20 acres so he said wow this is how you got to file this claim and you got
it on a file some claims around you up if you see everything that looks good
they left here the two soldiers with their long guns or supplies and knowning how
to file.. but they left by themselves so what happened to them you've never seen
alive again never seen alive again they were murdered in the superstitions
two bodies were found that we're pretty sure that one of them was a soldier
because they they were killed and made to look like the Apache's killed him
because they took most of their clothes if they left the hat and the hat was
bought at from the store in the...the company store at Fort McDowell ok the
black hats and
and...
some of the other things reminded them if they were soldiers
didn't anyone ever dig them up and verify who they were
Tom Kollenborn dug up one of the graves over there by quarter circle U by
miners needle and and the dug and that picture of me is in there it's this area
this grave is near here all right then where's the grave I can't
tell where was because nobody knows where it was I thought if Tom could go
back to it today because it's all disappeared over there now everything's
changed hiking trail, horse trails, this that and the other they never found them
alive and then didn't find the mine there was thought that that was the Lost Dutchman mine
well why did they people think that well because the Dutchman in
the early days came by Silver King for supplies he could buy supplies here or
later in Pinal City but the last time he said he was here by his mine in the
Superstitions the mines that I found are only twelve miles from here twelve miles
east.. northeast of here the mines that I found and I wrote all about them in a
book called the lost El Dorado of Jacob Waltz because guess what I come out here for
I had known about soldier story before I really got hot on a Dutchman
story and I said everybody's written about stories about the Dutch.. I'm gonna
out write a story about a lot of soldiers mine no way it was so difficult
and it's so difficult I have 3,000 pages in binders on the Lost that's the lost
soldiers mine I have 300 binders on the Dutchman mine that's as
much information is out there on the Dutchman I have a hundred some books on
the Dutchman including my own and Jesse Feldman he's got a book called.. and Ron
Feldman who wrote books about the Dutchman and Tom Kullenborn who wrote
books about.. an article and Tom wrote a lot about the Dutchman in his articles
Kullenborn chronicles so and then Greg Davis so I followed it and I wanted to
find that soldiers trail because the Dutchman had been here he used to go
from here to Pinal city into Florence and he'd pay for things with gold
either gold dust or gold nuggets people remembered him from those days
just how important was the silver King mine
so this mine not only is it part of the
history of mining in this area but it also has a flavor to it of the Lost
Dutchman and the lost Soldiers Mine while the mystery of the two soldiers
was never solved and the two bodies or the remains thereof were never
completely identified because the clothes had been taken from them there
was the one thing remaining and that's the hat so at least one of them we know
was a soldier was it the two soldiers that came to Silver King it's one of the
mysteries of the superstition
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you