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welcome to another edition of Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains and today
we are going to find out everything there is to know about the gold that was
found under Jacob Waltz's death bed and we're gonna do it from a man who shook
the hand of the man who shook the hand of the man who was there. you got it!
let's go right now and find out about the gold
elaborate a little bit on the
stories we all have heard about the gold of the Dutchman's under his bed when he
died well at the Dutchman's deathbed there were only two people present
The Dutchman when he first moved in with Julia stayed in a small rental sort of
an apartment behind Julia's home but as his physical condition deteriorated she
moved him into a room in back of her bakery or she could keep close watch on him
again we've heard stories about who was with the Dutchman when he died so
just what are the facts and one morning very early when she went to work the
Dutchman was failing so she left to go find a doctor and as she left on the
street she met two men Gideon Roberts and Dick Holmes now Gideon Roberts was
an intimate friend of the Dutchman we believe that Gideon Roberts traveled
with the Dutchman from Castroville Texas to the California Gold Fields then up to
the the Prescott area and then finally down to Phoenix where the Roberts
homestead was adjacent to the Dutchman's homestead they were dear friends
Dick Holmes was with Roberts he was only a casual acquaintance of the Dutchman but
because of his presence with his dear friend Gideon Roberts the
Dutchman simply accepted Dick Holmes as being a reliable person so Julia asked
Roberts and Holmes to sit with the Dutchman while she went for the doctor
well she was delayed two hours the doctor was delivering a baby and
by the time she got back the Dutchman had died well in the two hours that
Julia was gone the Dutchman made what we call his
deathbed revelation to Holmes and Roberts now there was on the western
frontier even among unchurched people the idea that on your deathbed you make
what they called your final confession they called it making your peace and it
was in those two hours that the Dutchman told to Holmes and Roberts the
circumstances of him to him discovering the mine and trying to direct Dick
Holmes back to the mine he picked Dick Holmes because Gideon Roberts was the
Dutchman's age he was an old man in feeble health himself in fact Roberts
died just a few months after the Dutchman did died of silicosis they
called it miners disease in those days
how much gold was in the candle box
under his bed in telling about the mine he told Dick Holmes he said under my bed
in a miner's candle box it's what I have left of the ore out of the mine
he said I made three caches back there I didn't trust banks I made three caches of gold
back in the mountains a large cache and two small caches that he said I went
back later and I packed one of the small caches out it's what I've been living on
all these years and he said what's left in it of it
isn't a miner's candle box under my bed he said Dick get it out Holmes got it
out it was heavy the Dutchman told him to open it and
when he did Holmes could scarcely believe his eyes there was nearly 50
pounds forty-eight and a half pounds actually of incredibly high-grade ore in
that candle box richer than anything Holmes that ever dreamed of and Holmes
of somewhat of a prospector in fact his father was a graduate of the University
at Ann Arbor Michigan with a degree in geology and mineralogy Holmes had some
background well the Dutchman tried to direct Holmes
back to the mine the problem was he was not able to use place-names because it
was only in the Dutchman's later years that they were attaching names to the
mountains and the canyons in Superstition Mountain so he couldn't say
lebarge Canyon Boulder Canyon or Peters Canyon he didn't know the names he could
only describe what the country looked like as he traveled and had one of the
roughest pieces of wilderness terrain on the North American continent it simply
wasn't good enough they never found the mine that holmes sold the gold to
Goldman's store Leo and Charley Goldman ran a mercantile store on the northeast
corner of central in Washington and Phoenix and interestingly enough that
store was founded by Miguel Peralta who operated the Valenciana mine up the
Black Canyon Country and there's a legend it may be the same Miguel Peralta
that had mines in the Superstition Mountains
back in the 1840s up through the 1860s that 48 and a half pounds of gold had to
have an assay to determine its value for the purchase they took it to an assayer
named Joe Porter' II had an assay little-ass a shop on Wall Street the
streets not there anymore it's nothing but an alley today and Portier'
took representative samples and assayed that ore at a hundred and ten thousand
dollars at ton when gold was twenty dollars and 64 cents an ounce that would
be a couple million dollars a ton in today's gold values Holmes kept several
pieces of the gold that he later had made into jewelry in fact some of the
gold that goldmans bought was acquired by a Phoenix jeweler named Rosensweig
that cut a number of the the best pieces into jewelry settings and a jeweler
named John levy in San Francisco acquired some of the ore and made
jewelry including a gold matchbox that later became quite famous it was the
largest piece of jewelry so the most representative piece of jewelry most
representative of the the wealth of the Dutchman's gold
so so clay have you seen
the Dutchman's gold I mean really and held it in your hand and I've seen eight
pieces of what we call Dutchman jewelry that still exists here in Arizona it's
all the same stuff it is all incredibly rich so that's the story of what
happened to the Dutchman's gold
okay concerning the existing
of the assay as they're proof that it even existed
well the actual assay is
not documented now Joe Porter is records are still in existence but they're all
in French and they've never been translated they're down at Superstition
Mountain Historical Society the chances of him actually retaining assay records
over many years is pretty doubtful although the possibility still exists
that that assay could could be of record but no there's no actual documentation
on this and you know some people say oh this can't be true because you know Dick
Holmes wasn't rich he died the same as everybody else did and I always ask him
well where was he buried who I don't know where he was buried well he was
buried in a marble crypt of a mausoleum in Phoenix he wasn't buried in potter's
field Holmes evidently was in possession of a substantial amount of money and he
said that's where it came from
all right so Clay did you did you know
Rhine Petrasch no I didn't know Rhine Rhine died Rhine killed himself in
superior in the month in 1943 shortly before I came to Arizona I
came here in 47 but I knew Rhine's brother Herman now
where Herman figured into it when the Dutchman died Julia's home Julia and Rhine
felt that the Dutchman had even though he had never taken them to the mine that
he'd told them enough about it that they might stand a chance of actually finding
it but neither one of them was qualified to search but Rhine had his brother
Herman and his father Gottfried both experienced miners that were at that
time living near Helena Montana probably not
right in town but Rhine wrote a letter to his father and his brother outlying
some of the story and telling the clues that he knew of to try and convince his
brother Herman and his father Gottfried that they really had something to go on
that Gottfried and Herman should come down and organize a search for the mine
which they did but again the sketchy part that Rhine and Judia had picked up
just wasn't good enough that's oh that's big country back there terribly rough
big big country they never found the mine
could he have actually stolen that
from some other mine well you're very right the the most one of the most
popular theories for the source of the Dutchman's gold that was that he worked
at the vulture mine and high grated stole rich specimens of gold and there
was extremely rich gold at the vulture mine at Wickenburg now I mentioned that
the assayer that assayed the gold under the Dutchman's bed was a man named Joe
Porter' well when that rumor came out that the gold under the Dutchman's bed came
out of the vulture mine at Wickenburg Porter threw up his hands and said
absolutely not that there was rich mine in the vulture but it was nothing like
what was under the Dutchman's bed and Porter should have known because the
chief assayer at the vulture mine was Joe Porter II that's all that man did
from morning til night was handled vulture or if the Dutchman's or had been
from the vulture Porter e would have recognized it immediately but then
regarding a Goldfield I maintain it can't be here because the Dutchman was
headed out the clavaness is back into the Superstitions he'd have gone right by
Goldfield but she could have driven up to with the buckboard but there were
samples taken including this Dutchman matchbox that I mentioned that was made
by John Levy company in San Francisco there was the matchbox samples from the
Mammoth mine here at Gold field from the pioneer era samples in the black Queen
here at Goldfield samples from the Vulture samples from the Bulldog here at
Goldfield and these were taken to the Mackay School of Mines up at Reno and I
was present at that time I helped take this material up there and it was placed
under a scanning electron microscope and very carefully examined but there are
limitations to what you can do with a scanning electron microscope for one
thing the magnification is so extremely powerful that you're examined only a
very tiny minut spot on a specimen you can't get an overall view of anything
and so what it boiled down to you can't say that the Dutchman gold came from a
specific place you can say that it was only very similar or very dissimilar to
the other specimens that you're examining did that gold match any other
known mine and under the electron microscope it was pronounced very
dissimilar from any other specimen that we had the Dutchman matchbox was also a
one time taken to the Arizona mines Department of Mines and mineral
resources and Phoenix or it was examined by several very prominent Arizona
geologists mining men and they all agreed that they knew of nothing similar
to that that ever came out of any known Arizona mine that it must have come from
an unknown source so it's one of the mysteries of Superstition Mountain
Well there you have it firsthand from someone who was there when the gold from under
the Dutchman's bed was tested and they found out that it doesn't match any gold
from anywhere else just another mystery of the Superstition Mountains
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