Welcome to Mysteries of Superstition Mountain I'm Larry Hedrick where we bring the past into
the present for our future viewers today we have another great story by Hank Sheffer
you know one of the topics that we all talk about at Mysteries of Superstition Mountains when we all
get together and have our BS sessions is we talk about the history especially after all the years
we've been doing this the history we find the people keep getting closer and closer together as
as having relationships and I don't mean it like that but I mean they they they knew each other uh
or they're they're part of the same family we find events in history going from one year to the next
are getting closer and closer together and we also got to thinking you know what's really interesting
with the superstition mountains uh there's so much to talk about there and the Lost Dutchman and the
and the ghost stories and all that stuff that we forget that Arizona is not the only place
that existed on this planet at the time you know we look at not just Arizona in that case
and our own local happenings but also those happenings in other places in this country
and around the world let's look at the turn of the century in the early 1900s cowboys cattle
shoot Arizona restored territory from 1863 until 1912. but there was a whole lot going on in 1900
golly we it hadn't been all that long that they just captured Geronimo my gosh we even had we
even had the Roosevelt dam that was being built we had all sorts of things that were going on
so the 1900s early on were pretty interesting stuff and it was leading into the the 1920s
golly 1920s that was the roaring 20s where we had all the guys with their machine guns over in
Chicago and New York and New Orleans and down in Florida shooting each other and they were carrying
on in the whiskey shooting and all that crazy stuff in the 1930s in Arizona we had an insurgency
of people coming out here like Adolf Ruth I mean a lot of people coming out just like him looking
for gold they've been through a depression and they people were looking to restore their own
batteries and get some money in their own coffers and in the meantime all the way overseas we saw
the beginnings of the emergence of a really nasty fella who was going to start in on the second
world war and that was Adolf Hitler everybody hated him and for good reason now the 1940s sauce
plunged into war 1946 was a pretty good year though that was the year I was born
that's when I hit the ground running and all I wanted to do was when I got a little bit older
was be a cowboy so I was still thinking about Arizona back then and then the 1950s we saw
the rest of the world again at war we had Korea going on but the western magazines that emerged
were talking about the adventures of Cowboys and Indians and gold and crazy things that
were going on out in Arizona that was the place to be this was also when we saw the emergence
of the cowboy era with all the b-movies of cowboys and all sorts of wonderful heroes
everybody wanted to be a cowboy the 50s were truly the age of the cowboy and Arizona was
the place to be but by the 1960s the flamboyant if not overactive creative headlines supposedly
describing the same old wild and wooly has substained had subsided pretty greatly it was just
about gone but they were still there two of those writers were long gone and everybody knew them
the incredible is written by Edward Zane Carroll Judson Singer
better known as Ned Buntline the guy that wrote all the
the dime novels and made heroes all men of that were nine foot tall and bulletproof
and they took care of adventures that nobody in the world would ever undertake
except them and of course there's the incomparable Pierpoint Constable bicnell best known simply as
Bic he was a freelance writer for numerous papers in the east as well as for the California coast
he was an adventurer and was responsible in great part for the legend of the lost Dutchman
mine to come about going into the turn of the century everybody knew about the lost Dutchman
mine and everybody wanted them just as they still do today want to find the lost Dutchman gold mine
on the other hand speaking for Arizona she was still in the throes of making her own history
the lore of the Superstitions and the thirsts for those adventures and many
treasures with their accompanying legends and lore were as much alive today as they were back then
this was at a time when the Vietnam conflict was raised in hell everywhere
else on the planet a passage junction had a major revelation going on of its own
on March 27 1964 that's the same year I graduated for pete's sake two months later
the headline in the local newspaper bugle the Apache Sentinel said
skeleton of long lost hermit Kay Clapp found a few scattered bones sun bleached and coyote
lying helter skelter in an arroyo deep in the superstition mountains are all that remain
of Yahez Clapp now having been a newspaper editor for several newspapers myself
that is the kind of headline that you just pray for i mean that gets everybody's attention and
we're talking about another dead body over in Superstition Mountains in 1964.
no one had seen or heard a word from jay since 1961 and his mother Audrey had heard nothing from
her son for several weeks that set off an alarm now bear in mind nobody knows who Jay Clapp is
except probably his mother I guess I don't know but it wouldn't be but for another three and a
half years that anybody even found Jay he was up in the mountains somewhere but he wouldn't
be found until three and a half years later in Boulder Canyon by a hiker over from California
ironically this story is about a man who came to the mountain not looking for the usual treasure
no sorry he was completely he was completely different than anybody who'd ever come over here
but I gotta get ahead of myself there
there's more to tell before we get to that Jahez Clapp was born in Hollenberg
Kansas how about that somebody not born in Germany he was born in 1915 and we don't know
much about his childhood though but we do know that he attended the southeastern state college
over in Durant Oklahoma he was said to be a genius in mathematics and science
and this led to his deep interest in astronomy and then later astrology these were both very very
important to him for those of you who don't know the difference between astronomy and astrology
or won't admit that you don't know the difference astronomy is simply the study
of the planets and their relationships to each other out in the universe astrology
that is what probably really interested Jay Clapp was the study of how those planets influenced
people on earth what was going to go on in their lives these were both very very important to him
now jay arrived in Apache Junction in 1951 where he hoped to find find a place where he
could live in harmony with nature and devote himself completely to god he found a place
where there were some caves near the first water ranch and he lived in those caves for 12 years
he had no use for technology or regimentation of any kind
he believed that everybody's lives would be destroyed by technology
and he just didn't want any parts of that that pretty much makes him a loner
after he disappeared in 1961 pictures and ads etc were placed in papers all around the country
everybody was looking for j clap at this point but nobody found anything they just couldn't find jay
then when the discovery was finally made in 1964 the Pinal County Sheriffs attempted to
ride to the location but found the first water trail was so rough that they couldn't pass by
so they went around and they went in through the dons campsite
once the body was with the coroner it was determined that Jay had died an accidental death
but even after all of that they they still never found the skull but there was enough evidence
without the skull to identify the bones positively and all the other stuff that was around where they
found those bones as is always the case there was consternation concerning whether or not Jay Clapp
well whether his death was accidental or if it was something else anytime they find a body
that doesn't have a head you know it just has to be something got to be something dastardly
what was it then that actually took his life nobody really knows
we still don't know we don't even know if he found the solace that he sought with god
the answer to that question would just have to remain one of the mysteries of the Superstition
Mountains thank you for watching this episode of Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains