Howdy folks I'm Hank Sheffer and welcome to another true life story right here with
Larry Hedrick on Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains a little over 70 years ago in 1949
the infamous Peralta Stone maps surfaced
about 15 miles of where we're sitting right now out near Florence Junction
there's many variations to this story and it's not my intent to get involved in all those variations
you can go to google and type in stone maps and you can read all the different stories about
stone maps that you want to but some information surfaced recently in the last few months
that may lead to telling the truth about the stone maps needless to say the stone maps
ended up in the hands of a man named Travis Tumlinson from Texas and there have been
several people who have had personal contacts with the relatives of Tumlinson
You can go to Desert USA you can go to the Treasure Net and you can read the stories
that these people who had personal contact with the relatives of Tumlinson in Texas
and what the relatives had to say about these stone maps had a little experience with the
stone maps myself I met Tom Kollinborn in 1975 and it was through him he was teaching a class
at the Apache Junction High School called prospecting the superstitions that I learned
what I believe is the truth about the stone maps in 1978 tom began talking quite a bit about
the developing of a museum and we decided to continue with that and I wanted to pull
a little prank on Tom and also thought it would be nice to have a set of stone maps
to put on display so I made these maps in 1978 i cast them out of plaster of paris
and sand casted the bottom of them or the cross and the Don's name is on the back of the maps
and put them in the trunk of the car and covered them with a blanket and went over to tom's
and got told Tom I had something unusual I wanted him to see and
when he got in the proper position I opened the trunk and he yanked the
blanket off and Tom's jaw dropped so far I thought it was going to tear the bumper off my car
he was absolutely flabbergasted he said where did you get those and I'd like to never convinced him
that i made these maps I also knew a fellow named Robert E Lee I'm not quite that old
Robert E Lee was a filmmaker who was in a combat photographer in World War II and done
some documentary documentaries that was one of them that was most popular was called Sea Power
and I've seen these on television years ago but in 1971 he began to do a story on the Lost Dutchman
gold mine and he finished that by 1974 but then he continued to come over here yearly at the Lost
Dutchman parade where tom was showing his film in the evenings after the during Lost Dutchman days
so I got to meet Robert E Lee a couple of times and in his book
he had wonderful pictures of the maps and it was these pictures that were very clear that
I used to draw these pictures of the maps now my set of maps have been sitting around here
for nearly 50 years now and as far as I know I was the first person to ever duplicate a set
one of the people that did see the set was Jim Hatt,
Jim Hatt's a well-known Dutch Hunter he's passed away now uh he was a trained nuclear engineer
that worked at three mile island and he came out here and he worked at Palo Verde but he came out
here for the sole purpose of Dutch Hunting and he probably put put as much time as anybody i know
looking for the Lost Dutchman goldmine well he was doing it in an old Oldsmobile Toronado car
real low off the ground type of a car and he was traveling over some of the roughest roads you ever
saw to get to where he would start walking in to do his search my son was a mechanic and had done
mechanic work on some other Dutch Hunter's car and he got the word and he came over to have my
son work on his car and he was complaining about the lowness of it and the roughness of the roads
and it just so happened I had just bought a pickup from the guy that used to own the the old barrel
root bear stand that's still here but it's not being used it's in the shape of a giant barrel
in in east mesa and his son was in Vietnam and told him to sell his pickup for him and I bought
it and Jim wanted that pickup so I made a trade with for the car with Jim and a little to boot
and my son fixed the car up which had the the front bearing was out of the four at front-wheel
drive and the front bearing was out and it was hard starting and but he fixed it up and sold it
and we split the profit and anyway that red pickup that everybody saw Jim driving around was the one
that came from the Root Beer Stand a dozen or so years after we traded vehicles and he saw my maps
Jim began to make he casted copies of match and was selling them there's quite a few of them
that were sold I have no idea how many and then somebody I don't think it was Jim but somebody
come out with some miniature ones that were not much bigger than a postcard and they were a lot of
those sold and so they're just wall hangers that people have for example like the one that set that
Jim gave me the maps here have been sitting in my tack room for about almost 50 years now and
other than tom and Jim I can't even remember who I showed them to other than that that
that wasn't the point of doing it it was it was a joke on tom number one and number two
we were thinking about the we were working on the paperwork for the museum and i was thinking that
it would be nice to have that set to put on display because the you know the the mission
statement of the museum was that we collect and preserve fact fiction and legend so it
there's a lot of stuff up at the museum that are fact that are fiction and their legend
you know I mentioned before that there was a lot of various stories about
the maps particularly exactly where they were found I know of at least four places
three miles apart that people claim they were found but there are people who actually
went to Texas and made contact with uh Tumlinson's relatives who were still there
and they started the story in Desert USA and the Treasure Net these stories that you can
click on there and type in stone maps and you can read these stories for yourself
the most common thing about them is is that the relatives of Travis Tumlinson told everybody
exactly the same thing there was no mix-up and one of them actually made contact with Tavis's
daughter who was very young at the time all this happened and then he lost track of her because
they moved and then another fella tracked her down and he made personal contact with him so they
had some pretty direct information being given to him now you know all these various stories
can't all be true but I'm here to tell you that they could all be false
now there's a series of pictures we're going to show here and
i hope I can remember to get them straight and get them sent down for editing the first one
is a picture of well let me back up a little bit Travis, Travis Tumlinson
was the grandfather was the grandson of Pigleg Tumlesson Pegleg was a well-known treasure
hunter and so was his dad and Travis was raised in this atmosphere of constant treasure hunting
and peglag had quite a collection of maps different maps of treasure hunting
and even after a fire destroyed some of them it was still a considerable collection of maps
and the first picture we're going to show you is the long-distant picture of
peg leg Tumlinson's house and which is dilapidated and you see the windmill there
and I want you to the most thing I want you to concentrate is on the chimney of this house
and the next picture we show is a close-up of the chimney and you can see that there's carvings on
this chimney on the rocks in east chimney and one of these carvings is signed by Travis Tumlinson
with the date of 1924 which meant that Travis was 14 years old when he was doing a lot of carving
on peg lakes chimney and one of the pictures here a little further close up is of a treasure chest
it looks like you can just see one end of the treasure chest with the handle but if
you look real close the entire chest is there and it's a beautiful job of carving
and I got some idea how long it takes to get things like that done and his is much bigger than
mine anyway this chimney is covered with carvings that Travis himself made and in 2016 two people
that I know went down to visit the Tumlinson's down in Texes of Travis Tumlinson and they
were told exactly the same thing that these other gentlemen on Treasure Net and Desert USA were told
that Travis is the one who carved the stone maps but in 2016 one of the fellows stayed down there
for a couple of months but i just recently talked to to the other one and they didn't
want their names I'm deliberately not mentioning names this isn't the point of this story but
he told me that they were told while they were down there in 2016 and this is the information
I referred to earlier that i had just learned about and was able to verify that the witch map
and I want to say also that often it's called the priest map I've even heard it called a banker
but they the relatives referred to it as the witch map that the model for the witch map
was taken from a comic book from his daughter who was just so high
it's quite obvious from the paper map called the Peralta treasure map
that this the heart map and the map below it was copied from this piece of paper map that
was in the collection of peg-leg TUmlinson but the witch map and the horse map were complete
for applications of his imagination and have absolutely nothing to do with the Lost Dutchman
goldmine and whether the paper map has anything to do with it cannot be proven one way or the other
but you might notice with the paper map here compared to the stone maps that there are some
significant differences there's information on the paper map that isn't on the stone map
and was either added before after the fact or left out deliberately on the stone maps
there's hundreds of people who absolutely believe that the stone maps are authentic and there's
probably twice as many and I'm talking about Dutch Hunters that believe that the stone
maps are completely fake after seeing what i just showed you you draw your own conclusion
is this a mystery of the superstition mountain or is it witchcraft
thank you for watching this episode of Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains