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Welcome to Mysteries of Superstition Mountain I'm Larry Hedrick or we bring
the past into the present for our future viewers today we have another great
story by Hank Sheffer Thank You Larry another character out of the annals of
the Superstition Mountain legacy there's a fella by the name of Elijah
Marcus Reavis better known as the Hermit of the Superstition Mountains
when I first came out here what I learned about him was just from the
stories and he was we don't know much about him we don't know where he came
from he's just this mysterious guy who managed to pop up out of nowhere but
that really isn't true because as time went on I learned there was a whole lot
more about this Elijah Reavis than what the legends and the story tell us
letting us know first off we know that Elijah was born in 1827 over in
Beardstown Illinois he went to school like most boys do and he finally came
out of college in 1849 and he was teaching school he did that for a little
while but he really got bored with it and then all of a sudden he got bit by
the same sweet scent of greed I guess you must say because it was gold in
California so he left Illinois and he went over to the San Gabriel River
that's where he he landed and he was looking for gold over there and he did
that for a while and he hunted and searched and it turned out that he
finally got bored with that because he didn't do very well with it and he went
back to teaching school for a while well come 1860 he got bored completely and he
left there and he went over into Arizona and he was over here hunting and
carrying on in bradshaw mountains looking for gold there but that didn't
really work out again and so he left there and he went back to his haunts by
1866 over in California now in California he met this gal Maria Y
Sexton and he decided to get married and lo and behold they did that by by 1868
and they had one child by the name of Luis Maria and they they didn't really
get along very well because the marriage just started well it it just went bad he
wanted to move back to Arizona and he wanted to take his family there but
Maria didn't want to do that she wanted to stay with her parents so in September
of 1869 he just up and leaves and he heads back to Arizona and he's back in
two areas of Prescott he's he's running around there he's running around all
over the place and finally by 1870 he's down around Fort McDowell now it's
interesting that people say that we don't know much about Reavis when in fact
his name was pretty well known he had an uncle his uncle Logan was a fella who
was from Nebraska at this point and he had decided that what should happen was
that the federal government should move the capital from Washington DC down to
st. Louis Missouri well that didn't work out fortunately but Reavis also had
another uncle by the name of Isia and Isia was a Supreme Court justice who was
located down in the McDowell Regional well now also we find that Elijah hooks
up with his uncle who's the judge and he becomes the United States
deputy marshal this is probably where he got to understand and know the territory
as we know the Superstition Mountains because he handled all of that territory
well now we roll around over into 1874 and Elisha Reavis has finally decided
he's not going to play any of that stuff he's not gonna be a marshal he's not
gonna be a schoolteacher he's gonna move off on his own up into the Superstition
Mountain and where he went where this is really gonna help you is what they now
call rebus Valley well now Reavis Valley is about 12 miles
back in off of Route 88 and it's a beautiful area back in there it's one of
the few places where there is annual water it's there perpetually there's a
creek that runs down through that property and that's where he landed four
years later while he's still he's already set this place up to be a a
garden spot literally he's raised in vegetables he's raising apple trees he
has an apple orchard but in 1878 I guess to add to his income if you will he was
also breaking horses and mules and training them for the United States Army
I don't know how long that lasted but he did it for a little while but now
meanwhile back up on the ranch I love that meanwhile back at the ranch gotta
love it at any rate he's back at the ranch
there's a letter that he wrote to his uncle Logan and it's interesting that he
says this particular year he had lost all of his crops and that that was going
to cost him that season $5,000 that's a lot of money we're in the 1870s here
at any rate we know that he's taking these this produce and he's selling it
to the communities that are around the area well now the story that everybody
remembers and bear in mind were were after the
ranchero wars with the Apache in the Yavapai were actually after that
era but the way the story goes and the way he got the name as being the madman
was that one day he was looking at over his over his property and he happened to
see an Indian walking around now Reavis really didn't think much of Indians so
obviously he didn't think much of them cuz he shot the man dead and he let him
lay there he just left him where he felt well a couple days later one of his
buddies came looking for him apparently concerned were where he'd gone and as he
came up and found the guy which probably wasn't hard to do cuz after several days
in the Sun well you figured out for yourself at any rate he found the guy in
about that same time Reavis shot him dead and left him lay well now things are
getting a little cranky here with the Indians come a few days later they came
back with a party of Braves and they started a seige on Reavis' hut that he had up there
they shot and shot and he shot in a shot and as the story goes he ran out
of ammunition but he was he was just angry as he could
be but the Indians now that they had an opportunity to get this guy they stopped
and the reason they stopped was because according to the old Indian tradition
they would not fight after dark and it was now late evening well the Indians
all sat down they built themselves a fire they were sitting around just
contemplating on the Morning Sun coming in and how they were gonna destroy this
old goofy farmer well Reavis right after dark the fires
are going and the Indians are sitting there and
they're all in this and it's laid-back mood they're just waiting for the
sunrise and here comes Reavis just stark naked as a jaybird with a butcher knife
in each hand just yelling and screaming and carrying on and he come running over
there jumped in the middle of that fire just started kicking coals in the face
of these Indian Braves and they started going crazy because they think he's
crazy and their other tradition says that they can't kill a crazy man or
they'll have to take his place and be as crazy as he is
well they ran off and they let him be and the way the story goes was they
never bothered him again well that's all fine and good now he's the mad man as
well as the Hermit but in the meantime he's now producing all of these fruits
and vegetables and taking him into town there are people say who saw him one of
the few times he actually went into Phoenix normally he just went to the
ranchers and some of the other communities like Florence and went into
globe occasionally but he was in Phoenix and they they said that this guy was
something to behold he had a scraggly old beard it was just
disgustingly filthy he had hair looked like it had never had a haircut and he
had this propensity for when he wear out a pair of pants he didn't get rid of he
just put another pair of pants on top of that so I guess you could pretty much
know he was coming before he got there but at any rate he always rode this
favorite burro his and he carried as the legend says a forty five seventy
Winchester weld the problem with that is that it was a it wasn't an eighteen
seventy four forty five seventy it was in 1873 38 40 Winchester rifle be that
as it may but anyway they would see him coming into town and essentially they
said that you could always spot him because he would have 8 to 15 buros
well he had another funny eccentricity because he would occasionally sit and
drink with people but he would not go into a building where a woman was
already there he wouldn't have many parts of that don't know if it had to do
with Mary Y can't imagine what the Y was Mary Y Sexton his wife or what
the deal was but he would not do that at any rate he would get his money get his
supplies and he would head up back up to the mountain well as time went on there
were some folks that would go up and visit him periodically because he was
getting old by 1896 Reavis was approaching 70 for you who haven't done the
math already he was approaching 70 he was getting pretty feeble and apparently
had a heart condition one of the fellows that was visiting periodically was James
Dellabeau and he had stopped in and Reavis was getting ready to make yet
another trip into one of the towns we don't know where he was headed but we
know he has headed down toward Rogers Canyon Rogers trough area but at any
rate he said Reavis he said you know you're getting pretty feeble here maybe
maybe he ought to just back off of us a little better
go to town see a doctor take care of yourself
well Reavis wasn't having any parts of it and James left Delabow left because he had
other business to take care of at the time around the mountain and so he did
that and then he wound up back the j-f ranch at any rate when he got to the
ranch this was sometimes later sometime later come to find out Reavis had been by
the ranch yet and so he questioned if anybody'd seen him and they said no he
hadn't passed that way which was something that he always did
so Dellabow decided to backtrack the trail and see if he could find what was
going on here well he did he found Reavis his body about three miles from his
ranch and he had he'd been dead for a little while for the amount of time that
at least the amount of times that Delabow had been taking care of his
business the burros were still tied up and they were they were in pretty bad
shape but they were still alive
but they were there Reavis was dead so at that point he just gathered up all the
bones and they put it by the side of the road and put a rock up on top of it and
marked the place I don't know what happened to the burros there was no
documentation on the burros but at any rate hikers were not leaving the the
original burial site alone and so what happened was the gravesite was changed
and it was moved over ironically on to an Indian ruin area I'm sure he didn't
have any say in that but at any rate that's the way that worked
Reavis in 1896 as we assumed it was in the middle of April when he died he was
gone from the Superstition Mountain how he died or if it was the Indians or the
mountain or whatever it was we don't know not for sure and that is just
another one of the mysteries of the superstition though thank you for
watching this episode of mysteries of the Superstition Mountains
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