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Our episode today for Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains is going to deal
with the best organized search for the lost Dutchman gold mine that ever took place
Not only was it the best organized it was the best researched
it was the best financed it was the best supplied Expedition that ever took place our story starts
in 1966. that's the same year I moved out here permanently to Arizona and bought my home
it started when an attorney contacted a private investigator named Glenn Magill in Oklahoma City
he wanted Mr Magill who he knew was very experienced in finding
missing people to find a missing heir to an estate
and after Magill found this missing heir the attorney invited him to a celebratory dinner
and during that dinner the attorney told Mr Magill the story of the Lost Dutchman Legend
Magill wasn't all that interested in it because he thought you know looking for something like
that might take years but the attorney offered to finance his first expedition and promised to send
him all the documentation that he had on hand well Glenn had a job come up that took him to Phoenix
so while he's was visiting Phoenix he went through all the newspaper archives and he
went down to some of the libraries and looked up a bunch of stuff on Jacob Waltz and any of the
names that were involved and done a tremendous amount of research he ran across two books one
was by Barry storm which was the book that was used to make Lust For Gold movie and Sims Ely's
book the lost Dutchman gold mine and in those books he saw all the same clues that we've been
talking about in the newspapers the same stories that we've been talking about all this time but
he did one thing that nobody else had ever done he had seen the clue of the imaginary five-mile
Circle the center of was Weaver's needles so he rented a helicopter and he knew about from
the books he knew about Canyon Fresco that nobody had ever found and he flew this five-mile Circle
and on one of his last flights that went directly towards Weaver's neither they went over the top of
Bluff Springs Mountain and there he saw what everybody today now knows is Canyon Fresca
so with that information he went he went back home and organized in Oklahoma City and organized Five
Guys that he had trust in to go on this search he bought all the equipment all the all the food
all the every man was purchased a rifle for every man and plenty of ammunition because these early
60s was the feud between Ed Piper and Celeste Marie Jones or some people have been killed
and he wasn't about to go out there under these circumstances without being heavily armed
he bought two pack mules and they loaded him in a truck and another car followed behind and
they all came out to Apache Junction and headquarters out of the Superstition Inn
they went into the mountains and uh following the from Peralta Road following the exact clues of
the north trending Canyon and all the clues that we've talked about and the end of the tributary
Canyon and ended up in Needle Canyon this is between blacktop Mesa and Bluff Springs Mountain
so they decided to go up on blacktop Mesa and using binoculars they searched the whole West Wall
of black Bluff Springs Mountain looking for a cave because this is what they were supposed to find
and they couldn't see a thing there's no vegetation to speak of on the on the Cliffs
of Bluff Springs Mountain so they went on down the side of blacktop Mesa were at Adolf roof's
body was found and by the way I need to back up a little bit there because he also contacted Adolf's
son he tracked him down and gave him a phone call because he and he explained it to to his son
that he thought that Adolf wouldn't have took the original Maps into the superstitions that
he would probably have taken copies and perhaps some member of the family might have the originals
so he explained this to to Mr Ruth and Ruth stated that no dad took the original in with
him and not only took that original he took two other maps in with him too
and he promised to send him the maps and this is what really got
Mr Magill so excited about doing this Expedition so now we're back in Needle Canyon and using the
Ruth, Gonzalez profile map he found the face that looked like a man and this pillars that they were
talking about so when when Magill and his group found the rock face that that matched the profile
map it it wasn't right there's there was something absolutely wrong with the whole thing then he
remembered what Erwin Ruth told mentioned something about having to reverse the map
so he reversed the map and it matched exactly what was on the profile map and they were at the bottom
of Bluff Springs Mountain and one of the guys started up up the cliff ahead of the rest of them
and he was scaling pretty good and lost his grip and had a bad fall he didn't hurt himself but he
fell out of sight and the rest of the guys were rushing to find him and when they got there they
were actually looking past him because there was the cave that they couldn't find with binoculars
but it was a big cave it wasn't a tunnel like the clues said a tunnel in the side of the mountain
with a funnel pit on top the mountain over the tunnel it was a huge tunnel about 30 feet high
but one of the guys went into the cave and found that in the back of the cave there was a tunnel
that had been poured into the mountain since they found the tunnel in in the back of the cave they
were now assured that the pit mine was going to be found on top the cliffs but even though Mr Magill
had flown the superstitions in the helicopter and found Canyon Frisco and knew about Bluff
Springs Mountain he didn't know of a way to get up on the top because it was sheer Cliffs so he
decided to rent a helicopter and this helicopter was just a two-seater It could only take one guy
at a time in very small amount of supplies and it was 75 dollars an hour to use this helicopter and
it was very expensive getting the whole group up on top of Bluff Springs and all the equipment they
didn't know about the the way that we all go up on Bluff Springs from the southeast corner or the the
trail that is precarious that is on the North side anyway they established their base cap on a flat
place up on top of Bluff Springs Mountain and we have a map here that Mr Magill Drew himself of
their operation up there that you can you can look at and then they begin to make the Trek along the
whole West face of the Bluff Springs mountains towards the South End where they hope to find
this funnel pit well it took them two or several hours to negotiate the entire length of the Bluff
Springs but when they got to the end Mr Magill tripped at the very end and almost fell in the
pit and there it was and they were just absolutely elated and were absolutely certain that they had
really found the lost Dutchman gold mine so their next step was to go back to Oklahoma City they
left the place unguarded and swore everybody to secrecy and went back and to organize they
they formed a corporation they made up contracts for people's shares and all this kind of stuff
and a day or two after they got home they got a phone call from a reporter
one of the guys wives had talked to her sister who was a proofreader at
the newspaper in Oklahoma City and she had spilled the beans to a reporter
and this reporter wanted all the information about the lost Dutchman gold mine
well they were flabbergasted that the word had got out that the cat was out of the bag and they tried
to convince this guy that it was just absolutely too early to put any story out about it because
you'd have the mountains flooded with people now trying to find what they'd already found
so they made a deal with the guy to hold the story and he would be allowed to have uh what's the word
exclusive an exclusive on on on this whole thing and he agreed
but the next day the story was in the paper and it was bad and it turned out that that the reporter
had got a hold of Erwin Ruth Adolf roof's son and uh and Mr Ruth made a question a statement that
well if they use my dad's map and found this then they must have found the lost Dutchman gold mine
well the phone began ringing off the hooks now and uh but one of the fellas was from
one of the calls was from a fella in Arizona who agreed to finance the whole operation
and of course for a share and they really didn't have any alternative so they decided to do this
and they got all their act together and made another trip out to to Arizona into the mountains
and started working on cleaning out the pit only two guys could actually work on the pit and they
got down about 12 feet and it seemed like there was a layer of cement it was very difficult to
to do anything with it but they kept chipping away at it and and Magill took a sample of it
and sent it off to be analyzed and it wasn't cement it was some kind of a natural formation
and they managed to get through it and got down to another foot and run into another layer of it
and they got into that and managed to get that open meanwhile some guys were working on the
tunnel and they come up on a wall of the same kind of stuff that look like a door and they
just kept working at this so you know and Magill was in and out of the mountains back to Oklahoma
City and and stuff like that while all this was going on and uh finally a phone call came
to um Glenn that they had broken through the last layer of this stuff and came across some
wooden logs that were across the bottom and they took up the logs and they were hand hewn and
the guy that made the call reported that well we found the vein but it was worked out
Tom Kollenburn and I uh as co-founders of the museum
we had been on Bluff Springs Mountain a time or two one time we went up to look for a 18 inch
opening that his dad had found many years ago and if you look at Glenn Magill's map clear over on
the east end of Bluff Springs Mountain you'll find a notation where it says Cave of the Lost sandals
well the Lost sandals was not what we were looking for but it was an 18 inch opening
that I read that Tom allowed me to read in his dad's diary that he found and went in and it
opened up into a larger chamber then narrowed down again and opened up into a much larger casual uh
cave and in there he found a couple of really old trunks and he didn't tell his buddies about
it because his statement was they'd just take it out and put it on their mantel so he just left all
of it in there well Tom and I searched for this tunnel but it's a little opening but we never did
find it so Tom and I decided that we would go over and try to find that pit and in this this book
Killer Mountain they had taken a photograph of the pit looking down the valley into needle Canyon and
we got on Google Earth and was able to duplicate where they were standing when that picture was
taken so we went back up on Bluff Springs Mountain probably the third time for specifically to try to
find this this pit and we worked our way over uh you know this Bluff Springs Mountain is quite a
large mountain and we were coming up from the south east corner to the northwest corner and
then clear over to the south end it was it was an all-day trip and when we got to the point
we we were able to stand right exactly where our picture that we had taken from off Google Earth
uh was where the pit should have been but actually there was nothing there then I remembered in the
book when Glenn Magill went back in there after they found nothing at the bottom of the pit
that they had went over to visit it one more time and it was completely filled up and somebody
had found their stash of dynamite and set their Dynamite off and caused it enough of a landslide
to fill the whole pit so we were standing in the area but well obviously we didn't find it and but
that was an interesting trip too because that's the trip where I mentioned in one of our stories
that there was some dynamiting going on some place and else in the superstitions and Tom thought it
was uh crazy Jake and we met crazy Jake that night in the bar and uh had a little go around with him
but also uh on that trip Tom wanted to show me the Spanish rings um not very far from where
the pit was supposed to be Spikes have been driven into the wall there was at least four
of them that I remember might have been five or six and these spikes had rings on them and this
is supposedly where the Spaniards were supposed to have tied their animals tethered their animals
while they were working but Tom later revealed to me that he knew that it was
Cowboys that put those up there because Bluff Springs Mountain cattle often went up to the
top of Bluff Springs metal because there was a lot of grass up there there was water up there
and um and the Cowboys sometimes spent the night up there and tethered their animals to the Rings
they drove in the mall you know this book that I'm talking about is called killer Mountain
and it was very well written and it's just it's riveting to read it
and only somebody that knows a lot about the legend would know where the mistakes were made
in some of the clues and stuff like that but it it's worth the read even though it came to nothing
but Glenn Magill was back in the mountains several times after that the last date I
remember was 1973 he was still back in there and um when we got our taxes at status in 1980
Tom Kollenburn had contacted Mr Magill and Mr Magill was in our first Journal
as an honorary board member of the Superstition Mountain Historical Society anyway as it all come
to nothing thousands of people are still looking and it's just another mystery of the Superstition
now thank you for watching this episode of mysteries of the Superstition Mountains [Music]
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