[SFX]
you know if you have Clay Worst in front of you you have to get from him his
crazy Jake story I mean we've had it from everybody else so let's hear what
Clay has to say. you know Clay everybody's got a story about crazy Jake
did you ever meet him well crazy Jake his name was Robert Jacob they say
Jacobs but his name was actually Jacob
I don't know how Jake got out here but
he was actually from back East somewhere may have had a little legal background I
don't know
but he went back in the superstitions looking for lost gold and
it's kind of interesting because the first time I ever met Jake he always
carried a double-barrel sawed-off shotgun which loaded with buckshot has a
pretty formidable weapon
I was coming out of the superstitions and I met Jake
coming in carrying this double-barreled shotgun and he introduced himself he
said I'm known as crazy Jake and he says I'm working the mine right over here in
the Red Hills and he said you know there's a Spanish mine in the Red Hills
he said to fellow named Clay Worst was a local historian here had done some
research and he found came into some Spanish records of a survey called the
Salazar survey there was done in 1854 I believe after this country had become a
part of the United States it was Mexico up until the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and according to the Clay Worst the Mexicans came up
here and made a clandestine trip into the superstitions and opened up a mine
which they did not own and actually brought a primitive camera with the
chemicals to sensitize the plates and made photographs
pinnacle they called El Sombrero presumably weavers needle and a
photograph taken of El Sombrero from the mine site and actually ran a survey that
a fella named Cristobal Peralta showed up in Florence Mellon Tucson originally
in 1924 and said that he had family records of a mine operated in what is
now the Superstition Mountains by his family when this was still a part of Old
Mexico he spoke no English he needed an interpreter they sent him to a man named
Perfecto Salazar in Florence Perfecto was a court interpreter for the the
Superior Court so he actually spoke both fluent Spanish and English and he was
immediately hired by Christabel Peralta they first examined the
records at the courthouse at Florence then at Phoenix looking for some
possible color of title that Peralta might have to these mines found nothing
before Peralta gave up and left he said I would like to see this pinnacle that
they called El Sombrero so Salazar drove him I think with a
Model T up what's now called the Apache Trail highway 88 to a spot where you can
see weavers needle back in the superstitions and explained to Peralta
that was probably the El Sombrero that he was looking for at that point
Peralta showed Salazar a map didn't allow him to copy it
but it showed this pinnacle El Sombrero it showed the real Salado the Salt River
and it showed to the north of the Salt River Quattro Boccaccio's four peaks and
between the pinnacle El Sombrero and the river was a mine and there were the
numbers 4 and 62 between the pinnacle and the mine and then between the mine
and the river there was the number 7 and
Peralta did not explain what these figures meant to Salazar and did not
allow him to copy the map but Peralta evidently left and went back to Spain or
Mexico
Salazar thought that maybe these numbers meant something so he went back there
and tried to search from the mine and was appalled when he found how big that
country is back there so he got a surveyor man named Bartlett went back
there and they didn't know what the 4 and 62 meant and he thought it might be
4 kilometers of 62 meters and he wanted Bartlett to measure out that distant and
Bartlett objected he said you don't express things that way in the metric
system so many kilometers and so many meters if it was that distance you would
have said it was 4 point 62 kilometers or 4062 meters he said you've got this
wrong but since he was getting paid regardless of how the survey turned out
he went ahead and run that distance ended up in what they call the Red Hills
so crazy Jake when I met him up on the bull trail up there is explaining this
all to me that Clay Worst did this Clay Worst did that
and Clay Worst ran this survey up there himself brought a transit in here
and actually ran the survey taht Clay Worst had all this stuff but he just
wasn't able to put it together well he said I have put it together he said I
found the mine and he says I built a camp up there little broad Shack and I'm
putting my shaft down up there and he said he'd have to be on his way was
getting along in the day and so we parted and we walked about thirty yards
apart twenty yards apart and he said I'd say I didn't get your name I said I'm Clay Worst
[laughter]
Jake
[laughter]
if he'd had worn dentures he'd dropped them
[laughter]
so we both had a good laugh and we both went or way but the thing that was interesting
I did run that survey and strangely after strangely I found a spot up there
where I had an old Fisher metal detector that I'd bought in 1940's from Gerhart
Fisher the old man himself a very crude null balance that thing weighed probably
fifteen or twenty pounds you're talking about the one that's in the museum down
in the museum and I found a place where I got an indication so we did put a hole
down there we went down hole probably ten or twelve feet and it proved to be
just a vein of decomposed granite that carried no values no Gold that you could
see at least but it held ground moisture and the early Fisher metal detectors are
very sensitive to ground moisture that's all it was but there was a foot wall
pretty soft material in this hole and I don't know why I did it I wasn't trying
to deceive anybody that that stuff was soft and I had a prospectors pick and I
just noticed how soft it was and just for no reason I cut across a
Roman cross in that foot wall well that's what crazy Jake found and he thought
he'd found a Spanish mine that that was the Spanish cross so that's how that's
how I met crazy Jake and that's how crazy Jake met Clay Worst
[laughter]
oh dear
I've heard all these stories about crazy Jake finding gold bars up there what do
you know about that. crazy Jake finally ended up on malapi with a story that
he'd found a cave back there with brush in front of the entrance and inside that
cave were gold bars Dobby bar stacked up in there averaged
about 47 pounds of piece and he had all these gold bars and of course know he
needed financing to go in there and bring all this gold out so he was going
around the valley area here offering people 300% return in 60 days if they'd
come up with money to finance his going in there and bringing out these gold
bars and there were many prominent people doctors lawyers prominent people
Jake probably promoted more than anywhere from three to five million
dollars from investors and not one of them thought to ask Jake why didn't you
bring out one bar and sell it and then you'd have the money to bring out all
the rest of they never thought of that and Bob Corbin was the Attorney General
then bob was a friend of mine and they finally prosecuted they got somebody to
testify against Jake and they sent him to the penitentiary for fraud but Bob
told me it was difficult getting people to testify against Jake
I said why because they were fear of retribution that if they testified
against him that he might take violent action and they said no he said they
were still clinging to the hope that maybe there were gold bars back there
but of course there were not all right what's this story about crazy Jake
coming back from the dead the final episodes of the crazy Jake story.
Tom Collinborn a very well-known local historian and Tom is undoubtedly one of
the best best authorities on the history of superstition mountain of anybody alive
and after crazy Jake had died and was buried
Tom had a phone call one day he answered the phone he said who is this no I said
this is Jake and Tom says you're supposed to be dead and he said yeah
that's what everybody thinks and they held a long conversation and Tom
told me he said I honestly believe I was talking to crazy Jake that somehow he
had faked his death and Tom shook his head he said I still believe I was
talking to crazy Jake so there's my crazy Jake story
[laughter]
Thank You Clay for
sharing your stories about crazy Jake you know crazy Jake was really crazy and
still remains one of those mysteries of the Superstition Mountains
[music]