Howdy folks I'm Hank Sheffer and welcome to another true life story right here with
Larry Hedrick on Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains you know there are so many stories
about the superstition mountains out there and one of the more enduring stories is the story of
the Piper Jones feud at weaver's needle Clay Worst has touched upon it others have touched upon it
but just recently Jack San Felice come out with a story called a shootout
at weaver's needle that was all about the Jones Piper feud uh back in the mid mid 70s when
I became a sidekick with Tom Kollenburn was taking many trips into superstitions one of the first
ones we did was at weaver's needle and he took me to where he knew that Mrs. Jones's camp was
and I found these two items in her camp this little skillet with a bullet hole in it
and this prince albert can which was typical of people when they made their claims put their
claim papers inside a prince albert can and this is one of the claim papers but of course it can't
be opened or dealt with because it's just would be ruined and these two items were specifically found
in Mrs. Jones campsite these other items when we had the superstition mountain museum was
cleaning up the the land there was a lot of trash on the land at the museum
and um I don't know I hauled off about 25 tires and stuff like that but in the
late 1800s when goldfield was established there were prospect holes all over the museum grounds
and under some of the trees out there the palo verde trees we found some campsites and these
are things that came out of those campsites I'm assuming that these were sardine cans
and this is a carnation milk can and notice the little dot right there in the middle and right in
here these were all sealed in the 1800s with lead and this is how this lead bled into the food that
was inside and people actually got lead poisoning from eating from these type of cans this was a
a snuff box a tobacco box that they used at that time and this we found was a 45-60 cartridge that
typically came from a converted sharps carbine the first sharps carbine used a paper cartridge with a
bullet in it you put it in and detonated it with a cap and they converted those to brass shells
the army used these they were using them at the time of the skull cave and it was way well into
the late 70s before they were equipped with 45-70s so this is a 45-60 like was found at apache leap
nevertheless all over the superstitions were things that were discarded we
actually run across up on top of peter's mesa a complete camp with tents and everything
obviously had been there for a long time because the canvas was rotted and things like that but
there was a tripod stand with a crock pot on it it still had beans in the bottom of it
molded you know for for for months that the whole thing had been abandoned obviously
things like that have been packed out by the forest service and gotten rid of and what have
you but there's just all kinds of evidence of people in the superstitions from the 1800s on
thank you for watching this episode of Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains
you