Matthew Roberts
Bronze Member
Photo of Tex Barkley with the remains of Adolph Ruth in the Superstition Mountains, January 1932.
The mysterious disappearance of Adolph Ruth in the Superstition Mountains in June of 1931.
Adolph Ruth, a 76 year old Washington D.C. resident disappeared in the Superstition Mountains in June of 1931 while searching for the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. His severed head was discovered six months later under a Palo Verde Tree and the rest of his remains were found in January of 1932 in a wash on the north east end of Black Top Mesa about a quarter mile from where his head had been found. Even though his skull clearly showed he had been shot in the head with a large calibre weapon, the Maricopa County coroner ruled his death to be the result of natural causes.
Eighty-six years later his disappearance and death is still hotly debated. The records of the 1931 Adolph Ruth missing persons investigation by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office were destroyed in March of 2008. The files were sealed by a court order for 50 years until 1982 when they became public record. In those 26 years before they were destroyed, only a few individuals took the time, patience and effort to gain access to those files and copy what they could of the information.
The information in the Maricopa Sheriff’s files are drastically different from what was publically known and believed concerning the mystery of Adolph Ruth’s death. The files directly contradicted so much of what was publically believed to be the facts surrounding Ruth’s disappearance and death.
A whole story grew up surrounding the Ruth disappearance and that story centred around Tex Barkley and his Barkley Ranch on the edges of the Superstition Mountains. In spite of many published newspaper accounts of 1931-1932, these stories and rumours persisted until they became the believed narrative of Mr. Ruth’s demise. Several Dutchman books were published over the years which further perpetuated these false rumours and stories.
The commonly believed story is that Adolph Ruth travelled to Arizona in May of 1931 to stay at Tex Barkley’s Quarter Circle U Ranch on the south edge of the Superstition Mountains. A month later it is told that two of Tex Barkley’s cowboys took Ruth into the Superstitions to a camp in a place known as Willow Spring.
It is further told that Tex Barkley was away at the time selling cattle and did not know the cowboys had taken Ruth into the mountains in 100 degree summer weather. When the two cowboys went to check on Ruth a week later they found him gone and could not locate him. Tex Barkley was said to be very upset and called the Sheriff to ring the alarm that Adolph Ruth was missing in the Superstition Mountains.
This story became the accepted version of what happened. The only problem is, the story is not true.
Adolph Ruth was an aging ex-government employee earning a 42 dollar a month disability pension. He was known to be interested in mines and treasure in the southwest and had made several previous trips to both California and Arizona to pursue lost mines. Adolph Ruth had with him several maps to supposed mines that he had acquired from his son while in old Mexico.
When Adolph Ruth came to Arizona in May of 1931 he was feeble and in poor health. His ambitious goal was to follow one of his maps which he believed would lead him to the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. When Adolph Ruth decided to search for the lost mine, he did not come to Tex Barkley and the Barkley Ranch, but went straight to the ranch of a man named Cal Morse. Mr. Ruth received all his mail at the Morse ranch while in Arizona and his place of contact with his family in Washington D.C. was with Cal Morse.
Cal Morse was a prospector and miner in his early years and himself an enthusiast of the Lost Dutchman Mine which he searched for many years unsuccessfully. Later in life Cal Morse became a cattle rancher, planted a large orange orchard outside Mesa, and operated several business establishments in Mesa and at what would become Apache Junction.
Two of Cal Morse’s business in the 1930's were service stations, gas and auto repair in east Mesa. Both of the two alleged Barkley cowboys who took Mr. Ruth into the Superstitions were not Barkley cowboys at all, but the two, Leroy Purnell and Jack Keenan, were in Morse’s employ at various jobs in the summer of 1931. Purnell and Keenan worked for Cal Morse at everything from ranch hands to auto mechanics and even fruit pickers in his citrus orchard.
Jack Keenan's relationship with Cal Morse was especially close while Purnell seemed to be more of a part time employee. Keenan worked as an auto mechanic in Morse's east Mesa gas station. While both Keenan and Purnell knew Tex Barkley and his family, and certainly had been at the Quarter Circle U ranch on occasions, neither man was working for Barkley as a cowboy in the summer of 1931 as is commonly believed.
Adolph Ruth and his son Erwin became acquainted with Cal Morse in the 1920's when the Ruth's learned of Cal Morse's interest in the Lost Dutchman mine and his efforts at locating that mine. Morse's searching for the mine was well known across Arizona and parts of the southwest and Morse spent a considerable amount of money in that endeavour. From this mutual interest, a friendship developed between the Morse and Ruth family. Much transpired between the time the two met and Adolph Ruth came to Arizona on his fatal trip in May 1931.
Adolph Ruth did have an interest in Tex Barkley’s ranch because it was the entry point into the Superstition Mountains. Ruth visiting the ranch and talking to wranglers and prospectors who came and went there may have added to the rumours that he was staying there at the Barkley Ranch. Ruth was aware a lot of other Dutchman hunters hung around the Barkley Ranch and it was a good place for him to pick up information about the trails, other mines and lay of the land.
In the hot summer heat of June, Leroy Purnell and Jack Keenan took Adolph Ruth into a camp at Willow Spring in the Superstition Mountains. They packed Mr. Ruth in through the First Water ranch on the North West side of the Superstitions. On the morning Purnell and Keenan took Ruth in the mountains they circumvented the First Water ranch headquarters so they would not be seen.
The reason for this distinction was because Ruth did not want Tex Barkley and others at the Barkley ranch to see him being taken into the mountains through the ranch headquarters. Later on when it was discovered Ruth was missing, Tex Barkley and others at the Barkley ranch were surprised Ruth had been in the mountains.
Leroy Purnell and Jack Keenan were not very forthcoming with authorities in the beginning themselves on the specifics of how, when, where and why Ruth got into Willow Springs.
When Adolph Ruth was discovered missing it was Cal Morse, not Tex Barkley, who first knew of his disappearance and alerted Maricopa County Sheriff James MacFadden. It was Cal Morse whom Ruth's wife wired $100 reward money for anyone who might find her husband. It was the Cal Morse Ranch where Ruth’s son, Erwin, came to stay while searching for his father. And it was Cal Morse ranch where the Ruth family in Washington D.C. kept in touch with the ongoing search.
It is an interesting and highly curious fact that Cal Morse called the Maricopa County Sheriff to report Adolph Ruth missing when he knew for a fact Ruth’s camp was in Willow Spring, and the last place anyone allegedly saw Adolph Ruth, was in Pinal County.
Why didn’t Cal Morse call the Pinal County Sheriff? It was almost as if Morse was saying, consciously or otherwise, that Adolph Ruth is missing, and he is missing in Maricopa County, not Pinal County.
The decision for Adolph Ruth to go into the mountains in the heat of summer was not a decision made by someone who didn't know any better. The timing was planned very carefully. At that time, June of 1931, a lot of prospectors and mine hunters as well as transients were in those mountains. It was the depression and many people were jobless and homeless and camping in the mountains and looking for a lost mine was as good a past time as any.
As the summer heat set in, the number of people in the mountains would dwindle as men escaped the furnace and left the mountains for cooler spots to camp. Ruth going in those mountains when he did, mid-late June, would insure the least amount of people would be in there to interfere or observe his activities.
Ruth had his limitations and he knew them. But Ruth never planned to hike the mountains and look for the mine under his own power. His plan was to be supplied with everything he needed and taken on horseback to wherever he needed to go. Sometime within the first few days of his arrival at Willow Spring, that plan was interfered with.
When Adolph Ruth was discovered missing by Jack Keenan, Cal Morse and Keenan did not at first believe Ruth was dead or in any serious danger, but a little later, as the circumstances unfolded and they became more aware of what might have happened, they alerted the Maricopa County Sheriff. But at the same time, they distanced themselves from the publicity that began to fly, allowing the rumours and stories to circulate while they kept a very low profile and worked mostly with Adolph Ruth’s son, Erwin Ruth.
Cal Morse refused to be interviewed by reporters covering the story and all references to him in relation to Mr. Ruth came directly from James MacFadden the Maricopa County Sheriff and his conversations with Cal Morse.
Cal Morse and his wife Florence, and Tex Barkley's and his wife Gertrude were good friends as each were pioneer Mesa ranching families. They knew each other but strangely as it seems, during the search for Ruth, Tex Barkley and Cal Morse had little or no contact with each other.
Adolph Ruth made his camp at Willow Spring in Pinal County. The prevailing story is, Ruth was told to camp at Willow spring by Tex Barkley because it was a place of permanent water. However, in fact, Tex Barkley didn't know where Ruth had camped until he was told it was Willow spring, after Ruth had disappeared.
Tex Barkley and his friend Deputy Sheriff Jeff Adams became the point men in the search for Adolph Ruth as Sheriff MacFadden had his hands full with an even more sensational case that attracted nationwide attention, the Winne Judd axe murder case in Phoenix.
It was Adams and Barkley that found Ruth’s skeletal remains minus his head in January of 1932. Ruth’s skull had been located a month earlier about a quarter mile away lying under a Palo Verde tree. It was Brownie Holmes and an archaeologic team in the Superstitions that by chance stumbled across Ruth’s skull.
The whole story took a curious twist when Tex Barkley and Jeff Adams found a map among the remains of Adolph Ruth and decided to follow it to see where it might lead. Adams, Barkley and three of their friends followed the map which led them onto Peters Mesa to a cave where supposedly they would find a nearby mine. The group found the cave shown on the map but never could locate the mine.
In another curious twist it was Tex Barkley who told Walter Gassler that he and Adams didn’t find Ruth’s remains at the spot a quarter mile away from where Ruth’s skull had been found. Barkley told Gassler they found the remains a few miles away up on Peters Mesa nearby where he and Adams had followed Ruth’s map to the cave. Barkley showed Gassler the exact spot on Peters Mesa where he said Ruth’s remains were discovered. Barkley further told Gassler that he and a friend packed Ruth’s remains down to nearby where Ruth’s skull had been found.
All this was astonishingly in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s investigation report. It appeared that there were three main local suspects in Ruth’s disappearance and eventual death, and Sheriff MacFadden did not want details of the investigation to get out in public so those details would become known to everyone. If the Sheriff had any chance to catch those who were responsible, his only chance was to try and catch them divulging a piece of information that only someone involved would possibly know.
In the end the investigation stalled with a goodly amount of suspicion but no evidence to bring anyone to trial. It also appears, if you read between the lines, the politics of the day and certain prominent citizens may have played a role in interfering with investigating the people it really needed to.
In another curiosity the investigation established beyond a shadow of a doubt that Ruth’s camp in Willow Spring and the last time anyone saw him alive, was in Pinal County. Both Ruth's skull and his remains were eventually found in Pinal County.
Yet it was Maricopa County Sheriff James MacFadden whom Cal Morse called to report Ruth’s disappearance. And it was Maricopa County who handled the search, investigation and final cause of death for Adolph Ruth. Under the law it was the authority and responsibility of Pinal County to handle the matter and they could not legally defer the responsibility to another jurisdiction. The only reason Maricopa County would have handled the Ruth investigation was because the investigators knew for a fact Adolph Ruth had died in Maricopa County, not Pinal County. Peters Mesa is in Maricopa County.
The death certificate for Adolph Ruth was perhaps the final curiosity. The Doctor who filled out the death certificate, James Mauldin, listed the cause of death as “unknown”, leaving it open to later be designated as suicide or homicide. The Maricopa County Coroner had already listed Ruth’s death as due to natural causes. Mauldin issued the Maricopa County Death Certificate number of 133 but also assigned it a regulation number of 208 and filed it separately under the 208 number which left it open for change at a later date if more information should be acquired.
The mystery of the strange death of Adolph Ruth still causes question to this day. The last person involved in the investigation died in 1980. The Sheriff’s office investigation report was released in 1982 and in 2008 the Maricopa County Sheriff destroyed all investigation records prior to 1935.
We may never know what really happened to Adolph Ruth in the Superstition Mountains in that long ago summer of 1931.
It will remain another unanswered question of the mysterious Superstition Mountains.
Matthew
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