Thanks to our two well-read stalwarts for some interesting comments and additions.
How about some of you lurkers? Any ideas?
Here is another article.
This time, we need to find a cottonwood tree, and the date was 1850.
Also, the placer was supposedly located by the party traveling from the East to California. No Gotch Ear or Mexican or a Pima.
View attachment 1529215
This is another seeming combination of stories, but actually an interesting one, IMO.
The Year: 1850. Very early account of 49ers heading across NM to CA, one of whom is allegedly Adams. This odd version leads me to believe that either 1) it's just a total mishmash of two lost placer mine stories combined into one and therefore not a reliable source of the original LAD kernal; or 2) the lost placer mine story from 1850 and the LAD found in the 1860s are both describing the same place separated in time with the protagonists confused.
The Route: Across southern NM to CA. In 1850, this would likely be describing the route coming through Santa Fe, south down the Rio Grande, then westerly following the early Mormon Trail, later used by the California Column, over land acquired by the Gadsden Purchase and today roughly following the railroad and I-10 west into AZ. In 1850, there were many local variances. There was also a major alternative route pioneered by the Taos trappers in the 1820s that ran more or less southwest from Santa Fe through Zuni country to the Frisco River and into the Gila River. Negrito Creek, where the cottonwood tree was allegedly found, is a tributary of the Frisco.
The Diggings: hard to pin it down from the narrative (ha ha). Too bad it wasn't mentioned where on Negrito Creek the cottonwood tree was found, because this creek has two major forks and many smaller drainages. It heads up either in the Tularosa Mountains region to the north or in the Mogollon Range to the south. The creek itself does not empty into the Gila as described in the narrative, but into the Frisco, and then a hundred miles more to the Gila. This is troublesome and supports the idea that this narrative is cross-pollinating two different tales. For all we know, Adams himself may have been responsible for the cross-pollination - he may have heard two stories, the Lost Snively Diggings and the Lost 49ers Diggings, mixed them up in a whiskey talk session and created the version we're discussing here.
Notwithstanding the Snively Diggings theory (which I support), let's assume the 49ers 1850 version is also based on facts. These guys may have taken the Zuni shortcut, putting them in or near the Tularosa Mountains - east of some point on Negrito Creek - where they found placer gold and had Indian problems. That would match part of the information in Article 6. This may support, more or less, the idea put forth in Article 1 about CA-bound prospectors finding gold in NM in 1853. Maybe this means there is another separate lost placer mine that originated in the 1850s that occurred further north of the 1860s Snively Diggings.
