I would have loved to have seen that! Has anyone written an account of how they found it and what happened?
PotBelly Jim,
There is a lot more to the story but here is the basics of what occurred:
In 1949, a friend of Ted Sliger, Alfred S. Lewis, a mining engineer, purchased the property that was once the Mammoth Mine near Superstition Mountain and the old town of Goldfield.
During WWII the Shumway brothers of Mesa had bought the Mammoth Mine from the estate of George U. Young. The Shumway’s tore down what was left of the town of Goldfield and the Mammoth site and sold the lumber and machinery.
Alfred Lewis had bought the property because while working to evaluate the property for the Shumway’s he had accidently discovered a shaft and tunnel hidden beneath a large boulder just south of the Mammoth Mill, about where the Goldfield Ghost Town tourist attraction sits today.
This old mine shaft and tunnel was not a part of the original Mammoth Mine and in fact predated and was previously unknown to any of the owners of the Mammoth Mine.
Inside the tunnel Lewis had found rough cut timbers and Spanish/Mexican artifacts that were dated to the early Mexican period by the University of Arizona.
Alfred Lewis told his friend Ted Sliger about the amazing discovery and with Mesa neighbors, Hugh Nichols, Tom Reynolds and Charles Waterbury the 5 men formed what became the Goldfield Mines Company Inc.
Over the next year the group took a total of $50,000 dollars-worth of gold in quartz from the tunnel before they broke into an old tunnel of the Charles Hall section of the Mammoth mine. At that point their vein of quartz and gold was lost forever.
The group suffered a final blow when in 1950, Alfred Lewis suddenly died. Lewis was the only one of the group who actually knew mining and the Goldfield Mines Inc. partners gradually sold off their interests until Charles Waterbury was the final owner. It was Waterbury’s family who eventually sold the property to the present owner of the Goldfield Ghost Town tourist attraction.
Alfred Lewis steadfastly believed the old Mexican shaft and tunnel he discovered under that boulder was the famous Peralta / Lost Dutchman Mine. Lewis wrote a manuscript which detailed his findings and belief in the mine. That manuscript can be found at the Superstition Mountain Museum at Apache Junction, AZ.
Ted Sliger would often quip he was once a past owner of the famous lost dutchman mine.
