Roadrunner wrote
And like I said,most of it is fiction I believe. There have been 2 posts that I read that could give a set of directions from the board house in 3 sentences.
Why did not waltz just say that. Unless he did and no one heard him right.
The fact that we have two basic versions, which are both complicated with several "clues", and the third version which gives very little information, hints that it is not easy to find the mine at all. There are many canyons that run the right general way (as with the clue, "
north trending canyon") and they do all tend to look rather alike. I think Waltz did try to tell them how to get to the mine, but they simply did not understand what he was trying to get across to them.
Loke wrote
Oro - I think those are the best directions I have ever seen!! (I don't mean just the li'l excerpt, but your whole post).
And hey - you wouldn't even tell ME where you think it is? Shame on you!! (just kiddin' of course - if anyone ever found it, I'd be the first in the queue of congratulants!!)
Thank you for the very kind words, hope it came out the way it was intended. Too often a lot of us treasure hunters get SO caught up in trying to work out the various clues, maps (stone or otherwise) and forget that the mine had to be discovered in the first place. Even if Waltz did not discover the mine (as the popular version has it) then the Peraltas had to discover it, or if they found it due to Apaches working it, then the Apaches had to discover it any way you slice it, the mine was not always a mine, someone had to discover it the old fashioned way, by tracing the float, or tracing panned out specks of gold back to the vein. The story I believe is the true one, is the story we get from the Pioneer interviews, which has no Peraltas, no massacre, no huge funnel shaped pit etc but does have Waltz getting a drywasher to use, which he then uses to trace back to the vein and thus finds his mine.
This same approach should work today. The need for the drywasher was not so much for actual gold mining (remember it is a lode mine after all, not a placer) but to get enough concentrates to be able to get a color or two, which I take to indicate that the mine is not in a place where you can pan a lot of gold easily. Hence that clue about "
No miner will find my mine" which also suggests that the place does not look right for a vein of gold. It could mean that it is a vein in a lot of solid volcanic rock, well known to be poor for finding gold, or in a sedimentary type of rock, also known to be very poor places to hunt for gold but as that saying goes, gold is where you find it, and a vein can be found intruding into the worst kind of rock, where it "shouldn't" be. Sorry for getting carried away on it, hope that others do not let the confusion and far too many clues and maps to let that discourage them, when the mine cannot hide the "trail" of quartz float that may be hundreds of yards or even miles down from the vein, nor can it conceal the tiny specks of gold that likewise will travel over the years.
For our readers - just keep that in mind, that all mines had to be discovered, and the person who found it in the first place had no clues or maps to lead to it, and in almost all cases they used regular, old-fashioned prospecting methods to find the mine. So no matter how confusing or how many lies or false maps there are about the Lost Dutchman mine, you could throw them all out and hunt for the mine the same way it was found and stand a good chance of finding it.
Also, just because I have not told you that location pard Loke, does not mean that I won't tell you!
Obviously
I do not know where the mine is, only know some places where it
is not. If you are curious about where I do think it is, I will tell you when we meet next month, for our little joint venture. I will tell you this, the spot I suspect is not within the popularly-believed area at all.
I think that the idea Cactusjumper was suggesting was not to hunt right ON Pinto Creek, but on the side canyons, and there are many of them. The lower end of Pinto creek has some patented (private) land, just upstream from the bridge, and there are (or were last winter) several active claims on the Forest Service land as well, right on the creek. However it is pretty much a certainty that Waltz's mine is not right on the creek, it is on a side canyon, that is what the old timers told the interviewers in the Pinto Creek version and most of the side canyons are not under active claims. Some are within the Wilderness Area and could not be claimed anyway. If the mine were right on Pinto creek, which got a lot of attention from propectors and still does, it seems more than likely that the mine would have been found long ago and would not be lost today.
Good luck and good hunting amigos, I hope you find the treasures that you seek.
Oroblanco
