Gypsy Heart
Gold Member
In 1884, four men held up a mail train near Pantano, a tiny town east of Tucson and just south of Colossal Cave, and got away with $72,000 in gold and currency. They hightailed it into the Rincon Mountains. Sheriff Bob Leatherwood got a posse together and trailed the bandits to a hole in a mountainside—a cave entrance. When the Sheriff stuck his head in, he was greeted by gunfire, so he decided the best thing to do was to starve the bandits out. He sat in front of that hole for two weeks, till one day a deputy came riding up to tell him that four men were whooping it up in the Corner Saloon in Willcox—that’s about 70 miles from the Cave—throwing gold around and bragging about how they’d left the Pima County Sheriff sitting in front of a cave in the middle of the desert while they took a back way out.
The posse took off for Willcox and cornered the men in the saloon. In the gunfight that followed, three of the men were killed. The fourth, named Phil Carver, was arrested and sentenced to twenty-eight years in the Federal prison at Yuma. The Cave, of course, was thoroughly explored, and the back entrance and bandits’ lair found: the remains of a campfire, food, clothes, all there—but not a trace of the $72,000
The posse took off for Willcox and cornered the men in the saloon. In the gunfight that followed, three of the men were killed. The fourth, named Phil Carver, was arrested and sentenced to twenty-eight years in the Federal prison at Yuma. The Cave, of course, was thoroughly explored, and the back entrance and bandits’ lair found: the remains of a campfire, food, clothes, all there—but not a trace of the $72,000
