Somewhere, in a deep box-shaped canyon, a small stream flows. It is there that the Lost Adams excavations are found, as rich as any of the lost treasures of the west, and perhaps the most legitimate in terms of factual evidence. It is a story corroborated by more than one individual.
The man named Adams was a trucker heading to Los Angeles with 12 horses. Adams (his first name was variously given as William, Edward, Henry, and John) was an overland freighter that carried goods for a fee between Los Angeles and Tucson, Arizona. He was married with a wife and three children in Los Angeles.
After his last trip, Adams camped in the vicinity of Florence, Arizona. The Apaches, fleeing with their horses, woke him up. Adams gave chase and recovered the animals.
When he returned to his camp, he found his wagon burning and all his other property, including the two thousand dollars received from his cargo delivery, gone. The Apaches had simply used the ploy of stealing horses to allow them to pillage the camp of its real valuables.
Without his valuables save for the 12 horses, Adams, penniless, left for a friendly Pima Indian village in what is now Gila Bend, Arizona. There he listened to the miners exchanging prospecting stories. A mixed-race Mexican Apache nicknamed “Gotch Ear” listened as miners expressed their desire to find gold. The boy was named Gotch Ear due to a misshapen and wrinkled earlobe.
Gotch Ear and his brother were captured by the Apaches as young children living in Mexico. Gotch Ear was now on the run from the tribe because he killed the Apache who killed his brother in a fight.
Gotch Ear finally approached the group of miners. If you’re interested in gold, he told them, he knew a canyon ten days’ ride away where a stream literally flowed with nuggets of gold. All he asked for in return was a horse that would take him back to Mexico.
It was in 1864 that Gotch Ear led the group of 22 men to the site. Gotch Ear led the party panning for gold up the Gila River in a northeasterly direction for several days. On or about August 25, the party camped in the lower area between two high peaks, believed to be Mount Ord and Mount Baldy.
However, this has led to confusion for treasure hunters, as Mount Ord lies north of Phoenix and is unsuitable for the journey Gotch Ear and his followers undertake.
Since Adams had all the horses, the gold-hungry miners chose him as their leader.
After four days of traveling through heavy timber, the young Mexican man led the miners around a high mountain that Adams and John Brewer, another of the miners, say were the White Mountains of eastern Arizona.
The group eventually reached what appeared to be a box canyon. Here they camped for the night. In the morning, they rode through the canyon toward a cliff that was reddish in color, but was really a wall of solid rock twenty to twenty meters high.
Gotch Ear led the men around a huge boulder at the base of the wall. There, through a hidden portal, they entered a switchback canyon, so tight, Adams later said, that a cyclist holding out his arms could touch both sides.
Along the canyon floor was a stream, which they followed to an acre-sized meadow. Here they camped for the night.
Hardly had the miners settled down and begun collecting the yellow metal when a group of Apaches, led by Chief Nana, appeared in the meadow near a waterfall.
Nana told the miners to take what they wanted from the stream, but to make no effort to locate the gold deposits further up the canyon above the waterfall. He also ordered them to leave soon and never come back.
While the gold had no attraction to the Indians, the canyon where it was found did. The canyon, named “Sno-Tah-Hay” by Nana, was a very special religious site for the Indians.
The Apaches also believed that gold was the “tears of the sun.” No one touched the tears of the sun because it was the source of all life.
The gold prospectors remained in the canyon against Nana’s orders. They not only stayed, but soon began the construction of a cabin. In three weeks they had amassed about sixty thousand dollars in gold, which they placed in a container and hid in the fireplace of the unfinished cabin.
The intention was later to distribute the gold evenly among the men in the prospecting party, with the exception of a German named Snively. Snively took his share each day and kept his gold apart from the rest.
Supplies soon ran out. A party of five miners, led by John Brewer, was assigned to go to Fort Wingate to resupply the camp. The miners would carry nuggets, some as big as turkey eggs, to use as payment.
At the fort, when the miners paid for their supplies with the huge nuggets of gold, the shopkeeper carefully noted this fact.
Meanwhile, Chief Apache Nana, unseen, continued to watch activity in the creek and also noted surreptitious nocturnal trips up the canyon to search for the source of the gold.
I was not pleased. He ordered his Apache warriors to kill the five-man supply party as he returned from Fort Wingate. This was done with the exception of one man, Brewer, who escaped.
The Apaches then killed all the miners in the canyon except for two men who were some distance from the Anglo camp. Snively, the German, who had already taken his gold and returned to Germany. Years later, Snively verified the existence of gold in detail.
One of the two men who escaped the Apache massacre was Adams, and the other was Jack Davidson. The only reason the two men escaped Apache’s wrath is that they had gone in search of the long-delayed Fort Wingate supply crew.
Adams and Davidson decided for safety that it was best to head to Los Angeles to avoid further contact with the Apaches. Traveling at night, they got lost.
They were seen by US soldiers and taken to Fort Apache, according to one story. However, this casts some doubt on this version, since Fort Apache was not established until 1872.
Jack Davidson later claimed that they were taken to Fort Whipple, east of Prescott.
Adams and Davidson were unaware that John Brewer, who was leading the supply party, had also escaped the Apache massacre. Brewer scaled the canyon wall and reached the friendly Pueblo Indians. Brewer eventually went to Colorado, married an Indian woman, and started a family.
Adams returned to his family in California and stayed there for ten years. He was afraid to go back to New Mexico to look for the excavations.
Adams returned in 1874. He searched and searched for the missing “Adams Diggings” until his death in 1876, but was never able to relocate the gold mine.
There are many stories about attempts to retrace the path taken by Gotch Ear and his Anglo-Saxon followers.
A man named Edward Doheny, who was traveling through New Mexico toward Phoenix in search of work, reported that he had traveled through a box canyon before realizing he could not cross it. He noticed the ruins of a burnt-out cabin before returning, but, at the time, he knew nothing of Adams’ history.
When he later crawled out, Doheny was unable to find the location again.
A cowboy named Jack Townsend claimed to have found the Lost Adams Diggings site in New Mexico in 1894, while working in Magdalena, New Mexico. This was never confirmed.
Once, during the period when he was trying to relocate the “golden river”, Adams put Bob Lewis in a saloon. Lewis had also been looking for the “Digs”.
“Go and find the bones of those men who were loading supplies into the canyon. Show me the bones and I’ll show you the gold.”
According to an account by Lee Paul, on a website called “The Outlaws”, Lewis found the bones. He found them thirty years later. Piled in a crevice were the skeletons of several men covered with bits of packsaddles and stones.
Lewis was in the Datil Mountains of New Mexico. Although he found the bones, he couldn’t find the secret door. An earthquake, which struck southern Arizona and New Mexico in 1887, is believed to have reshaped the landscape of the Datil Mountains.
Many, many efforts have been made to follow the path laid out by Gotch Ear. None have been successful. It looks like The Lost Adams Diggings will remain just that: lost.