The next person to discover this gold mine was doctor Abraham Thome. He was born in Illinois and devoted his life to treating Indians in the western states of America.
There was a time when the war between the white man and the Apache Indians was intense. The Indians were besieged by US government troops, but President Abraham Lincoln soon made a treaty for the area. Accordingly, a reservation was established along the Verde River, near Fort McDowell, to become the exclusive place for the Apache tribe to reside.
β
A piece of gold taken from Me Tin Mountain (Photo: Examiner)
Dr. Thorne went to live and work among the Indians. He quickly made many friends and was loved by the patriarchs because he helped them cure diseases, deliver babies and taught them how to clean their bodies.
In 1870, a strange event occurred in Dr. Thorne’s career. The elders of the tribe came to him and made a proposal. Since he was considered a good man and a friend of the Apache tribe, they would lead him to a place where he could find gold. The only condition was that he would be blindfolded throughout the roughly 20-mile trip.
Dr. Thorne agreed and they led him to a strange canyon and took off his blindfold. Later, Dr. Thorne wrote in a document that he saw a jagged mountain ridge about a mile long. Near the foot of the canyon are blocks of pure gold lying on top of each other. He was able to pick up as much gold as he wanted and then he sold the gold for $6,000.
However, very few people are so lucky. It’s unknown how many people have perished, or strangely disappeared and never came back in the journey to find this mysterious gold mine.
In the summer of 1880, two young soldiers who had just been discharged from the army came to the town of Pinal, Arizona, to apply for work in Mr. Aaron Mason’s Silver King mine. These two men asked Mason to check the quality of some raw gold they picked up while passing through Superstition Mountain.
Mason was amazed to see a bag full of high-quality raw gold. Two soldiers said they were hunting deer in the mountains and cornered it in a canyon. On the way out, they discovered an old mine shaft. The bag of gold was just a few that they picked up from there.
Mason bought back the gold from the two soldiers and offered to provide equipment for them to return to the mine. The two soldiers agreed because they believed that time spent carefully training on how to navigate in the army would help them find their way back to where they were. They left the next day, but never returned.
Mason waited 2 weeks and didn’t find him so he sent a team to look for him. The body of a lychman was found next to the trail leading to the mountain in a state of nakedness. He was shot in the head. The second soldier’s body was found the next day in a similar condition.
Today, Superstition Mountain continues to challenge adventurous people (Photo: 5RF)
A year later, a miner named Joe Dearing came to Pinal to work and heard the story of the two soldiers. He set out to find Me Tin Mountain and found a funnel-shaped mine. The entrance was destroyed and blocked by rocks. Dearing returned and applied for a job at the Silver King mine with the intention of saving money to explore the gold mine himself. But a week later he was killed.
Another mysterious death linked to the Lost Dutchman Mine is Elisha Reavis, nicknamed the Madman of Superstition Mountain. From 1872 until his death in 1896, he lived in the most remote area of the mountain and grew vegetables for a living. The Indians never bothered him because they feared the curse of crazy people. It is said that Reavis used to run naked and shoot at the stars.
In April 1896, a friend of Reavis did not see him coming to town as usual, so he went to his residence to look for him. The friend discovered Reavis’ headless body near the house, and the head was dumped elsewhere. The same year Reavis was killed, two people from the East who went looking for gold mines never returned…
