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Speaker 1: sideways to learn more Thinking Sideways. I don't know stories
Speaker 1: of things we simply don't know the answer too. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome again to another episode of Thinking Sideways. I
Speaker 1: am Steve as always, joined by and Wolf Wolf. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's my new name, turning a new I want to
Speaker 1: suthing a little more macho a wolf, so you can
Speaker 1: all call me Wolf, all right, Wolf, Okay, we'll go
Speaker 1: with that. Okay, So it's it's Steve Devon and the
Speaker 1: old Wolf. No bark bark another that. Well, hey everybody,
Speaker 1: this week, as always, we have a mystery. This mystery
Speaker 1: was a listeners suggestion. It was suggested by Meredith, So
Speaker 1: thank you Meredith. I know she said this one in
Speaker 1: a while back. I'm gonna say Meredith was the first
Speaker 1: of many. Oh yeah, we probably just didn't record the
Speaker 1: rest the first come, first served kind of thing. But
Speaker 1: what we're going to talk about this week is the
Speaker 1: Lost Dutchman's Mind. The Lost Dutchman's mind. Crap, I misread it.
Speaker 1: I thought it was the Lost Dutch Boy paid store franchise.
Speaker 1: Sounds so similar. Yeah, well, that's actually a legitimate mystery.
Speaker 1: They built this franchise and they wrote the address down
Speaker 1: a piece of paper, and then somebody lost it the
Speaker 1: piece of paper that is. Oh I thought they lost
Speaker 1: a little boy. No, no, that's another mystery. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: we just proved that one. Alright, Well, let's let's focus
Speaker 1: on this, okay. So before we get started with the mystery,
Speaker 1: I do want to say that there's several lost Dutchman's
Speaker 1: minds across the US. So we are specifically talking about
Speaker 1: the one that is believed to be in the Superstition
Speaker 1: Mountains in Arizona. That's it is the big one, but
Speaker 1: there are others, so I just want to make sure
Speaker 1: a brief overview before we get into most of it
Speaker 1: is the legend of the Lost Dutchman's Mind, which says
Speaker 1: that there is a gold mine with an amazingly pure
Speaker 1: vein of gold and it was found either by the
Speaker 1: Apaches at some unknown time in history, by the Spanish
Speaker 1: in the fifteen hundreds, or a German immigrant in the
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds. The mine is believed to be located somewhere
Speaker 1: in the Superstition Mountains, and it's believed to be in
Speaker 1: the vicinity of there's a peak called Weaver's Needle, and
Speaker 1: that's where everybody thinks it's at. And supposedly the mine
Speaker 1: is lost. But the funny thing is is that it
Speaker 1: wasn't lost before gold was pulled out of it and
Speaker 1: brought back to civilization, possibly along with a map, maybe not.
Speaker 1: I don't know stories very and that's something i'll preface
Speaker 1: this with. There are multiple versions of the story. That's
Speaker 1: what makes it so fun it is. It's kind of
Speaker 1: boring if you just say, I know there was a mind,
Speaker 1: but we don't really know where it is anymore. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: an episode over done. No, that's the way it's gonna go. Right. So,
Speaker 1: since the story came out in whichever time frame it
Speaker 1: is that it came out, whether it was with the
Speaker 1: Spanish or with the German minor in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: people have since been going out into the desert searching
Speaker 1: for the mind. If they're lucky, they just lose their fortunes.
Speaker 1: If they're not so lucky, they're losing their lives. Happens
Speaker 1: it does. And part of the reason for that is
Speaker 1: because people go looking for it and they aren't exactly
Speaker 1: seasoned prospectors. They didn't know what they were doing, and
Speaker 1: they weren't prepared. And so you add that in with
Speaker 1: the weather and the country side, and it's a recipe
Speaker 1: for disaster, especially if you go out by yourself, which
Speaker 1: some people, which is a lot of people seem to
Speaker 1: have died and anything. You go out in the wilderness
Speaker 1: by yourself, by the way, you know, you're taking a
Speaker 1: big chance, a bad idea. Yeah, it is. So let's
Speaker 1: give a little bit of geographic info here, just what
Speaker 1: people know where we're talking about. Superstition Mountains themselves are
Speaker 1: roughly fifty miles or eighty kilometers east of Phoenix, Arizona.
Speaker 1: The temperatures in the area swing. This is in the summers.
Speaker 1: They swing from a low of eighty degrees to a
Speaker 1: high of a hundred and six degrees and that is
Speaker 1: the average in that time frame. Yeah, in the winter,
Speaker 1: it's like also super weird. It's super cold because it's
Speaker 1: high plains, right, yeah, and it's it's it's desert, and
Speaker 1: deserts aren't known for being warm in the winter. Actually,
Speaker 1: even in the summertime, the desert gets pretty damn cold
Speaker 1: at night. Actually, I would saying, are you talking eighty
Speaker 1: degrees at night? I'm sure I would take it to
Speaker 1: get a lot lower than that it can. But this is,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm this is this is the highs. So
Speaker 1: this is a big peak July August. You know, then
Speaker 1: there's not so much a temperate swing at that part. Okay,
Speaker 1: So these are highs. Okay. So the other reason, you know,
Speaker 1: as we said, it's a desert, it only gets a
Speaker 1: couple I think, what is it, eight inches of rain
Speaker 1: a year, So it's not as if you're just gonna
Speaker 1: find pools of water laying around your canteen up with
Speaker 1: none of that. So the whole place is it's rock,
Speaker 1: it's scrub, it's valleys and bluffs, and it's just not
Speaker 1: the place that anybody should be going wandering into unprepared
Speaker 1: and most definitely not on their own. I recommend you
Speaker 1: get a guide if you're gonna go, like five, do
Speaker 1: they have rattlers up there, the ones that little babies
Speaker 1: have or the snake? Yeah they do, they have. They
Speaker 1: have snakes and probably some other creepy crawleys kind of
Speaker 1: like Australia, not as bad as Australia, and Australia everything
Speaker 1: wants to kill you. Arizona is the Australia of America.
Speaker 1: Let's be probably. I don't know about that, but I'm
Speaker 1: sure there's some other places that will take Umbridge at that.
Speaker 1: So I'll let them email us. You're the most poisonous
Speaker 1: state in America. We want to hear from you New Jersey. Wait,
Speaker 1: that's around kind of poison. Okay. So there's there's a
Speaker 1: misnomer in our story that I want to clear up
Speaker 1: real quick also before we get into it, and that
Speaker 1: is the name of the mind. We here in the
Speaker 1: US were super culturally sensitive, especially in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: and so that's where this comes from. Is the mine
Speaker 1: was found by a man who was called the Dutchman,
Speaker 1: but he wasn't Dutch. He was Chairman. So Deutsch. Being
Speaker 1: as like I said, sensitive, it was we are Deutsch
Speaker 1: Dutch potato potato, they're the same thing. So that's why
Speaker 1: it's called that. So, as I said before, there are
Speaker 1: multiple versions of this story, and there are multiple variants
Speaker 1: of each version. So what I've decided to do here
Speaker 1: is kind of what I've done in the past. I've
Speaker 1: packed each one up into as much of a stories
Speaker 1: I can without yep, without going veering down every little
Speaker 1: side alley here. So if you're familiar with the story
Speaker 1: and this doesn't made up exactly with what you've heard,
Speaker 1: well that's because it's a variant initially the story. So
Speaker 1: this is the earliest version of the story of the
Speaker 1: Lost Dutchman's mind. It comes from the Apaches, the Indians,
Speaker 1: American Indians who lived in the area, and they of
Speaker 1: course were there before Spanish or Europeans showed up. The
Speaker 1: story that they tell is about a sacred cave that
Speaker 1: houses the spirits that protect the mountain. The entrance to
Speaker 1: the cave, according to their legend, is protected by a
Speaker 1: pair of rattle snakes, one is male and one is female.
Speaker 1: Between those snakes are two cops, and I believe it's
Speaker 1: shell cups if I remember right. To enter the cave, though,
Speaker 1: you need to walk up to the cups and have
Speaker 1: a bluestone and a white stone and you need to
Speaker 1: put those into the cups. The or in some other
Speaker 1: versions they're blue and a white feather. But you're gonna
Speaker 1: put him into the cups. It is going to be
Speaker 1: that the female will get the white stone and the
Speaker 1: male will get the bluestone, and when you do that,
Speaker 1: that will prompt the snakes to leave the entrance of
Speaker 1: the cave and you can enter it. What's really interesting
Speaker 1: is when I was listening to when I was reading this,
Speaker 1: and then I watched UM in Search of the old
Speaker 1: Leonard Nimoy show, which was a lot of fun. I
Speaker 1: didn't realize he hosted that show for it just completely
Speaker 1: evaporated from my head. But the guy was telling the story,
Speaker 1: and then I was like, Okay, so this is just
Speaker 1: kind of it is allegory. Is at the right word
Speaker 1: to say? Yeah, I think it's allegory. Okay. So I
Speaker 1: was saying, Oh, it's just an allegory whatever whatever story
Speaker 1: with a hidden right, And then I started reading on
Speaker 1: some boards about this, and people are saying that they
Speaker 1: were interpreting this to mean that the entrance of the
Speaker 1: cave was protected or covered by two actual rattlesnake stone statues,
Speaker 1: and that the stone, the blue and the white stone
Speaker 1: would act as a key to open it, which doesn't
Speaker 1: mate up at all with what we know of what
Speaker 1: the tribes of the American Indians did, but it was
Speaker 1: an interesting idea to me. No, absolutely sure. This wasn't
Speaker 1: on web slues. This was on some miners board statues
Speaker 1: that are closed Indiana jones Es. Yeah, and then you
Speaker 1: put the stones in and give them a twist and
Speaker 1: they slide apart. You got it. That's I think that's
Speaker 1: a little bit beyond a patch of technology to tell
Speaker 1: you the truth. Well, maybe it was alien technology. I
Speaker 1: love the idea. Yes, it's pretty cool. It was pretty interesting. Again,
Speaker 1: I don't I agree. I don't think it's right, but cool, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think. Yeah, alright, well let me finish up just
Speaker 1: with this bit of story, then we'll keep going. I
Speaker 1: know you don't think that's right, and that's fine. I
Speaker 1: just thought it was fun good. I got the feeling
Speaker 1: from what I read and listened to about the story
Speaker 1: from the Apache that the cave is not so much
Speaker 1: you know, this this gold filled thing, but instead was
Speaker 1: a place to go to commune with the spirits of
Speaker 1: the Suspicions Mountains. Um, you know, I think it was
Speaker 1: a thunder god. I heard it referred to and referred
Speaker 1: to in one place, so I don't know, but it
Speaker 1: seems like it's more of a spiritual place for them,
Speaker 1: not a gold thing. That would make sense. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's my understanding that historically Native American people's have had
Speaker 1: more of like a reverence for the space that they're
Speaker 1: in than the sort of wow, that's gold. Um, let's
Speaker 1: take it. They didn't really. Yeah, I'm sure they would
Speaker 1: have loved to have had the gold if they had
Speaker 1: been valuable in their economy, but it really wasn't wasn't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it would makes sense that you might look at
Speaker 1: that and think, yeah, that's a special place that I'm
Speaker 1: going to talk to somebody important in. But the value
Speaker 1: is not what's in the walls. The value was in
Speaker 1: the space itself released on your system. Yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: well let's go on from here. We have our next Actually,
Speaker 1: we have two versions of this story that revolve around
Speaker 1: the Spanish. According yeah, of course, according to this version
Speaker 1: of the story, about fifteen forty, a Spanish conquistador named
Speaker 1: Francisco of Vasquez de Coronado, he came to the area
Speaker 1: and he was looking for the seven Golden Cities of Cibola,
Speaker 1: and they the Spanish, met the Apache and they told
Speaker 1: him about the Suspicion Mountains and he immediately interpreted their
Speaker 1: stories to mean that one of the golden cities of
Speaker 1: Cibola was there, and he is his men immediately went
Speaker 1: to search the area. They obviously they never found it,
Speaker 1: but while they were in the area, they kept mysteriously
Speaker 1: losing men. And that's the way you'll see it described
Speaker 1: as men would just evaporator disappear. And I don't know
Speaker 1: if really they were deserting or if they're falling off cliffs.
Speaker 1: I have no idea, although as always possible, the apaches
Speaker 1: were kidnapping him in murdering him, Yeah, that's absolutely possible.
Speaker 1: Um So, so I don't know. That's where the Spanish
Speaker 1: the actual fifteen forty version of the story ends, and
Speaker 1: it disappears from there, but it's dovetails quite nicely in
Speaker 1: with the second part of our story. Here, the last
Speaker 1: telling of the story, which is probably the most fleshed
Speaker 1: out because I think it's the most popular, pushing us
Speaker 1: into the eighteen forties, there's a man named Don Miguel Peralta,
Speaker 1: and he's the member of a prominent family, and he
Speaker 1: goes out looking for the gold that de Coronado couldn't
Speaker 1: find in the years earlier. He By the way, remember
Speaker 1: that name, Well, I watched the wire, so yeah, not
Speaker 1: not not that uh. In this story, his name is
Speaker 1: peppered all over the place. So the story goes that
Speaker 1: Don Miguel Perelta went out searching for the gold in
Speaker 1: the Suspicion Mountains and he indeed founded and he returned
Speaker 1: to the site that he had found the gold with
Speaker 1: a whole host of workers and began to mine it.
Speaker 1: Being that he was digging in sacred territory, the apache
Speaker 1: were none too keen with that, and he figured, well,
Speaker 1: it's probably time to pack up and get out of here.
Speaker 1: But being unwilling to just leave his gold mine open
Speaker 1: for any old schmode to just walk in and start working,
Speaker 1: he somehow covers the entrance of the mine. And I
Speaker 1: don't know how he does that, Probably a pretty good way, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it makes it hard to go back can start working.
Speaker 1: That's that's why I don't know how he did it.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't really pay too much into this, because
Speaker 1: what happens is that he loads his pack animals with
Speaker 1: gold and his equipment and his men and then they
Speaker 1: take they go to leave. But he probably shouldn't have
Speaker 1: spent so much time oh, I don't know, packing up
Speaker 1: his stuff and blowing up the entrance to the mind
Speaker 1: because the Apache show up and they kill every last man.
Speaker 1: The pack animals, however, are not killed, and they are
Speaker 1: loaded with gold and they run away, and supposedly, for
Speaker 1: about fifty to eighty years, people wandering in the area
Speaker 1: would find the corpses of these pack animals with statchells
Speaker 1: of gold attached to them, so they were they were
Speaker 1: above find. Yeah, I my my one issue with it
Speaker 1: is that I don't exactly know how anybody knows that
Speaker 1: that's what the what happened to him and the men,
Speaker 1: because yeah, they had to be survived. Or there's other
Speaker 1: people who said they found a whole host of corpses
Speaker 1: several miles out away from Weaver's Needle, so that must
Speaker 1: have been the indication that the Apaches. I as, I
Speaker 1: don't know why you have such a problem with this,
Speaker 1: because what we're saying is a group of Apache Indians
Speaker 1: came and killed a bunch of dudes who were messing
Speaker 1: with their sacred site and survived that attack and left.
Speaker 1: And I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that they
Speaker 1: might have bragged to some people about it. And that's
Speaker 1: how we got this story, was that they said, yeah,
Speaker 1: that guy that was digging in there, we killed them all,
Speaker 1: because that's what happens to people. So you're saying the Apache,
Speaker 1: we're spreading the story that they had. Okay, Okay, I
Speaker 1: just making sure I understand who when you said that guy. Yes.
Speaker 1: So for me, it's like, there are a bunch of
Speaker 1: there are a bunch of people who left that scene alive.
Speaker 1: And it wouldn't be so crazy to me to say,
Speaker 1: especially if they were trying to disencourage what's the discourage,
Speaker 1: thank you discourage people from going out there and searching
Speaker 1: for it anymore? They would say, yeah, you don't happened
Speaker 1: to Laska who did that? We killed him at all
Speaker 1: of his men, We killed them all. And there is
Speaker 1: an addition to this story which I initially hadn't included,
Speaker 1: which is that they're supposedly so there was a doctor
Speaker 1: who was friendly to the APACHE and helped them, and
Speaker 1: so what they did one day was they said, we're
Speaker 1: going to pay you back, and we know what, old
Speaker 1: viable valuable can't say the word valuable all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: but they blindfold him, put him on a horse, take
Speaker 1: him somewhere and he picks up as much gold as
Speaker 1: he can off the ground from there. So I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe you're right, maybe there is that's that's how
Speaker 1: we spread from there. I don't know. I'm always just
Speaker 1: always questioned when it's and every man was killed, you
Speaker 1: know the story. Yeah, but again it's like not literally
Speaker 1: not everyone was killed, right, just just all of the
Speaker 1: workers who were digging the minds were killed. There were
Speaker 1: a bunch of people who did the killing. And actually
Speaker 1: the workers are probably slated to get killed any because
Speaker 1: they knew the where the mind was possible. Yeah. Oh,
Speaker 1: and by the way, that's the one thing I was
Speaker 1: going to say, is that story about the guys who
Speaker 1: were found away from Weaver's Needle that people said must
Speaker 1: have been the killing ground. That's that's actually it's called
Speaker 1: Master Grounds. It's actually a known site, so you can
Speaker 1: find it on the map. And I was all over
Speaker 1: Google Earth looking at this stuff. No, no, I gotta
Speaker 1: be honest with you. On Google Earth. This whole place
Speaker 1: is really not that fun to look at. It's brown,
Speaker 1: a little bit of scrubby green and valleys and ravines,
Speaker 1: but it's a known site as in a known place
Speaker 1: where there was known historical site where bodies were found, Yes,
Speaker 1: where bodies were found. Not, there's there's verse. There's accounts
Speaker 1: that say that some gold was collected at that site,
Speaker 1: but I I didn't dig too deep in if that
Speaker 1: was historically true or not. You know, this was one
Speaker 1: of those things. It's just it's in that that slide
Speaker 1: of so many bits of the story that you can
Speaker 1: only run down so many. Okay, so lastly, let's move
Speaker 1: on to our most popular version of the story, which
Speaker 1: is the Dutchman himself. Yeah, so our friend the Dutchman
Speaker 1: was an actual guy. We've historically know who he is.
Speaker 1: His name was I'm gonna say it's Jacob Waltz, but
Speaker 1: it could be Yakub. I'm not sure which it's gonna be,
Speaker 1: but I'm just gonna refer to him as Waltz because
Speaker 1: that's safe. He was born in Germany in the early
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds. He came to the America's or came to
Speaker 1: the US in eighty five, and he made his way
Speaker 1: in kind of this zig zaggy route south from New York.
Speaker 1: He went through North Carolina and then he you know,
Speaker 1: came across towards Texas, always chasing gold. He was always
Speaker 1: looking for the next place, because you gotta remember, there
Speaker 1: was a lot of boom towns at this this time
Speaker 1: in history, and people were mining things all over and
Speaker 1: they died out pretty quickly, they did. They would die
Speaker 1: out super fast. So he was chasing that all the time.
Speaker 1: And he eventually ended up in Arizona around Phoenix, and
Speaker 1: he ended up living out his years in that area.
Speaker 1: He was working his own minds there. And I don't
Speaker 1: we all have that that mountain man minor idea in
Speaker 1: your head, where the guy's up in the hills in
Speaker 1: a hole in the hills, and then he comes out
Speaker 1: once in a great while to go to town and
Speaker 1: get his supplies, and that's all you ever see them.
Speaker 1: And while it's true that he would spend time at
Speaker 1: his own minds, he couldn't make a living doing that
Speaker 1: because he never had a really any kind of profitable claims.
Speaker 1: So he would go do work for other people. He
Speaker 1: would work in town. I mean, it was not uncommon
Speaker 1: to to do that. A lot of these prospectors had
Speaker 1: to do that to be able to feed themselves. There
Speaker 1: wasn't actually, you know, all that many rich vines to
Speaker 1: be had at the things aren't just still did his
Speaker 1: day aren't very common. I think of it like a
Speaker 1: deadwood sort of situation. Do you guys ever watch? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and how the prospectors were more for higher than anything
Speaker 1: else and would be you would go work for the
Speaker 1: rich people who came into town thinking that their claimed
Speaker 1: that they had just bought was going to be worth
Speaker 1: a lot of money. And you know, that's kind of
Speaker 1: what I picture prospecting really like, not you know, down
Speaker 1: in the mind pulling gold out. I don't know pretty much. Well,
Speaker 1: there you go two ways to look at it. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right. They didn't do it full time. So
Speaker 1: we we reach a little bit of a split in
Speaker 1: our story here with Mr Waltz. From here, there are
Speaker 1: variants of the story that he um so he met
Speaker 1: a fellow German by the name of Jacob Wiser who
Speaker 1: had been in the area as well. And there's some
Speaker 1: version of the story, like I said, though, that have him.
Speaker 1: There's versions that don't. So we're just going to kind
Speaker 1: of run on. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't exist.
Speaker 1: But they showed up in the Phoenix area in seventy
Speaker 1: and suddenly had a bunch of gold and drank on
Speaker 1: it for days before they packed up and headed back
Speaker 1: out into the mountains. And according to the legend the story,
Speaker 1: Wiser did this for twenty years. He would show up
Speaker 1: with gold and you know, live high on the hog
Speaker 1: for a while, and then he'd head back out in
Speaker 1: the hills. And there are variations that say how he
Speaker 1: found the gold. So this is some of the difficulty
Speaker 1: with the story. Some people say that, uh, he accidentally
Speaker 1: stumbled onto one of those piles of gold that was
Speaker 1: attached to a dead pack animal. That would be reasonable
Speaker 1: and easy. There are others that say that he or
Speaker 1: he and his heat and or his partner killed two
Speaker 1: Mexican miners who they took to be apache and then
Speaker 1: after they had killed and realized they were mining the area,
Speaker 1: and then realized they had a valuable mind. Or there
Speaker 1: are the versions that say that these two were given
Speaker 1: a map by a Mexican don whose life they saved.
Speaker 1: And let's flesh that out just a little bit. The
Speaker 1: Mexican don, because it it turns out it was a
Speaker 1: man who was Don Miguel Peralta, Peralta that guy again again,
Speaker 1: and he was according to this he's a descendant of
Speaker 1: the man who had found the mind the first time,
Speaker 1: and the Dutchman saved him from certain death in a
Speaker 1: knife fight, certain death, and as a reward he let
Speaker 1: him look at a map he had of the mind,
Speaker 1: and then eventually he took him and if his partner
Speaker 1: Wiser existed out there, and supposedly they started working it,
Speaker 1: and eventually he was bought out. And then after a
Speaker 1: while suddenly the partner stop stopped showing up, and people
Speaker 1: can't decide if he just died of natural causes, if
Speaker 1: the Apache killed him, or if Wise killed him, Waltz Wise,
Speaker 1: I don't know who very similar or if Waltz had
Speaker 1: killed him. So he kind of disappears at that point,
Speaker 1: Walts himself dies, but not before he meets a woman
Speaker 1: named Juliet Thomas. And it's really funny when you read
Speaker 1: the accountings of her. I've heard that she was a
Speaker 1: rather young woman. I have heard that she was a
Speaker 1: rather old widow. Uh. You know, it goes back and
Speaker 1: forth what she did. But apparently he befriended her and
Speaker 1: maybe they had some kind of romantic relationship, and he
Speaker 1: kept dropping hints about where his mind was and telling
Speaker 1: her that he would take her to it to see
Speaker 1: it in the spring. Unfortunately, he died in I believe
Speaker 1: it was October. It was October of Julia Thomas, perhaps
Speaker 1: a very young beautiful girl who had found a guy
Speaker 1: who was promising an older guy who was promising her
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff. Possibly she is possibly that she
Speaker 1: could also be a woman of you know, mature woman,
Speaker 1: so not a twenty year old girl, but at forty
Speaker 1: or fifty, because she's always described as a widow, So
Speaker 1: she could have been the widow of a minor at
Speaker 1: of a man at twenty, or she could be the
Speaker 1: widow of a man in her fifty You'd never know that,
Speaker 1: and her age is never specified anywhere. When they collected
Speaker 1: his body to take it away, they found underneath his
Speaker 1: bed a sack of gold, was very pure gold in it.
Speaker 1: So everybody is excited to say that he got it
Speaker 1: from the lost Dutchman's mind, and you know, we've we've
Speaker 1: got to go get that. And then of course since
Speaker 1: then people have been going out into the hills and
Speaker 1: digging holes like their gophers and just riddling the area
Speaker 1: with with pock marks. So that's kind of where our
Speaker 1: story ends. There is one thing about this that I
Speaker 1: feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about,
Speaker 1: and that is the Peralta stones. Course, again, the Peraltas
Speaker 1: pop up in our story. In the early nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: Three stones, I guess technically four stones, three rectangular stones,
Speaker 1: were discovered in Apache Junction, Arizona, and along with them,
Speaker 1: there was a heart shaped stone that was found. The
Speaker 1: rectangular stones are made of sandstone, and they're called the
Speaker 1: Peralta stones, and then the heart stone is called the
Speaker 1: Latin heart. And we're talking things that had been made
Speaker 1: to be that shaped by men, right. They are man made, yes,
Speaker 1: so somebody did carve them somehow, right, and they're like
Speaker 1: bricks about what eight by fourteen inches something like that.
Speaker 1: I think they're I thought they were more candle to
Speaker 1: like eleven by seventeen, but somewhere in that range. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've always seen pictures of them, but I
Speaker 1: never got good dimensions for scale, no banana for scale.
Speaker 1: So on one face, so one of the stones is
Speaker 1: carved on both sides and on one face of that
Speaker 1: that's referred to as the pre map, and it shows
Speaker 1: an etching of a person wearing a pointed hat standing
Speaker 1: on a rectangle which I believe is supposed to be
Speaker 1: a block, and it's got eighty seven etched into that block,
Speaker 1: and they're swinging across the shape of a cross down
Speaker 1: and underneath that there's a rectangle with a cross in
Speaker 1: it and a heart, almost like they're falling away from
Speaker 1: the cross. Then to the right of that there are
Speaker 1: several lines of text in Spanish. On the opposite side
Speaker 1: of the stone is what is called the horse map,
Speaker 1: and that also has more Spanish on it, along with
Speaker 1: the engraving of not surprisingly all horse. And then there's
Speaker 1: some squiggly lines and some numbers on it. To take
Speaker 1: the other two stones, which these stones get stacked on
Speaker 1: top of one another, so there appears to only be
Speaker 1: carved on one face of each, and they have on
Speaker 1: their face again this is a series of squiggly line
Speaker 1: and some numbers, and there is in one of them
Speaker 1: a depression that has been carved in that is in
Speaker 1: the shape of a heart. And by the way, when
Speaker 1: I say the shape of a heart, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: like the the Europpean Valentine heart shape exactly, that's exactly it.
Speaker 1: The lines that are on the stone run up to
Speaker 1: the edge of the heart, the part of it that's
Speaker 1: carved out, and if you take the Latin heart and
Speaker 1: put it into the spot they made up perfectly, and
Speaker 1: those lines continue across the Latin heart. So people interpret
Speaker 1: this to mean that these stones are a map, that
Speaker 1: they are reflective of certain geographic features in the area,
Speaker 1: and so they're trying you see people always trying to
Speaker 1: make these up to different maps, which depending on how
Speaker 1: you zoom in or out, you can put it into
Speaker 1: a thousand places. So one of them definitely looks to
Speaker 1: me to have maybe some like constellation drawings on it
Speaker 1: maybe or something like that as well, so you're probably
Speaker 1: referring to it. It looks like a series of dots
Speaker 1: with lines connecting it. No, that's that's what I wouldn't
Speaker 1: interpret as a trail a cath right. But then there's
Speaker 1: the squiggly like one that looks kind of like a
Speaker 1: W and one that looks maybe like you're interpreting them
Speaker 1: is constellations. I got it, okay, or I mean mountains,
Speaker 1: because one of them definitely looks like mountains. And then
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of the sky that looked like constellations
Speaker 1: to me. I don't know. It's totally up to interpretation.
Speaker 1: Those it absolutely is. I mean everybody, okay, not everything.
Speaker 1: A lot of people are convinced that it is a
Speaker 1: bath that's meant to lead you to the lost Dutchman's mind.
Speaker 1: I find it strange that it showed up in the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, But hey, what do I know? Oh? Wait, um,
Speaker 1: I I do know something, because it turns out that
Speaker 1: most of the authorities on engraving from the eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: and stoneworking have looked at these things and said they're
Speaker 1: fakes because the faces of the stone owns where they're
Speaker 1: the etching is. They're they're rather smooth, and to have
Speaker 1: done that at the in period in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: you have to rub two stones together for quite a
Speaker 1: while with moist with water between them to wear them down.
Speaker 1: Doesn't appear to be that way. The lines in the
Speaker 1: shapes that are cut into them appear to have been
Speaker 1: cut with a modern power tool, and then somebody took
Speaker 1: some other implement to them to try to rough them
Speaker 1: up and make it look real antiquing. Yeah, that's exactly it,
Speaker 1: but they don't. For for a lot of of experts
Speaker 1: from that kind of work that they don't pass must
Speaker 1: also don't I mean, they don't look for as old
Speaker 1: as they're supposed to be. Those fine lines have held
Speaker 1: up remarkably well in the arid wasteland of the desert.
Speaker 1: So you know, the other problems are, oh, tell me
Speaker 1: all of them. Okay. So the Valentine's Heart that it's
Speaker 1: kind of it's a European thing that didn't show up
Speaker 1: in Latin cultures until the twentieth century, so couldn't be
Speaker 1: in era. And the Spanish is poorly assembled sentences that
Speaker 1: are also using modern words and phrases, So there's a
Speaker 1: lot of things that call this out as not being
Speaker 1: truly period. Yeah, I and yeah, the maps, supposedly it's
Speaker 1: on him, it's just kind of like crude and meanless.
Speaker 1: That's yeah, it's hard to say. I've actually watched previews.
Speaker 1: There's a TV show, apparently reality show of a bunch
Speaker 1: of guys hiking around in that area using a map
Speaker 1: similar to this to try to locate the mind, and
Speaker 1: it is just so funny to watch them do it
Speaker 1: and overlay it on this and overlay it on that,
Speaker 1: Like you can put that on whatever you want if
Speaker 1: you zoom in and out, you'll eventually make it fit
Speaker 1: something something. So yeah, theory time. Yeah, shall we go
Speaker 1: down the rabbit hole here and we'll we'll start off
Speaker 1: let's start off with the whole thing is a fake,
Speaker 1: because that's one of this the two very basic theories here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so let's start off with is fake. Not long before
Speaker 1: Waltz showed up in Phoenix in eighteen seventy or so
Speaker 1: with all of that gold that he was spending around town.
Speaker 1: Remember I said that he had been working other claims
Speaker 1: and things like that to make ends meet. Well, it
Speaker 1: turns out that he had been working at a mind
Speaker 1: known as Vulture Mind, which was actually a super productive mind.
Speaker 1: It ran from eighteen sixty three to nineteen forty two,
Speaker 1: so years. Yeah, Well, he was fired apparently for stealing.
Speaker 1: So it is very possible that he simply stole some
Speaker 1: going from Vulture the folder mind, went out in the
Speaker 1: superstitions and then came in and said he had totally
Speaker 1: found it. So that is totally a plausible thing. Money,
Speaker 1: it's a good way to under your money. It's also
Speaker 1: a really good way to build trust to open a
Speaker 1: line of credit. Say, if you come rolling into town,
Speaker 1: with a bunch of really pure gold and you spend
Speaker 1: it all. But you've said that from that one, that thing,
Speaker 1: you know it's out there, there's a mine out there.
Speaker 1: It's super productive. You've seen it. I'm going to go
Speaker 1: out in a couple of days. I just need, you know,
Speaker 1: a couple more drinks, one more night in the hotel,
Speaker 1: and then I'm good. I mean, I know that's not
Speaker 1: attached to the story necessarily, but yeah, I know that
Speaker 1: that stuff did happen, and maybe he did it several times,
Speaker 1: came back several times, and that's how he built up
Speaker 1: that kind of trust me. Yeah, it could be. I
Speaker 1: don't know, he could have hit a bunch of Actually,
Speaker 1: in those days, you probably didn't want to walk around
Speaker 1: with your entire fortune for disaster. Yeah. These days even too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know, stealing a bunch, getting fired for that,
Speaker 1: and then needing to build up a name for yourself
Speaker 1: somewhere else. It's not unreasonable to think this is a
Speaker 1: good way to curry trust from people. They'll think that
Speaker 1: I have a lot of money, they think I have
Speaker 1: a productive claim, and then when I run out of
Speaker 1: this money, they'll trust me. Yeah, I do what I
Speaker 1: gotta do, and maybe he intended town but he had
Speaker 1: enough stretched it out. I don't know. Let's go and
Speaker 1: quickly talk about his dear lady friend, Julia Thomas. Julia
Speaker 1: took care of him and his last his later years, right,
Speaker 1: according to versions of the story, yes, at least in
Speaker 1: the last year. Do we know how he died was
Speaker 1: an old age. I believe he just died of old age.
Speaker 1: It wasn't as if he died of a mysterious knife
Speaker 1: wound to the back, right, But I didn't know if
Speaker 1: it was an injury or an illness or something. As
Speaker 1: far as I can tell, his seventies. Yeah, yeah, I've
Speaker 1: been working out the mountains his entire life. So she though,
Speaker 1: Julia Thomas, she might actually be the reason that we
Speaker 1: know this story and that it's so popular. And that's
Speaker 1: because after Waltz died, she and two other men went
Speaker 1: out into the Suspicion Mountains looking for the mine, and
Speaker 1: after they couldn't find it, they came back and she
Speaker 1: started selling maps to the mine. So now she's making
Speaker 1: money by saying this is this is a map based
Speaker 1: on what he told me or gave me, which is suspicious.
Speaker 1: It's almost a gold mine and of itself well played there.
Speaker 1: In eight two, she spoke with a writer named Pierre
Speaker 1: pont Ce Bicknell, and he wrote, he wrote several stories
Speaker 1: over the years about this, and not surprisingly that the
Speaker 1: details changed from addition to addition. He was writing his articles.
Speaker 1: At least the one that we're going to cite came
Speaker 1: from the San Francisco Chronicle, which actually had a pretty
Speaker 1: decent circulation for the time. Yeah, and there's no internet
Speaker 1: archive very easily. Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's the only
Speaker 1: way to go. So it's easy. It's easy to just
Speaker 1: print a bunch of different stuff. Just do what you want. Okay.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna take an excerpt from an article that
Speaker 1: he put A wrote and it was in the January thirteen,
Speaker 1: eighteen edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. Joe, can you
Speaker 1: do your best eighteen nineties newsman voice for us? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's see, I'm gonna do a gruff mountain man voice here. Well,
Speaker 1: that's not very imaginary circle, it's not more than five miles.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's gonna I think that's gonna work. Alright,
Speaker 1: let me let me start over again. Okay, Okay, let's
Speaker 1: just do it this way, just a flat Midwestern accent.
Speaker 1: The mind lines within an imaginary circle whose diameter is
Speaker 1: not more than five miles and whose center is marked
Speaker 1: by the weaver's needle, which is about feet higher. I'm
Speaker 1: like a confusion of lesser peaks and mountain masses of
Speaker 1: basaltic rock. The first orige. On the south side from
Speaker 1: the west end of the range, they found a monument
Speaker 1: structure a little weird night. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're missing
Speaker 1: We're missing a verb there. Uh. They found a monumental
Speaker 1: trail which led them northward past Sombrero Butte into a
Speaker 1: long canyon, traveled northward in the gorge, and up over
Speaker 1: a lofty ridge, hence downward past the needle, into a
Speaker 1: canyon running north, and finally into a tributary canyon very
Speaker 1: steep and rocky and densely wooded, with the continuous thicket
Speaker 1: of scrub oak. Reads like a legal description. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's not exactly and where he got all these details
Speaker 1: is really really confusing to me. Uh. The only thing
Speaker 1: that I can guess, and I know a lot of
Speaker 1: people think, is that he gave an interview to Julia
Speaker 1: or Julia Thomas gave an interview to him, I should say,
Speaker 1: and then he ran with it and he added things.
Speaker 1: He changed the name of Weaver's needle to uh so,
Speaker 1: like it says in here, I thinks Sombrero beaut He
Speaker 1: used to call it Sombrero peak, like the name's always
Speaker 1: kind of got shuffled about. Is that what that is? Okay?
Speaker 1: Here's the thing about about this description, and and of
Speaker 1: course the map that Julia Thomas says was selling, is
Speaker 1: that Walts did drop some hints. Apparently he was known
Speaker 1: for dropping some hints about where the mind was, But
Speaker 1: nothing anywhere seems to lend me to believe that it
Speaker 1: was as such a detailed description as this. There were
Speaker 1: people who tried to follow him. It's according to the
Speaker 1: legend he would go out and people say, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: follow him, I'm gonna knock him over his head when
Speaker 1: I find his mind. I'm gonna take his claim, except
Speaker 1: that he would always shake who was ever following him.
Speaker 1: So I sometimes wonder if if that is true, that
Speaker 1: bit about him shaking people. Maybe people he Bicknell talked
Speaker 1: to people who gave bits and pieces that then Bicknell
Speaker 1: assembled al on with the stuff that he got from
Speaker 1: Julia Thomas. I don't know. I mean, that's that's a
Speaker 1: complete guess on my part as to where this fantastic
Speaker 1: word problem of a description comes from. Okay, let's move
Speaker 1: on to the other thing that makes me think that
Speaker 1: possibly this whole thing is a fake, and that is
Speaker 1: the Peralta's. Once again, we're gonna talk about those folks.
Speaker 1: They did. The first mention of them comes from documents
Speaker 1: that were filed in two and that documentation was from
Speaker 1: a scam that was made up by him hand named
Speaker 1: James Rivas. Supposedly, the Peraltas were actually in the area
Speaker 1: for a long long time before that, right according to
Speaker 1: the lineage that Vas made, Yes, the name Peralta is
Speaker 1: a very common name, so there were it is very
Speaker 1: possible that there were people with that name in the area.
Speaker 1: But it seems that the lineage that is assigned to
Speaker 1: this may have actually been taken from this scam that
Speaker 1: that he was doing, because he's trying to do it
Speaker 1: in a in a land grab bid. He claimed to
Speaker 1: be related to the family, and he claimed that he
Speaker 1: was working with the family or they had they had
Speaker 1: given him this and there was some land claimed deed
Speaker 1: deed stuff going on. He pulled this at least one
Speaker 1: other time, um, and he he would double down on
Speaker 1: it and then he get caught and he'd go to
Speaker 1: jail and he'd start a different scam. But then from
Speaker 1: there the name didn't show up again until the Big
Speaker 1: Nail article. So it may be that McNeill heard, oh, well,
Speaker 1: there was the Peraltas, Well, let's go ahead and pull
Speaker 1: that into the story, and maybe that's where the seed
Speaker 1: of that part came from. I don't know this part
Speaker 1: of the story, and that there's variants on that I
Speaker 1: believe it was. One is that the Peraltas had a
Speaker 1: minor two or another one is that they just had
Speaker 1: a but little gold that they hid up in the
Speaker 1: Superstious Mountain. There was also that they were rich cattle ranchers.
Speaker 1: There was also that that controlled a huge swath of
Speaker 1: the area, although I think the cattle rancher one is
Speaker 1: from the Reeva's scam. Probably. Yeah. The last thing that
Speaker 1: I have for this theory is that, you know, people
Speaker 1: have been scouring the Superstition Mountains and especially in the
Speaker 1: area around Weaver's Needle for over a hundred years and
Speaker 1: nothing has been found. Nobody has found a thing. Um
Speaker 1: and if indeed the thing is truly there, the chances
Speaker 1: of anybody finding it, well, they're they're amazingly fantastic, and
Speaker 1: they're very low. And I say they're very low because
Speaker 1: the area has been closed to mining. Uh. It was
Speaker 1: closed in four under the Wilderness Act of nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: which said you can't go in and do this stuff.
Speaker 1: Prospecting today is allowed, and that is wander around, pick
Speaker 1: up rocks off of the ground and then take them
Speaker 1: home and figure out what they are. No dig. If
Speaker 1: you want to dig, that is considered mining, and you've
Speaker 1: got to get a permit to mine. You can also
Speaker 1: do what is called treasure trove hunting, which as you
Speaker 1: go along and you try to find some kind of
Speaker 1: treasure that's just sitting around, but you've also got to
Speaker 1: get a permit for that. So it's a real The
Speaker 1: act is set up with a real catch twenty two.
Speaker 1: You can't show a fine unless you did for it,
Speaker 1: but you can't did for it to have a claim
Speaker 1: to show. And if you did for it you suddenly
Speaker 1: show up with this claim, they're gonna put you in
Speaker 1: irons and lock you away for digging unprotected layers. I
Speaker 1: love a bureaucracy. I know, is I knew. I used
Speaker 1: to work with somebody in her husband was a scuba
Speaker 1: diver and he and a friend discovered this treasure trove
Speaker 1: of cars at the bottom of the Lamor River because
Speaker 1: people back before they closed the ramp by the Cellar Bridge,
Speaker 1: people would just like shove their cars out of the river. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so they wanted to salvious these cars and say.
Speaker 1: It was like, well, you can't. You can't salvage those cars.
Speaker 1: Let's you have title to them. And they were like, well,
Speaker 1: how are we going to get title unless we pull
Speaker 1: them out of the water. Well, we don't care. Actually
Speaker 1: they worked it out, but yeah, it took him a
Speaker 1: while bereacratic mindset, and yeah, I don't even want to
Speaker 1: know how they had to go about that, but yeah, awesome, Okay, ok,
Speaker 1: let's go on to theory section number two, which is
Speaker 1: it's real you like how they put a little bit
Speaker 1: of feeling behind that. I mean, I guess, yeah, you
Speaker 1: are you giving me a C minus on my my acting? Still,
Speaker 1: I am no. I was more going to say, to
Speaker 1: the point of nobody's found it, you know, for me,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like, well, okay, you can't mind right,
Speaker 1: So even if there was this mine, and also, what's
Speaker 1: what's to say that it wasn't just totally mind dry,
Speaker 1: it's actually very possible, you know, that would account for
Speaker 1: nobody having found it. But well, and people have said
Speaker 1: they found it. So if we're going to start and
Speaker 1: this isn't something that I got on what you guys
Speaker 1: are looking at. But there is a guy who in
Speaker 1: the late seventies, I believe it was maybe it was
Speaker 1: the sad said he, I believe it was that age.
Speaker 1: He said he had met some men who had known
Speaker 1: the Dutchman and they had told him what the Dutchman
Speaker 1: had told them, and he went out and he found
Speaker 1: the Dutchman's mind. But it wasn't around Weaver's needle. It
Speaker 1: was in another area, in a valley, up a hill,
Speaker 1: up a mountain, and it was a pit mine and
Speaker 1: he pulled out, you know, a couple ten or twenty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars worth of gold at the time, and the
Speaker 1: thing ran dry. So it is possible that somebody else
Speaker 1: found it, not knowing it was the Dutchman's mind. You're okay,
Speaker 1: so no, that's fine, because this is this is right
Speaker 1: along the lines of the fact that, yes, lots of
Speaker 1: people have been finding gold in and around the Phoenix area. Mean,
Speaker 1: we just we talked about the Vulture Mine, almost a
Speaker 1: hundred years in operation for for God's sakes, um although
Speaker 1: I've I've heard too, though that geological surveys of the
Speaker 1: Superstition Mountains indicate there isn't likely to be any gold there. Well,
Speaker 1: that's yeah, that's I've heard that. I've also heard people say, well,
Speaker 1: you've got to find the vein. There are precious metals.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a huge copper mine right just to
Speaker 1: the east of the Superstitions that is being mined. So
Speaker 1: there is stuff in the ground. I mean, I I
Speaker 1: don't know. And well, is it the mercury vapor test?
Speaker 1: Is that what you're talking about? Is that the one
Speaker 1: you're referring to that was saying that there wasn't probably
Speaker 1: a lot of golden area. I don't know. I just
Speaker 1: rather as they did a survey. I'm not sure exactly
Speaker 1: how that A chairman who if it was just geological,
Speaker 1: It's like this is a kind of rock where you're
Speaker 1: just not you know, it's like igneous rock. Volcanic in origin.
Speaker 1: My understanding is that gold veys comes from things like
Speaker 1: meteor impacts. Yeah and so, but a lot of the
Speaker 1: volcanic activity in the West is actually pretty recent in
Speaker 1: geological terms, and so and so there probably are some
Speaker 1: rich gold veins, but they're buried underneath a huge slab
Speaker 1: of lava. True. Yeah, and but you know, I mean again,
Speaker 1: there there were gold fields found. I mean, there's a
Speaker 1: place called Goldfield. There was not too far away from
Speaker 1: where people think the Lost Dutchman's Mind is. There was
Speaker 1: the Black Queen minds, which were super productive minds for
Speaker 1: a while. So, I mean, there is gold, There is
Speaker 1: gold in the area. Getting to it and finding it
Speaker 1: is the problem. And you know then that's that's part
Speaker 1: of the reason that like the Wildlife Act of nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty four was used to close the area because you
Speaker 1: know how people used to go prospecting dynamite dynamite just
Speaker 1: blow stuff up until something sparkles, so it looked like
Speaker 1: the whole area started looking like the surface of the moon.
Speaker 1: And that's one of the reasons they did it because
Speaker 1: people were just going crazy because they could because it
Speaker 1: was who cares, it's the middle of hour. So but
Speaker 1: people did find gold. I mean it did get found.
Speaker 1: Now does that mean that the lost Dutchman's mind is real?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mentioned to briefly a second ago
Speaker 1: was the I used the term pit mine. We I,
Speaker 1: at least in my head, always had this idea that
Speaker 1: the Dutchman's mind must be your typical mind. That is
Speaker 1: just a hole cut in the side of a mountain
Speaker 1: and it burrows straight down and slowly slopes down. But
Speaker 1: there's there's our minds where guys just dig straight down.
Speaker 1: It's literally just a pit in the ground. You dig
Speaker 1: a hole and you put timbers around it so it
Speaker 1: doesn't collapse on you, and eventually stopped getting anything out
Speaker 1: of it, and then you just walk away and nature
Speaker 1: fills it in. So that's why we talked about the
Speaker 1: It could have been mined out or maybe he minded
Speaker 1: out and it just over time filled in. We don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know how often they fill in. They fill
Speaker 1: in with dead bodies because people keep falling into well.
Speaker 1: You know, actually the landscape in the area has changed
Speaker 1: in the last hundred years, not just because of bozos
Speaker 1: out there with dynamite, but there are there have been earthquakes.
Speaker 1: I think there have been a half dozen strong earthquakes
Speaker 1: in the last hundred years, enough that collapse of mind
Speaker 1: shaft cause rock slides. So it could be that the
Speaker 1: pit was filled in with material, or the entrance collapsed,
Speaker 1: or it was covered in a rock slide, and this
Speaker 1: is these are things It very easily could have happened.
Speaker 1: And so that's why we don't see anything. You know,
Speaker 1: everybody's like, oh, well, that's obviously just a bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff that's sloughed off. It can't be behind that. You
Speaker 1: just keep going, Yeah, I don't know. It's it's a
Speaker 1: total guess. I do want to say as a public
Speaker 1: service announcement here that if you do decide to go
Speaker 1: out and mind for the Lost Dutchment on your own,
Speaker 1: you want to go dutching, because that's what it's called.
Speaker 1: I want you. You need to get a guide, You
Speaker 1: need to take the right provisions because it is very
Speaker 1: easy to get lost and to suffer great injury, if
Speaker 1: not die. If you really want to do this, you
Speaker 1: can actually join the Lost Dutchman's Mining Association and for
Speaker 1: a small fee of just under five thousand dollars, they'll
Speaker 1: let you go to their site, which is right near
Speaker 1: where they say the Lost Dutchman's Mine is and you
Speaker 1: can dig for gold. Dare. Yeah, I think that's probably
Speaker 1: a better way to invest your I agree. And five
Speaker 1: dollar one time fee. That's if you pay all up
Speaker 1: at once. You they've got payment plans you could you
Speaker 1: could spread it out as long as you want. You
Speaker 1: don't get the discounts if you don't pay up front.
Speaker 1: But well, I mean, I guess you know. For me,
Speaker 1: one of the things is it's all circled around the needle, right,
Speaker 1: we're seeing it's weavers needle. It's all weaver's needle. But
Speaker 1: I've been hiking before. It's cool. And we live near
Speaker 1: the Cascades, so you go in the Cascades and you
Speaker 1: can tell the difference between that's the mountain and this
Speaker 1: is all of the other little er mountains combs things
Speaker 1: around it. But I don't know that I can necessarily,
Speaker 1: and granted I'm a layman, right, but I can't necessarily
Speaker 1: when I'm standing next to a thing, say oh, this
Speaker 1: is the tallest peak in this area versus that's the
Speaker 1: tallest peak in this area, versus that thing that's twenty
Speaker 1: miles away. The tallest peak in this area. So I
Speaker 1: don't know how much room for error there is on
Speaker 1: saying yeah, it was the biggest thing around because we
Speaker 1: were it was very distinct. It is a very distinct.
Speaker 1: It's almost looks like an obelis and it has been, yeah,
Speaker 1: throughout all of the earthquakes and stuff, and you know,
Speaker 1: it might just be one of these one of those
Speaker 1: things that's like the guy who's looking out of the
Speaker 1: of the street light for his car key's even though
Speaker 1: he didn't drop them there. You know, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like that weaver's needle is such a distinctive landmark that
Speaker 1: how could you leave it out of your story? You know?
Speaker 1: That's great? Wow, this is this fabulous landmark that's easy
Speaker 1: to find. Everybody knows what it is, very recognizable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, so not surprising, I guess. So, but
Speaker 1: that sort of leads me towards a fake part of things.
Speaker 1: I guess. Okay, Well, although I for me, if I'm
Speaker 1: trying to hide a mind and people are really pushing
Speaker 1: me for info, and especially especially if this is the
Speaker 1: sort of situation where I've got a mind and I
Speaker 1: just want to line of credit for a couple of
Speaker 1: drinks and they're like, okay, Joe, I'll pour you another
Speaker 1: drink if you give me like one hint as to
Speaker 1: where your mind is. And you say it's near Weaver's Needle,
Speaker 1: and they'll go, okay, yeah, I know where that is. Okay, cool,
Speaker 1: here's your you know, here's your thing. Yeah, versus saying
Speaker 1: you know that fourth biggest peak on the east side
Speaker 1: there that area you I mean, that's not what you're
Speaker 1: gonna say. You might know in your brain that's where
Speaker 1: it is. But I think, especially if you're trying to
Speaker 1: sell maps like Julia Thompson, you're just gonna say it's there.
Speaker 1: But I think it exists. I do. I would like
Speaker 1: to think it does, but I also have a feeling
Speaker 1: that if it did, it's it's been leaned out long ago,
Speaker 1: and it's just it's a story as always, it's it's
Speaker 1: the story is snowballed, and the mind is now in
Speaker 1: telling is much greater than it ever was. An actuality. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think there's definitely a nugget of truth here. Oh god,
Speaker 1: oh wow wow. Well. The last thing I was gonna
Speaker 1: tell you guys I really found interesting is there was
Speaker 1: a book called Earthcore that I listened to several years ago,
Speaker 1: and it had. When I was listening to it, all
Speaker 1: these features that were described and about these guys were
Speaker 1: mining and YadA YadA, And as I was researching the
Speaker 1: Lost Dutchman's Mind, I realized I was like, Wow, a
Speaker 1: lot of this sounds like the terrain around Weaver's Needle
Speaker 1: and makes me wonder if this is what was the
Speaker 1: foundation of the story or the inspiration for stories set
Speaker 1: somewhere else. But it was just really interesting. It's like, Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to go pick up Earthcore again, damn
Speaker 1: it and find out if that's it. Um. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: kind of I'm kind of tending to think that if
Speaker 1: I found a great vein of gold and I'm going
Speaker 1: to the town that people are asking me about it,
Speaker 1: I would send them totally in the wrong direction. So
Speaker 1: there might be a lost mine or a great vein
Speaker 1: of gold, but it's probably not in the superstitions at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's right along the same thing as what Devil was saying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you might you might walk out towards Weaver's Needle knowing
Speaker 1: that you can easily ditch the guys that are following
Speaker 1: you and then hang it right and start heading east
Speaker 1: to your real site, which is not even in the mountains,
Speaker 1: which is not even there. Yeah, exactly exactly. That's uh so, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking that probably it might have been a rich
Speaker 1: vein somewhere, but not in the Superstition Mountains. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know. It's it's hard to say. I mean, like
Speaker 1: I said that, there are minds right in that area,
Speaker 1: right around where everybody thinks it. And I think that's
Speaker 1: part of why the legend is so solid and built in.
Speaker 1: It's just because there was actual productive minds. Well, it's
Speaker 1: a cool legend. I mean, I've liked I've enjoyed reading
Speaker 1: about this onceince I was a kid. Yeah, it's been
Speaker 1: around a long time, it has, and I think we've
Speaker 1: probably sunk enough time into this one. So let's go
Speaker 1: dev it. Devin started it. Let's go ahead, and so
Speaker 1: we should probably go ahead and give everybody their favorite
Speaker 1: bit of information because and she already used that one.
Speaker 1: You got to come something better. You're really you're minding
Speaker 1: for something now that was just as bad. Well, we
Speaker 1: have a website if you want to go see that website.
Speaker 1: It is thinking Sideways podcast dot com. We'll have some
Speaker 1: links for research on this episode, along with all of
Speaker 1: our other episodes, so you can listen to and download
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Speaker 1: middle because there's that character limit thing on Twitter, just
Speaker 1: like what you can tweet abbreviated as well, where Devin
Speaker 1: sends out weird stuff and confuses people and it's it's
Speaker 1: quite entertaining. I keep making jokes and nobody's getting them anymore.
Speaker 1: They're falling flat account and I'll pretend to get them. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: We are also on Reddit, so we have a subreddit
Speaker 1: which is Thinking Sideways and there. I've been noticing a
Speaker 1: lot more stuff coming through Reddit lately, so it's taken
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Speaker 1: stay off the radar, if you're like a drug kapin whatever,
Speaker 1: just send us an email. Will give you r PO box.
Speaker 1: You can send us a novel, pull of cash, or
Speaker 1: maybe you know, a kilo cocaine whatever. We appreciate all contributions,
Speaker 1: we really do, so send us out an email for ever.
Speaker 1: Anybody who's listening. Disregard what Joe said, except for the
Speaker 1: part of sending us cash. Yeah, yeah, the drugs not
Speaker 1: so much. Okay, okay, we are going to go ahead
Speaker 1: and wrap this one up and call it a night.
Speaker 1: So thanks a lot everybody, and we will talk to
Speaker 1: you next week. Bye. Uys. I was waiting for a
Speaker 1: better pun. I got nothing. Mind out, tapped out at
Speaker 1: the bottom, nothing more in there? Really run this vein dry? Yeah? I,
Speaker 1: Like I said, keep digging next week.