10 Unsolved Old West Mysteries

no period of history has been romanticized like the Old West and enshrined in 19th century dime novels and later in the movies of John Wayne and Clint Westwood but it wasn't just fiction. There really worked gangs of notorious outlaws, there really were tales a revenge ending in shootouts it was an era of great change of society encroaching on the untamed wilderness and even of Mexicans so it should be no surprise there are many mysteries of the Old West from famous outlaws who disappeared without a trace to great treasures generations have hunted for here attend unsolved Old West mysteries one of the most interesting yet least well-known figures of the Old West was Doc Noss a self-taught foot doctor he traveled around in search of adventure befriending cowboys and gunslingers one day he and his wife were exploring a remote mountain range in New Mexico when they discovered a mysterious cave venturing into the cave and through several hundred feet of tunnel he discovered a treasure trove before him lay colonial-era gold coins and artifacts historical documents and sixteen thousand gold bars. Days later they returned ready to excavate the great treasure but Noss was not a wise man and when he attempted to widen the tunnel using dynamite it caused the ceiling to collapse permanently sealing off the cave. Doc Noss would spend the rest of his life raising money to fund new efforts to retrieve that treasure investors poured millions into the effort enriching Noss in the process but his life of befriending shady figures came back to bite him as he was eventually murdered by one of his own investors in the decades that followed the story became legendary and treasure hunters continued to search for his gold none of them have found even a single gold bar but countless people still believe in the treasure there was once a Frenchman living in what at the time was called Utah Territory by all accounts he was an upstanding member of the community working as the local gravedigger but when it was found out he had been grave robbing people were outraged angry mobs wanted to lynch him on the street so to keep him safe until his trial police decided to exile him to a small island on the Great Salt Lake for six weeks he was to live alone on that island entirely isolated from the outside world but when authorities returned to the island he was nowhere to be found immediate speculation was that he somehow escaped either by a homemade boat or by swimming to shore but as time went on these theories seems less plausible not only was it a long way to shore no sign of the man was seen again and so his fate has been a mystery ever since 1800 Texas was an especially violent place American outlaws Mexican bandits and Comanche Raiders made its frontiers dangerous for all one Mexican bandit was especially notorious for stealing horses he would do so during sandstorms as to cover his tracks but according to legend he one day accidentally left a trail allowing a group of Texas Rangers to follow after him as a warning to other bandits that cut off his head tied his headless corpse to a horse and left it to wander off into the desert his killers headed home believing they would never again need worry about him but it was not long before strange rumors began to emerge across the state stories told of a Headless Horseman terrorizing settlers holding his own severed head its eyes glew brightly as he galloped towards his victims murdering anyone slower than his horse not even bullets could slow him down nor seem to damage him at all and ever since legends of this Headless Horseman have endured Bill Longley was known as the man hanged three times one of the most violent gun fighters of the Old West he spent his time roaming post-civil war Texas killing anyone who got in his way he claimed to have killed 32 people which is a lot more than I have according to legend he was captured by a lynch mob one night who decided to hang him as he was left hanging by a rope the mob rode off on horseback shooting into the air. But then a stray bullet cut the rope saving his life years later he was apprehended in Louisiana and sentenced to death again he escaped death, the hangman accidentally using the wrong length of rope but this time his executioner's realized their mistake and simply hanged him again bill Bill Longley was dead however one day his father came forward claiming his death had been faked it was said he escaped from prison days before leaving guards to panic and kill someone else in his place he did have a history of breaking out of jail and as time went on more people claims to encounter him could he really have escaped justice or was his father just a crazy old man among the figures who shaped this era of history was Pancho Villa - a Mexican revolutionary known for bravery and charisma one of the Mexican revolutions great leaders he had enemies on either side of a border and in 1923 he was assassinated three years later cemetery workers discovered a bizarre theft the grave of Pancho Villa had been desecrated his body decapitated and his head stolen there was no immediate suspect only rumor while many people hated Villa, no one seemed directly linked to the crime investigators hit an instant dead end and still today the fate of Pancho Villa's head is unknown some said it was stolen by a renegade art dealer and sold to a private collection in France but the most prominent rumor blamed a group of American students at Yale University is a notorious secret society called skull and bones also known as the Brotherhood of death they have been accused of acquiring many stolen skulls especially of great military leaders like the Apache chief Geronimo according to legend they paid twenty five thousand dollars for his skull of Pancho Villa to be stolen for them and an entire century later they still have it From the early days of Spanish conquest in the new world rumor spread among explorers of a series of great lost cities Tales of the seven cities of gold made it back to Europe and dozens of expeditions organized to find them but no matter how thoroughly they searched South and Central America no golden city was found centuries later when the Old West experienced a gold rush rumor again circulated of these lost cities this time telling they were in California Arizona or Colorado once more crazy white people went all over in search of his Seven Cities of Gold legend told they were surrounded by miles of desert in every direction and on the journey towards them you would see countless corpses of long dead explorers follow in the footsteps of those dead explorers and keep going and perhaps he will discover great wealth in those lost cities that was believed by many at for time but nothing resembling a city of God was ever found in the Old West in remote Nevada stands El Dorado Canyon a place long known to be rich in gold and silver for over a hundred years the mines here extracted precious metals making many fortunes as Nevada's most successful mining area all kinds of people which run here including criminals murder and shootouts were a regular occurrence so for protection many dogs were kept here but people of the Old West were cold hearted and when it came time to leave for Canyon many dogs were simply tied down and left to die Eldorado Canyon has been abandoned for decades but it said if you go there at night you can still hear the ghostly howling of those long dead dogs as the howling gets closer you will hear the sound of chains being dragged along the ground and if you do not then run you will be torn to pieces such is the legend of the El Dorado Canyon ghost dogs Henry Plummer was a legendary lawman of the Old West though sheriff of a town he led a double life being part of a gang of Outlaws using his position as sheriff he would carefully pick his victims choosing only to rob wagons full of gold from local mines for several years he and his gang of Outlaws preyed on traveling wagons it was an open secret that he led the gang but he was Sheriff and he wasn't exactly going to arrest himself eventually a group of locals came together as vigilantes capturing and executing Plummer but after his death none of the gold he had stolen was recovered no matter how hard they tried no one could find it it was said he had amassed a fortune of $200,000 worth an incredible sum for the mid 19th century according to legend he buried for gold somewhere near a ghost town of Bannack but its exact location was lost when Henry Plummer died just like every other part of the world Native American folklore tells of many mythical creatures perhaps the most interesting are Thunderbirds a giant winged creature of great strength but European settlers never took this belief seriously not until 1890 in that year a local newspaper in Tombstone Arizona published a story about it according to that story a Thunderbird was seen flying near the town and shot down by locals it was larger than any bird they had seen before initially there was no photographic evidence only the new story itself but before long all kinds of strange images began to circulate appearing to show the dead Beast this was not the last reported case of a Thunderbird encounter many other communities of the Old West claimed to witness one... probably because they were bored perhaps the greatest of all mysteries of the Old West is the lost gold mine in 1857 two men were crossing the Sierra Nevada mountain range according to legend they were doing so as part of a larger group but somehow got separated now alone they stumbled upon a large deposit of strange-looking rock on approaching the rock they discovered it was really gold enough to make them vastly wealthy by the time they made it back to society one of them was dead and the other seriously ill as he lay on his deathbed he revealed its approximate location before suddenly dying though brought by tragedy this revelation excited the doctor who immediately set out to find the gold but strangely he was unable to find it years went by yet still he found no gold more than a century and a half later the location of that mine remains unknown if it even exists

Channel: Eskify

Views: 15,489

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Keywords: Wild west, old west, old west mysteries, wild west mysteries

Id: Qn9z5MHNeiM

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2020