Dying man tells all - Treasure Secrets

or ladies you best be interviewing the old timers before it's too late they've got a lot of great stories to tell so so they've told you it's terminal and yeah yeah he told me the doctor said i've got some bad news maybe we'll just say it your terminal and i said how long have i got and he said till the middle of the week maybe the end uh maybe the end [Music] let me tell you just a little bit about the sugarloaf mine okay hold on so before you do so so i just recently did a video and it was about the trapper's gold the sugarloaf gold mine um and and um you know it had to deal with your family and you have uh the correct or you have some some you know new implement more information that wasn't quite right or we didn't know about and so with that take it away well um johnny rasmussen came up from old mexico as dad would say and i found two or three articles in the deseret news and the salt lake tribune and i don't remember the time frame it was around 1910 uh 1915 in that time frame and uh but those two newspapers they interviewed him and what he was doing and he started out going to to bishop coyle over at santa quinn or at salem and he felt that things didn't match up to the description that johnny gave in his his uh story who was that was that lars olsen uh that was lars olsen larsells and he was a neighbor of my father grandfathers and he told johnny that he ought to see ben bullock that he had a property down by santa quinn that he felt fit the description better so he got a hold of my grandfather whether it was in provo or over spring lake i i have no idea and a lot of that's in the story that my dad wrote but my dad put that story together for for her heart and bev and me david wasn't born yet bev's my sister heart's my brother and he'd tell us stories at night so anyway he typed up that story if it hadn't been for your family we wouldn't have known about that at all no no you're right i'm just trying to think and i keep losing my thinking anyway he got a hold of my grandfather and they went over to spring lake and everything fit except there were no no cedar trees and grandpa told him hey the pioneers cut all the cedar trees they used them for fences they used them in the construction of their barns and their their homes and uh so they decided oh the other thing that fit that what wasn't in the last story you just did when the trappers were trying to escape they went up into the foothills south of spring lake where the indian encampment was as they were doing that a band of indians came out of yellow they call it yeller rock canyon over there and yellow rock canyon is about oh a mile and a half south of of uh spring lake and it's very predominant if you're riding along the the freeway or the highway there and you look right down the foothills there's a canyon and that lock rock is as yellow as can be but that that's where the band of indians came out so that made the trappers go higher up the mountain higher up the foothills and there they saw they saw the badger come out of the hole or they saw the badger hole i don't know which and they crawled into that but one of the indians from the band that came out of yellow rock canyon shot one of the trappers with an arrow and they lived in that cave for approximately three days and during that time the trapper died one of the trappers died the other two uh they used the rat's nest to build a fire in there and their story was that it was just filled full of gold bars now those gold bars i've heard they weighed 40 pounds i heard they weighed 70 pounds i've heard they weighed 10 pounds we don't know but uh uh they decide when they came back whether the trapper died they decided to make a coffin out of gold bars for him and so they piled those gold bars up and then when they left they were going to take each take a gold bar with them and this leads me to think that the gold bars were probably in the 40 to 70 pound range probably closer to the 40. but they were going to carry each carry a gold bar and they didn't have horses they lost them and they decided that that uh the bar it was too heavy to carry a bar back to the great salt sea so anyway they they didn't take the gold bar instead they made a map and and wrote the story the description of it and that's what what uh johnny rasmussen had and how did he end up with it his his uh his fake his grandfather or great grandfather was one of those trappers that was in the that spent the three days in that cave so anyway when his grandfather great grandfather he was going through his things and he found it and that's when he decided to come to utah now the other thing in that story as i looked at it looked like they were right down just above the the road where that gentleman said they were plowing they decided uh they formed a company and that was my grandfather i think lars olsen and probably johnny and others to get some money to to see if they could find that that gold and first of all they they rode on horseback looking for it they couldn't find it on horseback my grandfather used the willow witch the to to look for ore bodies he'd use the maple from the maple trees and you'd also use the uh the uh what do you call the trees out here with the pine cones not pine cones no the acorns acorns acorns yeah he'd use those but they'd pick locations that that his dowsing rod would go down so that it could be here it could be here and uh so they they marked those locations and then they they uh got horses and plows around those locations and they plowed the hillside trying to find the the cave and they didn't find it that way so they picked what they felt the majority of them felt was the best location and that's where the golden relief dump is and they they drilled a hole going east into the mountain and then they turned to the right and they skirted the inside the mountain so if the hill comes down like this and this is all the dirt in here this is air out here they came through and they did and then they would go around the mountain this way trying to stay just under the surface looking for it i have i had some photographs of that cave of the golden relief mine that were taken uh in the early 1950s my grandfather said i think we'll open that up again and see if we can find anything in there and so my dad and hart and i were living in the shad down just below that and we we went up there and there was a dam that the farmer had the water rights on it and had dammed it up so we talked to him could we take the dam out let the water run out he was used to water his his livestock and his cherry trees and uh there's pretty good stream of water that came out of that tunnel and he made a dam out of uh uh two by eights two by twelves i don't remember but we got picks and we lose that and we pulled the boards up and it let the water out and we let that water drain a couple of days until the water was was gone and then we started to walk back in that tunnel and it was up above our knees in a an iron silt just a lot of iron in that tunnel and we we started walking back in that tunnel and it was just so hard to walk in so uh we waited until we went home came to provo we got our fishing boots went back up and we walked back in that tunnel and i can't tell you how far it went back maybe 500 feet something like that but as we walked back into it it got it got more and more beautiful there were slag tights and slag types that were just that heavy iron looking and some of them have grown together others were just hanging down and others where the water drip they were just shooting up and uh my my son has those photographs and the type story that my my dad did but uh we thought that tunnel is too beautiful with all those slack types and slag bites to go in there and tear them up to to uh uh go in there and and clean it out and make the tunnel and so we took pictures with a polaroid camera and showed to my grandfather ben h bullock and he agreed that was a beautiful tunnel so is that his mind in the beginning is he the one that put it in there in the first place well it was it was the golden relief excuse me the yeah the golden relief mining company is what they called it and grandpa was the president of it and they got stockholders that had heard the story and were interested in it and they uh they bought stock in it a lot of them just agreed to to work on it but they kept looking for it they couldn't find it and finally they gave out so if if you go up there and did you go up to the golden relief dump i'm not sure where the golden relief dump is it'd probably be a little pool of water outside of the workings but they've they've gone back in there and cleaned that out they've they've who cleaned it out i think it's the new owner oh have they they've got that orchard in there because um i'm trying to think of the guy's name matt paulson came to see me a couple years ago and he's got a paper they have been to every tunnel on the west side of dry mountain and they had listed all of them i i had for all the years we spent over there i had no idea there are that many tunnels a lot of tunnels but anyway they tried to go back in that and that tunnel was totally filled in right to the the mouth of that tunnel uh you never know there was a tunnel there it just filled up with that uh iron so maybe somebody's cleaned it out but two years ago it wasn't up above there just behind it and to the left a little bit last time i was there that you could almost put a little cabin up there i think that's where we were looking for the gold of some treasure hunters from las vegas and uh we didn't find any indication of it with the sensors that they used uh since then someone's gone up there and pretty much cleaned it out and leveled it and looks like they could put a cabin upon it just above the golden relief when you're facing the tunnel which which direction they level it off north because there's a there's a fellow named tony that contacted me uh several years ago and he can read this old spanish and indian writings he's very good at it and uh he found writings over there and and he'd heard about the trapper's gold again as i call it um and he was looking for it and he had a an instrument too and he put it just above and to the right when you're facing the golden relief tunnel and there was a big stone up there that was kind of triangular shape it's longer than that hospital bed and he said if you lift it up that he felt that's where the entrance of the cave was so i went up and i looked at it and laughed because that was about 20 30 feet off our property it was on all um lyman's property yeah and so they went down the linemans and that that tony did and he talked to them but somebody told me that that lymans had gone up there be sold before they sold their property and they had moved that rock uh they'd used i don't know what they used a back hole or whatever to flatten that off up there but my understanding it was it would be no i'm going to say 50 feet above the golden relief dump if if you go from the highway would like you we're going to go up to the cynical mine have you been in the cynic of mine oh you're missing i've been to it but i haven't been in it yeah you can't get in it now you'd have these that matt paulson he and some guys they spent several hours digging so they could go back in it then they explored every tunnel back in there really an interesting man he every weekend they go out and they explore caves in utah and he puts him on on facebook his his his adventures but they've got a bunch of them they they explore those but when he went back in the syndicate mine because the cynic had a big opening to it it was almost as wide as this room is long and they had an air compressor over in this corner the track went back in on that side there was an air compressor they stocked their gasoline for the winter outside just under that cover and it just it was they just blasted out it was like a a grotto and uh if they quit working it for a while and you get a storm the the rock above it and the overburden had to come down and it would cover that up and uh every couple of years they'd go up there and they'd have to dig all that out and uh there was a fire up there east of santa when it started kind of down low but it when was that fire day five years ago longer than that longer probably more like uh eight eight nine years okay anyway it it burned that that side of the mountain and uh then in the spring they had a flash flood and that yellow rock canyon i was telling you about is yellow down the bottom but that it was the roadway to go up to those mines and then it ended at the syndicate mine and the water came down the the canyon that turned into yellow rock canyon bringing all that overburden with it and it got down to the seneca dump which was a big dump and it turned and put water back in that tunnel and it pretty well filled it uh if you tried if you tried to get back in it you had to crawl the first little bit then you could duck walk and then you could bend over and walk until you got back around the first bend then you could stand up and walk but uh i'll get on to that from the other one you gotta excuse me mike that's all interesting it's all right yeah my my mind isn't working too good i've got a i got this bad infection in my leg and it's gone to my heart and it's killing me in fact i was supposed to have been dead by a weekend ago and i'm still here but i i get confused how you feeling all right are you feeling terrible you feeling you know it's got to play be tough on you mentally it uh i feel good when i'm just sitting yeah okay i stand up and it's a oh and this the pain is just terrible in my knee and i try to walk i take a step and it just just kills me and yesterday the nurse came to give me a shower and i got to where you are and i had to stop i just couldn't go i said you're gonna have to give me a sponge bath so we backed up to the bed there and i got a sponge bath but i just can't get out of this room so you were talking about the the trapper treasure yeah uh you know maybe we should mention that dad ran a couple other tunnels right one on the left and one on the right of the original golden relief mine yeah the one on the left i don't know why they gave up on that maybe you have a better idea that but then they went in over on the right where the grand grandpa had the doodlebug the dowsing rod and he felt that it was to the right as a matter of fact when i was about eight years old he took me up to this spot and he pointed straight down and he said dave the trapper is buried under gold bars right there and that's why they built or ran the third tunnel was to get in and find that trapper in the cavern and it's interesting but dad ran that tunnel and he started skirting around just like the the golden relief original one did but he after a blasting one time there was a gold nugget in the end of that tunnel oh really and he refused to remove it or even to go and do any more work because he didn't want to be accused of salt in the mine but there was proof that there's gold and it was right there in front of his face and he took me back in the mine and showed it to me really so yeah there was a gold nugget where was that tunnel from how how far from the golden relief that's the mine that's to the right it's just about what 40 feet well the the original golden relief's the one that had the water coming out of it okay and then they did that other tunnel you just go to the right about 40 feet he ran another drift well to the left about 40 feet that's the second tunnel well maybe the third because he had also a powder magazine back there and that caved in and he said there's a couple hundred pounds of dynamite back in there we were always a little bit nervous about that exploding but uh it never has but the tunnel to the right is where he found that that gold nugget how big was the golden nugget oh it was bigger than a dime but it was a yeah that's pretty good for utah now he ran another mine back in uh over i'm forgetting the cedar fort and and beyond and they were working in that mine and they found the gold nugget in that mine and that's when i first got a true view of what gold fever is uh vaughn i think his name was vaughn hails and he worked with my dad out there and that guy danced and danced and shouted and hooped and he was the most excited man i ever saw in my life he almost to the point of his being crazy but yeah gold can do crazy things that you don't think i've seen would happen i don't remember the tunnel i just remembered two tunnels on that golden relief dump don't remember another tunnel there so so back to the you know the story you know i don't know if it's true or not that uh rasmus and johnny rasmus on the left go back home but he kept in contact with your grandfather and wrote a few letters they i i don't know uh if if it's in that story dad wrote then he did it but i haven't read that for so long i can't remember it and you don't remember coming across any of the letters from johnny right no no dad was a keeper he he kept record of everything so it'd be hard to believe that he would have uh discarded those letters uh well if he had them they're downstairs in that file cabinet but i never found him what i did find was those uh those uh newspaper clippings in the desert news in the tribune so so 100 though your grandfather was a 100 believer that johnny rasmussen was telling the truth oh yeah yeah he spent a lot of time a lot of money yeah they spent a lot of time and they drilled the hole back in there and they hit the water it was a bitter water we used to take our pennies and and dimes silver dimes and they had the dam but some would leak out and go across the dump so when we'd go up to the syndicate in the morning we'd drop a handful of coins and then when we'd come back that night we'd take them out and boy they were shiny they were right out of the mint really also at the golden relief they you know they how much uh charcoal did they uncover that like a wagon it's a wagon load a wagon load of charcoal and that it's from what i understand they'd heat the rock up with charcoal and then they'd pour cold water on yeah and it would fracture the rock and then dig it out that uh they'd drill it with the old single jack or an or double jack that's a drill single jack so one guy uses the drill and the sledgehammer okay and we're not talking a power drill we're talking about it as kind of a a chisel that's going to yeah and they'd hit it and turn it hit it yeah and then pull it out but then they'd they'd uh put the rock down there or the charcoal down there to heat it and they wouldn't go very deep because they'd wanna you know that go maybe so deep and then they'd put the the charcoal in it and then they'd heat it and then they'd throw the water on it and that would fracture it and then they'd pick it out and that that was one of the ways they'd mine also dad told me that one of those areas out on the golden relief dump he never dumped any ore or i mean overburden over this one area because he said that's an ancient mind dumb really and i always wondered if that was an ancient mind dump and i when when dad bought that backhoe i went up there and i dug into that ancient dump and it really truly was an ancient dump it was just full of you know fractured rock and uh there was carbon in it so i've seen the carbon and i believe that's an ancient mind dump so there were some workings there at one time when hart and me started working over there i was 12 and my brother heart was 11. and we had a traitor or another a tent pitched on that that mind dump and then the miners some of them they were living down below and they'd take the jeep and they'd go up and then we'd run from there and see if we could beat them up the syndicate but we were always go along with a stick trying to uncover a hole see if we can find the the treasure but all i know johnny rasmussen did come up because there's newspaper articles of him being there they formed the the golden relief mining company so it was born because of this gold story yeah yeah yeah that's it they they formed the company to to look for it and uh they they worked the the tunnels until they ran out of money and then that stop so did johnny get discouraged or he just think but he left and was going to come back we got to read that story i don't have a coffee here because that the best information i got on that is a story my dad wrote and uh he got his information from his dad and my grandpa bullock he'd talk about it sometimes we'd go up there and we we were going across that dump one day and there was a rattlesnake on the dump and i had a bb gun and he said let's see how good that bb gun is and he pushed the window open on the jeep and i gave it to him and he shot that rattlesnake in the head till it died and then he we got out and there was a little hatchet he carried in there and he scooted the snake over to one of the railroad ties and then he cut his head off and he says you got to bury those heads deep because that venom lives in him for a while and so we dug a hole and buried the head then he had me put the snake in the back of the jeep and he said we're going to have that for separate light and then we got up the syndicate he got his knife out and he skinned it just like he was skinning a fish cut it open and we cut the skin off and so we had the meat and then we took the skin and went in the cabin and got a thing of norton salt come out and spread it all over the inside and rubbed it in and then he rolled it up and he said we'll make you a hat band out of that so that night he made a what do you call us the spit stretcher so we could cook the the rattlesnake we then we tied it on and ran it down where it cut it open and then we kept turning it and turning it then when it got through we just laid it out on a board there and we just slice it about every rib well it's not ribs whatever they have you know you just slice it down pieces so thick and we ate our rattlesnake that night that it wasn't that bad tastes like chicken i don't know if it tastes like chicken it was a darker meat but it i mean you could if that's all i had to eat i'd eat it so is there mining going on in that area before johnny rasmussen's oh yeah uh was your grandfather doing things there before i guess he must have been doing yeah i know the cynic of mine i don't remember who old owned that mine but they had run a tunnel and again this is all double jack and single jack and then they had run a tunnel back i don't know how much was grandpa's and how much was the other guy but i know we'd walk back into these big uh redwood water barrels and that was probably back about a half mile three a third of a mile i don't i'm not good at distance underground but i'd say it's about a third of a mile yeah and uh that tunnel that would go back and went off to the right went back in a mile from the from the mouth of the tunnel to the end of it and hart and me went back in there once and then dad told us he says don't go back in there that's cavey he said that'll cave in on you so we never went again but this matt paulson he went all through it they they hiked went through the tunnels and uh they they they took oxygen bottles that's what i was telling before they had to clean out the tunnel because the overburden was over it and they didn't know if there'd be any oxygen so they cleaned out enough they could crawl back in and they had their oxygen bottles i think there were three or four of them they got back around the first bend and they said they could breathe real good and he had an oxygen meter and that showed it was a good strong oxygen so they went back through the all of the tunnels in there but there's a big cave that my dad hit in 1948 i think it was and uh that when they went back in after they'd blast on a friday night they would wait until the gases would come out and then they would go back and get some samples well they waited and waited and no gases came out usually it'd be a blue gas would come rolling out so he went back in there and the further back he got there was a little breeze blowing at him and uh pretty soon he got back and he was looking up and the top cut that they blew had air coming out of it and so rather than come home they they made a ladder anyway they they climbed up and they could look around in this cave and they couldn't quite get in it so they they got a couple of stick of dynamite took it out of the wrappers and they made a plaster at it and they put it on both sides and then they ran a fuse to them and that was enough to make it they could crawl up in this cave and uh word got out a lot of a lot of people came up to climb in this this cave you could put this house in it really yeah and there there must have been a entrance to the surface with the air air coming through either not one that was visible but yeah not one that was visible but it the cave went on down to different levels and uh heart made with climb down through them and uh we'd always make sure that we could get out but there was always fresh air in there so does it look like it was a natural cave oh it was a natural it was a natural cave it uh sloped up and sloped down and there's a big streak a white count side over on one wall next to it there was a big streak of iron didn't dad build a trestle yeah they decided that they were going to go crossed it and so they they uh they built a trestle crossed it and uh we're drilling on the other side and my my dad was hard of hearing from a mine explosion in that mine but he said he heard a what he called a the screech of a dozen of a hundred banshees and he looked up and the whole top came down because it was like layers but it came down and it broke the trestle and the mine cars and the the mucking machine everything they had on the trestle got buried up and he said when that started peeling away from itself that's what made the noise yeah and that he started running to get out of the tunnel to get out of the cave i mean he knew what that noise was huh so he he made it out of the cave but the concussion of the cave and knocked him off his feet yeah knocked his helmet off it the old hard hat you know those whatever they were made out of it it broke his hat and the one of the other miners with him and uh anyway they lost their lights but they found their the on the other side they found the track so they just followed the track out and then they got more lights and came back in but it buried their mine car and the monkey machine they had and they decided they weren't going to do any more drilling that jackhammer pounded away so they went around it and uh kept on going we used to go in there when i was younger and set off fireworks yeah i mean it was a big cave and and it's a live cave so it's always caving yep all right it's it's half the size maybe even less than that is what it used to be so so in this mine they're mine in it to look for the gold bars or they're just mine this they they were looking up on the surface above there as you go up yellow rock canyon where it turns and goes up up on the surface they found high grade silver lead ore and so in the 1930s uh they were mining that when i was born in 1935 but uh they they when i say they my dad his brother and my two of my mother's brothers built a log cabin up there and it was quite high on the mountain the mountain goes up and then rounds off a bit then up and it was this portion here where they where they built the cabin and then right here was the tunnel they were going back in so that they mined that and it would be veins of silver lead ore and so they'd dig that out they dig out the pockets of the silver lead ore and then they put him in uh gunny sacks or canvas sacks and they stack them up outside and uh then they had a horse that would pull the would go down the mountain then it would uh what do you call those things you put behind the indian ponies to dress yeah travis and they would they built one of those and then they'd put the oar sacks on it and they would haul it down to the bottom of the mountain what's what we call the sagebrush flats now i think there's homes right there and that ace hard to wear a grocery store or ace hardware store is close to it but they stacked it up and they just hid it in the sagebrush and they never shipped the ore because they said it wasn't enough of it so they decided to have that tunnel underneath it and they were going to find the oar underneath it and so after the war they got a a d8 cat to pull an air compressor and they wound that around and they were able to get it up to the dump and they put it back in the that overhang and then they'd haul they made a chariot out of an old um automobile chassis they'd put they could put two barrels of gasoline and two 50 pound boxes of dynamite on it and then they had had two horses would pull it from santa quinn up through yellow rock canyon and all the way up to that mine well the first winner they decided that that wasn't a good place for the compressor because it was cold outside and so the next spring they went back in the tunnel oh 30 feet 40 feet and uh made a room off to the side and they moved the compressor in there and then they stored the gasoline outside and then they ran a airline from the compressor up outside so they do that so they could work their and they used propane to fire the compressor to fire the compressor oh they converted it to propane oh did they yeah because i know that dad told me he came home and he was all kind of singed up he didn't have much hair on him and he had gone back in the mine in the morning and he had his carbide lantern on and he bent down to pick up a tool and the whole tunnel went whoosh and he the the propane had been leaking out of the canister and it he says that flame went shooting down the tunnel and then it came right back at him i hadn't heard that story that's interesting so they they had a propane tank up there and they ran the compressor on that yeah they had it i think it was a dual system they could either run gasoline or propane i went in the army so i don't know i moved away telling that story that gave me a thought the one we were telling earlier that i moved away from and then i forgot it not a very good storyteller today grandpa bought that he didn't buy it he traded a man that had a a mine if you if you go over to genoa and then into alberta on your way to eureka as you start up the mountain there's a dirt road that takes off to the left and goes to the burger bergman mine and my grandad owned that mine and he traded it for the seneca mine so somebody else was already buying it yeah they were mining it and then they'd run some of the tunnels and i'm guessing this was around uh 1905 to 1910 time frame it was in that that time frame and uh did he ever get anything out of this no no no they thought there was something there well they were trying to hit that vein for the [ __ ] was up on top on the surface they were going underneath and they wanted to get that there were a few places that there were they had some good outcroppings on the surface so they would run underneath those but the money traded off they made millions millions yeah can i caught copper it's like it made millions of dollars off of it yeah he just wasn't meant to get rich you know wasn't meant to get rich cheap uh blackhawk i guess grave was up there at one someplace around here do you have a picture of of them you lift him out of his grave no my grandfather was working that mine and his wife's sister uh was living as a young girl she lived down in that village all of her sisters did and when black hawk died they had a funeral procession for him they they buried him in his blue army coat and they took him up and it's below the syndicate and to the north of the syndicate there was a big taylor slope and that's where it was said they was buried so anyway the girls had told my grandfather about that that'd be his sister-in-law's so they were living on the syndicate dump the miners and after work they'd go looking for black hawk and they got over there and they found his grave and they moved the rocks and anyway they took him out and when they lifted him out there must have been four because three were left him out and one took the picture but as they picked him up his head came off and so one of them had his head and then the other two picked him up but his his feet were pulled up against his chest and then he was bound they that bind him so his arms and his feet were pulled together i can't bend my leg i'd show you but you liked your chest david i've already got it yeah but that that's the way he was buried and so they was he buried with his horse or a saddle uh do you remember anything about what he had i i know he he had a saddle the indians had saddles he had a saddle and he had saddle bags uh [Music] he had a bow and some arrows and i think that close by was the horse was buried but uh anyway they dug him out and uh they took his body down to spanish fork to i think it was jc penney's and they they put his his body on display at jc penney's and with the stuff they found and they put his head back down in the socket they just they just played his body there for some period of time and there was a lot of positive and negative comments about it so they took it up to the lds conference center to the museum up there and they had him on display and i remember as a kid growing up and they had made a special display case for for him you could look into it and it said a story about chief blackhawk and it had his the things they found with him and they were all laid out and it was pretty interesting and he was there for years and then it wasn't politically correct anymore and so the church uh put his body in a coffin and they packed it away and took it out of the visitor center chief blackhawk was was up there in the temple square and then they because it was now the story i hear and it hasn't been verified but from what i understand the representatives from blackhawks tribe came to the presidency of the church and they wanted to know where their their prophet brigham young was buried well why do you want to know where he's buried and the response was so we can dig him up and put him on display like you have our chief on display and that's from what i understand is that caused them to to take him out of display and they probably stored him up in the granite uh uh don't know where they stored him but several years ago when i say several twenty probably there was a boy scout over in spring lake and he was working on his eagle project and he decided he wanted to get black hawk restored to to spring lake so he worked with the city officials over there and there's that park when you go into spring lake and anyway he he got blackhawk's body back in a coffin and they made a uh cement thing in the park a marker yeah well that's he's buried under it oh yeah he's buried under that and uh anyway they had uh a big hudu people came to it and uh they celebrated they were able to find a lot of the of his descendants and they were there and they had the county commissioners and the mayor of payson and a lot of people go there and they had an indian funeral for him and then they put him in the ground and then they poured a big cement circle around him so where he was buried at do you think there was a reason he was at a sacred spot or just a convenient spot or you have no idea i have no idea rival like that that it's more protective of a body when you it's like a rock slide yeah for every rock you pull out three will come back so so i mean i don't know where his i guess his home was the spring lake area yeah he had a lot of homes because they moved around but just because if there was a reason they picked that was it the sacred space did they know about the gold bars was they you know i'm just so no i remember my dad telling me that his mother was also buried up there in the rock slide yeah and so that that could be a burial spot but uh it's interesting when i inherited grandpa ben h bullock's roll top desk he had all kinds of fufura in there uh he had arrowheads and and there were a a lot of buttons from uh a cavalry jacket and they were even the little buttons i guess the sleeve buttons and i still got those but i often wonder if those buttons didn't come off of blackhawks cavalry jacket so so you i remember you telling me one time david that possibly your grandfather was not regretful but maybe spooked or something that he disturbed black hawk's grave or do you well that's my thing he never he never struck it rich and i it's almost like maybe he was cursed for taking up the sacred body and he wouldn't talk about it he wouldn't talk about that and i i think he'd be very happy that that black hawk made it back home yeah i think he's very he was regretful about that i think so so your family your grandfather your father was involved in looking for the lost roads mine tell me about that story uh my grandpa used to sit in his living room and he'd use his willow witch and then he and harvey fletcher jr got together and he made a neat instrument that david's got out of welding rod calls it his doodlebug yeah he called his doodlebug but they took a piece of rod and they made it shaped like this it was it was like a m with the rounded corners okay so it goes up then down here where it drops down they welded a straight uh welding rod to it so now you got something you can hold and then it goes then on the end of it he took a uh went to the drugstore and he bought a bunch of little medicine bottles about so long and some of them had corks you could put in the end some you can screw a lid on but he got one of those lids and now you got your rod so on the end of the of the peter that stuck out he uh shouldn't say that yeah he had a cap i had a cap put on it and then he took a clarinet box and on that clarinets box he put a piece of board down the sides and he drilled holes in them so these little bottles would fit in and i'm going to tell you something he had he had he had pieces of gold silver lead copper zinc bismuth animony uranium foreskin he also had a bottle i still have it and it's labeled spirit of the lord oh but he had a doctor friend gave him some foreskin and people would come to him and say we're going to have a baby can you tell me what i'm going to have and he'd hold it up and if it started to jiggle or if he'd hold it here if it kind of swung towards you and then jiggled he'd say it's a boy if he held it on you and it didn't jiggle and say it's got to be a girl and then when the baby was born they'd come to him oh brother bullock you were so right we had a boy pat him on the back somebody would come in and say oh brother bullock we had a girl you told us we're gonna have a boy he says i'm sure i told you you were going to have a girl no you said a boy he says well i wrote it down on my wallet so he'd take a piece of paper out of his wallet and it'd have smith's girl so right they're naming it foot girl he said i told you i was going to be a girl i even wrote it down they'd get a big laugh out of it but uh he he had natural gas in it he had oil uh you you name it diamonds yep he had that in his bottle and then he'd screw the bottle onto the end of the stick he'd take it out and he'd hold it and his thinking was that different people have different vibrations and if he held that and if he was out looking for water in fact one time uh the state president over at uh spring lake not spring lake saratoga springs in that area he called him and he said we've drilled a water well and we didn't hit water and we think you can help us so i drove him over there and he got out no we had we were in the field and he had me drive forward a little bit and then drive around and then he'd open the door and he'd take his thing and then he got out state president was there he said you drilled on the wrong side the fault and he said what fault he said the maps didn't show a fault and grandpa said there's no water on this side that i get but he said if i go over here or is it deeper it was deeper on one side the other he said if i go on this side of the fault and he went over there and he'd hold it and go bing bing and each time it bounced was was it 10 feet dave i think so yeah yeah it was 10 feet so you know it sit there and it bounced a hundred times so the water was a thousand feet deep and then it moved to the other side of the fault and being being bounced up and down and if it bounced uh 25 times it was 250 feet deep and he said if you come over here he said i'd go a little further and you drill your well you're going to hit the water at 250 feet he said if you stay on this side you've got to go down a thousand feet and i think they were down 50 or 500 feet i don't remember anyway it was cheaper to move the rig over and and bounce then but when he'd hold it this was 10 20 30 40 50 10 20 30 40 50 60 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 10 20 30. 10 20. so what it was doing it would go down then when it go sideways that's how thick it was through the water layer so and then it would go again down to the next water layer and then how thick it was through the water layer so anyway they they moved over and they drilled the well they got good water out of it about 250 feet right what he told them huh yeah yep so do you use that to to help locate the lost roads mind thing man or he would sit in his house and he would hunt for gold he would just turn around and he'd say to my dad i think we need to go out that way he says there's there's some gold and silver and they get the maps out and they look at it and they say yeah let's let's go on this road and about 20 miles and let me take a bearing on it then he'd get out and hunt around and hit triangulated that way and it was thought that the gold that the lost roads mine was in the south face of the eu in the mountains by some because he was living in but i think he was living in camas at the time and anyway he would go look for his oar and he would bring it back and they had enough that it helped the church plus they used the gold from that to gold plate the angel moroni on the temple in salt lake so uh there were maps that were supposedly that he had drawn on his death bed now there's two roads there's caleb and who thomas thomas was the oldest and he was the first one to do it then he passed it on to caleb and as far as i know thomas never told anybody where it was except caleb but caleb told some of his family and he he drew these maps on his deathbed and uh they regraded his hip and never gave a starting point yeah oh yeah here i've got a map of it it's right here where do i start and but he talked to his wife just before he died and whispered something to her and the family knew what he whispered and uh anyway grandpa had one of the maps and he had determined that it was west of moon lake so we went out there one saturday uh it was in the fall beautiful weather and uh we we stopped at moon lake and dad took the jeep as four up this this uh stream as he could and then pulled it out and i remember grandpa took out his instrument okay it's that way so we tried staying along the stream bank and going that way but pretty soon it got too hard to do it but there was an animal trail that turned and it went up just above the pine trees along there so you know 50 feet high something like that and we followed that that uh animal trail and they got up to a place where they found a tree and it said oral uh 19 or 18 something i don't remember the date 1850 something 1859 or 54 whatever the date anyway so they figured that that caleb had written on the tree uh and then right down below it my dad and grandpa were excited because here's a mine shaft yeah now to me being 12 or 13 years old and knowing everything about mining to me it looked like a pine tree and fall over and that hole was was the where the roots had been anyway that that's what it looked to me about what year was this uh 1985 let's see i think i was 12 or 13. i've worn in 35 so 58. well i think 58 i believe is when the notice was in the duchenne newspaper that bullock found the mind so i don't know you were you were 23 years old now you know when i was a kid when that's when we first found it okay but they wanted to talk about is that the shaft or is that the stump of a where the tree was and on the map now dad and grandpa were going to buy that map i think it was on a buckskin some kind of animal hide but in the course of negotiations the was it the wife or widow of caleb the widow she had decided that she didn't want to sell it so grandpa got a piece of paper and he copied the map and down on the bottom i think you see this in norm thompson's book or one of those books it says this is as shown on the rhodes map so that was copied down by your grandfather and i have that but anyway uh and there were three exes also yeah i remember seeing those three different uh shafts so so anyway we laughed didn't do anything with it you know is that it wasn't it and then next thing i knew i was in the army or going to school i can't remember and uh dad sent me a copy of that article in the newspaper and it was also in the newspaper out of nevada too the men age bullet can release the this discovery of the rhodes mine now i think that there were a lot of road spines my own personal feeling is that the indians knew where they were and they should they had had showed uh thomas and if he was living in duchesne he went to one if he was living in in hebrew or help what's that uh daniels what's the town just north of if he left him left was living in canvas he'd go from there too and my friend tony he would agree to that and he's studied that for years and years and well dad do you know if this is true or not but what i hear and i seem to recall that he's the one who told me that he crawled down head first into this shaft that they found and it was so narrow that it was obvious that either children or a woman or women ran that shaft because it's all he could do to squeeze down in there but he tied from what i hear he tied his one leg with the rope and tied the rope around the tree and then he climbed down head first into that shaft and he saw where the spaniards or the somebody had chiseled off this vein of gold but they didn't get it all right at the very end of it was a white quartz with a lot of gold uh in it and he broke that off and brought it back out with him and he used to go around the lion's club in different organizations and and show that gold courts and he said every time he'd do that he'd pass it around and it kept getting smaller and smaller smaller and so he decided to break it up and just have all that gold melted together so so what what happened then if he they found it was it played out or or uh i i don't know i didn't know they were working it because i where was i when that what year was it you said the article was in the papers eight years old then and you're 15 years old so you're up and gone i was living in vernal yeah now what i understand is that they made the announcement that the the rhodes mine had been found because they found the tree and they went he he hired a team of men to go up there and begin clearing ground and working so they could get into it and when they went up there my dad said that it was as though a bulldozer had come in there and tipped the tree over and buried up the mine shaft yeah and grandpa ben h bullock he put his arm around the shoulder of his son and he said let's go home dad or let's go home vern this is bigger than the two of us and that's that's the story that i remember that they were at that point i think feared for their life because they were messing with something that was bigger than the two of them afraid the indians would get them yeah but i've got that map he copied and he spent a lot of time up there doing the claims he got 10 claims that he put in on that but i've never been there i have no idea how far it is from moon lake oh well grandpa had been in that wreck and broke his hip and was healing from that they didn't do surgery on them then and we take kept taking turns hanging onto his back belt and walking with him so dad or heart or me always had a hold of him you know when we were walking but it it like i say it got the stream got too rough so that's what we cut up and along this animal trail that's where the tree was but it was uh do you remember seeing the the the 408 oh yeah yeah you remember seeing yeah it was it was carved in there they were really excited about it we saw that before we saw the the hole but uh i just kept thinking that that a tree had fallen over next to it and the stumping came out then i got thinking about it but there was no tree laying there so but that's what it looked like to me oh a tree fell over and here's a hole we climbed down into it where we went now what kept on going or was it caved in or you couldn't tell if it was a stump or a hole it was it was climbed down like 10 feet just to round it out in that mountain soil and that that's the part i saw but i know he went back and then who was it when it went to prison uh carrie boren yeah he said that the bullocks in their greed went out and destroyed it and uh with we took a bulldozer in there and they they knocked over the tree and they covered up the hole then dad got the book and read it it really pissed him off because that happened so he uh tried to get a hold of terry carrie isn't it not terry it's kerry you're terry the other scary and uh he found out he was in prison through his publisher and so he wrote him a letter about it and he wrote a letter back to dad apologizing and uh which i hear a lot of these guys make accusations you know to make their story better and then they get called on it they apologize so he wrote in his book that your family went in there destroyed the tree covered up period so nobody else could find it simply wasn't true somebody went in there and did it but it wasn't your family yep dad said there was a oil well company working out there at that time and they were making roads and trails in there so they could get their seismograph equipment in but and then he wrote a board and wrote another book and in that he quoted the letter from my dad to him what was that footprints the first uh edition was that footprints in the wilderness and then the lost roads mine was that by what pierce norman pierce well more than another guy who wrote the one book i think it was pierce oh it was born and and uh gail rhodes yeah gail rhodes that's right born and gail rhodes they wrote it see i think i remember you david say maybe i can't remember i talked to so many people did you say your dad got lost or somebody got lost there for three days you remember that grandpa was waiting for him at the jeep and dad got lost which is easy to do up in you yeah and i believe he was missing for three days and grandpa was i guess too uh infirm to really walk out of there yeah i don't know why he didn't drive maybe dad probably took the key now i missed a lot in those days because we were living in vernal and in uh seattle and california so i know there was a story about your grandfather going and i think i got it from you david that he went to uh mexico was looking for treasure well i remember grandpa put me on his lap when i was a little boy i had to have been maybe four years old and he told me that he had a description of where montezuma's mine was and uh or montezuma's treasure and that was a long time ago i mean 60 66 years anyway and so my memory fades but as i can kind of recall uh he had interpreted the writings of it was a story told to a priest a catholic priest and that it gave enough information to grandpa and my dad they they started exploring down around uh wasn't moab kanab canal yeah and they wanted to get a mining permission on some private property to go in there and the way it was told to me that i remember by grandpa was that the aztecs the porters there were thousands of them and there were also guards and soldiers and they came up and they brought the treasure up into southeastern utah and they excavated and everything that they took out of this huge hole they preserved they took the top soil they took the plants they took everything and then they got down to bedrock and they mined into the bedrock and they made a cavern and they put all of this treasure into this cavern and then they put the stone back and he put the top soil back and planted the plants back again and i don't know i he i think before i remember he told me that most of those bears were were uh sacrificed because they couldn't afford to have anybody go back or or go anywhere and tell where this treasure was buried so almost everybody was killed and there was only uh you know the highest of the ranking leaders that were in that expedition that lived and one of them told the story i i think if i remember he was a soldier and he escaped but he told the story to a catholic priest of how that treasure was buried and grandpa knew where it was but the owner of the property thought that they were after uranium and wouldn't give them the the lease to the land so it was a dead dog and they didn't do anything with it do you remember anything about that uh i know that that there's a lot of stories of montezuma's treasure yeah being hid down around kanab yep neil you you're uh kind of a treasure hunter then got it in your blood you're doing a little bit with somebody you got anything you can share with us it's not divulging anything secret that you're working on or somebody else that you're working with is working on you got any good stories not the locations or some great stories or how about that uh gold buried out at chimney rock oh we didn't find it uh back in the 1800s the stage coach would go from from uh eureka to cedar fort uh or to uh salt lake and anyway it got held up by i don't remember two or three guys they they held it up and they took the gold box and they had 38 000 worth of gold so they formed a posse to looking for the guys and i can't remember they caught two of them or one of them but he said they had buried the box of gold under a large chimney or under a large cedar tree with about three feet of chain sticking out so they'd wrap the chain around it then they buried it and they had just a chain laying on the ground so they could find it over by a chimney rock all that got out and everybody started hunting for it and nobody's ever fessed up to finding it and back in 1952 or 53 we were working to mine north of of chimney rock right underneath the nutty putty cave and in the sunday newspaper they used to have these supplements you'd pull out of the middle of it it was a article on slick paper and they'd have different stories but they ran a story on that and they had the newspaper articles about the that robbery and where the gold was hidden and dad said i'll bet you that place is just swarming with people when we go over the mine tomorrow and because we we rode right by chimney rock and then we had to turn north and we got over there and there were tents there were trailers there were campers and the people out there they were looking for that that gold so i think if anybody did find it they would be smart enough to not say they found it because chimney rock because when you said chimney okay i'm thinking the four corners area but we're here by eureka yeah uh you you haven't been to nutty putty cave but you know about it yeah uh there's different ways you can get to it the way we would always go we would go to alberta and then we would turn and we would go north to mile marker 7 on your way to salt lake so we'd go seven miles and there's an intersection just past that seven miles and on the north west portion of it there's an old ranch there you go by there now and it's a junkyard old cars and trucks and stuff but anyway and and right there that junction you come to it says chimney rock pass okay and if you take chimney rock past four enough you go past anyway that road goes west over to cedar valley and there's a the old road from eureka goes up what they call hummonsville pass just before you get into eureka there's a lime on the this side of the road but the old rose goes up that pass on down and then it goes it junctions against that uh chimney rock pass road so chimney rock is between the the old highway that went to salt lake from alberta and the old highway that went to salt lake from eureka roughly five miles good road very good dirt road [Music] and there's this big rock that sticks up that must be oh the top 75 feet across roughly uh down the bottom uh go around it we we shoot at it that's a good place to shoot and not start fires but uh my granddad always said when he hit orr over there he was going to hollow out underneath that rock and make a dance hall for the miners that was found in santa quinn that guy was filing up his garden and turned up some gold coins and he called the police they brought the i don't know the fed fed's in or something but it turned out they brought metal detectors and they found not only all these gold coins but the stamps i guess it come from the denver mint that they they stole the gold coins and the stamps that made them and they vets come in and and seize it all they're in santa queen how long ago was that i'm going to guess 15 or 20 years ago i don't recall hearing about it but if you go back 100 years ago i remember what about that nutty putty cave didn't you and hart discover that and do you think it had been found before that again a story i've told so many times that it gets off just a little bit and i can't remember i i do know that richard nixon bob hatch and jim are on heart and i went over the line and uh we were over just south of and a little bit east or west of chimney rock there's a another mine my dad ran there but we were it was during the christmas vacation and we were going to hunt rabbits and it was so cold but i i think that the five of us were in the jeep and we rode through rattlesnake pass and we looked up on the hill and there was smoke coming out on the hill and we thought somebody had uh was up there and built a fire we wonder if they were distressed either that or dad did it and told us that's why i can't remember anyway i've told the story so many times and dad's told it so many times i can't remember if hart and me saw the steam come out or whether it was dad but anyway we went up there uh with dad as uh carbide light and it was about 30 below it was really cold and this hole in the ground there's a pit there and this steam is coming out enough to make it when you look at it though there's a fire in there so dad decided to go down in it and you you climb down one end and you go down oh six seven feet then you move over and then it drops down another six or seven feet and then a cave takes off to the north and when dad got down there he said whoa rattlesnakes two big balls of rattlesnakes and they were all wrapped around each other and he came out of there and he said don't you boys go down there that's got rattlesnakes and so i never went there uh looking for rattlesnakes but that spring my dad was up on top on that hill and he found some silver and so he and grandpa got there and they said well there's silver down here so they decided to mine it so about a third of the way up the mountain or hill whatever you want to call it uh it was kind of a flat place good place to start a mine so they started a mine to go after this silver and they ran that for a couple of years and they got back where it got real cavey and it was cavey from that uh nutty putty cave the nutty putty cave that hill looking north from the south looking north you go up on the hill and it goes like this and then this goes up and then down and this goes down and so about a third of the way up they started this mine and they ran it back in and then we realized later on when we found out there was a cave there that that mine went underneath the cave but nobody knew about the cave we we would be there all summer and you wouldn't even see a rabbit hunter but set up above that cave when we found it that made a winds go up they had some pine trees and some pine trees with the log going across and so they could turn it like oh we're going to go down this cave and we're going to go back and we're going to get rattlesnakes anyway and then we looked on the maps and the maps called it windlass hill w-i-n-d-l-e-s-s hill and uh several years later i was married i'd lived in california for seven years we'd moved back here my brother and i took our oldest daughter daughters and our old and our sons and we took some motorcycles and went over there and let them ride the motorcycles and we'd drive in the truck i had and we got over to that mine we ran and my son said oh i've been here before i said you've been here four says yeah the scouts came over here he says we went down nutty putty caves i said where's nutty putty caves oh he's on top of that hill he said there's a cave that goes down and he says it's they got maps of it it goes all under that that mountain and he said there's one they call the birth canal he said that is really tight he says you got to be little to get through that and then we started seeing people when we go over there and we'd go several times a year we'd ride the the four wheelers and the motorcycles and uh we go over there and it'd always be a big bunch from byu have their tents set up uh utah valley community college that have that get a bus up there four wheel drive and then go down through the nutty putty caves and uh we always told that people don't go down there there's snakes down there and then that kid jonathan johnson see i got a good memory jonathan johnson was with the group and they went there and he got down to the birth canal head first and he got stuck he couldn't he couldn't go forward and he couldn't go out and they called the sheriffs and the sheriff's department came out and they worked on him and they couldn't pull him through and they couldn't back him up and he was there three days head down and he was dying and they tried greasing him up everything but they couldn't they couldn't get him out and they ran a telephone line down there so we could talk to his wife and his wife was outside talking to him and then we ended up he died in there so they decided to close the the tunnel off and uh they buried him there and they put made a monument and they put it in there and had a picture of him and here lies jonathan johnson aids such and such and you know something about him and they um down in the cave where it flattened out they drilled some holes going up and down and then they took a steel post and they they put those down in the ground and then they let's see i can't remember how to anyway they put the post in there so they were stuck in between the top of the bottom and they put holes across and then in the middle they made a gate that was about so big and you could get the key from the county sheriff for the grotto association and then they decided that they were going to close it off completely and two years ago we went over there three years ago we went over there and they had had filled it up with dirt uh up above the level of the gate and then then made a another nice monument and then cemented it into the limestone and that was three years ago and then two years ago i took some guys from saint george that live in the same trader called as me in the winter and we went over there and somebody had shot his monument all up terrible and so i called the sheriff's office and told them last year we went over there they'd taken white stones oh averaged about this size some were bigger some were smaller and they made a fence out of these white stones around that cave and it was about as i think it was you'd say it's wider than this room at about as long as from here to the front of my house and then on the west side of it the stones didn't come together they got about eight feet apart and then they turned and went out that way a little ways out to the west but then put two monuments up to him they had one on the west side one on the east side and so the hole was all caved in they're all filled in so the first time you guys went in it you explored a little bit of just a cave nothing couldn't tell there'd been any human activity in there in in the past or you couldn't tell anybody had ever been in there except there was that windsor hoist over it and we we figured maybe the the sheepherders had made that for some reason and then it went on and then when when that kid got buried in it uh some guy said that he discovered it in [Music] uh 1970 something anyway that that he was the first person ever he discovered that he was the first person to ever crawl back in there you see it back in that and i don't know if he was or wasn't i don't know if i know that we didn't the miners wouldn't go in there but maybe the sheepherders went down in there yeah i remember in the syndicate when i was a little boy i was about four years old because i was small i could fit underneath this overhang inside the mine and dad wanted me to crawl up in there and and tell him what was on the other side because it was obvious it was a cave and it was pretty close you know where the elephant side cave is it's in the the left tunnels going off towards the cave okay and i uh alphas alpha is that where they first discovered it the cave what do you call it uh the elephant sign i've i think i've even got a picture of it it did look like an elephant song it's just all the formation is it right up in the top right hand corner off to the right and almost eye level oh i don't know that but anyway he i don't really remember where it was in the syndicate mine but i think it was he and grandpa they gave me a miner's hat and the carbide light and had me crawl up in there and i ice wormed on up into that thing and looked around a lot of rock and nothing dramatic i i didn't know what i was looking at even if i did see something but uh i'll never forget how afraid i was four years old on my belly and crawling up into that cave and then uh there's that story about the the water hole you know where the water ran across the tunnel and there's the cave yeah it goes down yeah and oh this dad played a dirty trick on his miners this hole was there and they wanted to go down and explore it let me back up a little bit okay i'll let you tell it because i think okay when they ran this tunnel back in they made a turn and uh off to the left and they hit a cave and the cave was when went down below and they went down into this cave and there was nothing there so what they started doing their mark rather than pushing outside that just push it back they ran rails right over the that cave that went down and that dumped their their mine cars they just dump the roar down there they're uh dig them down there that always if it didn't have ward and it was dig them that's 95 dirt and 10 hope or 50 50 dirt 50 and anyway they they had that that cave there then they turned going back so that the tunnel comes i'm going to go up like it's laying down the tunnel comes in it turned here's where the cave was they got over here they turned and they went up here well years later you were working back in the tunnel and uh you'd light your fuses and we'd walk a little ways out we'd just step in a side tunnel go boom boom and it blew out your light most of the time but uh we'd count the shots as they went off to make sure they all went then we liked the light would go out well we got out to this place and it had caved in the tunnel had come down and dad looked at it and he says well let's see if we can climb over so we went up we climbed over and went down the other side and we went out so now he's got this tunnel that turns with a cave in right here that comes down so they had to just goes up and where it turns they just started here and ran another tunnel up here okay and they got up there 15 feet or so and they mucked out as they were mucking out the dirt kept sliding down through this hole and so they dug around it and they said hey look at this so here here's a hole and they picked on it and it was marv marvin roy yorks marv was the dad and roy was the son and they lived in sanequin and anyway they they picked around the hole and they looked down it and they said why don't you go down there burn and see what it looks like so dad says go get me some rope and i will so they went outside they got the rope off their horses and came back in and dad says now how to keep jerking on this rope and you make sure i'm okay so he crawled through the hole and he went down and then they say okay yeah i'm okay and he'd jerk on the rope and he'd go further yeah i'm okay then he came up in this other cave and so he okay he gave it a good tug on it yeah i'm okay he really pulled it and then he ran back and around there wasn't very four and he comes up behind the guys they're saying burn vern you okay and he kneels down between them and he puts his hand on his shoulders and he said what you boys looking at and they turned and here's my dad scared him to death and roy york the young man he was superstitious he really was superstitious but he jumps up he he's for running out of the tunnel and dad called him back but when we were working that mine over by chimney rock uh there there was a water tank that the sheepherders had put in and that had got water to it and then it had a figured it'd open up and it would go in the trough so they'd have water drink so uh they let us rig up the things so we could get water because you use a lot of water in mining so i'd i'd take the jeep and two 55-gallon drums and i'd go over there and it was kind of like the the old railroad trains you know they had to pull up the water tower and get watered open anyway i'd fill those 55 gallon drums and i saw this man and lady and they were carrying each carrying a gallon glass bottle and anyway they were coming towards the the water trough to get water so they got there and i got talking to them and some guy in salt lake hired them to do assessment work on a piece of property he had out there and all they were doing was living in the cabin he had and making it look like he was they were doing road work and he dropped him off with enough food for two weeks and and water and he was going to be back and it was in the third week they were out of water they had rationed their food so they'd walked out of this mine and i imagined i imagine a round trip was six or seven miles so they'd get the water and go back and so i i put them in the jeep and i took them back up where they were staying you know and then everything they had up there they could put water in we took it out of the 55 gallon drums and loaded my pans and pots and that so they wouldn't have to go so often and then i left them went bad i just told them i'd tell my dad and i went back filled up with water again went over the mine and told dad and so that evening we went up to see him and dad took everything he could spare us for his groceries and so he took that up to him and he he talked to him and found out that emmett was gassed uh in the first world war in germany had bad lungs kind of a little guy he was half indian i don't remember which tribe and he met esther and they got married and i thought she was older than him and later on on her birthday we found out she was 34 birthday and emmett was in his 70s wow but uh the weekend when we we left we had the miners with us so there was four of us in the jeep but we went up to that mine and we got up there and they were gone and there everything they had was gone so i don't know if they left on their own or they told my dad later on but later on he wanted watchmen to be over there at sanequin at the camp we had there just as you go out of spring lake and sometime he some way put an advertise advertisement in the paper and they read it and they called him and so he went to salt lake and got them and all their belongings and he took him out to the cabin and we used to call the cabin emmett's name was emmett king so they lived in the king castle and esther was the queen and the outhouse was the throne but they lived for several years and dad would buy their groceries and pay him something today two dollars a day or something like that but they got all their groceries and he'd buy him stuff to read or he'd go the library and esther didn't know how to read emma wouldn't teach her so dad taught her how to read and how to write but she was the sweetest lady she was really a sweetheart yeah she she wasn't very bright but uh she called me one night and said i tried to call your dad nobody's home emmett's been bitten by a rattlesnake and he said he's gone to town and i said well tell me about it she said he was bitten by a rattlesnake and he came in and had me heat water and he he had a bath in the wash tub and he was he was going down to find a doctor so i knew it was thursday night and that was lions club and my dad was a lions club so i went down to lion's club and i got him out of it and i said we got to go over to the mine and esther said haven't been bit by a lat rattlesnake so anyway we went over there she's just sitting there crying because he hadn't come back and it was a quarter mile from the highway up to the king castle at least wasn't it and she told us she said yeah he came in that house and said woman heat me some water i've been bitten by a rattlesnake i got to go to the doctor and she said i hated him some water and he wouldn't let me look at where he got bit and anyway he got his very best clothes and he put those on and he took a suitcase and he packed some stuff in there because he didn't know how long he'd be in the hospital and he left so we went down to santa quinn or the basin sheriff's office and told them and they got a search party out that night and people are up there if their flashlights and their lanterns and they were going through town and and uh the next morning there was a big search party and then the guys went in one of the cafes to get something to eat and it was around noon time and they would tell about this guy and the guy that runs the bus terminal they would stop there he said well i saw that guy last night he bought a ticket to los angeles and so they checked to see what time it got into los angeles and it would have already been to los angeles so they've got my dad and they said all right we think he just left her you know just just up and left her and uh so they called off the search and we let esther live there oh must have been another six months and daddy by the food and she was the watchman's wife but he got a call from the los angeles county sheriff's department and they had this alcoholic that they'd picked up and they were going to put him in jail but if you'd take him back we'll send the money we'll buy the ticket to send him back so dad said send him back so they put him on the on the bus and he got off at santa queen the bus driver had orders not to let him off till he got to santa quinn and we were there to meet the bus my dad told him he said emmett i could kick your hind in all the way to china he said you had us so upset we were looking all over for you we were hunting in the night time we were honey in the daytime he said if those guys hadn't gone in and got coffee i said we wouldn't have known you'd gone to los angeles and he apologized and he just wanted to change his scenery so dad said well he says you can stay here and work if you want or if you want to go back to salt lake i'll take you he said i want to go back up to salt lake and i want to take esther with me so they went to salt lake and they were there quite a while i don't remember how long it was but i remember stopping in dad's one night after work and he said oh i've got the kings back he said i hired him back so he must have been making a little bit of money off the mining for being able to hire people the miners and all that huh holders then sell yeah that's still stock people that thought or was there my grandpa told a good story and he had his machine that would tell a good story but they never got any money out of it you know speaking of dad telling good stories he put me to sleep at night when he'd be home just by telling me stories yeah he did the same thing i'll never forget that he told me that two kings were moving down onto the mine property and then he was building him a castle told me that the view they had from their castle was fit for a king and i couldn't wait to meet not just one but two kings and i was so disappointed because they didn't have crowns they didn't have purple robes with beautiful jewels they were poor just that i was the little boy and just by looking at them i knew they were they were tin can poor girl yeah they dad bought all his food and uh clothes they needed and i think he was paying him a dollar a day might have been two i think it was a dollar a day each yeah there you go yeah because they were she would cook and then he'd work in the mines he didn't do much work of the mind his lungs were bad he'd do he was more of a watchman and clean up outside i graduated in geology and we were on a geology field trip and we saw this coyote in a wash and she just looked at us and she acted like she was hurt so we got some rocks and we were going to kill her and every time we get closer it should get a little bit better and she'd run and then she'd stop lay down turn in circles and anyway we we kept after and pretty soon she just took off and she ran along for tails sticking up just in a good old like i tricked you guys and i said i wouldn't be surprised if she's got a den back there so we went back and we found five pups and so we we took those pups and uh we got back up to byu and we were around the science building and there were five of us so we had five pups and this one there the science building got over too close and it it had us you'd go up the steps and there was a wall here that came down and then below that there was you could walk underneath it well she fell off of it and well the baby coyote fell off and landed on her head that killed her and so i took a coyote each anyway again four of us took coyotes and i i took mine home and named it baby and i worked that coyote and tried to train it like a dog because it was small and my mom said one day she says you've got to get rid of that coyote every time my friends come in the house she hisses at him and they they didn't like a coyote there i'd take her on dates i had an old 48 studebaker and i'd put her in the back window and she those studebakers had that big window in the back and the big shelf and she'd snap at cars that go by and she really had a a good time but it was a good way to get a date you dive her out of a coyote in your car we bought a hundred chickens and we were gonna sell eggs we figure if you buy a hundred chickens at least halfway to be hands and half gonna be roosters we got those chickens turned out everyone was a rooster i don't know how they tell when they're that young but i mean they're little chickens and so we put them over the mine and we had a chicken coop that we'd built for the hens and we we'd feed them and emmett's wife should feed them and they started getting bigger and dad said what you gonna do with those chickens and if we thought about it and said you know he says you just can't keep feeding them he says why don't you go down to santa quinn at the store and see if he'll buy him if you will if you'll pluck them and clean them uh tell them you'll sell them a chicken for a dollar a piece or some some number like that so we killed two chickens and did did that went down to the store and told the man that we had a hundred chickens that we'd bought and that uh we couldn't keep him up there and feed him we'd sell him as many chickens he wanted till it's gone and if we gave him the first two chickens so he said well i'll take four a week from you so four a week at whatever price we agreed on and we decided that we'd let the chickens out of the chicken coop and would put their feet on the ground and they'd just get it outside then the coyote started killing the chickens and so dad put a a color around his neck and chained him up to a post and that coyote knew just how much space he had to get those chickens oh yeah and he'd lay back and then when the chicken came in range they didn't jump out and and get her you know if the rope was 100 feet long he'd lay back 25 feet so we decided to build a hook him to the clothes clothesline with that gave him more slack because he could run along it so then we decided to uh build a fence around him and dad had some of these metal form of fence post you get pound down so we pounded those down and he had a whole bunch of chicken wire up there so we put the chicken wire around it and we ran out so we went down to pace to buy some more chicken wire and we came back and the coyote was hanging and she jumped the fence to get the coyotes and the chicken wire was was too high and anyway she couldn't hit the ground and hung her so we lost the coyote but yeah well i like those little tidbits those stories are great they are i got one more i'll tell you if you got actually it's two more but when my folks were working the utah galena shaft which is north of eureka and a little bit east and just south of chimney rock maybe a half mile and mom was pregnant with me and so dad built a cabin for my dad and my mom and then he had a bigger bunk house for the miners and then they had the hoist house and then go up to the hoist and go down but uh i got pictures of all that oh cool they the week before my mom said that she wanted to make me some baby clothes and she said she had a cedar chest and she said take my cedar chest in the provo and she said i'm going to stay in provo the next week so she was staying at at my dad's mother's house and making these baby clothes and putting up some fruit and some guys from philadelphia had stock in the go in the you talked to lena mine then they had come out from philadelphia and they uh wanted to go over the mine and my grandpa was away on a trip raising money and anyway she said that she would take him but she says i'm big and pregnant and they said that's okay so they took her over the mine and at that time the road from santa quinn to eureka was dirt and anyway it was rough and they smoked cigars and it really made her sick and when they got there there was a sign on the door that said gone to eureka for supplies back in one hour so mom reached up to get the key and the key to the cabin was gone she said why would vern take the key so they set outside in the shade of the of the cabin and it went on quite a while and they didn't come back and so they said we're going to go back to provo we don't think he's coming back and my mom said i can't ride with you she said i'm going to stay here and wait for vern so they said okay so they left her there sitting on a chair outside the cabin and she started to have labor pains and of course it gets dark and she's afraid and she's praying because she's there all alone and my dad didn't come back and pretty soon she heard a vehicle coming and it was lars olsen the guy that had the the guy from mexico go see my grandpa and he came over to see how they were doing at the mine he just had a whim to drive over there so he picked her up and took her home and when they get to the house my dad's just loading up the truck and he's over there in provo and he said we ran out of money so i put the sign on the door so nobody would rob us so anyway uh he drove over and got my mom and brought her back home and that night she had real bad labor pains that i was born so they didn't go over for a few weeks it was like three or four weeks i finally got enough money to be able to pay the miners and buy some groceries they drove over there and when they drove up on the dump somebody had been there and they had stolen the tin off the roof of both cabins wow they had taken all of the siding off of both cabins they had taken all the furniture out of both cabins there was four bunk beds in one and and two full-size beds in the other they made it so if grandpa stayed that he could have one but they'd taken that there was a majestic range in each cabin they were gone they'd just taken everything totally shut them down because it took a lot of money to get started again wow so anyway my dad took a job selling sewing machines but there was an old man to me named george shulas he was uh greek some of the canyons over there with long canyons called shoeless canyon anyway he used to go to the miners he was mining over there and sometimes they'd get together at allen's ranch and alan would kill one of his sheep and he'd invite the miners in in north dinning to come and when we started working there that would knock off at noon and the miners would go home and they had a truck or a car and so it left the jeep so dad asked heart me he said how would you boys like to go exploring and we said sure so we started following the trails around uh that side of north tennic we came out around this bend and out of a canyon and here's this cabin sitting there and it's made out of logs and railroad ties and dad said i wonder if george is still alive so he pulls up in front of this cabin toots his horn and dogs are barking cats are running chickens are making noises and this guy came out of his cabin to me he was a big man and he came out and started talking to my dad and old friends and they were talking about mining and how where we were working at the time and george said well i'll have to come and see you then he had two model t coupes parked uh to the side of his house and one of them is driving and the other one he was using for parts but uh he invited us in his cabin for a cold drink of water and heart and me were both amazed when we went in because his walls were decorated with center folds from playboy and what was before that clear back to the early 1900s and he he had these women in their long bathing suits you know down below their knees and then he had some playboy pinups in there and uh he said to us he said if you guys want to come over and stay you're welcome to come over i'll tell you about me so we'd go over there and he told us the need of stories oh yeah and i think he was 14. he was drafted into the greek army and he didn't want to be in the army but they got he and one of his friends and his george george did something and they were going to execute him and his firing squad was set for the next morning and during the night his friend was on guard duty and he let him loose and they went down to the piers and they were loading one ship and he said so they stowed away on that ship and it left the next day whenever the tide went out they left and they were on it a few days before they were caught and they caught them so they said that they had to work so anyway they put them to work uh doing jobs but they said they'd pay them a wage and but he was on that ship with these sailors they were telling all the different stories to them and he told us many of them and i can't remember them but when they got to new york they pulled into new york and they had to go to ellis island and i think the statue of liberty was there then because they let all the guys see the statue of liberty when they came in and he got a job in new york doing something and he didn't like it and he'd heard about the pony express and he decided he wanted to be a pony express writer so he and his friend worked their way to saint louis and when they got to saint louis they told them that they were too big for the pony express and besides the pony express didn't exist anymore and in some way he and his friend got separated so he started working his way west and he'd get on at the freight lines and then he got on with the stage coaches that would go from wherever they were to little towns that are off the railroad line and he ended up in salt lake and the mining he was interested in that so we got down to eureka and he started working for a minor that had his mind and that's where he learned how to mine and then he found some more of his own and he was working for the guy during the day and then the night time he'd work on his own own mind but he was stacking it up out uh back of his cabin and he went out one day and two guys had jumped his claim and they were working it and they took off and he was going to shoot him and i guess he got liquored up and he took us he went into eureka walked into eureka and then he took the stage the morning stage to salt lake and he knew what hotel they were at so it was raining going into salt lake when he got out of the stage he was onto the boardwalk that went down both sides of state street and main street and he checked his gun make sure it was loaded and as he stepped off the boardwalk to go across the street to this hotel he was hit by lightning knocked him to the ground and he was laying there if his eyes wide open he could hear the people talking and they said he was dead and he said i don't want to be dead he said lord i don't want to die if that was the second bolt he was laying there in the mud and from the first one and he said he started to tingle and he could move his legs they jump back because they thought he was dead and now he's alive and anyway they helped him up got him back on the the side of the street he was on it burned the hair off his head and uh they wanted him to get a hotel and he said i got to kill those ged son of son of a [ __ ] and he walked across the street and just before he stepped on the other side he got hit again with lightning really and he laid there and he said his eyes were closed and he could see and he could hear and the people were all gathered around what do you do what do you do here's this dead man and that's when he said lord i don't want to die i want to but i want to kill those sons of [ __ ] that stole my claim and people were gathered around and he was still there and then he said lord if you don't want me to kill those sons of a [ __ ] i won't and he said when that happened that his toes started to tingle and his fingers started to tingle and he could feel his extremities start to tingle and then he could move him a little bit and that's when they were always alive he's alive you know and they got him up and they laid him on the boardwalk so he was out from under the lightning and he could hear what they were saying and i think he just told him he said i promise the lord i won't kill him i won't kill them sons of [ __ ] and so they helped him up he got on the stage coach back to eureka and went out and went back to his claim and those guys never came back so you know he he had a lot of chickens yeah and from what i understand he'd sell the chickens to the market in eureka and they'd pluck them and and prepare them but they had they'd go around and pick up all the little pebbles and such in their what do they call it and it was there'd be a lot of gold really in the in the gizzard at least that's the story i heard yeah i don't know if that's true or not i think it's not because he was going to tell dad the location of his mind that he was getting the color out of but dad never got over there well what happened was uh when i got out of the army i took dad let me take his truck and i took sharon and we went over there and i wanted to show her the places that i'd worked and by going up to shoeless canyon and the dogs came out and i'd been in his cabin several times and we'd stop there and get a drink of water never knew where he got his water but he came out and i used to think he was a big man and this little man comes out and he's on crutches and he's got real thick glasses on and i got out of the truck and i went over and i said george it's good to see you're still alive and he said who are you and i says you don't remember me and i smiled and oh i remember you how's your father he said you and your father are two of the honest honestest men i have ever known and as i talked to him i realized he thought i was my father and that my father was his father and i told him no oh i remember telling you all these stories you know but he invited me in and shared for a glass of cold water so we went in he still got his cabinet all decorated with these pin-up pictures on one wall the south wall he had a great big tapestry that was hung over there and i remember that tapestry and he said you get your father to come and see me nobody knows where my mind is and he said uh your father's the only man i will give it to you have him come out and this was in the fall because i got out in early october and we went up there to pick some pine nuts so we we went home and i stopped by my dad's and told him that george was still alive uh i said he's 107 years old and he wants to tell you where his mind is he doesn't think he's going to live much longer and dad says well i'll have to go see him this week and he didn't seem and then we picked a week and i was going to go and it snowed and we didn't go and then during the winter time i read in the daily herald that one of utah's oldest residents george shoeless had died at the age of 107. and i had an obituary about him on there but that that was one of those most unforgettable characters i ever met that the that the reader's digest used to put in their thing every month he had spittoons all around his cabin and he could hit a splatoon 12 feet away yeah yeah he could get a wide didn't hit it but that spring after he died we went over there and somebody had burned down his cabin and it was burned right to the ground but it opened up something on the south side of his cabin there was a shed that went into the ground and a tunnel went back in the ground so i got the flashlight and we went back in that about a hundred feet and it there was a dam back in there and water was dripping down from outside and the mountain and it was going down and just dripping on the ground and he had run a pipe through the bottom of it and uh then he had that it was a cement dam that it had was about i'm going to say four feet might have been three feet high and then he ran that pipe outside i used to wonder how he he had uh some trees there small orchard how he watered his orchard and how he watered his chickens and that's what he did he'd collect that water and there was enough for for him and his orchard and his chickens but it wasn't his mind that had the ore in it nope nope and i've looked i've looked on on the google earth trying to find all the mines over and then we've ridden our four-wheelers over there and anything that looked like it was a a mind dump we've been to found a lot of neat ones and uh but uh did you ever take a metal detector around where his cabin was or anything no i'm sure somebody did well i know somebody did because we wrote over there one day on four wheelers and there was a pickup truck there and there were two couples and they had metal detectors and they wanted to know where that where his toilet was they wanted to go down in the toilet so i said well he moved it a lot i mean it dig a hole and when it got full and he'd dig another hole and throw that dirt into it and he moved it i said but i remember it started there and the last time i saw it it was over there so this is up in that kind of allen allen ranch valley area yeah south of allen's ranch yep was there any story of anything being found in that little valley area anciently not out of out of place archaeology type not regular indian just you know you know of any stories or anything well i know there were some mines there that produced because that mine that where i was almost born and the shaft went down 777 feet and then it had different levels that it would take off and they got into my dad was the superintendent of the mine and he had a pretty good crew working for him and they they got into uh some real gravelly bad stuff that they had to timber and then they got a little further and then they they hit water and so they built some ditches so the water could run over and they were going to catch it before it went down and filled the rest of the hole up and they went home for the weekend and when they came back they went down and they hit water water was filling the shaft and it was a soft water really really bad smell and they got some pumps and put in it and they tried to pump the water out but the the pumps that they had couldn't keep up with the water and uh i have no idea what level the they had the pumps at but uh is that where one of the miners was killed yeah i know that uh that was dad told me it was the confirmation of one of the superstitions miners had was of not ever working your last day and this was this miners last day the shift was over they got on the lift cage and they were headed up to the surface and the the cage stopped and jarred and bounced up and down on the cable and after the second time it did that this guy says i'm not staying on this and he went over the ladder to climb off of out of the cage and the cage moved and knocked him off they went he fell into the bottle yeah grandpa peterson was the lift operator yeah and it's right the cable didn't go across nice like it shouldn't come back you know and it would build up on itself a little bit and then it would slip down and when they were coming up it's go around it would slip and that would juror the thing and the guy jumped off because he figured he'd take the ladders up and the he missed the ladders when he when he jumped off well that decapitated him wow well neil gosh i'd stay here all day and listen to you i appreciate it no i really do thank you david for changing this i'm glad i know him yeah [Music] you

Channel: Terry Carter

Views: 11,312

Rating: 4.9495268 out of 5

Keywords: Terry Carter, treasure hunter, treasure hunting, lost treasure, terry carter treasure hunter, Terry L carter, Dying man tells all - Treasure Secrets, Real Indiana Jones shared his secrets, Neil Bullock, David Bullock, trappers gold, lost rhoades mine utah, treasure hunters hideout, utah treasure, mining, treasure tales

Id: 4VzL7NZ2V_k

Length: 164min 44sec (9884 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 27 2020