Douglas mansion and the mine that built it

A millionaire built his mansion on this mountain.

It took Mr. Douglas two years of unfruitful excavating to find anything worth mining, but it paid off in 1944 when deposits of copper, silver and gold were found.

Boom.  He was rich.
He needed a mansion on a mountaintop.

Today you can stand at the top of one of the mining shafts and look down into its 1900 feet depths.
That's a greater height than the empire state building...as the sign shows.

The Audrey headframe, as it's called, lifted more than 320,000 tons of copper, 190 tons of silver, and 5.3 tons of gold during its 20 years of operation.
"Tons" of gold?
No wonder he had a mansion. 

There's no mining action today, just old machinery lying idle.

And there's no one living in the mansion either.  It was put on sale for only $40,000 dollars in the 1960s, but now it has been turned into a museum of the area's mining history.
No one is using the ahead-of-it's-time central vacuuming system.
No wealthy visitors are resting in the living room which, at 1400 square feet, is as big as some of the homes in Jerome.

No one needed what was left above ground once the millions of dollars were dug up from underground and carted away.

Vulture Mine

I drove a long, lonely road to find a real, non-touristy ghost town; one that would be cotton candy and kitschy souvenir free.

Vulture Mine promised to be just such a place, but I couldn't get in to see.  My arrival was not timed well with the limited touring schedule.

Vulture Mine began in the 1860s and was a thriving mining town until 1942.  With a population of around 5000, it was bigger even than my home town. It was Arizona's most wealthy mine, and the reason Phoenix grew up as a city.
But when the mine was closed, it became a ghost town almost over night.  Today it is quickly falling apart and mostly closed to the public. 

But if you show up at the right time on a Saturday, you can get in to see the old mining equipment, the hanging tree where men were hung for stealing gold, and several of the other buildings--if you go soon, you'll see it before the desert winds blow it all away.

Lost dutchman mine

Alleged belongings of the dutchman

The legend of the Lost Dutchman mine is a treasure-seeking tale of the old west.  One that still draws people in even today.
People have disappeared or been found dead in the area, causing theories and stories to develop around all the different possibilities of history and what treasure is really out there.  The conflicts to be found in it are the claims to accurate history, the claims to land and mines, and the claims to treasure found.

The legend goes that a German immigrant named Jacob Waltz, the "dutchman", found a wealthy gold mine in the Superstition Mountains in the mid 1800s. He died leaving a drawn map which gave only hints to the mine's location. Since then, treasure hunters have come from all over to search but no one has found anything.  Mixed throughout the legend are details of violence and beheading among those searching for gold

The mining museum of their belongings left behind

Today there are hikers, campers and horseback riders instead of suspicious gold hunters--but they are still out there, too.

The real treasure, though, is probably the mix of fact and fiction in the story of the dutchman's mine, and the hunt--the one for the truth of the characters involved amidst all the legend.

Superstition mountains