So why this mountain?

[Real de Tayopa Tropical Tramp]

Hi Doc syn, I guess that I find myself in my friend NP's catagory. I have given out data freely on the net - mines, placer fields, and treasure data. I have my program set up for Tayopa, and forTayopa alone, not for the Caballos / Victorio peak or anything else. so why not share ? I certainly can't handle more.

The Caballos and Victorio peak are interesting to me as far as completing the story on Tayopa. I will never search Either, hence I am grateful whenever some one, such as my friend, NP, takes the time to give me data that fills in the Tayopa story.

I have never destroyed a marker, moved one, or added to it.


Incidentally doc, good dowsers do exist, I have had proof of that.

Jorge Juan moved or destroyed every marker that he could find on the Gloria Pan that he could on the theoy that if anyone came looking for the deposits or mines, that they would have come to him. Fortuantely, I had already found the Gloria Pan mine and didn't need him or his misleading markers.

 

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[Drogo]

I have just started to delve into the published accounts of the Victorio Peak story (a la "The Gold House" trilogy, "100 Tons of Gold", and "What Men Call Treasure"), but it is a subject I've heard about all my life.

In another thread I related how my dad, an engineer at White Sands, had stayed in the military barracks one night as part of a missile test or something, and a soldier had come in during the wee hours of the morning with dirt on his uniform claiming to have been digging in Victorio Peak.

This is the closest thing to a first-hand account I have, although my dad years later claimed that an author had come to interview him about his knowledge of Victorio Peak. I do not know the man's name but my dad said that "he claimed to have too much material for a single book. He said he would have to write an encyclopedia." This leads me to believe the man was one of the authors of the "Gold House" trilogy although I have no proof.

So...to my own opinion.

On the one hand I find it very hard to believe that a treasure had simply been stored in a cave but "right out in the open" so-to-speak in said cave without someone discovering it long before Doc Noss. I could fathom a treasure buried under tons of rock remaining a secret, but stashed in "rooms" in a cave? That seems about as likely as finding chests of doubloons in Carlsbad Caverns.

Still, the mountain of circumstantial evidence suggests that there must have been something of value in Victorio Peak or all these people wouldn't have been running around trying to get their hands on it.

This prima facie contradiction is what bothers me.

I can almost picture that someone must have stashed the treasure in Victorio Peak during the early twentieth century, and as people have pointed out, all at once rather than in several trips.

I claim that it's highly unlikely it would have gone completely undiscovered for hundreds of years, and this becomes especially troublesome if one is to assume it was virtually a "bank" where people made regular deposits.

The nut I can't crack is who might have stashed it all at once and just a few years before Doc Noss made his discovery.

Was Noss just a con man and there never was a treasure? Then where do the authors of all these books get their evidence that the treasure was there?

Victorio Peak almost becomes the Treasure Hunting equivalent of the Roswell Incident: we don't know exactly what happened, and we never will.

 

[treasminder2]

well , the Spaniards didn't come to that hostile country to save souls ,,, so ,,,
something kept their interest alive for two to three hundred years in that area

and you can bet it wasn't the mezcal .

so if they mined , surely they stashed .

 

[Real de Tayopa Tropical Tramp]

G'd morning Drogo: You posted -- On the one hand I find it very hard to believe that a treasure had simply been stored in a cave but "right out in the open" so-to-speak in said cave without someone discovering it long before Doc Noss


You must reember they were normally depositories for further transshipment to a waiting Jesuit ship in the vicinity of Matamoros for shipment to Rome, via Del Rio Del Norte

When a ship would arrive, they would be emptied

 

[Drogo]

G'd morning Drogo: You posted -- On the one hand I find it very hard to believe that a treasure had simply been stored in a cave but "right out in the open" so-to-speak in said cave without someone discovering it long before Doc Noss


You must reember they were normally depositories for further transshipment to a waiting Jesuit ship in the vicinity of Matamoros for shipment to Rome, via Del Rio Del Norte

When a ship would arrive, they would be emptied


View attachment 1169420

I just find it hard to believe that was stored in that mountain for how many hundred years (?) without someone else finding it long ago.

 

[Real de Tayopa Tropical Tramp]

Drogo , happens my friend, especially since they degenerated into an Apache strong hold, sides there is a lot of country out there.

Sides, A cave in an area full of caves receives no attention

May I suggest n analogy with the dead sea scrolls. That survived thousands of years without being discovered

 

[Drogo]

May I suggest n analogy with the dead sea scrolls. That survived thousands of years without being discovered

Good point.


And encouraging.

Makes you wonder what else is still out there...(Twilight Zone music).

 

[Real de Tayopa Tropical Tramp]

Drogo, my friend, yep, that it does. For one there are stlll some with silver from Tayopa and her assocated mines in the Caballos. (Tayopa was a silver mine )

 

[Drogo]

Drogo, my friend, yep, that it does. For one there are stlll some with silver from Tayopa and her assocated mines in the Caballos. (Tayopa was a silver mine )

I would love to have seen "The Bridal Chamber" of pure silver at Lake Valley Ghost Town.

That whole area draws me for some reason.

 

[Real de Tayopa Tropical Tramp]

Drogo, that must have a pretty sight. I imagie that Tayopz was the same. It was formed by a volcanic intrusion uplifting and breaking the back of a Basalt layer some 800 ft thick, then filing the voids with Silver ( and gold) through Hydothermal deposition

Ask Oro

 

[Drogo]

Drogo, that must have a pretty sight. I imagie that Tayopz was the same. It was formed by a volcanic intrusion uplifting and breaking the back of a Basalt layer some 800 ft thick, then filing the voids with Silver ( and gold) through Hydothermal deposition

Ask Oro

IIRC if you visit the schoolhouse museum at Lake Valley there is an actual photo of "The Bridal Chamber" and you can see one of the workers literally flaying a huge chuck of silver off one of the walls.

 

[Not Peralta]

Having a lot of Silver is better than having some Gold.NP

 

[Real de Tayopa Tropical Tramp]

hi np. there was a time when silver was par with gold.

 

[sdcfia]

I would love to have seen "The Bridal Chamber" of pure silver at Lake Valley Ghost Town.

That whole area draws me for some reason.

It's entrance is right next to the highway. Just a hole in the ground now.

My buddy and I roamed all over the town site quite a few years ago when an old couple lived there as caretakers. There were some nice old rock cabin ruins scattered around the old mining structures. I remember one in particular that had some nice gun ports in the walls. I don't know if you can access the town site anymore.

 

[sdcfia]

Here's the entrance into the Bridal Chamber.


"Lake Valley was a silver-manganese mining district during the late 19th century. Silver was discovered in 1876, and the area was extensively mined until the silver crash in 1893 (Donegan et al., 1965; McLemore and Nutt, 2002). The Lake Valley district includes the famed Bridal Chamber, which was found in 1881. The Bridal Chamber was among the richest silver deposits ever mined (Eveleth, 1986). The spectacular Bridal Chamber ore body composed of silver chlorides and silver bromides was nearly two hundred feet long and 25 feet thick (Clark, 1895; MacDonald, 1909: McLemore and Nutt, 2002). Chlorargyrite (cerargyrite; AgCl), the main high-grade ore taken from the Bridal Chamber, was mined out by the late 1880s."

 

[Real de Tayopa Tropical Tramp]

Good squishing ground sheesh.

 

[Dr. Syn]

Yeah who needs a death trap when you mine like that!
Holy heck, that was a death sentence waiting to happen for those who mined there. Guess when you are using slave labor it was no real concern to those who ran the place. Funny we put such a high price on minerals and such a low one on human life.

 

[sdcfia]

Yeah who needs a death trap when you mine like that!
Holy heck, that was a death sentence waiting to happen for those who mined there. Guess when you are using slave labor it was no real concern to those who ran the place. Funny we put such a high price on minerals and such a low one on human life.

No slave labor in 1870s New Mexico, Doc. Those miners made very good money, the best wages in the Territory by far - a couple hundred dollars a day or more in today's money. Yes, mining is dangerous work, but nobody held a gun to their heads. The buttressing seen in the photo are just to keep the face of those openings from collapsing, which had been successful for a hundred years when I saw the place. By the way, the entrance (square portal on right side) was to a connecting tunnel - the actual Bridal Chamber deposit was a few hundred feet away.

 

[Dr. Syn]

You know whiskyrat brought up something about name changes over time for the mountain ranges. And maybe why some of the treasures never got picked up after they were stashed, and why folks now have a hard time finding them.

I had posted where I grew up, I knew places by the folks who lived there. Mention someone's name and everybody knew the place. Today do the same, and you get the deer in the headlights look from folks. They have no clue what you are talking about.

Say you have a map, that shows the X mountains and it tells you where to start to find the stash. Problem.
Is the X mountain the same place it was then or where it is now? If you are not thinking about it, you are in for a long fruitless hike.

And maybe like I had said, why some of the stashes never got picked up. Someone makes a stash, and then a map. Places named on the map are accurate for that time frame. 20/50/100 years later someone else finds the map and looking at it has no clue where the heck this place is as the names for everything have changed and now nothing on the map lines up with current places having the same name.

Funny the things you think of while hanging off a post in the middle of a corn field.

 

[Drogo]

You know whiskyrat brought up something about name changes over time for the mountain ranges. And maybe why some of the treasures never got picked up after they were stashed, and why folks now have a hard time finding them.

I had posted where I grew up, I knew places by the folks who lived there. Mention someone's name and everybody knew the place. Today do the same, and you get the deer in the headlights look from folks. They have no clue what you are talking about.

Say you have a map, that shows the X mountains and it tells you where to start to find the stash. Problem.
Is the X mountain the same place it was then or where it is now? If you are not thinking about it, you are in for a long fruitless hike.

And maybe like I had said, why some of the stashes never got picked up. Someone makes a stash, and then a map. Places named on the map are accurate for that time frame. 20/50/100 years later someone else finds the map and looking at it has no clue where the heck this place is as the names for everything have changed and now nothing on the map lines up with current places having the same name.

Funny the things you think of while hanging off a post in the middle of a corn field.

To the problem of name changes you have different places with the same name. For example, there is a Socorro, Texas and a Socorro, New Mexico. There is a Picacho Peak in Arizona, and one in New Mexico. And so on.