Thanks for the positive response. It is fascinating to me that people are still interestd in this! My main interest is to clear up some of the inaccuracies in the stories already floating around out there about my father Dale Howard and the tunnel and ore sample he found in the Superstitions.
My parents, Dale and Edna Howard, lived in Phoenix in 1947-49. They lived at 24th Street and Thomas, which at that time was the very eastern edge of the city, with nothing but desert between them and the tiny hamlet of Scottsdale many miles to the east. The only road that connected Phoenix to Scottsdale back then was Camelback or Highway 60 (Van Buren) which connected to the dirt version of Rural Road which would lead you to the very small Scottsdale downtown. Together they backpacked and camped in and around the Superstitions, including the area around Reives Ranch. I believe it was during this time that they met Al Morrow and Chuck and Peggy Aylor, a couple who lived in the mountains and prospected and placer mined (I think near what is now Goldfields?) for many years until Chuck died in the early 60s. My parents moved to northern California in 1950, but my father came back to AZ several times as he had gotten interested in the Lost Dutchman stories.
My father and a friend, a retired railroad engineer named Jack (still trying to remember his last name…) who my parents knew from Oakland, CA, were prospecting on Blacktop Mountain in the early 1950s…not before WW II as suggested in other versions of this story. Neither Jack nor my father was in the war either. Dale was in the CAP for a while in Washington, and Jack as a railroad engineer was in what was considered essential work; plus he was quite a bit older than my father, so Jack would have been maybe 45 or 50 during the war.
The story has been told elsewhere, but here is a more complete version: Jack and Dale were climbing around on Blacktop in the late spring. Jack, who was much taller, stepped up on a boulder to check a ledge for snakes before putting his hands up there; the stone rolled aside and they saw a small tunnel proceeding into the rock face. My father described the opening as about 2 ½ or 3 feet high about 2 feet wide at the base, with a smoothly rounded arched top. He said you could clearly see the chisel marks on the stone. The tunnel went back about 20 feet and then curved smoothly to one side (I’ve forgotten which, but my dad remembered it vividly!). About four feet inside the entrance a single chunk of rock a little smaller than a football was lying in the middle of the floor. They were concerned about noxious gases and snakes, so they twisted up a bunch of dried grass and lit it. When they held this inside the entrance, the flame bent and sucked forward, indicating that there was some other opening somewhere close enough to create a significant draft. After tossing their temporary torch forward and letting it burn out, they guessed it was safe. One of them crawled forward into the tunnel almost to the curve when he encountered a rattlesnake and retreated rapidly! They had just been hiking around and had neither guns nor flashlights and it was late in the day. They took the rock with them, rolled the boulder easily back in front of the opening, and spent the last remaining daylight drawing a diagram of sorts. (It should have been pretty accurate; Jack was a retired construction engineer who had built railroad bridges during his career.) The map included compass readings and major landmarks visible from the ledge in front of the tunnel opening, including Weaver’s Needle. They also paced off the location from the large petroglyphs carved into a slab of rock on the top of the mountain up the slope above the tunnel. (You could still see a piece of this rock in the late 1970s-the last time I was on Black Top, although much of it had been destroyed and/or stolen even back then. It was already smaller and much more damaged then than it was when I first saw it in the mid-1960s! I don’t know if it is still there or not…)
They returned to San Raphael, CA, where my parents lived at the time, and had the rock assayed in the SF county assayers office. The rock was mostly rose quartz and had visible lines of gold about the width of a pencil line on the surface. The rock was assayed and contained gold, silver and a trace of lead.
(Note: Sometime later, I believe I heard that this ore was similar to the ore from the Vulture mine, and the Dutchman was often accused of having “high-graded” from the Vulture, so my father and his friend suspected that there might be a connection. Or at least they considered this a possibility, I think…Tracy Hawkins was sort of an advocate of this theory, considering the tunnel a “cache”, rather than a “mine”)
Jack died in the early 60s from Parkinson’s; I can dimly remember how frail and wasted he had become and how much he shook like with palsy. In the era of his decline and death, the instructions (there was never an actual map) were lost. All that my father had was an abbreviated version of them he had sent in a letter to my mom from Phoenix before driving back to CA. They came back to AZ once about a year or two later, but had an accident, Jack got hurt, and they never made it in to the mountains. One thing and another, it was some years before my father was able to return to Arizona. He started prospecting in the area again in the mid-60s and filed claims for parts of the mountain near where he thought the tunnel was. ..but the ‘look’ of the mountainside was very different from what he remembered!
In about 1967, he met a guy named Jerry Pinta who was prospecting not too far away, somewhat farther down the slope. Jerry Pinta is the guy who was later shot to death by his own wife (I think this was around Christmas in 1967 or 68); I have seen a website posting which associated this story with my father -which is completely incorrect, but helps show some awareness by some people of the vague connection between Dale Howard and Jerry Pinta.
Sometime before he was shot, Pinta got in an argument with either some other prospectors or some rangers or both. I am not clear on the whys, but apparently Pinta swore he was giving up on the area and rather than pack it out, he set off a bunch of dynamite he had stored in his excavated cave or tunnel on the slope of Blacktop. It was supposedly several cases! Some stories said four, some claimed as many as 14! Either way, it was a huge blast. Al Morrow claimed it knocked him flat on his back as he was walking out of his tunnel with a couple of cans of fruit (he used to have stacked wooden orange crate shelves with canned goods in there where it was much cooler) in his camp which was several miles away. The blast shattered a lot of the once vertical face of the mountain at that point and sent it crashing down. Jerry Pinta claimed he had almost buried himself, as the blast and rockslide was way beyond what he’d expected. (He and my father later got in a fist fight over this episode at a horse stable in Glendale where they both boarded their horses, and Pinta pulled a pistol out of his car, but the owner of the stable pointed a rifle at him and ‘persuaded’ him to get in his car and leave. Hard to imagine perhaps, but Phoenix has always had some element of the ‘wild west’-especially back in the 60s!) Both my mother and I were standing there when this fight took place.
I think it was this blast that toppled and broke in half the large petroglyph on the crest above and caused huge rock slides. It also altered and largely buried the part of the slope where my father believed his tunnel had been. He spent the next 7 or 8 years every chance he got trying to dig back to the original vertical face-if it still existed-and to try and find the distinctive two-tiered ledge that had been in front of the opening. Through the years several men worked with him on this project, starting with Bob Acres in the early 60s. In the mid-60s he met Ernie Province and through Ernie he met Chuck Ribaudo. (The story of their meeting is pretty funny too, especially the way Ernie told it.) His most long-term and dedicated partner was Tracy Hawkins, who I think he met in late 1969 or early 1970, shortly after my mom died in a car accident. He and Tracy prospected together (sometimes with Ernie and others) up until about 1976, when my father got too sick to do it anymore.
I know that both Ernie and Tracy have died in the last couple years, and I’m sorry to hear it. They were both good guys; role models to me and my brother, and friends to my father- especially when he was dying of cancer. He passed away Oct. 17th, 1977, and one of my last conversations with him was about what would happen to “his” mountain and his grandfathered in claims in what had become Wilderness area. I regret that I had neither the resources nor the knowledge nor the inclination to do much to try and keep those claims alive at the time.
This is the basic story of Jack and Dale and the finding of the tunnel as well as I can remember it. I know this is a very long post, but believe me when I say this actually leaves out a lot of the details. I heard it many times, and I can still vividly recall the intensity with which my father told it: it was one of the most dramatic and exciting moments in his life; which already included a number of dramatic incidents going back to his boyhood during the Depression and life on a Wyoming cattle ranch. But there was no other story he told with such focus, such almost-religious intensity. Some of that was the lure of hidden treasure, perhaps, but more than that, it always seemed to me that he was trying to “bear witness”, to communicate through his own intensity the amazement of the experience which he could be emotionally moved by even 25 years later. He was a good storyteller-though probably not as good as Ernie- but there was no other story made his eyes gleam like this one.
I hope this narrative helps set straight some errors and confusion I see on these Superstition/Lost Dutchman sites. I think I can say without arrogance that I doubt there is anyone left alive who had the advantage of the first-hand perspective I have on these events and that era. I knew all these people; as well as Al Morrow, Peggy Aylor, Crazy Jake, and the infamous Bob Brady. If anyone is interested, in another installment, I will tell the story of the Bob Brady treasure cave expedition-which, by the way, I was supposed to go along on until my mother changed her mind at the last minute and made me stay home.
I welcome questions and comments and addendums to this story, as well as any legitimate memories of Dale, Ernie or Tracy. Thanks. -GH
Ggreg sent me the real story, and I will try to get him to post it here.
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