- Jan 6, 2006
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- Detector(s) used
- Garrett AT Pro, Ace 250 & Ace 400
- Primary Interest:
- All Treasure Hunting
Perhaps the most mysterious of all the Old West’s unsolved mysteries is the story of the Tres Piedras markers in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Tres Piedras in Spanish means Three Stones or Markers, and up until the early 1960’s, only three markers were known to exist. Each marker is composed of about fifteen large rocks buried about half-way into the ground and arranged in a pattern stretching over a distance of about one-quarter of a mile. Unless one knew that the rocks formed a distinct pattern, it would be very easy to mistake them as just rocks in the landscape.
Around 1962, the fourth marker was located, and when properly put together with the other three, they formed a square with six miles to each side. Near the geographical center of the square is an unusual landmark called Sugar Loaf Peak. Although the markers of this legend lie on a ranch in the Oklahoma panhandle, and most of the story has been pieced together from an old family Bible dating from the early 1800’s, no one has yet solved the mystery.
As early as 1844, frontiersmen were seeking to solve a riddle of mysterious stone markers found along the old Santa Fe Trail in New Mexico Territory. The trail had been used by pack trains and wagons for a couple of centuries, and the ruts were deeply grooved into the earth, but it was the multitude of embedded boulders spaced about ten miles apart lying adjacent to the trail which captivated everyone’s attention. These stone markers formed the letter V, always with one leg longer than the other and always pointed east. They were obviously deliberately set into the ground, and everyone presumed they pointed the way to a fabulous buried treasure, but as soon as one series of boulders could be found, the next series after that would remain lost. As the years passed with no solution to the riddle in sight, the marker stones achieved legend status.
The story apparently begins in 1800. Father Pierre LaFarge was an excommunicated French priest who had served a prison term for killing a nun. Although defrocked by the Catholic Church, he was still calling himself a priest when he was released from prison and journeyed to the New World. He traveled from settlement to settlement, using his priestly disguise to his own advantage for whatever nefarious activities he thought to accomplish. In New Orleans, he met a group of twelve other Frenchmen.
From New Orleans, the group sailed across the Gulf of Mexico to land at Matamoros, Mexico. They had learned of a buried treasure near Chihuahua, and they planned to have it, but they found themselves pitted against a heavily armed group of ten Mexican guards. The treasure consisted of both gold and silver, and since the silver was much too heavy to carry, and knowing that gold fetched a better price, the Frenchmen wanted only the gold. They attacked the Mexicans, and in the battle which followed, they managed to kill all but two of the guards. While the Frenchmen made off with the gold, which weighed better than one hundred pounds, the two guards notified a company of Rurales, who promptly gave chase. The Frenchmen fled into New Mexico Territory.
The group traveled north to Santa Fe, where they learned of a gold strike in the mountains around Taos. The year was now 1801. Strangely enough, New Mexico history claims the first gold strike was in 1833, but Chihuahua records indicate that $500,000 worth of gold brought from New Mexico was minted there in the year 1798, and it is generally known that evidence of placer mining was found east of Santa Fe as early as 1807. The Frenchmen headed to Taos.
In the mountains surrounding the town, the thirteen Frenchmen quickly established a placer mining operation along several of the small streams. Since none of them had any mining experience, they were easily frustrated in their endeavors. Even more frustrating was the news of large gold takes being panned by experienced Mexican miners nearby. After two years with little to show for their hard work, they decided it would be easier to rob from the successful miners, rather than toil in frustration by themselves. They again turned to piracy.
Over the next several months, they robbed and killed more than twenty placer miners and accumulated a large store of stolen gold. In the process, six of their number were killed in the raids and in the saloons of Taos, where they often fought mountain men with knives. With their number now down to seven, Father LaFarge thought it best to take the gold back to France. He set out to find someone with experience in smelting the ore and forming it into ingots.
In the summer of 1804, LaFarge found Jose Lopat, a Spaniard who had worked with metals in Mexico City before moving to live in Santa Fe. Lopat was also a an experience trail guide, and he agreed to lead the Frenchmen to New Orleans. Before they left, he smelted the gold into ingots for ease in transport. He devised what apparently was a blast furnace, creating a heat of better than 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit. In three months, he turned out 700 ingots, each cast in a special mold he had made for that purpose. The ingots had a weight of seven and a quarter pounds each, which never varied, making the total weight of the gold more than five thousand pounds.
In the late summer of 1804, LaFarge, his six friends, Lopat, and about a dozen Indian servants began the long trek from Santa Fe to New Orleans over a route known as the Old Santa Fe Trail. For centuries, this trail had been used by Spaniards, Mexicans, Indians, and bandits to travel from Santa Fe to any number of locations to the east. A southern part of this trail ran from Santa Fe through Texas, following the Canadian River down the North Fork and along the Red River to Natchitoches, Louisiana, becoming known as the Santa Fe - Natchitoches Trail. Another section was the Santa Fe - California Road which ran through southern Oklahoma into Missouri. Another section ran from Santa Fe into Kansas, and still another from Santa Fe into Colorado. The ruts were deep in all these roads, and banditry lay everywhere along them, mostly from Comancheros and hostile Indians. The section Lopat traveled was the old De Vargas Road, first used in 1686. It left Santa Fe and followed a northerly course through New Mexico, across the Oklahoma panhandle, eventually ending at an Indian village on the Arkansas River in Kansas. At what point, Lopat intended to turn south is not known, but presumably, he would have turned onto the old Vial Road of 1792, which paralleled what is the present-day Oklahoma - Texas border, and continued on the Natchitoches section of the Trail to a point where he could again turn south toward New Orleans. Since the party never made it to New Orleans, it is a moot point.
They were transporting six large, heavily laden oxcarts, and the going was very slow. At first glance, it would appear the oxcarts were filled with furs, the products of a season spent trapping in the Rocky Mountains to the west. But under the covering of furs lay the treasure of the 700 gold ingots. They made only a few miles each day.
The men stopped for the night at what is now known as Flag Spring in the Black Mesa area of the Oklahoma Panhandle, a small oasis not far off the old trail which wound through the area. This natural watering hole had been used since time immemorial by the Indians, as numerous arrowheads have been found there. It is one of only two watering holes in the whole Black Mesa country, and it had first been viewed by white men when Coronado and his horsemen and foot soldiers passed there in 1541. Being completely desolate and barren, the whole Panhandle would eventually acquire the nickname of "No Man’s Land."
On that night, the travelers met four mountain men bound for Taos in the New Mexico Territory. The mountain men were cooking their evening meal, and the weary travelers were invited to join them for dinner. The seven Frenchmen lost no time in telling the mountain men that they were hauling their furs to New Orleans, where they expected to receive a better price, since Spaniards frowned on Frenchmen in their territory. The mountain men, who had just come from Louisiana Territory, wasted no time in telling the Frenchmen that New Orleans was no longer a part of France. Louisiana had been sold to the United States in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase, which extended from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. Although the Frenchmen acted as if it would make no difference in their plans, it was unwelcome news. That night, none of them slept well.
After the mountain men pushed on the next morning, the Frenchmen held a conference. All believed the United States would not allow them to ship their gold to France, that American officials would confiscate it. It was finally decided that it might be prudent to send someone to Louisiana to the learn the facts. LaFarge called for Lopat’s opinion. Should they push on, or should they remain were they were, while someone made arrangements for a boat to pick them up elsewhere? Lopat told the group that it depended on what arrangements could be made. If they were to be picked up on the Gulf of Mexico or on the coast of the Carolinas, it might be better to wait until the exact route could be determined.
The Frenchmen elected to take Lopat’s advice and decided to remain where they were until the matter could be settled. Two of the hardiest of the group were chosen to make the round trip to New Orleans and back, a trip they calculated would take three and a half months. All decided the delay would be worth it, if the gold could be taken safely back to France. When the two men departed for New Orleans, the remainder of the group set about building shelter for their stay in the area. They chose a site a short distance from the spring.
When four months had passed and no word came from their compatriots, the remaining Frenchmen decided to bury their gold, marking it in such a fashion that only they would recognize and understand what the markers meant when they considered the timing right for safe transport to France. In a country as desolate and barren as where they were, they would need something truly unusual and ingenious to guide them back to their gold. Before they began to hide the gold, however, they decided to send Lopat and the Indian servants back to Santa Fe. Lopat had only been hired to mold the ingots and guide the group to New Orleans; he did not share in the gold with the Frenchmen. To make sure that Lopat would not double back and watch the Frenchmen bury the gold, he and the Indians were escorted for one hundred miles of their return journey to Santa Fe.
This much of the story comes from the memory of Jose Lopat, although he did not witness the actual burying of the gold. His son, Emanuel, who later helped build the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, carefully wrote down whatever Jose said when referring to the gold ingots and the Frenchmen. These notes Emanuel then glued in the back of the family Bible, and over the years, they grew to number over fifty pages filled with clues.
Jose Lopat returned to Santa Fe, forgot about the gold ingots, and resumed his normal life. About a year after his return, he ran into LaFarge on the street. LaFarge was not pleased to see the Spaniard, but he did tell Lopat that everyone who had helped bury the gold had been killed either by Indians or in the wild orgies staged in New Orleans. Lopat would always wonder if LaFarge had not killed all the men himself.
LaFarge was now very sick and in no condition to return to the Black Mesa country to retrieve what he now considered all his. He suffered from tuberculosis, and he told Lopat that he thought he stood a better chance of recovery if he stayed in the higher altitude of Santa Fe for awhile. As the weeks passed, however, he became bedridden.
LaFarge’s presence back in New Mexico did not go unnoticed. During his bandit raids with his French friends on the placer mining diggings, the group had killed one miner who had two sons operating a freighting service out of Santa Fe. When these sons learned their father’s murderer was now back in town, they organized a lynching party. Somehow, LaFarge learned of the plan, and he concealed himself in a cart of hay. He was never to be seen or heard from again. Two weeks after he had slipped town in the back of the hay cart, Lopat learned that he had died from his illness.
All the Frenchmen who buried the gold were now dead. LaFarge had spoken several times of the "gold buried near the spring," and Lopat knew it could only mean one spring…the one in the Black Mesa. He made one trip back to the area to look for the missing gold, but he had no idea where to look. He also knew absolutely nothing about the four massive markers the Frenchmen had left in the area to point to the location. After several weeks of foraging around the countryside, he returned to Santa Fe.
The Lopat family Bible records that Jose Lopat was born in Madrid, Spain on 17 October 1769, and that he died in Santa Fe on 4 June 1856 at eighty-seven years of age. His son Emanuel, who wrote his father’s story and glued it to the back of the Bible, was born in Santa Fe on 5 June 1819 and died in Denver, Colorado on 3 August 1906, also at eighty-seven years of age. Emanuel was still living when the next piece of the puzzle came to light, although he did not know it at the time. If he had known, he may have been able to piece together the riddle and furnish the searchers badly needed information from his father’s story.
In 1870, a series of strange stone markers were discovered near the old Santa Fe Trail in the mountains to the east of Santa Fe. The markers consisted of huge stones, spaced irregularly apart, buried in the ground with only their crowns showing, but which formed the gigantic letter V with one leg longer than the other. Chiseled on the underside of the stone at the point of the letter was the symbol V, which indicated the direction in which the next marker could be found. As each V pointed toward the next marker, a sort of directional course could be determined. Each gigantic marker was always five to ten miles away, forming a somewhat regular pattern from Santa Fe to the settlement of Las Vegas, nearly fifty miles east. Beyond Las Vegas, the trail just disappeared. No one knew what these stone markers represented, but everyone suspected they pointed the way toward something important.
Several years passed, during which time a group of priests hired guides and made an intensive search for what they believed would be more stone markers. Somewhere along the old road to Clayton, they picked up the trail and managed to follow it to within thirty miles of town, where they completely lost it again. No amount of searching ever turned up any more stone markers. At this point, they abandoned their quest and returned to Santa Fe.
There were now two riddles to solve. What happened to the gold of Father LaFarge, and what did the massive stone markers mean? None of the stones could be moved by one person; it always took two or more men to dig out and roll over the point rock. At what point researchers began to put the two stories together is not known, but everyone agreed that the only way the Frenchmen could return to their hidden hoard in the Black Mesa meant that they would need some means of finding it again by themselves. What better method than boulders in the ground to mark the way?
In 1900, Michael Ryan, who knew nothing of Jose Lopat, Father LaFarge, and the notes in the Lopat family Bible, entered the picture. He lived most of his life in the West and had learned to speak Spanish while playing with Mexican children. He knew all about the marker stones found from Santa Fe to Clayton, but not yet knowing about the missing gold hoard, he gave them little thought.
While driving a herd of horses from Clayton to his ranch in the Oklahoma Panhandle, Ryan spent the night on the plains east of Clayton. During the night, several of his horses broke away from the encampment, and he spent the next morning chasing them. After a few hours of tracking, he stopped to rest. Sitting on a stone, he noticed the rock formation around him appeared unnatural. It was obviously the work of man for it formed the distinct letter V with one leg longer than the other. Knowing of the old marker stones west of Clayton, he was immediately interested. Digging around the point rock, he finally managed to roll it over. Crudely chiseled on the bottom was another V. The site was a great distance beyond the point abandoned by the priests. Ryan carefully marked the location, returned to the business at hand of rounding up his horses, and sometime later, he returned to the spot to renew his search for other stone markers.
During the next few years, Ryan searched for the stone marker trail. At times, he found it, only to lose it, but he continued his search until the stone markers led him into the Black Mesa country of the Oklahoma Panhandle. At this point, the Lopat family again became involved. Emanuel Lopat died 3 August 1906 in Denver, Colorado, also at the age of eighty-seven like his father, and the family Bible passed to his daughter Angelina. She had heard of the Frenchmen’s gold all her life from her grandfather and father, and when she learned of the marker stones being found in the Black Mesa country, she understood what it could mean. She made the Bible pages known to researchers of the stone markers. Angelina died in 1925, and her niece then inherited the Lopat Bible.
The end finally came when Michael Ryan followed the stone markers to the Flag Spring area, which is where Lopat had said the Frenchmen must have buried their gold. But Ryan was now looking for stone markers, something Lopat had never known existed. He managed to locate three corner markers, known as the Tres Piedras stones. The two markers in the northwest and southeast corners were both shaped like the letter V, the longer leg extending about a quarter of a mile across the landscape. The marker in the southwest corner was the Roman number IX or XI, depending on how one looked at it. Not knowing exactly what they meant, but by using a triangulation, Ryan determined there were only two feasible landmarks in the area, Sugar Loaf Peak and Flag Spring. Of the two, only Flag Spring lay inside the triangulation. Since LaFarge had told Lopat that the 700 gold ingots had been buried near the spring, and convinced that it was the treasure site, Ryan dug there intermittently for years. He found nothing, except Indian arrowheads and what he believed were adobe bricks. He died never knowing of the fourth stone marker, located only a few miles north of the site.
By this time, the land in question belonged to Ryan’s great-nephew Cy Strong. The site is about fifteen miles north of present-day Boise City in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Cy Strong was once the official surveyor of Cimarron County, and he surveyed the stone markers found by his great-uncle. He insists that the Frenchmen laid out their markers with a compass because the county township line runs almost parallel to the south two markers. However, he said they used magnetic north instead of true north, as the southeast marker, only about half a mile east of Highway 287, is off about twelve degrees and located half a mile farther south of the township line. A couple of years later, he found the fourth marker in the northeast quadrant. Oddly enough, this marker is not shaped anything like the other three, but there is no doubt that it belongs in the pattern.
Since the discovery of that fourth stone marker, Strong is convinced that the gold is not buried near Flag Spring, which was named at least twenty years after the Frenchmen camped there. The geographic center of the square now formed by the four markers appears to lie between Flag Spring and Sugar Loaf Peak. In fact, the mountain is the only landmark which can be seen from all four stone markers and is presumed to be the site chosen by the Frenchmen. Not far from this location is where Strong found the ruins of an ancient dugout that he has always believed predated the Santa Fe Trail. Just west of those ruins, in the side of a rugged hill, he discovered what he believed to be the winter headquarters used by the Frenchmen while they waited for their two companions to return from New Orleans. He thinks the Frenchmen set up camp in a small cave and constructed the outside wall of adobe bricks. Pieces of decayed cartwheels found nearby reinforced his conviction.
Since the turn of the century, untold numbers of searchers have arrived at Flag Spring seeking instant wealth, but no one has found it. With the discovery of the fourth massive marker in the northeast corner, the search location has shifted. Cy Strong thinks the place to dig is in the center of the four markers, but he suspects that the center today would not be the same place the Frenchmen picked, that there is bound to be some deviation because they did not use true north when they laid out their marker stones. Without knowing exactly where to begin, the difference could mean a lot of digging. To add to the problem, the area is a cattle ranch, and cattle spook easily. Although Strong would like to see the riddle solved, he is unwilling to let the public swarm at whim over his property, digging holes everywhere, and endangering themselves or his cattle.
Of the notations recorded in the Lopat Bible, all written in Spanish, three seem to summarize the story:
1. In ninety days, I poured 700 gold ingots into a mold I made myself, and each weighed seven and one quarter pounds according to the scales we had.
2. Raymond (unidentified in the notes) told me he himself murdered five miners, and all the others had blood on their hands.
3. Father Lafarge was not happy to see me, and told me with great reluctance of the deaths of the others in the party.
The Frenchmen knew that once they buried their gold, they would be able to relocate it. They left markers all the way back to Santa Fe leading them to the exact spot. But they all died. Their secret was clever enough that six cart loads of gold has eluded recovery for nearly two centuries.
Around 1962, the fourth marker was located, and when properly put together with the other three, they formed a square with six miles to each side. Near the geographical center of the square is an unusual landmark called Sugar Loaf Peak. Although the markers of this legend lie on a ranch in the Oklahoma panhandle, and most of the story has been pieced together from an old family Bible dating from the early 1800’s, no one has yet solved the mystery.
As early as 1844, frontiersmen were seeking to solve a riddle of mysterious stone markers found along the old Santa Fe Trail in New Mexico Territory. The trail had been used by pack trains and wagons for a couple of centuries, and the ruts were deeply grooved into the earth, but it was the multitude of embedded boulders spaced about ten miles apart lying adjacent to the trail which captivated everyone’s attention. These stone markers formed the letter V, always with one leg longer than the other and always pointed east. They were obviously deliberately set into the ground, and everyone presumed they pointed the way to a fabulous buried treasure, but as soon as one series of boulders could be found, the next series after that would remain lost. As the years passed with no solution to the riddle in sight, the marker stones achieved legend status.
The story apparently begins in 1800. Father Pierre LaFarge was an excommunicated French priest who had served a prison term for killing a nun. Although defrocked by the Catholic Church, he was still calling himself a priest when he was released from prison and journeyed to the New World. He traveled from settlement to settlement, using his priestly disguise to his own advantage for whatever nefarious activities he thought to accomplish. In New Orleans, he met a group of twelve other Frenchmen.
From New Orleans, the group sailed across the Gulf of Mexico to land at Matamoros, Mexico. They had learned of a buried treasure near Chihuahua, and they planned to have it, but they found themselves pitted against a heavily armed group of ten Mexican guards. The treasure consisted of both gold and silver, and since the silver was much too heavy to carry, and knowing that gold fetched a better price, the Frenchmen wanted only the gold. They attacked the Mexicans, and in the battle which followed, they managed to kill all but two of the guards. While the Frenchmen made off with the gold, which weighed better than one hundred pounds, the two guards notified a company of Rurales, who promptly gave chase. The Frenchmen fled into New Mexico Territory.
The group traveled north to Santa Fe, where they learned of a gold strike in the mountains around Taos. The year was now 1801. Strangely enough, New Mexico history claims the first gold strike was in 1833, but Chihuahua records indicate that $500,000 worth of gold brought from New Mexico was minted there in the year 1798, and it is generally known that evidence of placer mining was found east of Santa Fe as early as 1807. The Frenchmen headed to Taos.
In the mountains surrounding the town, the thirteen Frenchmen quickly established a placer mining operation along several of the small streams. Since none of them had any mining experience, they were easily frustrated in their endeavors. Even more frustrating was the news of large gold takes being panned by experienced Mexican miners nearby. After two years with little to show for their hard work, they decided it would be easier to rob from the successful miners, rather than toil in frustration by themselves. They again turned to piracy.
Over the next several months, they robbed and killed more than twenty placer miners and accumulated a large store of stolen gold. In the process, six of their number were killed in the raids and in the saloons of Taos, where they often fought mountain men with knives. With their number now down to seven, Father LaFarge thought it best to take the gold back to France. He set out to find someone with experience in smelting the ore and forming it into ingots.
In the summer of 1804, LaFarge found Jose Lopat, a Spaniard who had worked with metals in Mexico City before moving to live in Santa Fe. Lopat was also a an experience trail guide, and he agreed to lead the Frenchmen to New Orleans. Before they left, he smelted the gold into ingots for ease in transport. He devised what apparently was a blast furnace, creating a heat of better than 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit. In three months, he turned out 700 ingots, each cast in a special mold he had made for that purpose. The ingots had a weight of seven and a quarter pounds each, which never varied, making the total weight of the gold more than five thousand pounds.
In the late summer of 1804, LaFarge, his six friends, Lopat, and about a dozen Indian servants began the long trek from Santa Fe to New Orleans over a route known as the Old Santa Fe Trail. For centuries, this trail had been used by Spaniards, Mexicans, Indians, and bandits to travel from Santa Fe to any number of locations to the east. A southern part of this trail ran from Santa Fe through Texas, following the Canadian River down the North Fork and along the Red River to Natchitoches, Louisiana, becoming known as the Santa Fe - Natchitoches Trail. Another section was the Santa Fe - California Road which ran through southern Oklahoma into Missouri. Another section ran from Santa Fe into Kansas, and still another from Santa Fe into Colorado. The ruts were deep in all these roads, and banditry lay everywhere along them, mostly from Comancheros and hostile Indians. The section Lopat traveled was the old De Vargas Road, first used in 1686. It left Santa Fe and followed a northerly course through New Mexico, across the Oklahoma panhandle, eventually ending at an Indian village on the Arkansas River in Kansas. At what point, Lopat intended to turn south is not known, but presumably, he would have turned onto the old Vial Road of 1792, which paralleled what is the present-day Oklahoma - Texas border, and continued on the Natchitoches section of the Trail to a point where he could again turn south toward New Orleans. Since the party never made it to New Orleans, it is a moot point.
They were transporting six large, heavily laden oxcarts, and the going was very slow. At first glance, it would appear the oxcarts were filled with furs, the products of a season spent trapping in the Rocky Mountains to the west. But under the covering of furs lay the treasure of the 700 gold ingots. They made only a few miles each day.
The men stopped for the night at what is now known as Flag Spring in the Black Mesa area of the Oklahoma Panhandle, a small oasis not far off the old trail which wound through the area. This natural watering hole had been used since time immemorial by the Indians, as numerous arrowheads have been found there. It is one of only two watering holes in the whole Black Mesa country, and it had first been viewed by white men when Coronado and his horsemen and foot soldiers passed there in 1541. Being completely desolate and barren, the whole Panhandle would eventually acquire the nickname of "No Man’s Land."
On that night, the travelers met four mountain men bound for Taos in the New Mexico Territory. The mountain men were cooking their evening meal, and the weary travelers were invited to join them for dinner. The seven Frenchmen lost no time in telling the mountain men that they were hauling their furs to New Orleans, where they expected to receive a better price, since Spaniards frowned on Frenchmen in their territory. The mountain men, who had just come from Louisiana Territory, wasted no time in telling the Frenchmen that New Orleans was no longer a part of France. Louisiana had been sold to the United States in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase, which extended from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. Although the Frenchmen acted as if it would make no difference in their plans, it was unwelcome news. That night, none of them slept well.
After the mountain men pushed on the next morning, the Frenchmen held a conference. All believed the United States would not allow them to ship their gold to France, that American officials would confiscate it. It was finally decided that it might be prudent to send someone to Louisiana to the learn the facts. LaFarge called for Lopat’s opinion. Should they push on, or should they remain were they were, while someone made arrangements for a boat to pick them up elsewhere? Lopat told the group that it depended on what arrangements could be made. If they were to be picked up on the Gulf of Mexico or on the coast of the Carolinas, it might be better to wait until the exact route could be determined.
The Frenchmen elected to take Lopat’s advice and decided to remain where they were until the matter could be settled. Two of the hardiest of the group were chosen to make the round trip to New Orleans and back, a trip they calculated would take three and a half months. All decided the delay would be worth it, if the gold could be taken safely back to France. When the two men departed for New Orleans, the remainder of the group set about building shelter for their stay in the area. They chose a site a short distance from the spring.
When four months had passed and no word came from their compatriots, the remaining Frenchmen decided to bury their gold, marking it in such a fashion that only they would recognize and understand what the markers meant when they considered the timing right for safe transport to France. In a country as desolate and barren as where they were, they would need something truly unusual and ingenious to guide them back to their gold. Before they began to hide the gold, however, they decided to send Lopat and the Indian servants back to Santa Fe. Lopat had only been hired to mold the ingots and guide the group to New Orleans; he did not share in the gold with the Frenchmen. To make sure that Lopat would not double back and watch the Frenchmen bury the gold, he and the Indians were escorted for one hundred miles of their return journey to Santa Fe.
This much of the story comes from the memory of Jose Lopat, although he did not witness the actual burying of the gold. His son, Emanuel, who later helped build the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, carefully wrote down whatever Jose said when referring to the gold ingots and the Frenchmen. These notes Emanuel then glued in the back of the family Bible, and over the years, they grew to number over fifty pages filled with clues.
Jose Lopat returned to Santa Fe, forgot about the gold ingots, and resumed his normal life. About a year after his return, he ran into LaFarge on the street. LaFarge was not pleased to see the Spaniard, but he did tell Lopat that everyone who had helped bury the gold had been killed either by Indians or in the wild orgies staged in New Orleans. Lopat would always wonder if LaFarge had not killed all the men himself.
LaFarge was now very sick and in no condition to return to the Black Mesa country to retrieve what he now considered all his. He suffered from tuberculosis, and he told Lopat that he thought he stood a better chance of recovery if he stayed in the higher altitude of Santa Fe for awhile. As the weeks passed, however, he became bedridden.
LaFarge’s presence back in New Mexico did not go unnoticed. During his bandit raids with his French friends on the placer mining diggings, the group had killed one miner who had two sons operating a freighting service out of Santa Fe. When these sons learned their father’s murderer was now back in town, they organized a lynching party. Somehow, LaFarge learned of the plan, and he concealed himself in a cart of hay. He was never to be seen or heard from again. Two weeks after he had slipped town in the back of the hay cart, Lopat learned that he had died from his illness.
All the Frenchmen who buried the gold were now dead. LaFarge had spoken several times of the "gold buried near the spring," and Lopat knew it could only mean one spring…the one in the Black Mesa. He made one trip back to the area to look for the missing gold, but he had no idea where to look. He also knew absolutely nothing about the four massive markers the Frenchmen had left in the area to point to the location. After several weeks of foraging around the countryside, he returned to Santa Fe.
The Lopat family Bible records that Jose Lopat was born in Madrid, Spain on 17 October 1769, and that he died in Santa Fe on 4 June 1856 at eighty-seven years of age. His son Emanuel, who wrote his father’s story and glued it to the back of the Bible, was born in Santa Fe on 5 June 1819 and died in Denver, Colorado on 3 August 1906, also at eighty-seven years of age. Emanuel was still living when the next piece of the puzzle came to light, although he did not know it at the time. If he had known, he may have been able to piece together the riddle and furnish the searchers badly needed information from his father’s story.
In 1870, a series of strange stone markers were discovered near the old Santa Fe Trail in the mountains to the east of Santa Fe. The markers consisted of huge stones, spaced irregularly apart, buried in the ground with only their crowns showing, but which formed the gigantic letter V with one leg longer than the other. Chiseled on the underside of the stone at the point of the letter was the symbol V, which indicated the direction in which the next marker could be found. As each V pointed toward the next marker, a sort of directional course could be determined. Each gigantic marker was always five to ten miles away, forming a somewhat regular pattern from Santa Fe to the settlement of Las Vegas, nearly fifty miles east. Beyond Las Vegas, the trail just disappeared. No one knew what these stone markers represented, but everyone suspected they pointed the way toward something important.
Several years passed, during which time a group of priests hired guides and made an intensive search for what they believed would be more stone markers. Somewhere along the old road to Clayton, they picked up the trail and managed to follow it to within thirty miles of town, where they completely lost it again. No amount of searching ever turned up any more stone markers. At this point, they abandoned their quest and returned to Santa Fe.
There were now two riddles to solve. What happened to the gold of Father LaFarge, and what did the massive stone markers mean? None of the stones could be moved by one person; it always took two or more men to dig out and roll over the point rock. At what point researchers began to put the two stories together is not known, but everyone agreed that the only way the Frenchmen could return to their hidden hoard in the Black Mesa meant that they would need some means of finding it again by themselves. What better method than boulders in the ground to mark the way?
In 1900, Michael Ryan, who knew nothing of Jose Lopat, Father LaFarge, and the notes in the Lopat family Bible, entered the picture. He lived most of his life in the West and had learned to speak Spanish while playing with Mexican children. He knew all about the marker stones found from Santa Fe to Clayton, but not yet knowing about the missing gold hoard, he gave them little thought.
While driving a herd of horses from Clayton to his ranch in the Oklahoma Panhandle, Ryan spent the night on the plains east of Clayton. During the night, several of his horses broke away from the encampment, and he spent the next morning chasing them. After a few hours of tracking, he stopped to rest. Sitting on a stone, he noticed the rock formation around him appeared unnatural. It was obviously the work of man for it formed the distinct letter V with one leg longer than the other. Knowing of the old marker stones west of Clayton, he was immediately interested. Digging around the point rock, he finally managed to roll it over. Crudely chiseled on the bottom was another V. The site was a great distance beyond the point abandoned by the priests. Ryan carefully marked the location, returned to the business at hand of rounding up his horses, and sometime later, he returned to the spot to renew his search for other stone markers.
During the next few years, Ryan searched for the stone marker trail. At times, he found it, only to lose it, but he continued his search until the stone markers led him into the Black Mesa country of the Oklahoma Panhandle. At this point, the Lopat family again became involved. Emanuel Lopat died 3 August 1906 in Denver, Colorado, also at the age of eighty-seven like his father, and the family Bible passed to his daughter Angelina. She had heard of the Frenchmen’s gold all her life from her grandfather and father, and when she learned of the marker stones being found in the Black Mesa country, she understood what it could mean. She made the Bible pages known to researchers of the stone markers. Angelina died in 1925, and her niece then inherited the Lopat Bible.
The end finally came when Michael Ryan followed the stone markers to the Flag Spring area, which is where Lopat had said the Frenchmen must have buried their gold. But Ryan was now looking for stone markers, something Lopat had never known existed. He managed to locate three corner markers, known as the Tres Piedras stones. The two markers in the northwest and southeast corners were both shaped like the letter V, the longer leg extending about a quarter of a mile across the landscape. The marker in the southwest corner was the Roman number IX or XI, depending on how one looked at it. Not knowing exactly what they meant, but by using a triangulation, Ryan determined there were only two feasible landmarks in the area, Sugar Loaf Peak and Flag Spring. Of the two, only Flag Spring lay inside the triangulation. Since LaFarge had told Lopat that the 700 gold ingots had been buried near the spring, and convinced that it was the treasure site, Ryan dug there intermittently for years. He found nothing, except Indian arrowheads and what he believed were adobe bricks. He died never knowing of the fourth stone marker, located only a few miles north of the site.
By this time, the land in question belonged to Ryan’s great-nephew Cy Strong. The site is about fifteen miles north of present-day Boise City in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Cy Strong was once the official surveyor of Cimarron County, and he surveyed the stone markers found by his great-uncle. He insists that the Frenchmen laid out their markers with a compass because the county township line runs almost parallel to the south two markers. However, he said they used magnetic north instead of true north, as the southeast marker, only about half a mile east of Highway 287, is off about twelve degrees and located half a mile farther south of the township line. A couple of years later, he found the fourth marker in the northeast quadrant. Oddly enough, this marker is not shaped anything like the other three, but there is no doubt that it belongs in the pattern.
Since the discovery of that fourth stone marker, Strong is convinced that the gold is not buried near Flag Spring, which was named at least twenty years after the Frenchmen camped there. The geographic center of the square now formed by the four markers appears to lie between Flag Spring and Sugar Loaf Peak. In fact, the mountain is the only landmark which can be seen from all four stone markers and is presumed to be the site chosen by the Frenchmen. Not far from this location is where Strong found the ruins of an ancient dugout that he has always believed predated the Santa Fe Trail. Just west of those ruins, in the side of a rugged hill, he discovered what he believed to be the winter headquarters used by the Frenchmen while they waited for their two companions to return from New Orleans. He thinks the Frenchmen set up camp in a small cave and constructed the outside wall of adobe bricks. Pieces of decayed cartwheels found nearby reinforced his conviction.
Since the turn of the century, untold numbers of searchers have arrived at Flag Spring seeking instant wealth, but no one has found it. With the discovery of the fourth massive marker in the northeast corner, the search location has shifted. Cy Strong thinks the place to dig is in the center of the four markers, but he suspects that the center today would not be the same place the Frenchmen picked, that there is bound to be some deviation because they did not use true north when they laid out their marker stones. Without knowing exactly where to begin, the difference could mean a lot of digging. To add to the problem, the area is a cattle ranch, and cattle spook easily. Although Strong would like to see the riddle solved, he is unwilling to let the public swarm at whim over his property, digging holes everywhere, and endangering themselves or his cattle.
Of the notations recorded in the Lopat Bible, all written in Spanish, three seem to summarize the story:
1. In ninety days, I poured 700 gold ingots into a mold I made myself, and each weighed seven and one quarter pounds according to the scales we had.
2. Raymond (unidentified in the notes) told me he himself murdered five miners, and all the others had blood on their hands.
3. Father Lafarge was not happy to see me, and told me with great reluctance of the deaths of the others in the party.
The Frenchmen knew that once they buried their gold, they would be able to relocate it. They left markers all the way back to Santa Fe leading them to the exact spot. But they all died. Their secret was clever enough that six cart loads of gold has eluded recovery for nearly two centuries.
Buck
