The Tumacácori Mission Mines (Part 1)

[Trlewis48]

The Tumacácori Mission Mines

A Forged Document, a Real Mining Cluster, and One Unsolved Theft

Santa Cruz and Pima Counties, Arizona • Legend claims 1518 to 1658; real history begins 1856

Research and Verification by T. R. Lewis

❦ Around Grandpa's Stove ❦​

Now, you have to understand something about treasure stories before I tell you this one. Most of them are about half gravel and half gold, and the trick is sorting the one from the other. Back in the Depression, when corn was ten cents a bushel and cheaper than firewood, we burned corn in the stove to keep warm. A winter evening by that stove was the best place in the world for a story, and the best stories always had a lost mine or a buried chest in them somewhere.

This one comes from Arizona, down near the Mexican line, at an old Spanish mission called Tumacácori. People will tell you the Jesuit padres there worked secret mines full of silver and gold, and sealed them up with gunpowder when the king of Spain ran them out of the country. They will tell you a whole room in one of those mines is stacked with silver bars to this day. They have a paper to prove it, too, an old Spanish document with directions and everything. That’s the problem with treasure maps. Sometimes the treasure's easier to find than the truth.

A man who knew old Spanish writing as well as anybody around looked the paper over and said it dated to about 1900, not the 1600s as it claimed. I wasn't born yesterday, but I stayed up pretty late, and I can tell you that a document placing a mission mine in 1518, nearly two centuries before any Jesuit ever reached the region, makes about as much sense as a screen door on a submarine.So that half of the story is gravel.

But don't throw the whole thing out just yet. Here's where the gold starts showing through the gravel. Not twenty miles from that mission, there were silver mines there, worked by men whose names still show up in the record books, and one of those men stole a load of silver bars, buried them, and got shot for it before he could ever go back. Nobody has found that silver yet. So let me tell you both halves, the one built on a forged paper and the one built on records and witnesses, and you can decide for yourself which deserves more trust.

❦ The Legend ❦​

According to the story built around a manuscript treasure hunters call the Molina Document, Jesuit missionaries at Tumacácori worked several mines in the surrounding hills for more than a century, taking out enormous quantities of silver and gold with the labor of Pima and Opata converts. The document describes the richest of these, the Mine of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, as lying a league and a half from the mission's main door, its entrance sealed forever by toppling rock outcroppings over it with gunpowder charges packed into the stone. Inside, the story goes, a room fifty varas square held the treasure of the missions: 2,650 units of stamped silver and 905 of gold and silver together. A second mine, called the Mine of the Opatas, sat halfway along the route to a third, la Purísima Concepción, with its own copper and silver workings smelted at the mission itself and recorded, the document claims, in the mission's own ledger for the year 1648.

A separate telling, popularized by prospector and author John D. Mitchell beginning in 1933, adds that Jesuit padres fled Tumacácori during the Pima uprising of 1751 with a cart, or carreta, loaded with silver. They hid it in a canyon south of Arivaca and sealed it behind a heavy wooden door before the 1767 expulsion of the Jesuits forced them out of the territory for good. In neither telling did the padres ever come back for what they buried.

❦ A Document Dated to 1900, Not the 1600s ❦​

The Molina Document takes its name from a Spanish ex-nun, Micaela Walloria de Molina, said to have carried the manuscript from Madrid and translated it. No evidence that this woman existed has ever surfaced. Donald Garate, for years the park historian at Tumacácori National Historical Park and a reader of authentic Spanish colonial documents, examined the manuscript's form, spelling, and wording. He concluded that it could not have been written during the colonial period and dates to around 1900. A man living at the mission at that time was among the earliest promoters of the Guadalupe Mine story, and the document may well be his own creation.

Garate's dating rests on details anyone can check:

The handwriting. The document is written in a printed style of lettering, not the cursive of genuine Spanish colonial records

The spelling. Its misspellings do not match how an eighteenth-century Spaniard spelled by ear. It misspells Tumacácori and San Ramón in ways no writer who knew the mission or its patron saint would have

The dates. It gives December 12, 1518, as the discovery date of one mine. Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino did not reach the Pimería Alta until 1687, and Tumacácori was not founded until 1691, roughly 170 years later

Researchers on TreasureNet's long-running forum thread about the document, working on their own and without Garate's archival access, reached the same forgery conclusion from the same handwriting and spelling evidence. When two different groups, working years apart and looking at the same paper, come to the same conclusion, it's worth paying attention.

The question is not completely closed. At least two published treasure books, George Thompson's The Old Spanish Trail North Branch and Gary Oliver's Enigma of Tumacácori, discuss the Molina Document without treating it as a settled forgery, and treasure hunters still argue over whether John D. Mitchell knew the document was fabricated or was fooled by it himself. One forum researcher raised another possibility: that the paper in circulation is a later, clumsy copy of some earlier original, made by someone who did not know period Spanish spelling or handwriting. Even if that were true, the document still could not be trusted as a colonial-era map, but a bad copy is a different thing from an outright invention, and no source consulted here settles which is closer to the truth.

A second telling with the same problem. Another version of the legend has the mine worked by Indigenous people until Francisco Vázquez de Coronado seized it in 1540 and founded a mission on the spot. Coronado's 1540 expedition through the region is real history. A mission at Tumacácori in 1540 is not. The mission's actual founding in 1691 came 151 years after the date this version requires.

Numbers that will not hold still. The Molina Document gives 2,650 units of stamped silver and 905 of gold and silver. Another circulating version gives 2,050 burro loads of silver alongside the same 905 figure, changing both the first number and the unit it is counted in. When a story can't decide how much treasure it's talking about, a fellow starts wondering whether anybody ever saw an original document at all.

Two thousand six hundred and fifty units of one thing in one telling, two thousand fifty burro loads in another. Well, that's clear as mud.

❦ The Real Mines Around Tubac ❦

Set the manuscript aside and something more interesting appears: a genuine mining district clustered around Tumacácori, rich enough to explain how the legend may have started in the first place.

In 1856, Charles D. Poston and Samuel P. Heintzelman founded the Sonora Exploring and Mining Company and set up headquarters in the abandoned ruins of the Tubac Presidio, a few miles from the mission. From there they reopened twenty old silver mines in two areas: the Santa Rita Mountains along Sópori Wash, and the Cerro Colorado district to the west. Poston personally invested $100,000 in eighty mining claims near the old mission and the Santa Rita Mountains east of it.

When the Santa Rita Mining Company split off from Poston's operation in 1858 to take over the Santa Rita claims, it made its headquarters at the Hacienda de Santa Rita, right next to the abandoned mission. An 1859 address before the Geographical Society, later reprinted in a period book on Arizona and Sonora, described the Heintzelman Mine and the mines of Arivaca, Sopori, and Santa Rita as lying within a circle of twenty miles from Tubac. These were four separate, working mining districts, all within a day's ride of Tumacácori.

The most productive was the Heintzelman Mine at Cerro Colorado, discovered by Spanish prospectors around 1750. Reopened by Poston's company in 1856, it produced 3,000 to 5,000 tons of ore averaging about 100 ounces of silver per ton, with the richest ore on record running over 12,000 ounces per ton. Recorded production for 1859 alone reached $100,000, not counting ore estimated at $900,000 that miners stole and smuggled into Sonora rather than report.