Free The Silver Madonna and Other Tales of America's Greatest Lost Treasures by W.C. Jameson Page A

permission to Quest Exploration, a California-based treasure hunting company, to try to reach the cache of gold and silver. Quest employed state-of-the-art computerized sensing equipment to determine the location of the chamber described by Jones. During their search, however, Quest officials were informed by the army that any treasure recovered would be placed in escrow until all claims for it were settled in a court of law.
    After a week of working at the site, the Quest team abandoned the project; they were not satisfied with the recovery terms. Before leaving the area, they stated that whatever openings and passageways may have existed had most certainly caved in as a result of previous excavation and demolition work.
    After the Quest Exploration team left the site, the military closed off Huachuca Canyon and forbade access to treasure hunters. During a final sweep of the canyon, military policemen encountered a small mine shaft nearby in which were found several very old digging tools, a number of Spanish coins, and some glassware. When the find was reported, the officer in charge confiscated the items and instructed the MPs to keep the discovery secret.
    The official position of the U.S. Army is that the treasure cache described by Robert Jones does not exist. Unofficially, however, the military continued to attempt to recover the gold and silver as late as 1979. During the autumn of that year, a squirrel hunter who frequented the canyon observed army bulldozers and other heavy equipment working around the site of the old shaft that Robert Jones had fallen into thirty-eight years earlier.

    That Robert Jones stumbled into an old mine that contained a fortune in gold and silver ingots in Huachuca Canyon cannot be doubted; the evidence, along with his lifetime commitment to recovering the treasure, is overwhelming. Without a doubt, the mine was operated by the Spanish who were known to frequent this area. Evidence also shows that members of the U.S. military were convinced of Jones’s assertions regarding the treasure cache, even to the point of organizing their own attempt at recovering it. It is known that they invested significant time, energy, and resources into the attempt. Subsequent visitors to the site in Huachuca Canyon have observed that, despite their efforts, the army has never been able to penetrate the mass of rock in order to achieve access to the underground chamber. For all indications, it is apparent that the fabulous Huachuca Canyon treasure has never been recovered and still lies there today in the ruined chamber under tons of rock and rubble.

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    Seventeen Tons of Gold at Lost Mesa
    One of the largest caches of gold in the history of the United States is located on a mesa in a remote portion of the desert in San Juan County in the Four Corners region of northwestern New Mexico. During the mid-1930s, approximately seventeen tons of gold were flown in several trips to this region from deep in Mexico. The gold was delivered to and buried at the top of an isolated flat-topped mountain where it was to be held until certain economic circumstances materialized. When such circumstances were not forthcoming, the parties involved in the caching of this incredible fortune were forced to abandon the site, never to return. According to all available information, the gold is still there. The principal difficulty related to locating and recovering it is in determining which mesa is the correct one. If found, the value of the gold would equal that of the treasury of a midsize nation.

    During the summer of 1933, William C. Elliot received an odd telegram at the office of the small crop-dusting service he owned and operated in Midvale, Utah, a few miles south of Salt Lake City. The telegram was from a man named Don Leon Trabuco and it was an invitation for Elliot to fly to a small landing strip near Kirtland, New Mexico, for a meeting. Elliot, who was known as Wild Bill among his pilot friends, had never heard of Don