Ho, for buried treasure! Throw the saddles on the ponies. Slap the blanket rolls and the grub and the old camp kit on the pack mule. Be sure of plenty of bacon and frijoles. And don’t forget the picks and shovels. There before you runs the trail. Out yonder across the desert a fortune of three million dollars is waiting for you. All you have to do is find it.

Get your directions right and keep them dark. Don’t confide them to your best friend. The danger is that your friend may smile in your face with great show of incredulity and then hurry off and dig up the treasure before you get there. That is sometimes the way with friends.

A dying outlaw who helped bury the treasure wrote out in detail the directions for finding it. That should mean smooth sailing for you. He certainly should have known all about it. He also drew a map, now faded and yellow with age. But never mind the map. The directions will do. And here they are:

Go first to Davis Mountain. Davis Mountain is the key to the whole secret of the treasure. Once there, the hidden riches will be yours. But if you miss Davis Mountain, you might just as well have stayed at home. That you may not, by any possible accident, mistake Davis Mountain for any other peak, keep your eyes open for a rounded, bald, granite dome visible for miles across rolling plains that run from it to the east. From the summit, with a good pair of field glasses, you can see over a good-sized slice of New Mexico. The old sugar-loaf stands boldly up against the sky, and you should be able to identify it at the first glance.

When you arrive at Davis Mountain, head west. A mile or a mile and a half due west, you will find a canyon. The east wall of this canyon is formed by wooded hills. The west wall is sheer rock precipice. A creek flowing through the canyon plunges over a ledge in a small cataract about ten feet high.

Bubbling from the bottom of the west wall is Silver Spring in the shade of a tall juniper tree. At the foot of this tree is a grave marked by slabs of stone at head and foot. This is the grave of an outlaw. Five hundred dollars in gold is buried in a tin can at the head of it. But let that go for the present.

Up the canyon and south of Silver Spring at a distance of exactly one mile and three tenths is Gum Spring. Between these two springs somewhere⁠—and you may have trouble here, as the canyon floor is overgrown with brush⁠—lie scattered in the grass the remains of a burned wagon. Probably all the charred woodwork has rotted away by now, but the rusty old iron felloe-rims, axles, springs, and hubs, slightly imbedded, perhaps, in the soil, should be there yet.

From Silver Spring to Gum Spring, the west wall of the canyon curves inward to form a shallow cove. At the deepest point of this concave space and a little out from the wall⁠—three feet or such a matter⁠—stands a slender stone which, as it will doubtless strike you at once, resembles a small obelisk. As a detail, it may be added that this stone is three feet high, squarely shaped, and one foot thick. On the east face of this rock pillar, carved deeply as with a chisel, are two crosses one above the other and standing out clearly to the eye. When you locate this rock of the two crosses, you may regard the three million as all but in your pocket.

Now, at this rock, face Davis Mountain and step twenty paces east. You will find yourself at a point on a straight north-and-south line between Silver Spring and Gum Spring. And you will notice the wreckage of the burned wagon just in front of you. Stop right here. This is the spot. You will be standing directly above the buried riches.

All, you see, just as clear as daylight.

Buried here in the Davis Mountain Canyon, according to the story, is the pillage of many robberies in old Mexico and the Southwest. A cigar box full of diamonds that were stolen from the vaults of a bank in Monterey and that once glittered on the dusky beauties of that rich old city beyond the Rio Grande. Two statuary figures of pure gold, one of the Saviour and the other of the Virgin Mary, that once occupied sanctuary niches in the great cathedral at Matamoras. Sacks of gold and silver money. Thirty-nine bars of solid gold bullion and several rawhide aparejos containing ninety thousand Mexican dollars captured in an attack on a smuggler train in Skeleton Canyon. The value of three million dollars placed on the treasure was the estimate of the dying outlaw who is supposed to have taken part in the robberies and the burial of the loot. It took a four-horse team, according to this freebooter, to haul the treasure to its secret hiding place.

Anyone who ever happens to unearth the treasure need not be surprised to find a few feet below the surface a skull and white, mouldering human bones. This will be the skeleton of a Mexican whom the outlaws hired, on promise of a rich share, to freight the treasure in, and who was murdered and buried with it when his labour was completed. In this, the robbers followed the best tradition of the old buccaneering sea rovers who buried their gold on lonely tropical islands, the dead man’s lips being sealed upon the secret of the treasure and his ghost forever after keeping watch and ward above it.

Down in Sonora, a smuggler train was making ready to start for Tucson with what may have been the richest cargo ever to cross the international line. Great secrecy had been observed. Since Curly Bill’s massacre of the smugglers in Skeleton Canyon, the Mexicans had grown wary. But while preparations for the journey were being made, a swarthy fellow fluent in Spanish, boisterously friendly and with money to spend, was busily hobnobbing and drinking with the smugglers. This was Jim Hughes. A veteran of Curly Bill’s robber expeditions, Hughes was a sly, intriguing man, adept in treacheries, but as bold as he was cunning. A half-breed Mexican himself, his crossed blood made him particularly useful to Curly Bill in scouting out news of the smuggler trains coming north across the border. Acting now as a spy for the San Simon outlaws, Hughes was looked upon by these men of Sonora as a Mexican, an impression that he helped along by scathing denunciations of the whole breed of gringos. He was soon in the confidence of the smugglers and over the tequila in the cantinas had little difficulty in worming from them all their plans. The smugglers were to follow the old trail through Skeleton Canyon. They were to market gold bullion in Tucson. The pack sacks of their mules were to be loaded with dobe dollars on one side and an equal weight of bar gold on the other. This information set the spy’s heart thumping. When the smuggler train set out on the trail, Jim Hughes, far ahead, was riding hard for the San Simon.

When Hughes arrived in Galeyville, Curly Bill was in Charleston. No time was left to report to the outlaw chieftain, and Hughes determined to enrich himself by a coup of his own. Hastily assembling a small band of outlaws, he headed for Skeleton Canyon. Where the canyon opens into the San Simon Valley, he placed his men in ambush in the mesquite along the low canyon wall. Who the men with Hughes were has been a matter of dispute. Milt Hicks and Jack McKenzie certainly; Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds possibly; Ike and Billy Clanton probably. There was one other whose identity is not known. The question of the presence of Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds had an important bearing on the story, later to evolve, of buried treasure at Davis Mountain.

Down through Skeleton Canyon over the Peloncillo Mountains came the Mexican smuggler train, mule bells jingling in the morning sunlight. A half mile from the mouth of the canyon and an equal distance below the Devil’s Kitchen, the scene of Curly Bill’s murderous exploit of a month before, the fifteen Mexicans halted for lunch. While their coffee simmered on a little camp fire and they sat eating on the grass, the canyon wall above them flamed with crashing rifles. Three Mexicans fell dead. Panic seized the others. They sprang on their ponies. Down the canyon they galloped in the midst of a mad welter of pack mules stampeding with wildly jangling bells. Three more Mexicans were killed, it is said, before the smugglers went racing out of the mouth of the canyon and escaped across the San Simon Valley.

Zwing Hunt, it is said, was struck in the shoulder and brought down by a bullet fired by the Mexicans in their flight. Also, it is said, Billy Grounds carried his wounded comrade to an oak tree at the canyon’s mouth and laid him on the ground in the shade. There, it is said, Billy Grounds dressed the wound after bathing it with water fetched from the creek in his hat. It is a pretty story, and it gave the tree, which stands now in Ross Sloan’s corral, the name of the Outlaw’s Oak.

The Mexicans routed, Jim Hughes and his men mounted their ponies and went helter-skelter in pursuit of the pack mules to kill them and save the treasure. The terror-stricken mules had rushed out of the canyon and were running in every direction across the San Simon. Lumbering under their heavy loads of silver money and gold bullion, the animals, one by one, were soon overtaken and shot. Only one mule escaped.

What to do with the ponderous treasure that had fallen into their hands became the problem of the outlaws. It was plainly impossible for six or eight men to carry it away on their ponies. They decided to cache it, it is said, and leave it until such time as they could return for it with a wagon. The dead mules lay here and there over a wide area, some a mile apart. It was slow work to rifle the aparejos and carry the money and gold bars into the canyon. But the job was completed at last, and the spoils of the fight, it is declared, were buried under a group of three live oaks near the mouth of the canyon.

The value of the loot of this robbery has been variously estimated. The Mexican money stolen, according to one story, amounted to $90,000, and the gold bars numbered thirty-nine.

The treasure was lifted by the outlaws within the next few days, it is supposed, and under the guidance of Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds hauled in a four-horse wagon, driven by a Mexican, to the Davis Mountain Canyon and reburied in a pit already half filled with robber loot brought by Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds out of Mexico. The Mexican teamster, it is said, was murdered and the wagon burned.

Whatever may be confused or uncertain in this Skeleton Canyon story, it is a fact that skeletons of the dead mules lie about the San Simon Valley near the canyon’s mouth even now, and the rawhide aparejos are still found here and there, rotted by the rains and suns of years. Certain, too, it is that, for many years after the fight, Mexican silver dollars, scattered broadcast by the runaway mules, were picked up all over the country. Cowboys at the San Simon ranch played poker all the next winter with the money they found in the Skeleton Canyon neighbourhood. Every now and then, even today, these tarnished old silver pieces are discovered, and only a little while ago, Mr. Joseph Wheeler, wealthy cattle man, whose ranch is within a few miles of the canyon, found six coins that are relics of the attack on the smuggler train nearly a half century ago.

A mysterious old German appeared in Skeleton Canyon early in the ’nineties. He built a little hut at the forks above the Devil’s Kitchen and for two years lived alone in his wilderness hermitage. Who he was, or even his name, never was learned, and he is known in the buried treasure tradition only as the Old Dutchman. But the Old Dutchman was a busy fellow, and he was forever digging holes. There was little travel through Skeleton in those days and few people ever saw him. But an occasional cowboy, combing the hills for cattle during a roundup, would stop and talk with the Old Dutchman smoking his pipe beside his cabin door. From stray hints dropped in these infrequent conversations with cowboys grew a story that the Old Dutchman had been with Jim Hughes in the attack on the smuggler train and since that day had served ten years in some penitentiary. Now, as it was supposed, having recently regained his freedom, he had come back to find the treasure buried by the outlaws.

If the Old Dutchman was with Hughes, he should have known, of course, the spot at which the plunder of the robbery had been cached. But evidently he did not know or he would not have spent two years hunting for it. But, at any rate, one day the Old Dutchman was gone. He had vanished into the mystery out of which he had come, and nothing more has been heard of him from that day to this.

But a half mile below the Devil’s Kitchen under a group of three live oaks on the bank of the creek, he had left a deep hole⁠—the deepest and largest of all the holes ever dug by treasure-hunters in the canyon⁠—and many believed that in this excavation he had at last found the treasure. The ruins of the Old Dutchman’s cabin still stand at the forks of the canyon; the scars of his industry with pick and shovel still pit the ground, and the last hole he dug is still wide and deep. But whether he lifted any treasure is a riddle that remains unanswered.

Though it seems fairly certain that the outlaws themselves removed all their booty from Skeleton Canyon, the story persisted that they had left at least part of it behind. Wherefore, treasure-hunters without end swarmed for years to the canyon. Some were equipped with divining rods. Some placed their faith in the magic of willow wands. Some had taken counsel of old Mexican crones who claimed the power of second sight. Some had consulted Indian witch-doctors. Others still had learned the exact spot at which the treasure could be found from spirit mediums who declared they had received the information direct from the ghosts of the Mexicans murdered in the canyon by the outlaws. But if any of these industrious delvers ever came away from Skeleton with anything more than sore muscles from unwonted work with pick and shovel, no one ever heard of it.

Porter McDonald, long chief of police of Tombstone, aided and abetted in the enterprise by James T. Kingsbury, Tombstone lawyer, received from a secret source several years ago information that he deemed worth investigating. He was led to believe that the treasure was buried on a ledge of the canyon wall within sight of the great hole dug by the Old Dutchman. On his prospecting trip to the canyon, however, he found no more than the others, but he was convinced that a violent earthquake that shook all that part of Arizona in 1886 had hopelessly entombed the hiding place of the treasure under tons of rocks toppled from the canyon wall.

Davis Mountain, far-off peak of purple mystery, begins now to loom imposingly through the haze of this buried treasure romance.

But before the story starts off on the trail for this rounded, bald, granite sugar-loaf, a murdered man must rise from the dead. Zwing Hunt, dangerously shot in the Stockton ranch fight in which Billy Grounds was killed, escaped, it will be remembered, from a Tombstone hospital, and a little later, Hugh Hunt, his brother, reported his death by Indians. The body was identified by men who had known him, and some dead man is sleeping today in a lonely Arizona canyon with a juniper tree for headstone, on which is carved Zwing Hunt’s name.

But Zwing Hunt, risen in marvellous resurrection, appeared in his proper person a few weeks afterward, according to his uncle, at his old home in San Antonio. He lived, it is said, only a short time after his return and died from the old wound he had received in the fight at the Stockton ranch. But he lived long enough, apparently, to set going the strange story of Davis Mountain and its buried outlaw gold.

When Zwing Hunt was about to die, he telegraphed, it is said, to his uncle, who lived in some other part of Texas, to come to him. His uncle, whose name has not survived in the tale, arrived.

“We came out of Mexico with two four-horse wagons loaded with plunder.”⁠—This is Zwing Hunt’s deathbed story as related by his uncle.⁠—“Our raid had lasted three months. We numbered twenty-nine men when we went in. Only eighteen of us got out alive. In Monterey, while Billy Grounds and I sat on our horses shooting up and down the street, our partners robbed the bank. They brought out two gunny sacks filled with money and a cigar box full of diamonds. We took possession of Matamoras and sacked the town. From the cathedral there we brought away statues of the Virgin Mary and the Saviour. These figures are lifesize and of pure gold. When we got back on this side of the Rio Grande, we got rid of some of our loot. The rest we hauled to Davis Mountain.

“One of our men who had been shot in Mexico died at Davis Mountain and we buried him by Silver Spring. Five hundred dollars in gold had fallen to his share. He had risked his life for that money, and at last he gave his life for it. We decided to let him keep it forever, and we buried the dead man’s money in a tin can at the head of the grave.”

When he had finished his story, Hunt, it is said, wrote out instructions as to how the treasure could be found. Then he drew a map on a piece of writing paper, and on this map he set down in their relative positions Davis Mountain, Silver Spring, Gum Spring, the wreck of the burned wagon, the rock of the two crosses, and the spot at which the treasure was buried. This old map is still in existence, and several copies of it are owned in Arizona.

Hunt, as his uncle declared, added several casual details to his story. He said that the outlaws bathed in the waterfall in the canyon, that they played poker in a cave on Davis Mountain, and that, from the mountain, with a pair of field glasses, they could see into New Mexico. Of Davis Mountain, he said, according to his uncle, “We called it Davis Mountain because a man named Davis was killed and is buried there.”

But Zwing Hunt failed to say where Davis Mountain was.

He told, it might seem, everything worth knowing about the treasure and how to find it except the one big thing that was the key to all the rest. His uncle, it seems, did not question him on this point. Why he didn’t seems almost as puzzling an enigma as Davis Mountain itself. Except for the passing mention that from Davis Mountain one could see into New Mexico, there was nothing in the outlaw’s alleged narrative that gave the slightest hint as to the location of this mystery peak. And, according to his uncle, when Zwing Hunt closed his eyes for the last long sleep, he left Davis Mountain the great sphinx riddle of the story of buried outlaw gold.

So you see the directions left by the dying outlaw are, after all, not quite so clear as you may at first have believed.

Virgil Boucher, an elder brother of Billy Grounds, whose real name was Billy Boucher, fell under the spell of the romantic tale Zwing Hunt is alleged to have told his uncle. Virgil Boucher came from Texas to Arizona for the first time to hunt the treasure in 1884, bringing with him what purported to be Zwing Hunt’s original map and written directions. For more than thirty years, intermittently, he followed the trail of the treasure, making eighteen expeditions into the mountains of southeastern Arizona⁠—the Chiricahuas, Stein’s Pass, Peloncillo, Guadalupe, and Silver Creek ranges. Failure after failure did not discourage him, and when he died three years ago in Duncan, New Mexico, he still believed, with the unshaken faith of a religious zealot, that the tale of the Davis Mountain treasure was true.

Mrs. Maggie Clinger of San Antonio is Billy Grounds’s sister, and she is troubled with no doubts whatever that the treasure is right where Zwing Hunt’s uncle said Zwing Hunt said it was.

“I’m just as sure about that treasure as that my name is Maggie Clinger,” said Mrs. Maggie Clinger. “I can see Silver Spring, the rock of the two crosses, and all the rest of it just as plain as if I had been in the canyon myself. I know I could walk straight to the spot where the treasure is buried, if,” said Mrs. Maggie Clinger, “I ever got to Davis Mountain.”

Bill Sanders, of West Turkey Creek Canyon, has been one of the most inveterate as well as most optimistic searchers for the treasure. He has lived in southeastern Arizona since early times, and knows the mountains as few men know them. He went on several expeditions with Virgil Boucher. He has acted as guide for a dozen parties of treasure-hunters. He has seen the original Zwing Hunt map and studied the written directions. He, too, has implicit faith in the truth of the story.

“There are Davis Mountains in west Texas,” said Bill Sanders. “But there is no Davis peak. I heard a few months ago that the wreck of a burned wagon had been found on top of a mountain in the Davis group. I went there and spent three weeks. The wreck of an old burned wagon was there, and I couldn’t figure out how it ever got on top of the mountain, but there was nothing in the Davis range that answered in any way Zwing Hunt’s description of the Davis Mountain country.

“But after twenty years of puzzling over Davis Mountain, I believe I have at last identified it. Harris Mountain, in my opinion, is Davis Mountain. I think Zwing Hunt got the two names twisted. Harris Mountain is the eastern gatepost of Turkey Creek Canyon, a few miles from the site of old Galeyville. It is a bald, rounded sugar-loaf. The plains of the San Simon Valley run off from it on the east. The state line of New Mexico is only twenty miles away, and you can see into New Mexico with the naked eye. And there is a tunnel-like cave in Harris Mountain in which the outlaws could have played poker. The grave ‘of a man named Davis’ is not there, but the grave of a man named Harris is. Also the grave of Harris’s wife and two children, all murdered by Apaches in 1873. The Indians carried off Harris’s fifteen-year-old daughter, and she married a buck and had a papoose. She was rescued from the Indians in 1876 by a detachment of the Second Cavalry, and while she was being taken to Fort Bowie she pointed out the spot on the mountain where her family had been massacred. The soldiers found the skeletons and buried them. The peak has been known as Harris Mountain ever since.

“At the foot of Harris Mountain, to the west, is Turkey Creek Canyon, which is not in any feature like the Silver Spring Canyon described by Hunt. But ‘a mile or a mile and a half due west’ of Harris Mountain is a little canyon running up into Round Valley, and I have an idea this is the canyon of the treasure story. I am going to explore this Round Valley Canyon thoroughly, pretty soon, on a hunt for Silver Spring and Gum Spring and the rock of the two crosses.”

Harken now to the words of Rube Hadden of Paradise.

“I knew all the fellows in the fight in Skeleton Canyon,” said Rube. “There were only six. They were Jim Hughes, Milt Hicks, Jack McKenzie, Ike and Billy Clanton, and another fellow, whose name I’ve forgotten. Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds were not within fifty miles of the fight. I heard all about the fight from Hughes, Hicks, and McKenzie a day or two afterward. They got only $4,000 out of the robbery. Of this, $1,400 was in Mexican dollars. The rest was in gold bullion, which they sold. Only three Mexicans were killed. For a few days, Hughes, Hicks, and McKenzie hid the gold bars in a log cabin at the mouth of Cave Creek Canyon below Galeyville and left Al George to watch them, while they hunted up a buyer. When they had disposed of the bullion, the three of them went on a big drunk in Tombstone. Hughes and his bunch buried nothing in Skeleton.

“As for the story of the big treasure buried by Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds at Davis Mountain, it’s pure bunk. I told Virgil Boucher so when he was through here. But he was a nut over this treasure, and God Almighty couldn’t have made him believe the yarn was not true. All this about the cigar box full of diamonds and the lifesize gold figures of the Virgin and Christ is simply bosh. Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds never were in Mexico in their lives.

“As outlaws, they didn’t amount to much. I knew Zwing Hunt when he was driving a lumber wagon for Morse’s sawmill. He was a better mule-skinner than he was a bandit. Billy Grounds, whom I knew also, was only nineteen when he was killed. If these two boys had had all the experience as bold freebooters in Mexico they are credited with in this fool story, they would never have acted like scared amateurs when they tried to stick up the stamp mill at Charleston.

“Zwing Hunt was killed by Apaches. There’s no doubt about that. Billy Breakenridge and Phil Montague and several others who had known Hunt well identified the body. So, you can bet everything you’ve got Zwing Hunt never got back to his old home in San Antonio and never told any deathbed story. The way I figure out this buried treasure romance is that Zwing Hunt’s uncle faked it. It sounds like a marijuana pipe dream. There is no Davis Mountain. It is not on any map, and nobody in this country ever heard of a peak by that name. In my opinion, it never had any existence except in the crazy imagination of Zwing Hunt’s uncle.”

But don’t be disheartened by any such talk as this. Don’t let a crabbed old pessimist like Rube Hadden dampen your ardour or shatter your rainbow dreams. Remember that the Cocos Island story, the world’s most gorgeous legend of buried treasure, rests on facts just as nebulous as these, and though the Cocos Island treasure never has been lifted, faith in it has burned like a steady flame for a hundred years. The clear-strain treasure hunter never loses faith or hope.

So, ho, for buried treasure once again! Saddle the ponies and slap the blanket rolls and the grub and the old camp kit on the pack mule. And don’t forget the picks and shovels. Out yonder across the desert a fortune of three million dollars is waiting for you⁠—maybe. All you have to do⁠—perhaps⁠—to make it yours is first to find Davis Mountain.