Adolph Ruth, the elderly treasure hunter who walked into the Superstitions in 1931 chasing the Dutchman's mine and vanished — and the skull, found months later, with two holes in it.
I've told you the golden legends of this mountain. Now let me tell you a true one, and a chilling one — the kind that gave these peaks their dark reputation. Because people don't just dream about the Superstitions. Sometimes they walk into them, and they do not walk out.
In the summer of 1931, an old man named Adolph Ruth came to these mountains. He was in his sixties, a determined amateur treasure hunter, and he believed — he was sure — that he had gotten hold of an old map to the lost Peralta mine, the Dutchman's gold. Friends and family worried; he was elderly, and this was killing country in June. But Adolph Ruth would not be talked out of it. He had his map, he had his dream, and he set off alone into the canyons to find the gold at last.
And he vanished. Simply gone. A search went out — men combed the canyons in that terrible heat — and they found his camp, but no Adolph Ruth. Days passed, then weeks, then the searchers gave him up for dead somewhere in that vast maze of rock, and the desert kept its silence.
And then, that December, months later, a search party found a skull. Human. And when the experts examined it — this is the detail that iced the blood of everyone who heard it — that skull had two holes in it. Holes that looked, they said, like they'd been made by a gun. The rest of his remains turned up later, some distance away. And near them, or so the tale runs, was found a note in his handwriting, with a few triumphant Latin words — "I came, I saw, I conquered" — as if the old man had actually found the mine before the end came for him. His map, though? Gone. Never recovered.
Was he murdered for his map, out there in the lonely canyons? Did he shoot himself, or was it something else, and the "bullet holes" just the desert's tricks on old bone? Nobody ever proved a thing. But the story of Adolph Ruth — the old dreamer who found his gold and lost his life, or his head, in the same lonely canyons — went around the world, and it fixed the reputation these mountains carry to this day: that the Superstitions guard their gold, and they exact a price. Look up at those quiet cliffs, friend. A lot of hopeful men have gone in there. Not all of them came back out. Roll on.
Photo: Alan English CPA from Scottsdale, Arizona 85254, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0
