Author Archives: mandala56

Morning blogsters:

Like most of the people I’ve gotten to know over the past quarter-century, I spent those years generally knowing the location of the Lost Adams Diggings.

I spent my winter nights researching, picking apart the accounts, studying topo maps and air photos through magnifiers, pondering and speculating.  I’d spend a lot of time in archives and libraries reading microfilm of correspondence between Army officers of the 1850s and 60s and newspaper accounts from the late 1800s searching for hints.  Then I’d be planning access and egress to whatever place I knew it was, come snow melt.

Chomping at the bit to get out there and check it out.  Sometimes not willing to wait, burning up with cabin fever I’d snowshoe in, knowing I couldn’t tell anything about it under all that snow, but just unable to contain myself and wait.

For me it was a lot of different places over the years.  Good canyons, mountains, mesas I was glad I went into (with a couple of exceptions), but never the Adams.  Which was okay, because I’d no sooner checked one out and found it lacking before another jumped off the map at me and pronounced itself the Adams with the same certainty as the last one.

Those were good years.

But the 1998 search sort of ended all that.  I’d made promises to a lot of people who searched with me, who’d grown tired of Fox Mountain, that if we didn’t turn it during that long series of climbs and unclimbs giving it everything we had, I’d concede Fox wasn’t it and try some other places.

We tried a few, though Fox still lingered for me and I couldn’t get excited about them.

Meanwhile my friends were growing old and the fire was going out of their bellies to some extent.  The appeal of long climbs and treks with heavy packs, poking and digging around, sleeping on the ground in places where the best rocks under the bag still weren’t soft enough to allow any sleep just dwindled for them.

Then along came Y2K.  My attention was diverted and my finances vanished.  From that point forward what searching I did came out of the certainties of strangers who knew where it was and wanted me along because of what I’d already done.  Wanted me there because I’d searched so long, written so much about it, and partly, I always suspected, to have me there to rub it in that they’d found it when I’d failed to do so.

I’ve always been picky about the people I go to the woods with.  If a man drops his trash, kills snakes, makes a lot of noise, doesn’t take care of hygiene matters in a way I approve of, I don’t go with him again.  If he does things to cause unnecessary risk to himself or others, or if he’s afraid to take the necessary risks, if he shirks camp duties, I don’t go with him again.

I ran into a lot of those kinds of people after Y2K, and I could never lock onto a location where I KNEW it was, as I always had before.

One night at my Y2K cabin, Mel came out and showed me a relatively flat nugget that must have weighed close to ten ounces he’d picked up in a canyon.  He was sure it was the Adams canyon, but someone else had told him about it in confidence, so he couldn’t share the info.

I didn’t get to examine the nugget closely, didn’t get to look at it through a magnifier.  It was near dark and I just got to hold it for a couple of minutes in the dusk trying to figure out what it was about it that didn’t feel right.

That canyon and that nugget became a source of contention between Mel and me for the next several years.  The nugget went into the hands of the guy who told him about the canyon, who claimed he sold it in Albuquerque for $500, which angered Mel and frustrated me.  Mel never went back to the canyon and the guy who took him there wasn’t all that interested.  But Mel claimed until the day he died that he was convinced the canyon was the Adams.

So it’s been several years since I’ve burned with an idea about the Adams.

But there’s a canyon creeping back in to my mind.  I find myself sneaking around on myself studying maps and thinking about it.  It’s not a new place for me.  I’ve done some searching within a couple of miles of there, but for some reason my mind was locked on target a bit off center from this one.  I just never went over the right ridges, never poked into it during the pair of decades I’ve been around the place.

But it has all the right stuff, or appears to.  At least until I can get in there and turn a few rocks over, pan a bit, it’s where the Adams is.

Too bad Mel couldn’t have lived to see it.

Jack

Hi blogsters:

I never see that phrase about fish without a flash of memory.

During the 1950s drought stock ponds were drying up all over the southwest.  There came a day a lot like this one, though it was probably warmer, when a kid named David Cagle and I were wandering around the ruins of cow country and came across a pond that was maybe five acres of surface and about three inches deep in water.  Every square foot of water had a fish flopping in it.  I’ve never seen anything like it.

A few hundred yards from the pond was an abandoned barn where we’d noticed an old galvanized washtub someone had probably used to water calves when there was still water, or feed them when there was still food.  We hoofed over to that barn and snagged the tub, waded into that fish and cow-mud calf deep throwing fish into the tub.

We glowed over that tubfull of fish all the way home, him on one handle, me on the other, thinking how deeeeeelighted our folks would be with the treasure we were bringing them.

Both of us smelled a joyous combination of cow-mud and fish when we got to David’s house, went in through the kitchen door and watched his mama shriek even before she turned around and saw the fish.

“Get those fish out of this house!”

We got them out and she followed us into the yard to hose him down before she’d allow him inside.  Me, she ordered to take those fish with me and head down the road.

My own mom took a more circumspect view of things, mainly because she wasn’t home when I got there.  I cleaned myself up and filled the kitchen sink with all the fish it would hold and started killing and gutting them.  The job was far enough along to make quitting a moot point when she got home.

I gutted a lot of fish over the next couple of days, though I did move the operation out into the back yard.

My mom’s one of those kind of people who remember such things after she can’t remember her own name.  I’m not sure I’ve ever returned to her company during the past 50 years without being reminded of it.

Give a person a fish and he might not appreciate it, but he won’t starve until the fish is digested.

But give a person a fishing pole and he’ll almost surely hook an ear or nostril before it’s over.

I had a different, longer blog entry I’ve tried to post a couple of times today about other matters, but my comp froze up every time I hit the ENTER button, so you’ll have to settle for this.

Jack

Hi blogsters:

Hope you’re getting yourselves all primed up to eat a lot of flour, sugar, poultry, pumpkin innards and yams in various stages of decomposition.

On the way out to the boonies the other day I picked up a Gallup Independent newspaper off the shelf at the Acoma Pueblo gas and flour shop.  The headlines grabbed me.

Seems we New Mexicans are only forth in the nation as the US distributor of sexually transmitted diseases, but we’re struggling and elbowing our way upward.  Evidently a lot of us aren’t yet doing our fair share, are shirking our statistical duties and obligations to make it unanimous.

I’ll admit I’ve been remiss and can only say I’ve been sort of busy working on the numbers and haven’t had seen myself as having time to get out to Gallup or Farmington to try to contract a case.  Syphilis appears to be the most romantically appealing out there.  Seems there are almost as many secondary cases floating around as there are primary cases.  Which means there are plenty of New Mexicans who have the good sense to hang on tight to it, once they’ve got it, and not take any chances on losing it by going to some sawbones who might be able to rob us of it.

Makes sense.

If a person goes to all the trouble and risk to hang around the places you have to go in order to pick that stuff up, most likely you’re better off keeping the one you’ve got, rather than having to go back and try to get it again because of some nosy interfering medico.

All the rest of you states, eat your hearts out.  Eat our dust.  New Mexico is going to be number one, same as we are on alcohol related automotive deaths.  You’ll never catch us.

Jack

Evening blogsters:

Had a serious case of cabin fever recently.  This morning around five I went down to Albuquerque, joined friends and headed out west, almost to Arizona.

There’s a hidden spring about fifteen miles off the pavement, an adobe ruin where vigilantes from Quemado killed a horsethief in the 1880s I’d been threatening to take them all to for a long time.  We tromped around hills pecking on rocks… brought home a lot more weight in quartz, worked flint, etc, than we went out there with.  Found a couple of ancient ruin sites I’d missed on previous trips.

Long, tiring trip, but worth every minute of it.  The fever went down about sunset as we headed back east.

Jack

Next day’s post:

I thought I’d tell you a bit more about those undocumented ruins we found yesterday, and other matters.

The horse-thief dwelling was evidently located just beside one of the outlets of the several springs coming out of cliff wall made up of ancient river bed delta/sea shore deposition.  There’s cause to believe the vigilantes dug a hole and burned most of his possessions after killing him, not anticipating the erosion factor.

An arroyo now cuts through the ashes and debris exposing the remains of what he had that the vigilantes didn’t want, along with a lot of spent .45 Long Colt hulls, metal objects severely corroded because of the alkaline ash, and not a lot else unless he’s buried back in there further, which didn’t interest us enough to try to find out.

The ruin sites are a lot more interesting.  That hilltop has been intermittently occupied throughout the known history of human beings in the southwest.  One of the people with me found a partially finished axe head, the workmanship having all the traits of the Clovis, or Folsum-Midland period, while hundreds of potsherds scattered across the terrain ranged in age from the earliest pottery makers to late enough to put a glaze on the pots.  Clovis stone work is 10,000 to 12,000 years old and marks a time when men really demonstrated some surprising skills in the rock tool making profession.

But the site also had a lot of evidence of youngsters during the times since squatting here and there chipping away, learning to make stones look like arrowheads, scrapers and other tools.

The site’s been walked over by cattle for a century or more, so everything’s fairly well destroyed on the surface.  In a few years there’ll be nothing left to see there.  However, sites of that sort are protected by Federal Statutes against being bothered by anything but cattle, so that part’s okay.

You don’t want to get caught doing more than walking around over those kinds of sites unless they’re on private land.  The archeology religion demands they be left completely alone, except by cows and archies.  But there’s no money for scholarly diggings these days, and the archies figure they’ve learned about all they’re going to about our ancients, so legal destruction of the sites are left almost entirely to hooves.

However, it was an interesting, revealing, exuberant day full of fun and the energy of discovery.

Jack

There’s a supreme law of the land in the US.

It’s called the US Constitution.

Section. 8.

Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

Clause 10: To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;

Clause 11: To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

Clause 12: To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

Clause 13: To provide and maintain a Navy;

Clause 14: To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

Clause 15: To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

Clause 16: To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

Clause 17: To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;–And

Clause 18: To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

There’s no such thing as a Democratic, not Republican war mentioned in that Constitution.  There’s no such thing, no such power granted in that document to the President of the US to wage war.

Wars are declared by Congress.

CONGRESS:  To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;

CONGRESS:  To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

Like it or not, that is the supreme law of the land.

THE PRESIDENT:  Clause 8: Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:–“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

That is what the US Constitution says about the war in Iraq.  It’s what the US Constitution says about this president of the US.

That is what the US Constitution says about who conducts wars and punishes pirates, et al.

That is what the US Constitution says about whether this president is fulfilling his oath of office.

That little tributary channel that got me expounding about things of no interest to you non-southwestern blogsters diverted me from filling your hearts with adventure and your heads with more yarns about treasure hunting.

Here’s something to get me back on track.

Early in the ’90s I came across a canyon that satisfied a lot of the needs to be the Lost Adams Diggings.  It had most of the right stuff men have searched for during the last 150 years.  The place occupied several years of my life, took me through a couple of lady friends and wore two good vehicles down to a small nub.

The place was located on a mountain in Catron County, New Mexico.  Fox Mountain.

One weekend in ’93 or ’94, I took off in my old Mitzubishi Montero with the intention of spending a couple of weeks down there solving it all.  I was about twenty miles out of Grants, NM, when a hose sprung a leak and the Mitzu began steaming under the hood.  I nursed it in to a parts house in Grants, feeding it water every mile or so, got the hose and changed it.  All during a light rainfall.

I was chilled to the bone when I finished, my clothes soaked, but I was in a hurry to get down there and set up camp, maybe get some work done before nightfall.  I didn’t change out of those wet clothes, just headed on down.

By the time I got to the place I was going to set up camp and trek in I could tell I’d been another of the many fools I’ve been.  I was running a fever and my chest was in a vice.  I decided to just throw down a sleeping bag and pull a pancho over me to let this thing go on over.

That night I burned alive with fever.  I was hallucinating and getting the blind staggers when I tried to walk.  Finally, about mid-day the following day I knew I’d best try to get out of there while I could.

I made it back to Albuquerque and crashed on the living room floor of a lady friend for several days getting over pneamonia.  While I was lying there she told me the news.  Somewhere down there in the same area as my claim there was a couple, Gary and Judy Wilson, missing.  Search and Rescue was scouring the area for them.

I’d never met Gary and Judy Wilson, but I knew their sign.  They were woodcutters, and I knew the kind of soft-drinks they preferred, their footprints, their habits from studying where they’d been ahead of me.

It was about nine months later when their bodies were discovered a couple of canyons over from where I was working, folded up yen/yang style together buried carefully in an ancient ruin in a 4x4x4 hole by someone who knew an awfully lot about forensics and police investigations.  A bear dug them up and ate away all the soft tissue, leaving them for elk hunters to find.

Gary and Judy Wilson were a part of a series of homicides committed within a 25 mile radius of that place over a period of a couple of years.  Those homicides remain unsolved today, but the reasons they were probably murdered were a matter of constant problems for me for several years, working that mountain.

It took a lot of the fun out of it, being constantly stalked by folks who didn’t want me on that mountain, and for the law enforcement people who appeared to be cooperating with them.  They warned me off every way they knew how short of putting me into a 4x4x4 hole they already had prepared in another ancient ruin.  (Disturbed me some, I’ll confess, when I stumbled across that vacant hole sitting there waiting for me)

I always figured someday a homicide investigator would want to ask me some questions about that weekend Gary and Judy vanished.  I had a lot of discussions with them about other matters, but that one never interested them.  The prevailing opinion expressed by law enforcement personnel working in that county was that I needed to stay the hell off that mountain.

I’ll probably have some more anecdotes about incidents over the next few years in later blog entries.

Jack

Afternoon blogsters:

Yesterday I told you a bit about a happening early in the No Name Canyon debacle.  It was a beginning, of sorts.  But myriad other tales of foolishness were to come out of that channel before any sort of conclusion.  The lightning storm experienced just elevated the level of priority for solving the mysteries there.

A while after the lightning/shovel event my old buddy Mel King and I were in that canyon determined to move a lot of dirt some easier way than with a pick and shovel.  I’ve told you a bit about Mel in an earlier blog entry here.

The bottom of that canyon’s already been described as V-bottomed, which is was.  But in the small box where the channel began there was a sedimentation layer I guessed to be 6-8 feet deep, judging from the angle where the walls would intersect underneath the surface.  It was clear that water ceased to move enough of that sedimentation to stratify things a long time before all the current material arrived on the scene.  I’d been getting all the stuff from the earlier visit I described out of the soil about a foot below the surface, which didn’t involve hardpan or bedrock.

Mel and I were relatively convinced the bottom of the Vee underneath all that unstratified material would be a glory hole.  Our reasoning was that in the distant past there was enough water movement to create the channel, so it should have dumped the richest material early and taken it as deep as it could go.

Neither of us had an explosives license, dynamite had become a hard-to-get commodity, equipment other than shovels was out of the question, so we made up a mess of home-made black powder.

Mel, his man-sized son Eric, and I trekked in there with every intention of moving some serious dirt and rock.  We dug down at what we calculated to be the best spot, about 3.5 feet and placed a pound of powder into the hole inside a plastic bottle.  We made a fuse by pouring a powder train into a masking tape tube and stuck that down into the powder vessel.

Meanwhile, Eric gathered as many musk melon sized boulders as he could find and we carefully placed them around and above the charge up to about a foot below the surface with the fuse sticking a few inches above the covering material.

A herd of geniuses at work.

I lit a cigarette and slid the unlighted end about an inch down around the end of the fuse, and we hurried down canyon about 75 yards just around a bend to wait for the big event.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

After about half an hour it was clear we had a problem.  Someone had to go try to see if the cig had gone out, or what.  Naturally, we all went, each trying to say a bit behind the others.

We arrived on the scene, bent down over the fuse and all jumped backward in rolling runs down canyon.  There was smoke coming out of that hole.

We repeated this sequence twice before we decided we’d just come back another day and try to figure out what happened.

Never did get around to trying to explode that canyon bottom again.

Jack