Superstition Mountains

The Pima wouldn't go into them. The mountains east of Phoenix — a volcanic caldera seven miles wide, raised twenty million years ago into spires and canyons the color of dried blood — were known to the Pima as the place of fear, and the Anglo farmers who cut hay for Fort McDowell in the 1860s translated that fear into the name: Sierra de las Supersticiones, the Mountains of Superstition. The Apaches who held the range in the nineteenth century treated it as sacred and defended it as stronghold — the Massacre Grounds at its western edge is where, legend says, the Peralta family's last gold train was wiped out in 1848.

The mountains' fame is the Lost Dutchman — Jacob Waltz's mine somewhere in the western wilderness near Weaver's Needle, searched for by nine thousand people a year and fatal to a steady few of them — but the range's real hold is older and stranger: a wilderness of cliff dwellings and caves whose inhabitants preceded the Apache by centuries, the Salado or Hohokam who left their structures in the canyon walls and their name unknown.

The Superstition Wilderness is a hundred sixty thousand acres of the roughest terrain in Arizona — the Bureau of Mines mapped the treasure diggings and found hundreds of holes dug in sight of Weaver's Needle by men who'd followed maps, psychics, and rumors into the heat. The bodies are periodic — the Dutchman hunters who go in in June and come out in a coroner's report are the range's modern toll, the legend still collecting.

The mountains' name is the file — the range the Pima feared, the Apache defended, the Dutchman died for, and the desert keeps. Whatever is in the Superstitions, the range's two hundred years of documented dead — massacred miners, ambushed troopers, lost hunters — is the only gold anyone's proven is there.