Treasure hunting may be its own reward

It's a trending item on the Internet, the wealthy New Mexican who reportedly hid several million dollars worth of gold somewhere in the wilds of our fair state.

Suffering from cancer at the time, the elderly gent is now happily cancer free, but has no plans to recoup the gold, nor to tell anyone where it is. The mystery remains to be solved, and the prize claimed, by the person or persons who unravel the clues.

It seems like a child's fantasy game, but this is the real thing, and it branches into the subject of buried and hidden treasures, in general. Such liquid assets are not confined to islands or barrier reefs off of the Florida Keys. In fact, it is likely that the majority of accessible pirate treasures have already been claimed.

I say that only because much of the technology available since 1950 would aid one searching for sunken ships, watery deposits of treasure, and related items. Not so, perhaps, for treasure hunting in the Southwest. If one fails to find the treasure recently hidden and much publicized, or if that treasure is already discovered and off the table, does that mean that treasure hunting in the Land of Enchantment is a waste of time?

Of course not; that's a rhetorical question. Treasure Tales of New Mexico website reveals no less than seven sites where adventurers may seek to find treasure, mostly associated with lost mines. In addition to that map, the New Mexico Legends site yields the following list, as just a starter:

• Caballo Mountains — Also called Horse Mountains;
• Capitan Mountains — A huge store of Aztec Indian treasure;
• Cimarron — along the Santa Fe Trail;
• Colfax County — Point of Rocks;
• Columbia — A cave, said to filled with a pile of gold Spanish coins;
• Cooney, Grant County — Long ago a stagecoach was robbed;
• Doubtful Canyon — Another cache from a held up stagecoach;
• Grants — More than $100,000 taken from several train robberies;
• Mount Dora — Devoy's Peak near Mount Dora was a favorite hideout for outlaws;
• Taos County — Gold bars have been missing for many decades at Tres Piedras;
• Tijeras Canyon — near Tijeras Canyon on I-40.

Some of these locations seem, frankly, unfathomable to me. The last is a good example; how everyone could miss a treasure so close to Albuquerque and the Interstate is beyond me. On the other hand, it doesn't take much room to place even a million in gold, does it?

Since a number of the above treasures have their source in robberies of trains or stagecoaches, I wonder if the old time outlaws, like the pirates supposedly did, were in the habit of killing a man and leaving him there to guard the treasure?

Well, summer weather is upon us; if you have the time and the inclination, there is a good list of places to get started in your treasure hunting. Be careful about private land laws, and don't get yourself afoul of the state and national laws governing what you can and can't do on public lands. Happy hunting.

Clyde Davis is a Presbyterian pastor and teacher at Clovis Christian High School. He can be contacted at:

[email protected]