The Silver Madonna and Other Tales of America's Greatest Lost Treasures (8 page)

8

The Lost Treasure of Cancino Arroyo

Cancino Arroyo is a winding, often deep gully located in Rio Arriba County in north-central New Mexico between the tiny town of Tres Piedras and the Rio Grande. There exists a compelling tale of dozens of gold ingots believed to be worth millions of dollars buried under a few feet of sand and gravel at the bottom of this arroyo. All who possessed intimate details of this lost treasure are long dead, though some of their offspring claim to have an idea of the general region where the treasure might be found. Well over a century of erosion and deposition, along with the soft, porous bottom of the arroyo, has hampered recovery operations that have been undertaken during the past decades.

Tres Piedras is a small village located about twenty-five miles from the Rio Grande. In this region, a number of deep, water-eroded arroyos wind their way from the higher elevation to the historic river. Water flows in these arroyos ephemerally, the result of occasional rains that visit the area. Most of the time, however, they are dry.

This tale has it origins in Cimarron, New Mexico, on August 9, 1880. Cimarron is located sixty miles east of Tres Piedras. A man named Porter Stockton, along with a companion named West, became embroiled in a dispute that ended in a gunfight. Stockton, a local ne’er-do-well with a reputation for robbery and murder, killed two men. Knowing he was in serious trouble, Stockton, accompanied by West, mounted his horse and fled westward to a hideout in Gallegos Canyon not far from Tres Piedras.

The two outlaws eventually crossed the Rio Grande and, after reaching the opposite bank, noted that storm clouds were forming in the northwest. After they had traveled another two miles a light rain began falling. For the rest of the day, the rain grew in intensity, making travel difficult. By nightfall, a raging storm struck the area and the dense rainfall reduced visibility to only a few feet. Much of the trail the two men were following was washed out and they soon found themselves lost. Seeking shelter, Stockton and West turned into a deep arroyo and followed its winding course, hoping it would come out on higher ground.

Unknown to Stockton and West, three riders were less than an hour behind them on the same trail. Like the two outlaws, these three men were lost and in search of shelter from the storm. Trailing behind the three men were two heavily laden mules on lead ropes, each one carrying a fortune in gold ingots. Weeks earlier, these same men had followed directions they had derived from an old and faded parchment map and located a large cache of Spanish gold hidden in an abandoned mine shaft far to the southwest in Arizona. After loading as many ingots as their leather panniers could hold, the trio set out on the long journey to their homes in Colorado, where they intended to sell the treasure and make plans to return to the cache and retrieve the remainder. They were less than one hundred miles from their destination when they were caught in the heavy storm.

Since none of them had visited that part of New Mexico before, the three newcomers became confused and disoriented when the trail they were following was washed away. Spotting the now vague tracks of Stockton and West, who had passed that way a short time earlier, and believing the riders must be familiar with the terrain, the trio turned into the arroyo and followed them.

As Stockton and West traveled up the arroyo, they noted that it grew deeper and narrower, the vertical walls stretching sixty feet high in some places. The normally dry stream bed accommodated a fast-moving current, and the roiling silt and sand bottom was nearly one foot deep and making travel difficult. Noting that the current was getting stronger and the water rising, Stockton suggested they turn around and return to the opening of the arroyo and seek a safer route. As the two outlaws retraced their path, occasional flashes of lighting illuminated the walls of the arroyo.

On rounding a bend in the channel, Stockton and West came face-to-face with the three riders who were making their way up the gully. Stockton assumed the men were part of a posse sent to capture or kill him and West. He yanked his revolver from its holster and fired, charging into the riders as he did so. West followed him.

The surprise encounter rendered the three riders stunned and helpless. Before they could regain their composure, all were lying dead, their bodies partially covered by the rising waters of the arroyo. Stockton and West also shot and killed the three horses and two mules, then fled as fast as they could toward the mouth of the arroyo and on to Gallegos Canyon.

Stockton and West, mistaking the three strangers for lawmen, were unaware that they had just ridden away from a fortune in gold.

As the two outlaws disappeared into the storm, the heavy rain continued to fall and dense sheets of runoff from the nearby slopes flowed into the numerous channels that fed the Rio Grande several miles away. Within an hour after the killing of the three men, Cancino Arroyo was inundated with a raging flash flood, with the surging water rising several feet up the vertical walls. These waters, carrying a heavy load of sediment, washed over the dead men, horses, and gold.

The morning following the intense storm, the high desert around Tres Piedras was bathed in sunshine and cleansed air. Two Mexican sheepherders—an old man and a young boy—awoke from their storm-ravaged sleep. The limb- and grass-thatched lean-to in which they lived afforded scant protection from the downpour of the previous night. As the old man hung blankets out to dry and looked over at the herd of sheep entrusted to his care, he remarked to the boy that he thought he had heard gunfire during the night.

Two hours later, after making certain that none of the sheep were missing, the old man walked over to the rim of Cancino Arroyo and looked into the deep, shaded channel. A stream of water several inches deep still flowed along the bottom, and as the old man’s eyes grew accustomed to the shadows below, he spotted what he thought were the bodies of three men and several horses partially submerged in the sand.

He called the boy over, and the two scrambled down a steep but negotiable bank of the arroyo and walked up to the grisly scene. Cutting open one of the leather packs that had not been completely buried, the sheepherder withdrew an eighteen-inch-long object that he believed to be a piece of iron. Curious, he sliced open the remaining packs only to find more of the same. Having no need for such metal, the herder tossed them to the ground. On an impulse, he stuck one of them in his sash, determined to keep it until such time as he might find a use for it. Finding nothing of value, the herder and the boy climbed back to the rim of the arroyo and returned to the job of caring for the sheep. As the old man passed the lean-to, he withdrew the piece of metal and tossed it inside amid his few belongings.

Later that afternoon, the rains returned. They were lighter than the previous day but lasted well into the night. That evening as the man and boy attempted to keep the cook fire going under the primitive lean-to, Cancino Arroyo was the scene of another flash flood. This time, with waters nearly ten feet deep, the stream raced and crashed along the bottom from wall to wall, sweeping away or covering everything in its path.

Around midmorning of the following day, Dolores Cancino, a rancher and owner of the sheep in the care of the old man and boy, arrived with supplies for the two herders. As he unloaded food and other items, the old man told the rancher what he had found at the bottom of the arroyo. When he had completed his report, he handed Cancino the piece of metal he retrieved. Cancino hefted the ingot, and scraped away at the surface with his thumbnail. A look of surprise washed over him as he realized the object he was holding was composed of almost pure gold.

After assigning the boy to watch over the sheep, Cancino and the old sheepherder returned to the bottom of the arroyo. Wading through the two-feet-deep water, they dug into the mud in an attempt to relocate the bodies of men and animals and the packs of gold. They found nothing. After returning to the top, Cancino decided to spend the night at the camp and make another attempt at finding the gold the next morning when he was certain the flow of water through the arroyo had ceased altogether.

Just after sunrise, Cancino and the old man were back in the arroyo, probing and digging in the sands but finding nothing. Cancino finally decided that the high-velocity waters of the flash flood of the previous night had carried away the corpses of men and animals as well as the packs of gold. Cancino rode a horse along the rim of the arroyo searching the stream bed for some sign. After traveling thirty yards he spotted one of the dead horses partially buried in the sand. Moments later he made his way to the bottom and found two more horses and a mule. The bodies of the three men were nowhere to be seen. None of the gold ingots were found.

One week later, Cancino drove his wagon to Santa Fe and turned the ingot over to a friend who agreed to have it assayed. When the report came in, it stated that the bar was composed of a high grade of gold and cast in a manner associated with early Spanish miners. The assayer said the ingot was worth just over two thousand dollars.

Over the next several months, Dolores Cancino explored up and down the bottom of the arroyo that bore his name but found nothing. When rains came and runoff flooded the bottom of the arroyo, Cancino would hurry to the area in hopes that the surging waters would wash away quantities of sand and silt and expose more of the gold ingots, but he had no luck.

In 1881, Cancino met Steve Upholt, a man with considerable mining experience. He told Upholt about the gold ingots he believed were lying under sand at the bottom of the arroyo and asked for his help in retrieving them. Upholt surprised Cancino by telling him that the gold was likely in the exact same place where it was originally dumped and that it had undoubtedly sunk several inches into the soft and yielding bottom of the arroyo. Upholt explained that when certain sands become saturated with water, they become unstable and turn into quicksand. Anything heavy, such as a gold ingot, would almost immediately sink to some depth below the surface.

Before the afternoon was over, Cancino and Upholt formed a partnership dedicated to a search for the gold. Two months later, Upholt arrived at the sheep camp near the rim of Cancino Arroyo and spent several days walking up and down the stream bed. Since the time the three unknown riders were killed and the gold dumped, a number of flash floods tearing through the narrow channel had created changes in the bottom and caused portions of the walls to collapse, all causing Upholt to believe the gold would be covered with more sand than he originally thought. This added to the difficulty of recovery, he explained. Furthermore, the configuration of the arroyo’s channel had been modified to the degree that the old sheepherder could not be certain of the exact location of his original discovery of the bodies and the gold.

Time passed, and one afternoon while walking along the canyon bottom, Upholt chanced upon a partial human skeleton. After scraping away the covering of sand, he found some rotted clothes and boots still clinging to the frame. Encircling the pelvis was a cracked leather cartridge belt with a holster in which a revolver still resided. Upholt was convinced that this skeleton was what remained of one of the three men found in the arroyo two years earlier. If so, it had washed a considerable distance downstream. The next afternoon, Upholt hiked farther up the arroyo and found a second skeleton. After examining it closely, he discerned that it had a bullet hole in the skull. One week later and several more yards upstream, Upholt found the skeleton of the third man.

Upholt explained to Cancino that the bodies, being lighter than the gold, had been carried some distance downstream by the floodwaters. Because they were heavier, the horses and mules, he reasoned, would not have been carried as far as the men. He claimed that if he continued to search farther upstream he would likely find the skeletons of the animals. If this was borne out, he further reasoned, this would place them closer to where the gold was dropped.

Another week passed, and Upholt found a skeleton of one of the mules. Nearby, he also found a rotted packsaddle and a portion of a leather pannier. Studying his location, Upholt realized that if he traveled a short distance upstream he would be near the rim close to the sheep camp.

A few more days passed, and Upholt finally decided on a location where he thought he would have the best chance for finding the gold. He excavated three holes within a wide perimeter he outlined. The work was tedious and exhausting, but the miner was convinced that planning, patience, and persistence would lead him to the gold. When he had excavated each hole to the depth of six feet, he employed a probe to try to determine the depth of bedrock. He found it nine feet below. The bars of gold, he concluded, could possibly have sunk that far. Upholt was encouraged.

Two days later as Upholt widened and deepened the holes, he encountered his first gold ingot. It was seven feet below the surface of the channel. Convinced this was the correct location, he renewed his efforts and found two more ingots over the next two days.

When Dolores Cancino arrived at the site one week later, Upholt showed him a total of twelve gold ingots he had retrieved. The following morning, the two men traveled to Santa Fe, sold the gold, and divided the money. While in town, Upholt told Cancino it was necessary for him to go to Colorado to check on some ongoing mining interests he had there and that he would return as soon as possible. When he got back to the site at the arroyo, he suggested they hire some laborers to continue with the excavation. After the two men shook hands, Upholt drove away. He was never seen again, and his disappearance remains a mystery to this day.