had the good fortune of growing up on Ft Huachuca (imaganie having to spell that as a kid).
This hidden treasure was well known in the early 60's and my dad and I would go hunting for it everychance we got. We would sit around the campfires and I'd listen as the grownups told their own tales, tales that they had heard from a reliable source.
The part I rememer is that the shaft was filled with timber & rocks layered and has been flooded.
Here are some stories i found. Occassionaly the Army has allowed exploration but supposedly that's not going to happen any more.
Makes sense because they don't want to damage the little canyon, it's like an oasis on the Fort.
I'd love to go back and have a crack at it now that I'm much older.
Here is a short overview from:
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Fort Huachuca Treasure Arizona
The Mexican bandito Juan Estrada amassed a great deal of gold. It is said that he had the gold melted down into 50 pound bars and hid them in Huachuca Canyon on what is now part of the Fort Huachuca Military Reservation. The treasure is estimated at over $60,000,000.
There is some confusion as to what exactly took place in 1941, but a PVT Robert Jones was apparently involved. By some accounts Jones fell into a hole and found the treasure. By other accounts, his Sergeant actually wrecked the bus he was driving and found the gold. The Sergeant had the bus pulled out at his own expense in order to keep the location secret. Jones and the Sergeant would get drunk together and talk about how the gold would be spent. The Sergeant was shipped off the European campaign and killed in battle.
In any case, in 1959, Jones went in the canyon with Government permission and an expedition in an attempt to find the gold. He was unsuccessful. Did he in fact discover the gold and not remember the exact locations? Did the Sergeant give him truthful directions to the cache?
Here is a good excerpt from.
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Found, Then Lost
Arizona? Huachuca Mountains have many legends of buried Spanish treasure, but the greatest one of all may have been found and lost by a soldier named Robert Jones.
Jones, an illiterate black man from Dallas, was stationed at Fort Huachuca as an infantry private in 1941. Taking a Sunday stroll on the reservation one afternoon, he fell into a sloping brush-covered shaft some 32 feet deep. At the bottom he discovered a chamber containing at least 100 gold bars that weighed about 50 pounds each and another 100 bars of silver ?millions of dollars in bullion.
Private Jones went back to his company and reported his find to the first sergeant. A few days later Jones threw a $400 party for his friends and paid for it from the $800 he received from a jeweler in nearby Douglas, Ariz., for part of one gold bar he had obtained.
A few days later Jones was shipped to the Pacific, before he could revisit his bonanza, and was seriously wounded while overseas. For years, between long sieges in veterans?hospitals, Jones told about his hidden treasure.
Between the time he came home and late 1959, he visited Fort Huachuca in his quest for the treasure several times, only to be told he couldn? dig on the reservation. Finally, in 1959, his story reached Major General F.W. Moorman, commander at Fort Huachuca.
General Moorman realized that Jones just might be right. And if he was, the government, under the law, would get 60 percent of the treasure, plus taxes on Jones?40 percent.
The general called Jones in and told him to start digging. Jones and a companion went up Huachuca Canyon with picks and shovels. Along the way, Jones pointed to a wooden shed blazed with his initials. A little farther on, Jones picked a spot and said, "It? just about here and about 32 feet down." But after a day of fruitless digging, Jones went back to headquarters for help.
He was offered a drill on condition that if it didn? hit an underground cavity at 32 feet, he would go back to Dallas. The drill ground down through the earth? crust and at just the right depth, vanished into emptiness.
A full colonel, Elbridge Bacon, was assigned to the search with a crew of men and equipment. For two full weeks they dug and clawed through the rotten granite with pneumatic drills, scoop shovels and bulldozers. When underground streams flooded their excavation, they brought up pumps.
Finally, after 15 days and an estimated $1,000 invested in the hole, the Army officials decided they would blast, and if there was no gold, they would quit the search. They drilled a hole 35 feet deep and dumped 30 sticks of dynamite in it. The blast revealed no gold.
Jones thanked them and said goodbye, but he was not giving up his search. His confidence unshaken, he conceded he might have been a few feet off on the location and firmly declared he would go to the Pentagon or to the U.S. Treasury Department for more help. However, Jones was never able to get any U.S. official to listen, so the gold is apparently still there.
This site, since the U.S. Army believed Jones and tried to help him, certainly needs further investigation. The estimated value of this treasure is between $28 million and $100 million. Fort Huachuca and Douglas are located in Cochise County. There is no record of this cache being found.
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