Spending time reading the old newspapers will not only give you plenty of leads, they can also keep you from going on a wild goose chase.
Case in point, in 1890 the dam at Walnut Grove failed wiping out the town of Wickenburg, Arizona and every small community between the dam and the where the Hassayampa River flowed into the Gila River west of Phoenix. One of the earliest reports of the flood was delivered to the Phoenix newspaper by no less notable and trustworthy of a person than "Buckey" ONeill, who was then serving as the Yavapai county sheriff. Included in his report was that a large commercial safe belonging to a well known saloon keeper/mercantile had been carried away in the flood and no sign of the safe had been found.
This report served as the basis for several treasure hunting legends regarding the lost safe of the Wickenburg (or Fool's Gulch) flood. All of the versions I have read indicate that the safe was never found.
I spent a few hours in the main Phoenix library a couple of years ago reading the microfilms from that period. Sure enough all of the details matched, including the full report by Sheriff ONeill, which included "the safe has not been found". Talk about being excited, I was ready to drop everything and head up the road the 40 or so miles that it would take me to get to the target area. BUT I kept reading subsequent issues of the paper looking for as many details as I could that would help in the search. In an issue dated about 2 weeks after Sheriff ONeill's initial report, there was an article quoting Sheriff ONeill as reporting that the safe had been found and recovered with the contents intact.
That sort of took the wind out of my sails. No safe, no rush. Of course, the riverbed should still yield a lot of smaller "treasures" from the flood so it's still on my list of places to search.
BTW, anyone that wants to see the safe in question will find it in the basement of Desert Caballeros Western Museum in downtown Wickenburg.
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