When the Spaniards came to the treasure vault to take possession, the loot was gone. Moctezuma and his people had twigged that the Spaniards weren’t gods, and changed their minds about giving them their entire gold supply.
The Conquistadores then embarked on the usual torture-forthe-treasure-location spree that they did all across South America. Most Aztecs wouldn’t talk, but eventually they managed to get hold of some chatterboxes willing to say that the gold had all been smuggled out, borne by slaves and guarded by elite warriors.
These Aztecs suggested that the treasure had been taken back to their tribal homeland, Aztlán, north of Tenochtitlan, to be hidden away from the reach of the Spanish forever, by being dumped in a lake.
PREVIOUS SEARCHES IN FACT AND FICTION
Cortés started his search immediately, focusing on Mexican lakes. In fact, he was so convinced by the torture confessions that over the next couple of decades he searched 5,000 lakes, without success.
This mention of a lake later got confused with the search for El Dorado, and the whole matter of the Muisca treasures in Lake Guatavita in Colombia. So the search drifted south, becoming part of the search for El Dorado.
While prospecting for gold in Arizona in 1913, a guy named Freddy Crystal was hit on the head by a crowbar, and had what he called a ‘Panorama’, but we’d call a dream or hallucination. He saw the evacuation of Moctezuma’s treasure, carried by slaves, escorted by warriors. They brought it north to Utah, and hid it in a cave. When the vision faded, he was left with an image of an Aztec petroglyph showing the course of the Colorado River.
Freddy was so affected by this vision that he gave up prospecting to research the Aztecs. He found that their treasure was supposedly smuggled north to Aztlán, the original Aztec homeland, and sealed in a cave watched over by warriors selected to be eternal guardians. This seemed to match Freddy’s vision, and he thought a petroglyph of a serpent on a red wall was a marker to the treasure’s location. Freddy then searched the serpentine canyons of the Colorado River in Utah for months, before giving up.
Months later, he saw a newspaper story about a Mormon leader called Levi E. Young, who had taken a picture of a petroglyph near Kanab, in Johnson County, Utah. Freddy was sure it was the glyph from his vision.
So Freddy Crystal cycled to Kanab (which had, a year before, seen the introduction of the world’s first democratically-elected all-female governing body, their town council) claiming that the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma’s gold was buried nearby. To his amazement, the local Mormons weren’t interested in imminent enrichment. The only person willing to put Freddy up while he searched was a rancher called Oscar Robison, in return for a stake in any treasure found, which Freddy had described as $10 million worth of gold bars, shields, plates and jewellery of emeralds and rubies.
Everybody else thought Freddy was a crazy freeloader, but in 1916 he found someone who recognized the petroglyph and knew where it had been: Johnson’s Canyon. It had been dynamited a couple of years earlier to make room for a cattle shelter, and no longer existed.
Freddy then disappeared for several years, going to Mexico City (formerly the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan), where he sneaked into the basement of a monastery that was being demolished and found Spanish colonial records referring to an Aztec captured with a map in the 1520s. The map was with the documents, and showed a marsh below a cliff, which was surrounded by seven mountains, one of which had a set of steps on it. Freddy reasoned these would lead to the walled-up cave entrance from his vision – and he also thought the mountains on the map resembled Johnson’s Canyon near Kanab.
When he returned to Johnson’s Canyon, Freddy found he had the interest of some of the younger cowboys – in particular Robison’s 16-year-old son-in-law Alvin Judd, and his friend Cowhide Adams. On Thanksgiving of 1922, they found a spot on Sheep Mountain, which Freddy recognized as being the point of view shown on the map, where the mountains lined up with the drawing.
They climbed a stepped slope, at the top of which was an indentation in the rock face. They used pocket knives to expose limestone mortar sealing the cave. This must have been artificial, as the nearest natural limestone was two dozen miles away. A rock fell on Freddy’s leg, but they discovered a short corridor containing a couple of statues (which have since disappeared) and a pair of sandals, with another false wall at the end.
Freddy was suddenly popular in Kanab when the trio announced their find. The whole town pulled together to help excavate, in return for shares in anything found, and decamped to a tent city in Johnson’s Canyon. Only a few people remained to make things seem normal, so that outsiders – such as legal authorities, rivals and tax inspectors – wouldn’t get wind of what was happening.
Behind the wall was a series of caves, all separated by constructed walls, and the occasional rock-fall booby trap, some of which had previously collapsed. Mule bones and at least one human skeleton were found, but no gold. Over the next two years, people gave up and drifted back to town. In 1924, the final cave was opened, and found to contain one Spanish helmet, one rotted moccasin, and that was it.
Freddy decided the caves were a temporary storage facility while a proper vault was prepared, and wanted to re-dig under the cave system. Unfortunately, this was where the earth from the excavation had been dumped, which would have made digging there even harder. The townsfolk were disillusioned and annoyed, and all went back to their normal lives.
Freddy Crystal himself disappeared. No-one knows whether he was murdered for his map, died from an accident or animal attack while searching on his own, or just climbed into a bottle somewhere and died in obscurity.
Only Alvin Judd kept the faith, and continued searching around the Johnson Canyon area for 30 years. He eventually inherited the farm from Robison, and his family inherited it from him.
In 1982, a group led by Raymond Dillman approached the Judd family, looking for petroglyphs of three animals with three circles, leading to a spiral glyph with a bullseye at the centre. The Judds showed them the glyphs were right there, and Dillman said this meant Montezuma’s treasure was on their ranch.
Dillman had spent 16 years studying ‘Peralta Stones’: stones with glyphs, which had been found in Arizona during a road construction in the 1950s. Most folklorists and journalists had thought they might be a map to a mythical Lost Dutchman’s Mine, but Dillman knew better. He was half-Latino and half-Apache, and was sure he had deciphered the markings as being a guide to ‘Montezuma’s treasure’. He wasn’t specific about which Montezuma it referred to.
His translation had led him to Johnson County, and now he and Brent and Bruce Judd used a bulldozer to shift the spoil heap from the 1920s dig.
Eventually they found some burnt bones, and a clay pot containing 213 turquoise beads, below a rock with a channel worn in it. Dillman and the Judds immediately assumed this was an Aztec sacrificial stone, and that the slaves who had carried the treasure were killed on it. Below this were small caves, 8ft deep, 2 or 3ft wide, filled with sand, and covered with flat stones. Skeletons were buried in them, and showed signs of cannibalism.
The Judd family still believes this treasure is on their land. They also believe it is too dangerous to search for. Local Native American tribes have warned against searching (saying it’s ‘not time for it to be found’).
Kanab native and millionaire Brandt Child, meanwhile, thought it was under a lake 6 miles north of Kanab, on Highway 89. He and his son Lon came to believe that 2–8,000 Aztec warriors (in 1991 he believed 2,000, but it had increased to 8,000 by 2001!) came north and dammed a river in order to create Three Lakes, a single 35ft-deep lake in Kane County, 10 miles from Johnson’s Canyon. This theory says the treasure is in a cave in the sandstone cliff, with the entrance now underwater.
The Childs brought in a friend who had diving experience, Tony Thurber, to explore a tunnel leading from the Three Lakes water under the cliff. Thurber got into difficulties with the underwater currents and refused to dive again. In 1989 Child the
n brought in a team of four from San Francisco, armed with sonar, metal detectors, communications and tether lines. Their air tanks and compressors kept failing, but in the end one diver ran out of safety line about 65ft into the tunnel, just as his metal detector registered something. He had also dreamed the night before that he swam into a cave where an Aztec warrior threw a spear at him.
A fortnight later, they tried again, having been promised half of any finds made. This time they brought longer safety lines and extra air tanks. When they got into the tunnel, according to Brandt in a 1991 interview with local paper The Deseret News, ‘They saw figures and forms and they couldn’t breathe. We could hear them screaming to pull them back out. All of the divers who tried to get in had the same experience.’
The Childs’ next step was to drain the lake, but the US Fish and Wildlife Department vetoed the plan, as the lake is home to a rare and protected species: The Kanab Amber Snail. Lon Child believes this was a sacred species to the Aztecs, the Golden Snail, who put it there as a special sort of guardian. Killing one snail would mean a fine of $50,000.
Childs then tried to drill down from the top of the cliff, but the drill’s operator was spooked by apparently seeing an Apache spear-carrier watching him. Nevertheless, after a test bore, the drill bit had some flakes of gold on it. A camera was sent down, and the operator claimed to see figures on screen, which may have been statues, and shadowy piles of who-knows-what. The camera operator then died of a heart attack that night, and his wife followed shortly after. The drill operator (the cameraman’s brother) never came back for his equipment.
The Childs claimed to have been visited by a tribal elder who warned them that the treasure is intended for Native Americans, to unite the tribes when the time is right. Supposedly when he left, his footsteps in the dirt just faded away. Brandt Child retired from treasure hunting in 1996, and died in 2002, when his car hit a horse. Naturally some people think this treasure is cursed, and that only a ‘Chosen One’ will be able to find it, when the time is right.
Nevertheless, Lon Child and a documentary maker called Mike Wiest are trying to raise funds to send some ROVs (remotely operated underwater vehicles) into Three Lakes to seek out and film the caverns. Lon Child now estimates the treasure to be worth over $3 billion.
Aztec gold turns up a lot in fiction, most famously in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, in which the gold is in the form of coins that have been cursed to make the finder an immortal zombie. It has also featured in movies such as the nobudget Montezuma’s Lost Gold in 1978, and the comedy-horror House II: The Second Story.
Likewise, if you type ‘Montezuma’s treasure’ into Amazon, you’ll find a lot of pulp adventure stories and YA novels about characters adventuring in search of the treasure, usually in the south-western US. The first such example was probably Montezuma’s Gold Mines by Fred Ober, in 1888. In this one, Montezuma and his gold are described as Mayan, which doesn’t bode well. The Lost Gold of the Montezumas by William Stoddard – which was actually brought back into print just a couple of years ago – came out in 1897, and bonded the legend with the Battle of the Alamo.
Arguably the output of the gold mine in the 1998 movie The Mask of Zorro is influenced by the legend of the Montezuma’s Head hoard.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
Cortés was told that Moctezuma had sent his treasures to be hidden in caves back in the Atzec homeland of Aztlàn, somewhere north of their capital, Tenochtitlan. With hindsight, and the reading of histories that Cortés ignored, we can actually now tell that Moctezuma’s folks were telling the Spanish conqueror a fib on the level of claiming that storks delivered new babies.
There was a legend among the Aztecs, and six related tribes – all part of the Nahuatl culture overall – that said they originally lived in seven cave systems, called Chicomoztoc (‘place of seven caves’ – they weren’t big on poetic licence for names). The Nahuatl then were dragged out and enslaved by the Azteca Chicomoztoca, the rulers of what would become the Aztec tribe, at Aztlán. The god Huitzilopochtli then led the Nahuatl slaves – including the lower caste Azteca – away in a flight from Aztlán. The god also insisted that this latter group hide by not calling themselves Azteca (‘people from Aztlán’) but ‘Mexica Tenochta’ instead. So far so good; they came from Aztlán, they could go back to hide stuff there, right?
Well, no. The flight from Aztlán was said to have happened centuries before Cortés’s time, and so the Aztecs themselves – who were given their ancestors’ name back by the Victorians, to separate them from modern Mexicans, to whom the Mexica (whom we now call Aztecs) had given their name – had actually forgotten where it was. Moctezuma did indeed send men to Aztlán, but not carrying treasure to hide there. He sent expeditions to search for it, and to try to find the place, because it was a lost legend even to him and his contemporaries. In fact he probably was hoping to find an ancient lost city full of loot, just as the Spanish were.
Nobody’s quite sure where Aztlán actually was, though believers in Aztec treasure in Arizona like to think that it was in the vicinity of the Sunset Crater Volcano. They say ‘The Aztec calendar’s Year One is AD 1054 , and That was when Sunset Crater was widened in an eruption.’ Unfortunately for that theory, the Nahuatl started immigrating into the central Valley of Mexico in the 6th century AD, and the Mexica Tenochta really only finished settling in 1248, so they were never driven out of anywhere as a result of one event. Also, it turns out that the Arizona volcano erupted in 1085, and the Aztecs had started their calendar from the sighting of the supernova that formed the Crab Nebula – an event also recorded by Arab and Chinese astronomers.
In the 1570s, a Spanish friar called Diego Durán made a study of Aztec records, and wrote about Moctezuma’s assembly of warriors and wise men, who were sent to find Aztlán. He also left some illustrations showing that the expedition did find a location that matched the unique characteristics of Aztlán, including a humped mountain rising from a lake. Unfortunately, Durán was writing so soon after the conquest of Mexico that the country hadn’t been mapped yet. This meant that he couldn’t actually tell us where the Aztec illustration referred to.
The records all agreed, however, that Aztlán was ‘150 leagues from Tenochtitlan’, which narrows things down a bit. Though we usually think of a league as 3 miles, a Mexican league was ‘as far as a man can walk in an hour’, which, accounting for terrain and load is more like a mile and a bit. The one humped mountain rising from a lake within such a range north of Tenochtitlan is Cerro Culiacán, a shield volcano on Lake Yuriria, in Guanajuato province. That’s probably Aztlán, and there are no lost cities full of gold there either.
Aztec cosmology didn’t have a protective golden snail either. The moon god did sometimes carry a snail shell on his back, but more often a seashell. That said, just to really throw a cat among the pigeons, the Inca did have golden snail protective amulets … Sadly it’s Moctezuma who’s said to have left a treasure, and not the legendary Inca, Manco Cápac.
The Kanab amber snail was only discovered at Three Lakes in 1991, which is ironic, as they had previously been rendered extinct at Kanab itself. There is another population of them at Vasey’s Paradise in Colorado (which is part of Grand Canyon National Park.) Someone released a flock of snail-eating geese into the lake, but they were rounded up before much damage was done. The geese were sent to an animal sanctuary, but whoever put them there was never found – though it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out a list of possible suspects.
Some of the caves and rooms found in Johnson’s Canyon still exist, and can be visited, though the entrance is well hidden and almost impossible to spot unless you or a guide already knows where it is. Most of the caves have been backfilled and are inaccessible.
Although the Judds’ discovery of pit burials showing signs of cannibalism, and at least one skeleton (nicknamed ‘Smiley’ when he was found in 1922), had raised hopes that these were proof of Aztec sacrifices, carbon dating
has proved them to be Neolithic. They date from 2000 BC, which is 3,500 years before Cortés had his eye on Moctezuma’s gold.
What of the cursed divers and drillers? Well, Thurman was certainly cautious and wise to not get involved with such vicious currents. The dive team have never come forward to say, ‘Hey. We were scared off by Aztec ghosts.’ We only have the Childs’ word that anyone saw such things, which do make for a more fun story.
The drill-operator who died of a heart attack seems to be a conflation of two different stories, depending on whether you believe Brandt Child’s son Lon (who says it was an operator they hired), or nephew Robert (who says it was just some other random prospector).
The Montezuma’s Head Mine output is a different matter, although people have appended the Aztec gold legend to that as well. There are three different versions of the tale, with different names for the guy running the mine (Ortega, or two different men with the surname Campoy). In one version, a guy called Campoy found 3,000lb of gold, including 20 gold bars, and buried them in a cave while the US Army and the Apache were after him. He took a local elderly guide with him, then killed him so he couldn’t talk, but himself died in his sleep. The second version casts the mine owner as Ortega, but is otherwise the same story, except that the murdered guide is a young boy. The third version has a Don Joaquim Campoy run the mine, and lead a mule train on a trail from Montezuma Peak to Montezuma’s Head, then on to a box canyon at the southern end of the Sierra Estrellas. He then likewise died before returning for it when the heat cooled off.
Arizona has one of the world’s highest densities of local buried treasure legends, from Aztec gold, to lost prospectors’ strikes, to multiple Lost Dutchmen’s Mines (a traditional American folktale). It’s also got quite a high density of actual gold veins.
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