Colorado Treasure Tales

Reprint. Originally published: 3rd rev. ed. Chicago: Sage Books, 1969.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press Veteran treasure hunter and folklorist W.C. Jameson presetns twenty-six colorful, inriguing and mysterious stories about fortunes lost and found in the mountains and deserts of New Mexico.

A compendium of hundreds of treasure tales, rumors and findings gleaned from diverse sources ranging from campfire stories and personal interviews to published works. Listed by each county throughout the state.

Thirty romantic and fabled tales of Colorado's misplaced wealth inspire the reader to go search.

The 32 tales from the area containing the backbone of America include The Gold Behind the Waterfall (Arizona), The Treasure of Deadman Cave (Colorado), Lava Cave Cache (Idaho), Henry Plummer's Lost Gold (Montana), The Curse of the Lost Sheepherder's Mine (Nevada), Lost Train Robbery Loot in Cibola County (New Mexico), Eighty Ingots in Spanish Gold (Utah), and Lost Ledge of Gold (Wyoming). As Jameson points out in his introduction, the Rocky Mountains still have many remote areas, ....

This book contains 70 stories of Lost Mines and Treasurers, in Colorado and New Mexico, plus a special section on the Gran Quivera, of New Mexico. Many of the stories concern treasurers buried by the French, Spanish, Indians and Colonial settlers during the many incidents and wars that rocked the area in the 16th through the 19th centuries. I found the data for this book while doing research on old mines for my series of books Mines of the American West. The "Lost Mines and Treasurers" were identified from articles in early American newspapers and other sources considered reliable. Where possible, for those lost treasures still to be found, I have tried to tie them to modern mines or areas and include some background data on such areas. In doing this, some of them seemed to "fall short" in the area of fact and logic, which I may point out. The reader should understand that this is a collection of data from old and new publications and not a focused specifically on the effort to find the specific properties, although some research, especially from a logic standpoint, has been done. If the reader can glean critical information from these original articles and the limited research that allows or helps him or her to locate a "lost mine" or "lost treasure", I wish him or her well and leave it to them to reap the rewards.The print version of this book has been produced in the 81⁄2" X 11" format to keep the price low. If done in 6" X 9" or smaller, the book would be 2 or 3 times as many pages in length and would cost substantially more to increased "on demand" print costs. These seem to be heavily influenced by the total number of pages. While this may be one of the seeming drawbacks to "on-demand printing" - the benefit of "on-demand printing" is that specialty books, such as this, are now practical to publish where the target market may be relatively small and minimal returns to the author are acceptable.It should also be noted that I may periodically update and revise the electronic version before creating a Second Edition. The guidelines for submissions for the electronic versions allow updates, without producing a full new edition, while the "print on demand" or hard copy paperback version does not and required a full new edition to be developed to incorporate any changes. As such, the two books may not be exactly the same, as it is likely the electronic version will be updated more frequently than the paperback.