Somewhere high in Utah’s Uinta Mountains there is said to be a mine so rich that the gold could be cut from the walls with a knife.
The story begins in the early 1850s. The Mormon settlers in the Salt Lake Valley were desperately short of money, and according to the legend, the Ute leader Wakara made Brigham Young an extraordinary offer. One trusted man would be shown the sacred gold of the Utes, the Carre Shinob, on three conditions. He must go alone. He must take only what the church needed. And he must never reveal the place, on pain of death.
That man was Thomas Rhoades. He is said to have come down from the mountains with about sixty pounds of pure gold on his first trip. When Thomas fell ill, his son Caleb took over the secret. The legend says this gold went into early Mormon coins and gilded the angel on top of the Salt Lake Temple.
Caleb Rhoades spent his later years trying to get legal access to the land, which by then lay inside the Ute reservation. He never got it. He died in 1905 and took the location with him.
Men have died looking since. Some old timers in the Uintas will tell you the mines are still watched, and that certain canyons are not healthy places to go poking around with a pick.
As a third generation treasure hunter, I know how these stories go. The ones with a family name and a death date attached are the ones worth a second look.
Makes you wonder what is still up there.
Frontier tall tale, or sacred gold still guarded?
