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?
What do you think about this? In 1615 a Spanish pearl ship is said to have sailed into an inland sea that then dried up. In 1870 a Los Angeles paper reported its hull found in the desert near the Salton Sea. Every searcher since has lost it to the sand. Mirage, or a galleon in the dunes?
What do you think about this? On May 20, 1967, a prospector in Manitoba walked up to a landed craft near Falcon Lake. It blasted him with hot gas and left a grid of burns on his chest matching its vents. Three governments investigated. Canada put it on a coin. Hoax, or the real thing?
What do you think about this? Serpent Mound in Ohio is a 1,348 foot snake of earth, its head aimed at the summer solstice sunset, its body built on the rim of an ancient meteor crater. One dating puts it right after Halley’s Comet in 1066. Sacred art, or a message for the sky?
What do you think about this? Since the early 1990s about two percent of people in Taos, New Mexico, hear a low hum like a distant diesel that never shuts off. In 1993 Los Alamos and Sandia scientists came to find it. Their instruments found nothing. Trick of the ear, or a hidden signal?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a retired air traffic controller cast footprints in Louisiana’s Honey Island Swamp: three webbed toes, a foot long. He had reported a seven foot gray haired creature with yellow eyes standing over a dead boar in 1963. Hoax, or the Letiche?
What do you think about this? For nearly three years beginning April 2, 1968, a glowing figure of a woman appeared on the roof of a church in Cairo, seen by crowds of tens of thousands, Christians and Muslims together, and caught in press photographs. Mass illusion, or a visitation?
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