Mystery Mounds of Arizona

This one is for my good buddy in Arizona. I’m sure somebody else might get a hankering to go look for this but most of the land if not all that this site is on is Indian Reservation and you’re going to have to have a few really good connections to be able to look around.

Back in 1881 there was a newspaper story about some “mounds” being found near old Fort McDowell. Fort McDowell was located in Arizona and now there are several things in the same area named after the fort. There is the Fort McDowell Indian Reservation, the Fort McDowell casino and even a present day town named Fort McDowell if I remember correctly. These mounds as they called them were approximately 250 feet wide and approximately 300 feet long. The outside walls of the mounds were made from quarried stone and were said to be two feet thick. The quarry where the stone was from was found about six miles away. Thousands of stones had been cut and moved the six miles to build the walls of the mounds.

When someone decided to dig into one of the mounds they “found stone implements of all kinds, utensils of peculiar material painted on the side with Egyptian characters, ornaments of shell, needles of bone and in fact, a perfect museum of relics of the stone age”. These items were found at a depth of about ten feet. Other digging in the mounds located “tombs, three tier deep and underneath cisterns of water”. More exploration of the area also uncovered old Indian rock paintings showing “camels”, “mastodons” and “other animal forms unknown to the explorers”.

OK, so we have camels and mastodons in Arizona, I can live with that but what about the utensils with the EGYPTIAN characters painted on them?? This isn’t the first time I have heard about Egyptian items being found in the U.S. Do you think somebody, maybe the government or them archies, are hiding something from us? They wouldn’t do that, would they?

The remnants of the old fort or mounds themselves would be interesting to see but finding some Egyptian stuff lying around in Arizona would really be the ticket! Of course it would probably get confiscated and you would be threatened with jail if you found it, and I’m talking about finding it with permission to be on the land, but it would still be interesting.

If you can come up with an old 1876 map of the area the ruins are supposed to be shown on the maps. They should be located on the Verde River north of present day McDowell on the old trail leading from Fort McDowell to Camp Verde. They are supposed to be just east of the river. One of the mounds was shown as being eight miles north of the old fort and another was shown as being eight miles south of Camp Verde.

There used to be a current day road going up the west side of the river from the location of the fort to the approximate location of the mound eight miles from the fort. The road ended at the eight-mile point but it is on the opposite side of the river.

Fort McDowell was established in 1865 and was located about seven miles above the confluence of the Verde and Salt rivers. The fort was originally called Camp Verde but don’t confuse this with the actual Camp Verde that was established on the river north of the fort location. Fort McDowell was a fairly large complex and operated until 1890. At that time it was turned over as part of an Indian reservation and I believe it remains a reservation to this day. The post cemetery should still be there along with the ruins of a building or two.

Make sure you know what land you are on if you go looking for this!! Permission, Permission, Permission.

Let me know if you run across any hieroglyphs!!