Friday, May 29, 2009

The Caballo Mountains of New Mexico

If you live near or around Sierra County, New Mexico you have no doubt heard of the Caballo Mountains and the many, many treasures that are supposed to be there.

For those of you not familiar with the Caballo Mountains I suggest you do a little reading in your spare time, especially if you are planning on taking a trip. The stories about lost treasure and mines are almost too numerous to count.

One such story relates that in 1925 several old documents were found in the rafters of Fort Seldon. Some of these documents were maps showing the locations of several Spanish treasure caches hidden in the Caballo Mountains. Someone was lucky enough to follow one of these maps to a deep cave where they located several gold bars. Two of the gold bars were removed from the cave as proof of the find.

Unfortunately for the finder, this turned out to be bad luck. The man who located the cave disappeared a short time later but his jacket was found, covered in blood and full of bullet holes.
The maps that were found in the fort indicated there were seven caches located on the west side of the Caballo Mountains, four more caches on the east side and an unknown number of caches on the south side. The story didn’t related how many were supposed to be on the south side, just “some”.

In the 1930’s another lucky man supposedly found a Spanish treasure cache in the Caballo Mountains only this one contained silver bars. The man who found the cache refused to give any specific information about where the cache was located, you can’t really blame him can you? He did produce a single silver bar to prove his story though.

Also in the 1930’s a man stumbled upon a cave in the Caballos that contained a full suit of Spanish armor. That in itself would be worth a fortune today!
In the 1940’s a cache of silver tableware was dug up and a cache of $16,000 in coins were found, both in the Caballo Mountains.

In 1944 two deer hunters were in the south end of the Caballo Mountain range, specifically Burbank Canyon, when they found a tunnel opening that led into several caverns inside the mountain. As they searched the underground rooms they came across one that contained “hundreds of skeletons and stacks of gold bars, pack saddles, racks of ancient long guns, armor and other items”. Apparently finding the skeletons was too much for the hunters as they got scared and ran screaming like little girls from the tunnel. OK, I just through in that last part, I don’t really know that they were screaming like little girls. They did say that were “terrified” and left the tunnels immediately, covering the opening with a large slab of sandstone when they left, running and screaming like little girls!

As you can guess, this tunnel has been searched for repeatedly but no one has reported ever finding it again.

I guess I need to start deer hunting again!

3 comments:

orvel robinson said...

I love the old stories about the Caballo Mountians as I have deer hunted all of them, and my brother and I saw the biggest deer i've ever seen on the north end. That deer had a rack of at least 3 &one half feet wide. He was as big as many elk i've hunted. That was in 1959. An old man named Barras who lived in t or c told us about that deer. He also told us of many of the treasure tales and also said he had seen the silver bar a friend of his had found on the west side of the north mountain.
I used to hunt arrowheads on those mountains and have found folsom points on the east side.

marty golubow/dreamerunlimited? said...

Not to downcast or let the air out of a person's dream? I, too, think that there are many types of buried treasures around this world ( depending? ) BUT let's be real....reality is choice your dream....reach for it, except be careful before you leap? It's that unplanned accident that really gets ya? Think about safety? First & far most?

marty golubow/dreamerunlimited? said...

Think before you leap?