The Lost Adams Diggings: Part II

 (Be sure to read Part I of this story, before you head further.)

    Adams (history has obscured his first name) and a group of men are busy collecting gold from a secret canyon...but they're running out of food. The supply party, led by John Brewer, is overdue. And in spite of warnings by the local Apache chief, Nana, men from Adams' party have gone up and over the waterfall to collect gold nuggets. 

     Adams is worried. 

     Finally, he and another man, Davidson, climb up out of the canyon to the 'secret door' entrance. And there they find the men sent to get food -- dead, and their things scattered. (All of them, Adams thinks...but he's wrong.) Adam and Davidson headed back to the camp, only to hear Indians whooping as they kill the rest of the men. The two quickly hide; at nightfall, thirst drives them down to the stream to drink. They try to access the gold under the hearth, but the Indians have set the cabin on fire. The stone is too hot to move. 

     Adams and Davidson see another dark figure nearby -- it must be one of the Apaches, there to finish them off. (Events later suggest it was actually John Brewer -- see below.) Adams and Davidson panic and flee up the canyon, then out on the desert. They're found, exhausted and near death, nearly two weeks later by soldiers from Fort Apache.

     Adams recovers. (Davidson does not.) His only proof of his story is the large hen's-fruit nugget he's managed to carry. For the rest of Adams' life, he searches for the lost diggings he remembers, often bringing along people who've funded the expeditions, hoping for treasure. Adams searches in different directions, but usually starts his search from Reserve, NM. He never finds what he's looking for.

     But Adams isn't the only one to have survived the massacre. 

     One of the men who went out with John Brewer, "the German," calls it good, once the men reach the fort, takes his gold (he'd kept it separate from the others), and buys a ranch. He's later murdered by Indians in the Prescott, AZ area.

     The other one is John Brewer himself. Brewer is wounded, but manages to hide while the others are finished off. (He also goes down to get a drink of water, and see two figures 'skulking about' -- Adams and Davidson, no doubt.) Brewer struggles out onto the desert, then is rescued and nursed back to health. He returns years later with his family, to continue the search. (Another story has him returning every year, then leaving with saddlebags full of gold, before he's finally wiped out by Indians.)

But did he? Is at least some of the gold still there, waiting to be found? Hundreds of people think so...ourselves included. The only problem: where do you start?

These people think the Diggings are in Arizona. 

Richard French's Four Days from Fort Wingate was the book we started with. And he makes an interesting argument for Fort Wingate being the fort along the "well-traveled road" that the Brewer party visited. (The map shown above is from his later book, Return to the Adams Diggings.) 

French isn't alone. W.C. Jameson's Lost Canyon of Gold argues that the Diggings are indeed in Arizona -- but they've been stripped fairly clean from later mining. (He panned a few flecks of gold.)

French (and Hale), by the way, has a totally different spot picked out from Jameson's. And each is equally certain that theirs is the right place. 

So why were we in New Mexico?

You'll have to wait for Part III to find out.