The Lost Gold of West Texas
- Jody Slaughter
- Jul 31, 2024
- 41 min read
Updated: Sep 25, 2024
Season: 1 \ Episode: 4
Join us as we explore the mysterious legend of Sublett's Lost Gold. Hidden deep within the rugged Guadalupe Mountains, this elusive treasure has captivated the imaginations of treasure hunters and adventurers for over a century. Discover the intriguing story of Will Sublett, a Texas Pacific Railroad scout who veered off his path in search of untold riches, and his relentless quest that spanned decades. From Apache legends to modern-day explorers, this episode unravels the tantalizing mystery of the hidden gold and the enduring legacy it has left behind. Tune in for a tale of adventure, danger, and the undying allure of buried treasure that continues to spark intrigue and curiosity today.
William Caldwell Sublett, drawing from a miniature photo; Permian Basin Geneological Society..
Cold Open: Ben Sublett and his son Rolth track a bear through the Guadalupe Mountains. They lose their water and, suffering from dehydration, discover a pool containing gold nuggets. But they aren't the only ones in the canyon that day...
Chapter 1: The Scout and the Mountains
Will Sublett's early life and career as a scout for the Texas Pacific Railroad.
The beginning of his treasure hunt in the Guadalupe Mountains.
Introduction of his son, Rolth, and their journey together.
Chapter 2: Legends and Lost Mines
Exploration of Apache legends and other historical accounts of hidden treasures in the Guadalupe Mountains.
Stories of other treasure hunters and their encounters with potential gold sites.
Geologists' perspectives on the possibility of gold in the region.
Chapter 3: The First Discovery
Will and Rolth's expedition to Pine Springs and their discovery of gold.
The challenges and dangers they faced, including dehydration and encounters with other prospectors.
The mysterious gunshots and their hasty retreat.
Chapter 4: Life After the Find
Will's return to Colorado City with gold and his subsequent activities.
Attempts to convert gold to currency and encounters with skeptics and conspirators.
Will's frugality and his refusal to reveal the mine's location to anyone, including his children.
Chapter 5: The Legacy of the Lost Mine
Will's move back to Granbury and subsequent return to the West.
His interactions with other settlers and his ultimate decision to keep the mine's location a secret.
Will's final journey and his death in Barstow.
Chapter 6: Rolth's Obsession
Rolth's lifelong quest to rediscover his father's mine.
Various accounts and conflicting stories about the mine's location.
Encounters with other treasure hunters and prospectors.
Chapter 7: Theories and Modern Explorations
Exploration of various theories and modern attempts to find the lost mine.
Stories of Lucius "Frenchy" Arthur and other notable treasure hunters.
The involvement of geologists and their findings.
Chapter 8: Tio Ben Wattson and Other Characters
The story of Tio Ben Wattson, a prospector with alleged divine dowsing abilities.
His claims of knowing the location of Sublett's mine and other hidden treasures.
Encounters with modern-day treasure seekers.
Chapter 9: The Mystery of Bill Sublett
The enigmatic figure of Bill Sublett and his rumored connection to the lost mine.
Rusty Russell's accounts and the mysterious disappearances of Bill Sublett.
Speculations about Bill Sublett's true identity.
Closing
Reflection on the enduring legend of Sublett's Lost Gold.
The impact of the legend on local culture and modern treasure hunters.
Thank you for tuning in to the WTX Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a review.
Media:
The Guadalupe Mountains and Pine Spring Canyon with Guadalupe, Shumard, and Bartlett peaks right of center viewed from the Tejas Trail in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas. Wikimedia Commons.
Purported photo of the Sublett mine printed in the Dell City Review in 1960. Pauline Sublett wrote a column for the paper telling many of Tio Ben's treasure hunting stories.
Chastain, E. S. Dell Valley Review (Dell City, Tex.), Vol. 5, No. 1, Ed. 1 Wednesday, August 31, 1960, newspaper, August 31, 1960; Dell City, Texas., University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .
Laura Sublett, drawing from a miniature photo; and Rolth Sublett in the 1950s. Permian Basin Geneological Society..
1888 Map of the Texas Pacific Railroad. Texas Tech Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library.
Reeves, Frank. [Photograph of Scene At El Capitan], photograph, Date Unknown; University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Cattle Raisers Museum.
Further Reading
Castle Gap and the Pecos Frontier, Revisited - Patrick Dearen, TCU Press, 1988
Coronado's Children - J. Frank Dobie, 1930
Credits:
Writer: Jody L. Slaughter
Producer: Jody L. Slaughter
Editor: Jody L. Slaughter
Engineer: Jody L. Slaughter
Music (in order of appearance):
It's All West Texas (WTX Theme Song) - Gentry Ford & the Homeless Lobos
Contact:
Email: lubbockistATgmail.com
Twitter: @Lubbockist
Listen on:
Thanks for listening, and so long...from West Texas.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
s01e04 -The Lost Gold of West Texas
Cold Open
The Guadalupe Mountains, a jagged spine of limestone thrust up from the desert floor, were a beast of a place. A man could spend a lifetime there and never know half of it. Will Sublett, a lean, sinewy scout for the Texas Pacific Railroad, knew this better than most.
The year was 1881, and Sublett had drifted from his duty. Instead of using his divining rod to locate water for the railroad, like he was supposed to, he veered off course, guided by the whispers of gold in the Guadalupe Mountains. His nine-year-old son, Rolth, a bundle of boundless energy and unyielding curiosity, followed in his father's footsteps, his small frame dwarfed by the colossal cliffs.
They had traveled 60 miles north of the track site to Pine Springs, a verdant oasis in a sea of stone. The morning light filtered through the pines, casting long shadows on the rocky terrain. It was there, amid the towering cliffs and the sparse, ancient trees, that they spotted a bear and its cub. Will, a sharpshooter with his trusty Sharps 50 cal rifle, took down the bear for its meat. The cub fled, and with a shared glance of determination, father and son pursued, driven by an excitement that masked the true danger of their situation.
The chase led them deep into a canyon, where the terrain became increasingly treacherous. Rocks shifted underfoot, and the dry air seemed to pull the moisture from their bodies. Hours passed, and in their fervor, they spilled their canteen, their only source of water. The rugged beauty of the landscape, though not overly harsh, demanded respect as dehydration set in steadily.
By mid-afternoon, they were in dire straits. The bear was long forgotten as their throats burned with thirst. Will scanned the landscape with a hunter's eye and spotted what looked like the reflection of water far down in a gulch. Clinging to hope, he tied a rope to a sturdy pine tree and together they descended the 60-foot rock face. Each step down felt like a leap of faith, the rough stone scraping their hands and boots.
At the bottom, they hiked 300 yards into the gulch, their movements slow and labored. The day was warm, with the October air still holding a trace of summer's heat, but finally, they reached a pair of water holes, shimmering like a mirage. Rolth, too exhausted to think of anything but relief, sat down to wash his feet in one of the pools. As the cool water lapped over his skin, he noticed a gleam beneath the surface. Reaching in, he pulled out a small, shiny rock and showed it to his father. It was pure gold.
Will's eyes widened with the realization of what they had found. Urgency returned, but this time it was tempered with a mix of greed and hope. He led Rolth further up the canyon, their steps quickening despite their fatigue. They reached the spring source that fed the pools, and there, among the rocks and the gurgling water, they found more gold nuggets. By nightfall, they had gathered 12 pounds of gold and silver ore, their pouches heavy with the promise of wealth.
As they settled back at their camp, the euphoria of their discovery mingled with the fatigue of the day. They slept deeply, the stars watching over them with an indifferent gaze. But their slumber was shattered by the sharp crack of gunshots echoing through the canyon at dawn. Will jolted awake, heart pounding. The sound came from the direction of the gulch.
They hurried back, the early light casting long shadows across the rugged landscape. There, they found evidence that a group of horsemen had visited during the night. Hoofprints marked the ground, and the remains of a hasty campfire smoldered. The air was thick with tension and the scent of danger. Were they Indians? Outlaws? Other prospectors? The questions hung heavy in the air, but they didn't stay to find answers. Grabbing their pouches of ore, they fled, the allure of gold now tainted with the fear of pursuit. Little did they know that their discovery would echo through the centuries, inspiring treasure seekers and adventurers even today.
INTRO
Hey y’all. I’m Jody Slaughter and welcome to West Texas. Where the sky stretches on forever, and the stories are as vast and rugged as the landscape itself. On this program, we will explore the characters who have etched their names into the sun bleached history of this region. From outlaws and lawmen, to everyday folks who dared to dance with destiny, we’ll explore the legends, the truths, and the tall tales that define this undefinable region.
On this episode, we’re talking about gold. Not black gold, real gold. Something West Texas isn’t necessarily known for…but maybe it should be? And if you listen closely you just might be inspired to be the one who rediscovers the Lost Treasure of West Texas.
CHAPTER 1: Early Life
William Caldwell Sublett was born in 1834 in Franklin County, TN. As a boy, he learned that he had the ability to witch water. Water witching, also known as dousing, was a form of divination looked at with skepticism even back in the mid-1800s. Will used the V of a green peach branch, holding the forks in his hands as he roamed the countryside searching for water. Theoretically, an underground water source would “pull” the stem, similar to a magnet, indicating where to drill.
As a kid, legend has it he was inducted into the Choctaw tribe (it’s possible his mother was part Native American), where he came to develop an understanding of Native American culture and even supposedly learned a form of Native American sign language, probably what is known today as Plains Indian Sign Language. A language many different tribes used to communicate with each other for trade and things like that.
By 16, he had taken up farming, basically a necessity in that era, and by 22 he had grown a blonde beard, eyes dark and beady, high forehead, and ears laid back against his head. In his 20s, the frontier began to call, and in 1857 when his parents relocated to Arkansas, he set out for Texas, settling near San Marcos.
In 1860, Governor Sam Houston announced that since the federal troops deployed to Texas were proving inadequate to stop the increasingly frequent Comanche raids on settlements, he would add 60 new men to the Texas Rangers, and Will Sublett enlisted as a private under Ranger Captain Edward Burleson. He was only a Texas Ranger for a few months, from January to September, but gained incalculable experience in how to survive on the frontier. In December 1860, he headed west alone. Some say he prospected the Rockies, others that he was a trapper in the Sierra Blancas of New Mexico, home of the Mescalero Apache. The nearby Guadalupe Mountains had a long history and connection with both the early Spanish and the Apache who ranged throughout New Mexico and West Texas. Stories of hidden treasures passed down through generations and likely found the ear of Sublett. But did he just hear the stories, or something more detailed, like a route to treasure?
Geologically, though, these mountains were formed by an ancient reef, making them unique but unlikely to contain gold, according to modern geologists. But as prospectors would say during that time, “gold is where you find it.” Geologists be damned.
When Will returned to Texas in 1862, the Civil War was in full swing and, with no family or roots in Texas, he joined the First Arkansas Cavalry for the Confederates. In April 1863, his brigade participated in a surprise attack on Union-held Fayetteville and Sublett earned a citation for gallantry. After the war, he rode to his parents’ home in Northwest Arkansas, where he married Laura Denny. The couple moved to St. Louis for a few years and had two daughters, Ollie and Pennie, before Laura contracted tuberculosis. Supposedly on doctor’s orders, the family left St. Louis and Will would tell family members later that they “traveled 5 years in a wagon for Laura’s health.” Eventually, they showed back up in Texas, where they had a son, Rolth, but Laura’s health would continue to deteriorate. In 1873, she passed away.
By 1874, with Col. Mackenzie’s conquest of the Comanche and Kiowa making raids less certain, Will Sublett loaded his three motherless children in a wagon and headed west again, stopping in the Fort Griffin area, between modern-day Albany and Throckmorton. In this area, vast herds of bison still roamed, and there was a market for their hides at Fort Griffin, so Will purchased a .50 caliber Sharps rifle. Weighing 16 pounds and accurate to 800 yards, it was a fearsome weapon. The Native American tribes were known to say that it “shoots today and kills tomorrow.”
Will became an excellent buffalo hunter, collecting hides during the day and returning to his children at the camp at night where they ate wild game, bread sorghum, Eagle brand milk, and even a little coffee. Scared for his children of city life after Heather’s tuberculosis, he would only bring his children into town often enough to “keep them from going wild,” his daughter would later recount. At some point in the late 1870s, he began leaving the children in Granbury with the widow of one of his childhood friends, who they called Grandma Rylee. He would leave them in her care for 2-3 months at a time while he went bison hunting, but would always pay her for their care.
In late 1876, some 1,500 bison hunters roamed the plains of West Texas, taking down entire herds in a single day. By 1880, for all intents and purposes, the bison that once roamed the plains by the millions were totally gone. So in early 1880, with no more opportunities for solo hunting and with children to care for, Will took a job with the Texas and Pacific Railroad, which was working to build a line from Fort Worth to Sierra Blanca (between modern-day Van Horn and El Paso) where it would tie into the Southern Pacific Railroad. This was a monumental project that aimed to connect the vast expanses of Texas, bringing with it the promise of growth and development for the tiny ranching communities in West Texas lucky enough to be located along the line. 522 miles of track would cut through a dozen counties, inhabited by just 25,000 permanent residents, along with coyotes and hostile Apaches.
In 1880, the rail had only reached as far as Weatherford, and Will embedded with the advance teams, scouting ahead of the line. His talents made him immediately valuable to the railroad, hunting with his Sharps rifle to feed the advance teams, and using his witching skills to find water along the route that could power the railroad's steam engines. In his free time, he began prospecting the crags and canyons west of the Pecos. Some stories claim he believed so much in his innate dousing ability that he was sure he could find gold on his own. Others say he made friends with the Apache, using his communication skills learned as a child to penetrate their inner circle and learn the secrets of hidden Apache gold.
By 1881, the line had moved so far west it became untenable to leave the children with Grandma Rylee in Granbury, so Will relocated the children to the railroad camp in Mitchell County that would later become Colorado City. The camp had 2-300 residents, 14 saloons, and the railroad construction headquarters. “It was a sprawling, sorry sight in the daytime,” one resident remembered, “with its disorderly rows of drab, dingy tents. The open range lay all about. But the tents were lovely at night. At night, the red lamp light glowed through them and you have never seen a prettier sight.” Will set up two tents: a taller cook tent that he slept in, next to a smaller tent for the children. 15-year-old Ollie, living in a tent or wagon for most of her life, had developed into an expert Dutch oven chef, preparing sourdough biscuits, gravy, fried venison, and baked beans for the hungry railroad workers. Will wouldn't miss an opportunity to regale these strangers with tales of the gold he knew was waiting on him somewhere out in the wilderness to the west.
CHAPTER 2: Guadalupe Gold
Will was probably thought crazy by his dinner guests as he chattered endlessly about gold in the Guadalupe Mountains, but he certainly wasn't the first to talk about gold in those hills. Those mountains, capped by the 8,749-foot Guadalupe Peak, would stay untamed for another century after Sublett's expeditions. It was a place where, if the Apache didn't get you, you still had an excellent chance of being killed by outlaws, hypothermia, dehydration, or rattlesnakes.
Guadalupe Peak was revered by the Apache as holy ground, the place where the Sun Gods danced. And Geronimo himself would be quoted as saying that they hid the greatest gold mine in the Southwest. In 1863, the Apache Tats-ah-das-ay-go, translating to Quick Killer, led Captain John Cremony and 35 men from Ft. Sumner in the New Mexico territory to a site in the Guadalupes that he claimed contained pure silver. Cremony would write later that he proceeded, alone with Quick Killer, over a mile from their camp where they climbed 300 feet to a spot where the Apache unearthed several silver nuggets. The pair split the loot and Cremony never reported the find to his superiors.
In 1911, the El Paso Times published the story of a man who claimed to have stumbled upon a band of Apaches washing gold in one of the range's many canyons. Returning home to Socorro, New Mexico, he assembled a mining party to return to the site where they found an abundance of gold and erected an adobe camp to develop the claim. But a terrible cloudburst formed, spawning a massive flood that washed away the camp and drowned most of the miners. The survivors returned to Socorro, and a second expedition of 30 miners returned to the site and continued the dig, but they were soon attacked by Apache, who killed all but 2 or 3 of the men. For years afterward, survivors reportedly made periodic trips to the site and returned with gold. But the location of the find, if it really existed, has been lost to the ages.
Another buffalo hunter and prospector, Charles Dixon, claimed that while prospecting in the Mescalero reservation near modern-day Ruidoso, he fell in love with an Apache woman who showed him gold nuggets that supposedly came from the south in Texas. She told him the mine was located 2 and a half miles south of the Selas Teticua - twin mountains- that he would find in the foothills below Guadalupe Peak. Other landmarks she mentioned were a spring, a canyon gulch, and a skeleton-filled cave haunted by the evil spirits of ancient Indians.
Now, of course, all of these stories are unverified speculation. From a geological standpoint, scientists today will tell you that there simply cannot be gold or precious metals in the Guadalupes because of the way the range was formed. Without putting you to sleep with too much geology talk, the quick rundown is that the Guadalupes are a limestone fossil reef. They were formed by an ancient reef, underneath a prehistoric ocean, that was slowly pushed up by tectonic activity over time. Limestone is just fossilized marine life. Mountain ranges containing gold, silver, and other precious metals are typically formed when ancient volcanos brought those metals up from deep under the earth's surface, depositing them when the volcanic activity cooled. There is no evidence of ancient volcanic activity in the Guadalupes.
Wallace Pratt, chief geologist for the Humble Oil company, who moved to the Guadalupes in the 1940s, would say, "only folklorists, very gullible, would believe there was a gold mine in the Guadalupes. It's the wrong kind of country for gold mines." But Dr. Donald Davidson, director of the Geological Society of America in the 1990s, would concede that it's technically possible, if not extremely unlikely, that if a volcano had intruded through the reef, interjected sea water into the system, that also happened to be carrying gold and silver material, "it is not beyond the realm of possibility."
But outside of the third-hand stories and folklore, there is one, somewhat, official account documenting Apache gold in the Guadalupes. In the late 1870s, Lew Wallace, the governor of New Mexico, unearthed records in the basement of the Palace at Santa Fe documenting an expedition by Spanish Captain de Gavilan. The records contained personal accounts, as well as the names of every man in the party, and a detailed description of each day's work. A lot of effort if it was a forgery.
According to the documents, in the late 1600s a group of local Native Americans, recently converted to Catholicism, guided de Gavilan and 30 men to the site. After marching for several days from Santa Fe south to the Guadalupes, the men established a mine in the foothills to the east near seven pure cold springs. The site was described as exceedingly rich in gold, with the metal found in wires, nuggets, and masses which were cut out with chisels. The mined gold was shipped back to Santa Fe where it fattened the coffers of the Crown and the Catholic church. After the Pueblo uprising of 1680, the Spanish all fled or were killed, the Native American converts were massacred, and the mine was lost.
CHAPTER 3: The Strike
Now certainly, scientific geology didn't concern Will Sublett, a man who could locate underground aquifers with a peach tree branch. And in early 1881 he began leaving the kids with a family in Colorado City and heading west, dousing branch in one hand and rock chisel in the other, to find the treasure he knew he was destined to find. He returned from the first few trips empty-handed but undeterred. In late 1881, he set off again, this time taking 9-year-old Rolth with him.
Rolth, later in his 70s, would recount the expedition, best he could remember, in the Carlsbad newspaper in 1948. Rolth would put the date in October 1882, though it was probably a year earlier. The railroad headquarters had moved further west by late 1882. Ostensibly scouting for water for the railroad, Will and his son detoured 60 miles north of the track site to Pine Springs at the mouth of Pine Canyon in the Guadalupes, where they camped at an old abandoned stagecoach station. There, they spotted a bear and cub one morning, and Will took down the bear for its meat with his Sharps rifle. The cub fled, and the pair took off after it, tracking the cub for several hours through the rough canyon. At one point, they spilled their canteen, their only water.
By mid-afternoon, they were in major trouble. They were now miles from the spring, and even in October, the desert sun dehydrated them quickly. Forget the bear, they needed to find water and fast. Spotting what he thought was the reflection of water down in a gulch, Will tied his rope to a tree, and the pair descended down a 60-foot cliff into the gulch where they found a pair of water holes. Rolth said he spotted a really neat-looking shiny rock. He grabbed it from the pool and showed it to Will. It was pure gold. Further up the canyon, they would find even more, taking out 12 pounds of gold and silver ore. The gunshots overnight kept them from investigating much further, but would this be the only time either of them would visit such a rich site?
Rolth would write in the 1948 article that neither he nor Will would ever return to the site. This isn’t a statement that’s backed up by any of the other accounts, at least in Will’s case. Now even within the family, the story of the initial find varies significantly. Rolth's sister Jennie said that Rolth wasn't with Will when the initial find happened, though he could have accompanied him later. Other family members recount the story, passed down through the generations, as Rolth being lowered into a deep cave by ropes. They hiked into the cave deeper where it opened up larger and water ran along the cave floor. In that water and along the banks is where the nuggets were found. They would ascend again, and Will would take great care to disguise any evidence of them having been there. The other family accounts agree that Will would return to the site periodically, always returning with his leather pouch full of the “shiny rocks.”
One curious wrinkle to this story is the fact that in 1947, the year before Rolth's article was published in the Carlsbad paper, Rolth signed an affidavit witnessed by the Carlsbad Caverns National Park Superintendent stating that he and Will had discovered and explored the Carlsbad Caverns in 1883 when Rolth was 12. They hiked down the natural entrance and into the bat cave. Now, for one thing, Rolth was not 12 in 1883. He would have been 9 or 10.
So, without knowing his motive for telling these two conflicting stories, it’s hard to reconcile what Rolth was trying to do here. Was it an old man’s wish for some notoriety in his twilight years, just simple confusion on dates and ages but otherwise accurate? Or did the family members confuse the Carlsbad Caverns story with the gold find story? It's impossible to say.
A third version of events, unsourced but part of the legend that grew throughout the years, was that Sublett's mine wasn't a mine at all. It was a cache. A stash of gold, not a natural occurrence. Large gold nuggets just lying in a pool of water without having to be removed from the rock face certainly defies credibility, even for a non-geologist like me.
Now, I have to admit that I was also a little incredulous when reading Rolth's story about them finding an abandoned stagecoach station way out in the middle of nowhere in the Guadalupe Mountains in the 1880s. Sounds ridiculous, right? Well, actually, that part could be true. In the late 1850s, the Butterfield Overland Mail Route had been established, providing passenger and mail stagecoach service from points in Memphis and St. Louis up to San Francisco. Its northern spur passed right through this area. The route would have been the equivalent of a highway at that time, especially this far west, and would have been used by anyone traveling through this region.
So, as this third version of the story goes, Will and another man named Sutterhall stopped a wagon headed east from the California gold rush in 1870, in the shadow of Guadalupe Peak. They killed the lone wagoner, loaded the gold onto their horses, and rode southeast along the nearby Delaware Mountain range and down into Chico Canyon. Using a frying pan and butcher knife, the pair buried four caches of gold and then left, agreeing only to return together. But Will double-crossed Sutterhall and moved the gold later.
This story would certainly satisfy the geologists, but the family insists that Will never referred to the site as anything but a mine. Even as the details of the find are disputed, what's not disputed is that Will left the camp at Colorado City penniless and returned with a pouch full of gold nuggets. He had accomplished what he told all those supper guests he would accomplish.
After checking in on his children, Will, never much of a drinker, is said to have held court in the saloons, showing off the large nuggets he had acquired. It's not known when exactly he converted any of this gold to currency, but it was practice in those days for the prospector to ship his ore to the nearest US Government Mint (the government was the only legal purchaser of gold then). The mint would grade and refine the ore and either return it to the owner as bullion or buy it from him. There is documentation that in 1927, a former employee of the Denver Mint had moved to Odessa and had made inquiries about Will. At the Mint many years before, the employee had received two samples of ore from a man named Sublett. Grading showed it to be the purest gold ever found in the region.
Regardless of when or what he sold to the mint, Will would carry his largest find on his person for most of his life, a nugget more than an inch in length and almost an inch in width, in the shape of a robin’s egg. His children reported that he showed it to them often.
CHAPTER 4: Settling Down?
Now that he no longer needed to hunt or douse just to keep his kids fed, Will began to think of his kids and their future. Living out of a tent or wagon was fine for him and Rolth, but he wanted Ollie, a teenager, and Jennie, aged 9, who had never gone to school for more than a few months, to learn how to become proper ladies. They had spent their formative years surrounded by buffalo hunters and railroad gangs.
So they packed the wagon and moved back to Granbury where he knew Grandma Rylee could mold them into ladies. He purchased a farm there and tried his hand again, but a sedentary life just wasn't for him. And in 1883, after just two years in Granbury, the West was calling to him again. They loaded the wagon and set off again following the Texas Pacific line, now completed, and not sure where the rails would take them. He certainly wanted to be closer to his mine, but there was almost nothing between the Colorado and Pecos rivers. Midland, then called Midway, consisted of nothing but a water tank and a rail car on siding. Odessa had a single section house. When Will and the kids finally stopped their wagon 40 miles west of Odessa near a boxcar depot, they more than doubled the population of Monahans.
When 25 other settlers arrived later in the year, they found Will and the kids living in a tent next to the railroad. Certainly not living like someone who had access to large quantities of gold. They described a short, heavyset, aging man—he would have been almost 50—with gray hair and a bushy mustache. The other two residents were railroad workers. One of them, Wilson, also a widower, became close friends with Will, likely bonding over mutual loss. More on Wilson later.
Now if Will lived frugally, it certainly wasn't to keep the gold a secret. He would still talk about his mine to anyone who would listen, just not revealing the location. He would make periodic trips to the spot, always alone, and would return with enough gold to get his family through the next year or so. It was bound to happen eventually as much as he talked about his gold mine, but one day, on his way by wagon to his gold, he stopped to make camp for the night. Several men rode up to his camp on horseback. He recognized them as acquaintances he knew from Monahans and invited them to sit by his fire with him. It was lonely on the road, and he was happy to have some company. No reason to reach for his Sharps rifle. The men pointed their guns at him and demanded to know where the mine was. He refused. They tied him up, telling him they would leave him out there to die if he didn't tell them. He refused. The next day, the hot desert sun rose, and without water, he began to suffer in the sweltering heat. He refused. 24 hours passed. He refused.
Now, I don't know how many white men have ever prayed for an Apache raid, but surely Will considered some providential reprieve from this torture. It came on the second night. The Apache raiding party descended on the camp, scattering his captors. Certainly, this tied-up old man was a curiosity to the raiders. Did they untie him, allowing him to communicate in the Native American sign language he learned as a child? Maybe they already knew him. One of the theories was that it was the Apache who had shared the secret to their gold with him. Either way, he was released safely.
Was it this attack that calcified his resolve to never share the location of the mine with even his own children? Was the knowledge of the location a curse in and of itself? If he wanted to test that theory, he would do it with his best friend and fellow widower Wilson in Monahans.
According to one of the earliest printed accounts of the Sublett treasure, published in the El Paso Herald in 1910, Will gave verbal directions to the site to Wilson at some point. No maps, no X marks the spot; he would have to commit it to memory. Wilson set out, locating the site, and emptied his pack of supplies so he could fill it with the gold, and began the dangerous journey back home, now without sufficient food or water. When he arrived, dehydrated and with an empty stomach, but with a sack full of gold ore, he embarked on a celebratory three-week drinking binge, almost killing him and demolishing his short-term memory. When he later tried to find the mine again, he became disoriented and couldn't locate it.
Will, after seeing what knowledge of the mine did to his friend, refused to tell him—or anyone else—the mine's location ever again.
CHAPTER 5: Laying Down the Pick
In 1885, Ollie, now 19, married and started a family of her own back in Granbury. In 1886, county tax records showed that Will's only assets were a $30 wagon and two horses, valued at $60 total. Will and the other two children would relocate to the big city of Odessa, population 100, in 1887. Jennie would marry a local man soon after. Will certainly spent plenty of time in Midland, talking as he tended to do. That's where Charles Dixon claimed that Will told him he learned the secret of the gold from his Apache friends.
Midland is also the place whose leading citizens hatched a scheme to steal the mine from him. As recounted by historian J. Frank Dobie, the conspirators were W.E. Connell, founder of Midland's First National Bank, rancher and County Commissioner George Gray, livery stable owner Lee Driver, and Jim Flannigan, a horseman. As Dobie's account goes, Connell and Gray offered Sublett $10,000 for the location of his mine. Will laughed at them, saying he could go dig up that much in a week's time. The two men then hired Flannigan to trail Will the next time he left for the mine. Driver would keep a horse on hand for Flannigan, ready to go at a moment's notice.
Flannigan had received word that Will had left Odessa heading west. He trailed him along the railroad line to the Pecos River, where he turned north for 25 miles before, unbelievably, losing all sight of wagon ruts or horse tracks. He searched fruitlessly for more than a day until he ran into a horseman who said he had seen Sublett headed back downriver. Flannigan raced back to Odessa, but Will had beaten him there, arriving with a sack full of gold.
Another account relates a man named Stewart who was serving as a guide for two Texas Pacific Railroad officials on a hunt in the Pecos River valley. Camping one night on the riverbanks, they were approached by Sublett, who Stewart knew from his railroad days, and they invited him to camp with them for the night. Will said he was headed to the mine, but now past 50 years old, the journey was much more taxing on him than it had ever been before. He wasn't sure if he had the strength to make the trip again. He offered to take Stewart along and show him the location. Stewart couldn't go. He had to finish guiding his benefactors on their hunt. The next morning, Will led him to the top of a hill where he tried to use a spyglass to show him the mine's location. It was impossible at such a distance, though, and Will set out alone. He returned to their camp three days later, revealing a tobacco sack full of gold nuggets.
In 1888, he claimed a homestead under the Act of 1873, claiming 80 acres a few miles southeast of Odessa, adjoining the homestead of his daughter Jennie and her husband. The Homestead Act had three tenets that must be followed: you had to file an application, live on the land for three years, and make improvements to it. If those three standards were met, the land was deeded over, free and clear. What a deal.
One quick aside here: people often talk about what they would do if they had a time machine. Buy a lottery ticket, or buy Google stock or whatever. But man, is there a better lottery ticket you could buy than free Permian Basin land, including mineral rights, before any oil was discovered there? Shoot me an email if you've got a better idea to become a billionaire than doing that.
By 1891, Rolth was 18 and out on his own, hunting jackrabbits for cash under a state program paying bounties for jackrabbit and predator scalps—$1 per dozen scalps. The three-year requirement for occupying his homestead was up, and Will felt the call of the West one last time. Taking his wagon and camping gear, he headed down the Texas Pacific track to his old hometown of Monahans, where he camped for some period of time, catching up with old friends, including the sheriff. It was there that he had a conversation with the sheriff, later relayed to his daughter Jennie, about why he never revealed the mine's location to his children.
Will had a special kind of fortitude, one that allowed him access to unfathomable riches without succumbing to the temptations of becoming a lazy rich guy. And he was probably right because no one else who found the gold was able to handle it without ruining their life. He told his sheriff friend, "It seems to me like it's a cursed thing, that gold. I've had people I thought were my friends try to kill me for the knowledge of it. If I was to tell my family about it, why, both my daughters are married to men that would be better to them if they had to work to make a living. If they were rich, they might not be good to them. And my son would never do another honest link of work the rest of his life."
He was right, of course, at least about Rolth. But more on that in a moment. By late 1891, Will had left his wagon in Monahans and headed further west to Barstow. If he made it back to the mine again, he never told anyone. But he was certainly headed in that direction. He rented a room above a restaurant in Barstow. Rolth would visit him there over Christmas. Rolth related in a newspaper article later that Will supposedly relented on his promise to withhold the mine's location, promising to take the boy once they could secure horses.
But that very night, Will became seriously ill with pneumonia. Will called to Rolth from his deathbed and whispered to him, "You're the only living person who knows anything about the mine. They all tried to get me to tell your sister and her husband about it. If you ever find the mine, it's my wish for you to see that 5 percent of it goes to the welfare of orphans, the sick, and the afflicted. Son, tell nobody what you know about the mine. Because then they'll know as much as you do."
If Rolth really were at his side when the pneumonia began, he didn't stay. Will was alone when the calendar rolled over to 1892, and his friend the Ward County sheriff found him dying and wired a telegram to Jennie and her husband. He would die alone on January 6, reportedly clutching the robin's egg-sized gold nugget that he had kept since that first find. His only worldly possessions were scattered up the Texas Pacific Railroad line—a homestead in Odessa, a wagon and horses in Monahans, a skinning knife, and his Sharps rifle by his bedside.
To quote Patrick Dearen in his book "Castle Gap and the Pecos Frontier Revisited," “as the last breath passed his lungs, the guarding spirits 80 miles northwest in the Guadalupe Mountains, or in the Delawares or Rustler Hills or another range, must have rent the earth and buried the last vestiges of a gilded oasis. And swore never to reveal it again.”
Jennie and her husband would arrive by train a few days later, finding him without even a cent for his own burial. Thieves had already ransacked the room and taken the gun, the knife, and his precious gold nugget. His daughters would pay to have him buried at the Ector County cemetery in Odessa, where his epitaph reads, “Their bodies are buried in the dust, but their names shall live forever.” And Will Sublett's name certainly has. For since his death, and even before, generations of treasure hunters have tried, and failed, to find Sublett's lost mine.
CHAPTER 6: Rolth and Frenchy
Rolth would become consumed with finding the mine again for his entire life. He inherited the homestead and sold it almost immediately. In a sad twist of irony, Rolth didn't inherit his father's dousing ability that would have told him the true gold mine, a black gold mine, lay just under his feet. He would sell the 80-acre tract in 1893 for just $80.
He soon rode west and took a job at the XT ranch on the eastern escarpment of the Guadalupes. He returned to the ranch hands’ quarters one night after a day's work to find a note on the table, a gold nugget on top of it as a paperweight. The note was from an acquaintance from a nearby ranch named Grizzly Bill. He claimed that he had found the lost mine, taken this nugget and many like it, and after finishing a cattle drive to Pecos, he would return in 12 days to develop the claim. Another man by the name of Stewart supposedly met up with Grizzly Bill on his way to Pecos, where he told him he had found the mine, not in the Guadalupes, but in the Rustler Hills, 20 miles southwest of Orla, in between the Pecos River and the Guadalupe Mountains.
Grizzly Bill, as the story goes, arrived in Pecos and went on a bender much like Wilson years earlier. But his fate would be even more pronounced when he, on a bet, drunkenly hopped atop a wild bronc and was thrown off, killing him. The curse would remain undefeated. For his part, Rolth became even more obsessed. Selling the ore piece, reportedly worth over a thousand dollars, and drifting from ranch to ranch. Never straying far from the Guadalupe Mountains, and venturing off to search whenever he could.
Now Rolth didn’t just search the Guadalupes. He was also known to search the Delawares, Rustler Hills, and even up into New Mexico for the site. A prospector named Frank Davis relayed that he had spoken to Rolth in New Mexico about a marker he had discovered on the rim of McKittrick Canyon on the Texas/New Mexico border. He said Rolth seemed very interested while also contending that the site of his father’s mine was further south. Later, as Davis was prospecting the other rim of the canyon, he saw Rolth and his burro at the marker. It took him most of a day to descend the canyon wall and back up the other side. By then, Rolth was gone, but he claimed to have found a hole several yards away from the marker, two feet deep, containing three rotting mail sacks—one of which had the brand of the Butterfield Stage Line. They were empty.
Another man claimed later that Rolth told him the mine did lie in McKittrick Canyon and was marked by three horseshoe nails sticking out of the limb of a juniper tree. The man claimed he had found a tree bearing three scars from nails that had been removed. Wallace Pratt, the Humble Oil geologist mentioned earlier, bought land at the mouth of the canyon. He had never heard of Sublett until learning about him from J. Frank Dobie as he researched his 1930 book "Coronado’s Children" about gold seekers in the region. Pratt mentioned that he had in his possession a metal plate with some symbols scratched on it suggesting McKittrick Canyon was the location of something. Whether he found the plate or obtained it another way, it isn’t clear.
What is clear is that the plate, combined with learning about Sublett’s mine, made the geologist, who again made it clear that it wasn’t possible for gold to be located in these mountains, curious. He inquired with the man he had bought the land from, who led him to a site on the property. The previous owner took him into the canyon where they found a dead juniper tree with a large blaze on it—a place where the bark was missing. In the blaze was carved WCS—William Caldwell Sublett. The rancher said, "Now look below it. There are three horseshoe nails. Two are close together, and one is further apart. They make a vertical line. Now look up on the wall of the canyon. There are three caves. Two close together, one further apart below them."
But the geologist had a problem with this theory. There was no way Sublett could have gotten to them. You’d either have to climb a 500-foot vertical cliff face or rappel down 250 feet from above. It seemed an unlikely spot. In the 70s, a treasure hunter, spotting the same caves as he surveyed the canyon by air, decided to check them out. He hired an expert climber, and the two rappelled down the side. Upon reaching the first cave, with an opening only 5 feet tall by 2 feet wide and narrowing from there, the hunter was only able to stick his head and a flashlight through. Inside, he said he saw a veering passage, stalactites, and stalagmites…but no gold.
In a 1910 newspaper interview, Rolth contended that the site was in the Rustler Hills, where Grizzly Bill supposedly made his strike. Anyone else starting to think that Rolth might not be being completely honest with the press? Those hills had been prospected in the 1880s by Charles Dixon—the man who claimed he learned the secret of Apache gold from the Mescalero girl near Ruidoso. He claimed to have discovered three landmarks that coincided with the clues given by the girl—a seep spring, a canyon gulch, and a cave…filled with skeletons. He located a cave—describing it as more of a sink than a cave with vertical walls that he could not descend due to lack of climbing equipment. And he didn’t particularly want to, scared of the stories from the girl of it being haunted by evil Apache spirits. Sitting at the top of it as the sun made his way across the sky, he said at one point the angle made the cave more illuminated. Inside, he could see three human skeletons.
Now, the skeleton cave was never supposed to contain the treasure, only a landmark to finding it, which Dixon apparently never did, even after searching the area for three years. One of the most compelling tales of these later searchers is that of Lucius “Frenchy” Arthur, who, while camping for the night on the El Paso ranch of F.H. Hardesty, told the rancher that he was trailing two Mexicans from Ysleta, supposedly on their way to a gold mine somewhere in the Guadalupes. Hardesty, seeing that Frenchy wasn’t outfitted for such an endeavor, offered to grubstake him. For those not familiar with 1800s mining vernacular, that just means an investor providing money and supplies to a prospector in exchange for a share in his claim.
So Frenchy, with new gear and supplies for two months, set out after the men. He returned to Hardesty six weeks later with gold quartz samples in hand. He told Hardesty that he had hid and watched the two men lower a rope ladder into a chasm and haul back up sacks of gold and water for their horses. After they left, he investigated closer and found the gold quartz at the top of the chasm, dropped by the men. He described an opening 100 feet across and 60 feet straight down, but he didn’t have enough rope to fashion his own ladder and make the descent. Frenchy rested a few days, and Hardesty provisioned him a second time—this time with more rope than he would ever need—and he set off again. Frenchy would never return. Hardesty never knew what became of Frenchy. Did he fall in the chasm to his death? Had the men returned and killed him? Did he double-cross his partner and make off with the gold himself? Or was he just a con-man to begin with, running a grift to get free food and supplies from a gullible rancher?
Frenchy’s description of the site does bear a passing resemblance to the Queen of the Guadalupes cave, 105 miles east of El Paso just north of the border in New Mexico. Prospector Joel Weldy of Carlsbad had discovered the site and staked a mining claim in 1932, but the cave (Weldy described it as a sinkhole) was totally filled in with dirt and rubble. Something there took his interest, though. It wasn’t until 1965 that Weldy would begin excavation work on the shaft using explosives and winch trucks. Sixty feet down, Weldy discovered a single human skeleton.
Further excavation revealed another cave passage next to the skeleton, descending an additional 176 vertical feet, with no other entrance. It was unknown to whom the skeleton had belonged, but what was certain is that someone had descended the shaft and then become covered with six stories of rubble. Was it possible that this was Frenchy, and the Mexicans, returning to discover him down in the cave, had dynamited the entrance, burying him alive?
Carlsbad Caverns National Park Ranger Andy Komensky was a member of the first party to explore the cave after Weldy reported his discovery. Rangers weren’t able to come to a definitive conclusion as to whether the collapse had been natural…or purposeful. The remains were shipped to the Eastern New Mexico University Paleo Indian Institute where forensic anthropologists examined them before shipping them to the University of Pennsylvania, where the head of the FBI’s forensic anthropology team, Wilton Krogman, was a professor. His 1968 report read, "The individual is a male about 40 to 50 years of age, and there are no archaic or Paleo-Indian characteristics that could be noted…This skeleton is of a modern man." In a follow-up report, the ENMU professor noted that the man was probably Caucasian, stating, "It seems to me that the skeleton was placed in the cavern and purposefully covered." The report noted a head wound from a blunt instrument, occurring shortly before or after death. He would elaborate in 1999, "the bones were fresh when he got the wound. Now, the possibility was, if he fell into that pit, he may have hit on his head. Otherwise…somebody did him in."
In the passing years, the skeleton has been lost, preventing future study with modern equipment. The Weldy family continued searching for gold in the area until, in 2005, the Bureau of Land Management terminated their claim to the site, with new regulations preventing future mining. The National Forest Service eventually sealed the entrance to the cave, citing safety concerns.
In 1950, Bill Barton from Odessa was hunting near Orla for the lost Sublett mine when he spotted a gully with a large rock slab perched at an angle against a cliff wall. He detoured to investigate and found that the rock slab concealed the entrance to a cave. Entering the cave by candlelight, he descended 20 feet before it opened into a room 12 feet high and almost 30 feet across. On one side of the room, he discovered a rock shelf containing 13 human skeletons.
Even though he was searching for the Sublett mine, he had somehow never heard the adjacent story of Dixon’s quest for the Apache goldmine and the clues to find it—the haunted skeleton cave. Thirty-five years later, upon hearing the story and knowing that he had found that very cave, he returned but could never locate the site.
CHAPTER 8: Tio Ben
This one’s going a little longer than I would normally like, but I came across a pirate guy with a hook involved in this story, and I feel like it’s my duty to tell you about him. Tio Ben Wattson, born 1863 on an island in Lake Michigan, as a child lived among the Sioux but ran away at age 10. He hitched a ride east on a freight train, arriving in New York, where he found a job as a cabin boy for a ship captain. A cabin boy was basically like a personal assistant for ship officers. He would probably bring him his meals, relay messages around the ship, clean, things like that. When the ship docked in France, Ben got into an argument with the captain, who punished him by whipping the boy. Screw that, I’m out. Ben fled inland.
He drifted around for a while after that, working as a shoe shine boy and occasionally going out to sea again. At age 16, he had returned to the States, arriving back home in Michigan, where he gave his mother several hundred dollars that he had saved up in his travels. After that, he headed for Texas. This would have been around 1880 or so.
Somewhere around present-day Lamesa, he met up with a group of horsemen who invited him to join up with them. They were headed west to the Guadalupe Mountains. Now Ben had really horrible luck, and he quickly found out that these men were outlaws, and he wasn’t part of their gang at all. He was their slave.
For three years, he traveled with them, forced to do all of the labor around the camp while they robbed and pillaged the locals. They were horribly abusive to him, and he dreamed of escaping. But he also saw what happened to those who would try to leave. Inevitably, an argument would break out between the men; someone would quit and ride off. And someone else from the gang, a few minutes later, would ride off after them, returning alone with their horse.
One night, he made his move. Slipping away silently in the night while they slept, probably drunk, scaling the 2,200-foot Pine Top Mountain in the darkness. If they sent anyone after him, they never found Ben. He was free. Two weeks later, dirty, hungry, exhausted, and dehydrated, he made it to Silver City, NM.
For the next 50 years, he would vacillate back and forth between the sea and the Guadalupes. It’s not known what he did at sea, maybe he just served as an honest shipmate. But at one point, he returned missing his left hand, a hook in its place. So come on, he was a pirate, right? Had to be a pirate. I’m going with pirate. He also, at the age of 72, married a woman named Pauline.
Ben also had what he claimed were divine dowsing abilities, remarking that he was directed by a higher power to separate the Guadalupes from the treasures buried within. He claimed to have located 20 gold mines, 85 gold caches, 55 silver caches, eight diamond caches, five jewel caches, and two sites of uranium ore. If this was true, I think the King of England would have been jealous of Tio Ben.
A Carlsbad resident, who prospected with Ben, sarcastically noted his innate dowsing ability. “He and his wife would go through the hills…and he would divine whatever it was. Turquoise or gold or silver or treasure. And then he’d say, ‘there it is.’ And then when asked why he didn’t dig it up, he said there was a curse on it and he would never touch it.”
Tio Ben also claimed to have known Will Sublett, going as far as telling people that Will had taken him to the mine. He said that it wasn’t actually a mine, though, but instead an ancient riverbed, naturally dammed at both ends, that would only fill with water during times of heavy rain. He said Will would take a feed sack and scoop as much gravel as he could carry from the dried bed and carry it to a nearby spring where he would wash it. That, he claimed, was the source of all the nuggets Will found. He said Will had told him upon returning from his last trip to the site that he wasn’t ever going back because there wasn’t anything left worth the effort.
Apparently, Rolth heard enough about Will from Ben that he believed the two had actually known each other, but he still didn’t let Ben’s claims that the gold was all gone ever discourage his personal search for the mine. In 1953, a group of teens from Midland arrived at the Signal Peak service station at the foot of the Guadalupes, en route to search for Sublett’s mine. They ran into Rolth there, but he wasn’t interested in talking to them about the mine, instead telling them, “You ought to go back behind the station and talk to Old Ben Wattson, he ran this country with my daddy.”
They did, and after chatting with Ben for a while about his life, one of the boys drew the courage to ask him about the mine. Ben deflected, telling them, "There are lots of mines here." He turned and pointed at El Capitan and said, "See that mountain there? It’s got a cave full of Spanish church treasure that was put there when the Pueblos ran the Spaniards out of Santa Fe in the 1600s. It’s hidden in a cave, but you’ll never find it."
Later on the trip, while camping, the boys chatted with a local man who had lived on a ranch nearby as a child. While searching for a lost sheep one evening, he stumbled on a cave in a mountain. He pointed to the mountain—it was also El Capitan. He told the teens that he was too scared to enter the cave at night, so he returned home, telling his family about the discovery. He said his father immediately grabbed lanterns and told the boy to lead him to the cave. But he could never find it again. For years after that, anytime the ranch chores were complete, he and his father were out looking for that lost cave. He never found it again.
Tio Ben died in 1963, just a few months shy of his 100th birthday. By all accounts, he doused all the way until the end, always finding what he was looking for but never digging up his finds. He knew they were there, and that’s all that mattered.
CHAPTER 9: Will or Bill?
Probably the strangest wrinkle in this strange story of the supernatural, curses, treasure, and half-truths comes from Rusty Russell, an Odessa man who was a fixture at the various bars and honky-tonks around town in the 1930s. He became drinking buddies with a man calling himself Bill Sublett, who he estimates was about 80 years old. He said it was common knowledge in all the taverns that this man knew the location of a hidden gold mine somewhere beyond the Pecos.
After a while, the more astute bar patrons learned that if you came up and flatly asked him about the gold, he would get mad and brush you off. But if you just sat there and talked to him for long enough, eventually he would bring it up. Rusty said this “Bill” Sublett lived in a hotel downtown, had a girlfriend who was one of the madams there, and said he had come to West Texas when he worked for the railroad, hunting for water for their water wells—and he would talk about these things in detail. Russell had no idea that there was another Sublett, with the same backstory, also an Odessa resident, who had died 40 years earlier.
And unlike Will Sublett, who never drank and never spoke of any woman but his beloved Laura—a man who lived in poverty despite, apparently, having an unending supply of gold—Bill Sublett liked to party. “He was kind of a louse,” Russell would say, “a good time Charlie that everybody was glad to see when he was up and at it. As long as he had a dime, he’d spend it on anybody.”
But when it ran out, it ran out completely, and the bars would have to feed him on credit. Patrick Dearen describes him in his book as “pursuing a lifestyle ranging from the well-to-do to that of a near wino, depending on how recently he had replenished his finances.”
When he faded from up to down and out, everyone in Odessa knew what was coming. Greedy acquaintances would follow him 24 hours a day, with vehicles and horses at the ready. At some point, he would disappear entirely and turn back up 2-3 weeks later, pay off his creditors, and start the party once again.
This went on for years until, in 1943, he disappeared for a final time. Russell never knew what happened to the mysterious prospector after that. And the story strains even a folklorist's suspension of disbelief. It clearly wasn’t Will Sublett, who would have been 109 in 1943. Rolth probably had the character of a man who would live out a total lie, but he would have been 15-20 years younger than Bill Sublett, and by all accounts, he never found so much as a gold flake. It’s also unlikely that Rolth would have let anyone but himself take credit for the find.
Maybe it was another prospector, unrelated to Sublett, who found gold himself and took on a nom de pic. Maybe he was wanted? The true identity of Bill Sublett will likely remain a mystery. Rolth Sublett would continue his fruitless search for his father’s lost mine, spending 60 years of his life drifting from job to job in between prospecting expeditions. He never found a thing. He would die penniless in 1963 in Artesia, NM, and with him, the last living person who had laid eyes on Sublett’s mine.
Epilogue
Treasure hunters still seek the treasure of Sublett today, but the prospects for prospectors are shrinking by the year. In 1972, 86,400 acres of the Guadalupe Mountains and surrounding area were designated a national park. All prospecting is now illegal there. The nearby Carlsbad Caverns National Park places an additional 46,800 acres off-limits. The Rustler Hills are largely private land.
Tio Ben, when asked in 1961 why he never digs up his finds, said, "I don’t need the money. I have everything I need. And besides…the world is not ready for the gold of the Guadalupes. Some of these days, the government will own these mountains and the gold will lie there for centuries until the civilization of the world is less greedy and more deserving, and only at that time will God level these hills and make the gold available to those who actually need it."
If you do go hunting, be sure and let us know what you find. And remember the old prospector’s axiom: No matter what the geologists say, gold is where you find it.
You’ve been listening to the West Texas Podcast. I’m Jody Slaughter. You can find this and all episodes on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Visit our website at wtxpodcast.com for companion articles, show notes, and photos for each episode. To get ahold of me with questions, comments, or show ideas you can email me at lubbockist@gmail.com or on Twitter @Lubbockist. L-U-B-B-O-C-K-I-S-T.
This episode was written, produced, engineered, and edited by me, Jody Slaughter.
Music in this episode was created by Gentry Ford and the Homeless Lobos. If you haven’t figured it out yet, that’s my AI band. You can find our theme song “It’s all West Texas” by Gentry Ford and the Homeless Lobos on their new album West Texas Werewolves, wherever you stream music.
Thanks for listening, and until next time...so long...From West Texas.
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