Jacob Waltz died in 1891 and his carer sold maps to his supposed gold mine; searchers have died looking for it since

The Lost Dutchman's Mine is an unproven tale. Jacob Waltz, a German immigrant, died in Phoenix on 25 October 1891. Julia Thomas, who kept the boarding house where he lived and nursed him, said he told her where a gold mine lay in the Superstition Mountains. After his death she reportedly found rich ore under his bed. She and two miner friends searched and found nothing. In 1892 she was selling maps to the mine for a few dollars each to pay her debts. She sold her story to the journalist P. C. Bicknell, whose 1895 article spread the legend. In the summer of 1931 Adolph Ruth went into the mountains to find the mine and disappeared. His skull, found months later, had two holes; the anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička judged he had probably been shot. No inquest was held, and his map was missing. Other searchers have been shot, disappeared or died there since. Brian Dunning finds no evidence that the Peralta family ever mined the range, and the writer Wilburn argued the mountains are volcanic and hold no gold. One researcher reported Waltz died with about $1,500. Arizona set aside Lost Dutchman State Park in 1977 and enlarged it to 320 acres in 1983.