AZentertain: Arizona Gold Rush

The Arizona Gold Rush

Hunt for Gold and Legends in the Santa Catalinas

By Robert Zucker
Contributed by William Flint Carter

The Arizona Gold Rush is still going on!

The gold rush has lasted hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

The search for gold in the Santa Catalina Mountains, north of Tucson, Arizona, may have started as early as the 1500s with the expedition of Coronado.

The arrival of the Spaniards in the 1700s also contributed to the legends of lost Spanish mines and the bullions of gold buried in the Catalina mountains.

Gold placer deposits in the Cañada del Oro, (Cañon of Gold) which runs through the Catalinas, were well exploited by the Spaniards. 1

The Gold Rush of the 1880s

During the Arizona gold rush of the 1880s, numerous newspaper accounts described the "gold bearing quartz" found in the mountains that helped spark the rush.

The Santa Catalina mountains had been extensively mined for copper, silver and gold by some of Tucson's community leaders of the 1900s, like E.O. Stratton, Sheriff Bob Leatherwood. Even William "Buffalo Bill" Cody invested and explored the mines in search of precious minerals.

Prospectors and wealthy industrialists staked multiple mining camps and hauled out thousands of pounds of gold from the hills well before Arizona became a state in 1912. This gold, encrusted in quartz, was not far from the legendary lost mine.

Gold placering sites in the Catalinas had a reported production as much as 1,000 ounces of gold from 1904 to 1949. One nugget found weighed over 6 ounces. 2

In 1982, a reported 230 oz of gold was recovered in a resource assessment test on "placer gravels allegedly near 200-year-old placer sites of the Spaniards. 3

Gold mining the Catalina Mountains still has some lucrative prospects, according to a mining assessment report published by the US Bureau of Mines in 1994. 4

Is there any gold left?

Some prospectors and gold hunting groups insist that the patient hobbyist, or entrepreneur can recover some gold, mostly in the form of flakes and occasional nugget. There are some claims that plenty of gold is still available if properly mined.

Recently mining operations has been revived on the Oracle Ridge by Gold Hawk Resources, a Canadian mining company.

Read about the discovery of gold in the Catalinas.

A lost city, lost mines and buried treasure

While American mining ventures have been extracting as much of the gold and copper it could from the Catalina mountains for over a century, there are still some spots that haven't been explored in a long, long time.

The lost mine and the lost city are among the most well known legends. Somewhere deep inside the basin of that mountain range, some of those great treasures may still be hidden, according to legends. Read about the Lost Mine in the Catalinas.

The Treasure in the Catalinas

The real treasure is what the Spaniards supposedly hidden, or took with them, when and what's left in those mountains.

This is where the legend of the treasure in the Santa Catalina begins. These are the stories, histories and legends of one of the biggest secrets in Southern Arizona- Arizona's rush for gold.

Discover the history of Arizona's rush for gold through old newspaper articles and personal accounts recorded from pioneers who helped spark Arizona's golden treasures.