Lost Louisiana Mine legend draws treasure hunters
The Lost Louisiana Mine is an American legend about buried Spanish treasure that has been sought since the Victorian era, primarily in Arkansas’ Ouachita and Ozark mountains.
The legend’s core narrative is that a Spanish expedition concealed a rich gold mine in the wilderness of Spain’s Louisiana colony, and in returning to New Orleans, all but one of the party was killed by American Indians. In the early 20th century, variants of the legend attributed the treasure to either Freemasons or Sephardic Jews exiled from Spain who brought a fortune in gold and jewels with them, or a Catholic or Aztec trove brought from Spanish Mexico.
The Lost Louisiana Mine story apparently sprang from colonial reports of a mineral curiosity located in or near modern Pike County. Lt. Gov. Francisco Bouligny in 1778 reported on gold diggings on the upper Little Missouri River, a tributary of the Ouachita River, which Chevalier D’Annemour reported in his 1803 “Memoire” on the Ouachita district as having been long abandoned due to either “suffocating vapors” or Indian harassment. William Dunbar in 1804 noted that pyrites (“fool’s gold”) found on the Little Missouri River had been mistaken by hunters for gold. Confusion between the homophones “Ouachita River” and “Washita River” led to the legend’s eventual extension to the Wichita Mountains of south-central Oklahoma.
Today’s Lost Louisiana Mine story can be traced to 19th-century stock promotions in Arkansas’ Ouachita Mountains. Following the construction of “Diamond Jo” Reynolds’ Hot Springs Railroad, enthusiastic boosterism and lavish national newspaper coverage lured midwestern capitalists to speculate in mines near Hot Springs. The legend emerged from the Silver City mining boom of 1876–1882 in nearby Montgomery County, and the term “Lost Louisiana Mine” was first published in the Arkansas Mining Journal of Mount Ida in 1880. The article’s reference to an 1803 French report on mines between the Ouachita and Little Missouri rivers seemingly links the legend to D’Annemour’s “Memoire.” Pulp-fiction writer James W. Buel helped spread the story through his 1880 book “The Legends of the Ozarks.”
The 1882-1888 mining frenzy at nearby Bear in Garland County popularized the story nationally. In 1886, the owners of an extinct hot spring near Bear announced it as the fabulous lost mine and sold stock in the Lost Louisiana Mining Co. Frenzied investment in the district was propelled in part by crooked mineralogists and assayers, including the Rev. Samuel Aughey, a “first-class charlatan” and disgraced professor, and Anson C. Tichenor, an imposter mineralogist who bilked investors in several western states. An independent investigation of mineral claims in the Ouachita Mountains, conducted by the Arkansas Geological Survey and released in 1888, exposed the Lost Louisiana and many other mines as fraudulent.
By 1900, the search for the Lost Louisiana Mine had expanded to the Ozark Mountains. Reports of Mexican mining parties periodically camping near the Mulberry River in the Boston Mountains circulated as early as the 1830s and inspired Friedrich Gerstäcker’s 1844 adventure story “Die Silbermine in den Ozarkgebirgen in Nordamerica.” In the 1890s, an elderly stranger calling himself Antonio Montez, who said he had been sent by President Porfirio Díaz of Mexico with treasure maps, located curious hieroglyphics on a Mulberry River bluff near Cass in Franklin County. In 1905, Dr. Lorenzo G. Hill of Mulberry began buying land and initiated an obsessive, two-decade treasure hunt. Newspapers reported in 1907 that an extensive panel of Indian, Spanish and Masonic hieroglyphics (petroglyphs) carved on the sandstone bluff presented clues to an $80 million Masonic treasure called the Lost Louisiana Mine.
Subsequent newspaper accounts described it as a Catholic treasure with gem-encrusted gold platters, a gold Madonna, and Aztec gold valued at $110 million. Hill’s excavations were periodically directed by Charlie Gonzales, purportedly a Spaniard with secret knowledge but who was eventually ousted as a fraud. To fund excavations, the Lost Louisiana Mining and Development Co. of Poteau, Okla., was chartered in 1908, and the Lonquil Mining Co. of Fort Smith was chartered in 1909. Arkansas’ 1915 “blue sky” law, enacted to safeguard investors from fraud, brought to a close an era of reckless speculation in Arkansas mining stocks. Hill’s death in 1926, following his arrest for selling narcotics, ended a two-decade obsession that had cost Hill $100,000.
The Lost Louisiana Mine ranks among the nation’s most popular buried treasure stories. In literature, the legend has inspired Jonathan Kellogg’s 1900 historical romance “The Lost Louisiana” and the 1918 novel “Beneath the Stone,” as well as Virgil Baker’s 1938 play, “Spanish Diggin’s”; Lois Snelling’s 1963 novel for teenagers, “The Yellow Cup Mystery”; and Jim Carroll’s 1992 supernatural fantasy “Angel Vision.”
This story is adapted by Guy Lancaster from the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System. Visit the site at encyclopediaofarkansas.net.