The Peralta stones

Disputed artifacts, documented and museum-held

The Peralta Stones are a set of carved stone slabs said to show the way to the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine in Arizona's Superstition Mountains. Two are red sandstone, each about two inches thick and weighing around 25 pounds; a third, of white sandstone, shows on one side a priest assembling the stones into a map and on the other a horse. One red slab has a heart cut into its face, and a heart-shaped piece of red quartzite fits into it exactly, with the outline of a cross carved on the back. Laid side by side with the heart in place, the red stones carry a long line pecked with 18 dots, and the date 1847. The names Pedro and Miguel are carved on them, and Spanish text on the priest stone says that to find the gold you must find the heart.

How they turned up is muddled. One account credits a Portland, Oregon police officer named Travis Tumlinson, who said he pulled off Highway 60 east of Apache Junction in the late 1940s to stretch his legs and stumbled over the corner of a stone sticking out of the dirt. Other men later claimed they had found the stones and sold them to him for $100, and the dates given run from 1949 to 1956.

The name comes from the legend of the Peralta family, miners from Sonora said to have worked gold in the Superstitions long before Jacob Waltz, the German immigrant remembered as the Dutchman, who said his mine was an old Peralta mine. The historical record does not support any Peralta mining there. The notion of a rich Peralta family in Arizona owes a good deal to James Reavis, who in 1882 asserted a forged Peralta land grant over a huge swath of Arizona and New Mexico and went to prison for fraud, and the first written mention of a Peralta mine in the Superstitions dates from 1895.

Most researchers are unconvinced. The engravings appear to have been made with modern power tools, with modern symbols and modern Spanish, and the ethnohistorian Father Charles Polzer of the Arizona State Museum called them fakes, noting among other things that the valentine heart was unknown to 19th-century Spaniards. Those who have studied them closely do agree that two different hands carved them, one skilled and consistent, the other barely scratching the surface. Claims to have read the map appear at regular intervals, pointing to Upper Labarge Canyon or a privately owned cave, and no one has yet recovered a flake of Waltz's gold. In 2012 the stones were back on display at the Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa.