Victorio Peak

A real 1992 supervised excavation on the site found nothing

Victorio Peak is a craggy outcrop barely 500 feet high in the Hembrillo Basin of southern New Mexico. It is named for the Apache leader Victorio, who used the basin as a stronghold, and in 1880 his Chiricahua and Mescalero warriors fought the Sixth and Ninth Cavalry, the Buffalo Soldiers, here, using the stepped sandstone slopes to pin down a small force before slipping away as reinforcements arrived. Today it lies inside the White Sands Missile Range.

The treasure story belongs to Milton "Doc" Noss and his wife Ova, known as Babe. By the best-known account, in November 1937 Doc was hunting deer below the peak when rain drove him under an overhang, where he lifted a worked stone and found an old shaft dropping into the mountain (some versions put the find in 1933). He said he climbed down past wall drawings that looked like Indian work into a cavern lined with small chiselled rooms, where he found 27 skeletons, many bound to stakes, and then thousands of stacked gold bars, coins, jewels, Wells Fargo chests and documents dated 1797. On each trip he claimed to carry out two bars and whatever artefacts he could manage, once a crown set with 243 diamonds and a ruby. Speculation pinned the hoard on everyone from Juan de Oñate to a padre's lost mine to Victorio's raiders.

Little of it could be proved, and nothing could be sold openly, since private ownership of gold had been outlawed in 1933. Doc hid what he had and trusted no one. In 1939 a mining engineer persuaded him to widen the passage with eight sticks of dynamite, and the blast collapsed the shaft and shut him out for good. He and Babe divorced in 1945, and on 5 March 1949, in an argument over gold he had promised a Texas oilman, Charles Ryan, in exchange for money to reopen the mine, Ryan shot him dead.

Babe held on to her claim, but in 1955 the missile range swallowed the basin and the Army kept her out. Then two airmen from Holloman Air Force Base said they had found about 100 gold bars in a small cavern on the peak. Searches followed: a military dig in 1961, the Gaddis Mining Company in 1963, and in 1977 an expedition representing some 50 claimants, organised with the lawyer F. Lee Bailey, which the Army gave only two weeks. Babe died in 1979 without finding anything. An act of Congress in 1989 opened the basin to her grandson Terry Delonas and the other heirs, and still nothing has been found. The peak stays behind the gates of an active missile range.