DON - Dutchman's mine

[Luca Boschi]

Hi Don and Eta!
 

>> I wouldn't expect a European
>> reader to recognize the name "Lost Dutchman's Mine"
> 
> Why not ? I read the Blueberry story for the first time around
> the mid-seventies, and I clearly remember having wondered why
> the title was "German's mine" rather than "Dutchman's mine"...
> 
> Meaning, I knew the legend already back then, but not to the
> finer details yet... can't remember where I'd heard the story
> before, though.

The reason is that the "dutchman" *was* actually a German, Jacob Waltz, who
personally discovered the mine; so tells the story about him, that is
not-so-popular, in Europe; maybe Gir and Charlier knew one of the many
"corrupted" versions of it or that some stories about the mine were only
lies, so they decided not to use them. For the American people of the XIX
century, guys coming from Germany of from Holland made no difference. The
words "Deutsche = German" and "Dutch = from Holland" has a quite similar
sound. 
I know about detailed papers concerning Waltz' life, who was in Phoenix
around 1870-1880. For example, there is a contract between Waltz and a
certain Andrew Starar, signed in 1878, about the mine's care after Waltz'
future death. The remaining stories, like the descriptions related by Sims
Ely in "The Lost Dutchman" 's book, are pure legends. One of them, talks
about Peralta's spanish family, who should have obtained the lands where
this mine is collocated, far in 1748. But according to official documents,
this Peralta family never existed, even if the Peralta's name is quite
common for people living in South-West areas.
Some legends about this issue were conceived and diffonded by the famous
James Addison Reavis, the "Arizona's Baron", who was a crook indeed,
claiming some lands' properties in Arizona and New Mexico. He was condemned
by a federal court in 1896 for his crimes (you can check the Vincent Price's
movie "The Baron of Arizona", or something like this). Anyway the Peralta's
story is told as it were a real fact in a reference book like "History of
Arizona and New Mexico", by Hubert H. Bancroft. Many stories about the
dutchman's mine come from there.

Luca