The Headless Miner of Deadman Pass

                                    “Robert Hume was found quite dead;
                                     It was quickly noted he had no head;
                            Someone lopped it off and it rolled in the creek;
                                   Robert knows who, but he can’t speak.”

Gold, Greed, and Guns are the making of many stories that took place
in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and if they were the only ingredients
of this tale then it might perhaps be considered just another (yawn)
commonplace tale of the past. But if you throw in a lost gold mine it
begins to tweak one’s interest. And then if you add a headless body
found on a mountainside – well, then it might veer out of the ordinary
and into the Land of the Strange.

In the year 1857 two German immigrants took their leave in Nevada from
a California-bound wagon train and began to trek along the eastern
side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, their hope being that, if instead
of continuing on to the already crowded gold fields of California they
instead explored a hitherto untapped region of the eastern Sierras,
they might not only find a gold mine but also have it all to
themselves. Their trek took them past Mono Lake and then high up into
the mountains near the streams that fed the Owens River. One day while
stopping for a rest near one of those streams they noticed, virtually
right next to their heads, a rocky outcropping which was reddish in
color and which, upon closer examination, appeared to have large lumps
of gold cemented in place within it.  The gold mine having found them,
the two men set to work chipping gold chunks out of the ledge and soon
had filled their packs with as much gold as they could carry, then
they set out to complete their journey across the mountains to
California. One of the men made it; the other died along the way. When
the surviving but sick miner arrived in the town of Millerton he was
told by the local doctor that he had tuberculosis and was sent to San
Francisco to see a specialist. There he was treated by a Dr. Randall
who was unable to cure him, and this miner, too, soon passed on.
Having no money the miner paid Dr. Randall with gold and even threw in
a map to the general location of the mine for good measure before he
died, which hardly seems justified given that the doctor was unable to
cure him. Perhaps he was just feeling generous as he viewed the
approach of the Reaper.

Following the map, Dr. Randall arrived in the general location of the
lost mine in 1861 with some friends and began his search for the exact
location of the gold. But once you share a secret, even with friends,
then it is no longer a secret, and the area soon became flooded with
men hungry for lost treasure. The Paiute Indians who lived on these
lands and who had been native to the area for centuries resented the
intrusion of the white gold seekers and the “Paiute War” soon began,
in which several prospectors were killed. It was said that two men in
Randall’s party actually found the ledge in question but kept the
location to themselves, intending to return and mine it when the
others had given up and departed. But if that was indeed the case then
it could never be verified, for those two men were among the first
killed when the Paiutes began their campaign to evict the unwanted
intruders. The mine was never found but for decades men kept coming,
braving the harsh climate of the mountains and the deadly retribution
of the Paiutes in the hope of finding that particular rocky ledge next
to a stream in which lumps of gold still waited, cemented together in
the rock  – the Lost Cement Mine.

Two of those men were named Farnsworth and Hume. In the mid-1860’s
Farnsworth met Robert Hume in Carson, Nevada. He cajoled Hume with a
tale of lost wealth waiting to be found up in the Sierras, and when
that didn’t quite convince Hume to accompany him Farnsworth upped the
ante and added that he had actually found the lost mine but needed
somebody to finance an expedition to retrieve its wealth.

Do you, Mr. Hume, by any chance have some money to invest for a half
interest in the treasure?

It turned out that indeed Hume did, and that he was willing to put up
several hundred dollars to go and get the gold and buy the equipment
for a mill to process it. So the two set off into the mountains, never
to be seen again. Well, to be accurate Hume was seen again, but he was
no longer alive nor in one piece. His body was found resting
peacefully high on a mountainside, and his head was later discovered
in a streambed not too far away, eyes still open and looking
surprised. The place where Hume’s body was found came to be called
Deadman Summit, and Deadman Pass nearby soon also adopted the name.
Some blamed the Paiutes for the deed as they had established a
reputation for dispatching miners, but Paiutes were not known for
decapitating their victims. So suspicion soon came to rest upon Hume’s
partner, Farnsworth, but Farnsworth had disappeared and was never seen
again.

Or was he?

A few years later, in 1869, two men named McDougall and Kent arrived
in Stockton and began purchasing supplies and equipment for a mining
expedition up into the mountains. Part way up they abandoned their
wagon and hired a native guide to take them and their pack horses
farther into the wilderness. The guide returned several weeks later
and said that he had left the two men near Mammoth Mountain, and the
men were seen off and on over the next several years repeating this
same expedition, leaving in the Spring and returning in the Fall, but
they were always careful to cover their trail and no one knew exactly
where they went.

Then in 1877 a man fell unconscious to the pavement on a San Francisco
street corner. When he awoke he was paralyzed and near death. A priest
was summoned to hear the man’s last confession and the sick man
revealed that he was McDougall, and that for the past eight years he
and his partner Kent had made regular trips to the Lost Cement Mine
and removed anywhere from $25,000 to $50,000 worth of gold each season
before the snow fell. Kent, who had known where the gold was located
and was the senior partner, took the bulk of the treasure back to
Chicago with him each Autumn and would return again in the Spring for
more gold. But this past year, McDougall wheezed as he lay dying, Kent
had decided would be the last, as the area of the mountains near the
mine was becoming too populated and someone was bound to discover
them. Kent said he would never return again. And McDougall, who had
been getting increasingly sick over the past year, knew that he would
never return to the mine again either.  Then, breathing his last,
McDougall apparently told the priest that Kent was in reality
Farnsworth, who had lopped off the head of his former partner, Robert
Hume. And then McDougall died.

There are many who take this whole tale with a large grain of salt
(instead of a large lump of gold). What begs most attention is that,
for a Lost Mine, a lot of people seemed to find it and then lose it
again. And why didn’t McDougall just make an occasional trip to the
mine by himself while Kent spent months each year in Chicago? And how
did just part of McDougall’s dying confession become public knowledge
– the part about the yearly trips to the mine – while other parts -
such as the exact location of the mine and the definite accusation
that Kent and Farnsworth were the same man – remained within the realm
of speculation and rumor?

Yet key parts of the tale are undeniably true. Gold was found in
abundance in that part of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, as proven when
such mining communities as Bodie and Mammoth City soon after sprang
into existence. The original finder of the gold, the man who stumbled
from the mountains, sick with tuberculosis, and paid his doctor with
gold nuggets was also a fact. McDougall and Kent did make regular
trips into the mountains every year for several years, and they would
hardly have done so had there not been some reward waiting for them.
And the headless body of Robert Hume was indeed a glaring and
undeniable fact. These are all things that are known.

But why did Robert Hume die, and did Farnsworth kill him? Was Kent
really Farnsworth, and had he discovered the location of the lost mine
and become fabulously wealthy? Is the lost mine still out there,
waiting to make someone else rich beyond their dreams with wealth yet
untapped? These are things that are not known, and may never be known.

But when you next hike over that part of the Sierras and suddenly find
yourself enjoying the view from Deadman Summit, may your thoughts now
inevitably turn to the possibility that lost gold may lie just around
the corner of the next granite outcropping, cemented within a rocky
ledge hanging just above a gentle stream. And as you pitch your tent
for the night and the darkness falls around you perhaps the shades of
some of the men who died looking for that gold will pay a visit to
your camp, and their soft laughter may wake you in the night.  And, if
you’re very lucky, then perhaps the ghost of Robert Hume, the Headless
Miner of Deadman Pass, will wake you in the wee small hours of the
morning, looking at you with eyes that stare without ever closing, and
he’ll whisper to you the location of the lost gold mine which he and
Farnsworth found. But you may have to bend low to hear him, for he’ll
be carrying his head in his hands.