“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.
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AuthorWith a degree in Anthropology and an avid interest in history, Tim Christensen has lived in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for many years. He has no cell phone or television, but manages, when not chopping firewood or shoveling snow, to keep himself entertained with a library of several thousand books. Archives
July 2017
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