I wanted to write about this fantastic legend myself and just take bits and pieces from my son Ben's narrative, but his is so good that I just had to post it in his own words. In the image below, the cliff just to the left there, where there is an overhang, is where the gold is supposedly buried.
“Sometimes
the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to
believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor,
courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money mean
nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to
remember this, that love... true love never dies. You remember that,
boy. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should
believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing
in.”
Ever since I
was a little kid, this quote from the movie Second Hand Lions has
stuck with me. I've always liked how it describes belief. That a man
needs to believe in important things, even if those things aren't
proven facts. Another aspect I like is how money and power mean
nothing, and that love means everything. Sometimes I get so caught up
on things that I think are true. For instance, sometimes I think if I
could win the lottery, or somehow land in a towering pile of
Benjamins, I would automatically have it made in this life. But money
and happiness don't always correlate with each other. I learned that
lesson this past summer, the summer I heard the best story of my
life.
An unexpected
opportunity arose in July to go to Southern Utah for a couple of
days. My buddy Caleb owns a bit of private property in Kanab, and I
was invited on the spur of the moment to go down there for a carefree
vacation. Locals call the area Three Lakes, chiefly because there are
three “lakes” on the property. I wouldn't really call them lakes,
more like miniature ponds, but all the same they were refreshing to
swim in, and the fishing was amazing. We'd cast out into the clear
water, and usually in less than a minute we'd have a blue gill or a
bass on our lines. The surrounding atmosphere was somewhat like Lake
Powell. With tall crimson cliffs encompassing deep blue water. Atop
one of the red rock cliffs was a zip line that spanned across the
entire length of the pond. Caleb and I spent most of our days in
Kanab down at the biggest, and most hospitable of the three lakes.
Beside that lake, with the smoke of our campfire rising up to meet
the glittering stars, was where I heard the story of the Aztec gold
for the first time.
Over fifty
years ago, Caleb's grandpa bought Three Lakes as a sanctuary for his
posterity. A place where you could breath without somebody else
breathing right down your neck. The privacy at Three Lakes is
heavenly. You can walk out the back door and shoot a rabbit without
worrying about the law. You can spend weeks exploring the miles of
property, or swimming and fishing in the lakes. That's what Three
Lakes was in the beginning, but it became much more than that.
In 1914, a man
named Freddie Crystal made a huge commotion when he came into Kanab
with a treasure map from Mexico. He claimed that the map led to a
spot a few miles out of Kanab in Johnson's canyon where Montezuma (
the last ruler of the Aztec empire) had supposedly hidden all of his
gold. Archaeologists estimate that Montezuma's lost treasure would be
the biggest and most valuable treasure ever to be unearthed. When the
citizens of Kanab heard this, the whole town flocked to Johnson's
canyon, searching every cave and crevice for gold. What they found
was interesting, but also disappointing. After several long months of
excavating, all they found were booby traps, and a couple shards of
ancient Indian pottery. The gold was never found, and the town's
people all gave up the search in vain, returning back to their normal
lives.
The case
seemed to be closed, until years later when Caleb's grandpa, Brandt
Child, made an exciting discovery. Scientists found that the Aztec's
sometimes used water traps to conceal their gold. What they would do
is find a cave in a rock wall, hide the gold somewhere inside, and
then fill the area up with water so that the passage to the treasure
was buried underneath the water. Never to be seen by the naked eye.
Scientists have found several of these water traps, and in all cases,
one factor is always the same. The depth of the water from the
surface, to the entrance of the underwater cave is always 25 Ft.
After hearing this, Brandt tested the depth of the largest pond at
Three Lakes out of sheer curiosity. The depth of the pond was 25 Ft.
deep. Brandt then hired Scuba divers to go down into the water to
check things out. To everyone's surprise, the divers found a tunnel
that went straight into the cliff wall, and then branched out into a
network of underwater passageways. However, when the divers tried
exploring these caves, strange things kept on happening to them. The
first time, one of the divers had to come back to the surface because
the nozzle on her tank somehow came loose, and all of her air was
released. On the second attempt, a couple members of the diving team
claimed to see ghosts in the water. Similar things kept on happening
when Brandt hired more divers. Each team of diver's was spooked off
in some way, and after a while no scuba diver's would even come near
the lake.
The next
thing they tried doing to get to the gold, was to drill down into the
water from the top of the cliff. They drilled into the water trap,
and when the drill was taken back up, there was gold on the drill
bit. Brandt decided he was going to need a bigger drill. They would
try again the next day. But that would never happen, that night the
driller went home and died of a sudden heart attack. A couple months
later his wife also passed away. More than a little spooked out,
Brandt decided to try one last thing. Probably the most logical thing
to do was to drain the lake. Then one could easily waltz right into
the cave and claim Montezuma's treasure. He might've done it too, if
it wasn't for an endangered species of snail that lives at Three
Lakes, called the Amber Snail. The State Wildlife Protectors wouldn't
let him drain the lake, because it would damage the habitat of the
Amber Snail.
After a while
Brandt Child stopped going after Montezuma's gold. He believed (with
good reason) that it was cursed, and that if he pursued that gold any
further he would end up a dead man. Since then, nobody has ever tried
to obtain the gold at Three Lakes. It would have been foolishness,
but as I sat around the crackling fire that night, I couldn't help
but feel a burning gold fever well up inside of my body. The greatest
treasure ever to be found on this continent, was possibly lying only
yards from where I sat, sleeping for eternity underneath a cursed
watery grave. Buried in the same water that I had been swimming in
all day. Why couldn't I somehow get the gold? I didn't have the
authority, resources, or equipment by any means. But what if, for
some divine reason, Caleb and I were the chosen ones, heavenly
commissioned to bring the gold back to the world. We slept under the
stars that night, and talked about these sort of silly unanswerable
questions. My gold fever slowly winded down as I gazed up into the
starry sky, thinking more deeply about life and the gold. The
availing words eventually drifted into my mind; power and money mean
nothing, and true love means everything. To this day, I believe that
a vast treasure is hidden beneath that beautiful lake in Kanab. But
much more important than money, I believe that people are naturally
good; that honor, courage, virtue, and love mean everything. Those
are the things that are worth believing in.
