The legend of Butch Cassidy has survived for over a century, but a family member’s claim suggests the outlaw may not have died in the Bolivian shootout that supposedly ended his life in 1908. Cassidy’s sister, Lula, swore she met her brother alive at a family gathering in 1925, 17 years after his reported death, and said he spoke with relatives as if nothing had happened. Others close to the family made similar claims, and a former president of Bolivia, René Barrientos, publicly stated the famous shootout was staged. Pinkerton detectives who had hunted the pair insisted the two outlaws actually died in Uruguay, not Bolivia, and the bodies found after the clash were never officially identified as Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
According to Lula, her brother lived quietly for decades, possibly in Chile, Paraguay, or Spokane, Washington, and died of pneumonia on U. S. soil in 1930. If true, the most famous outlaw of the Old West would have vanished completely and died in his own bed.
Long before Cassidy, Cochise led the Chiricahua Apaches as the American Southwest became a battlefield. Almost nothing is known about his early years, but by 1860 he was leading his people between Arizona and northern Mexico, organizing ambushes that left the U. S. Army struggling to respond.
His knowledge of every rock and canyon in the desert gave him an advantage soldiers could not match. The war ended in 1872 when a deal guaranteed land in southeastern Arizona for the Chiricahuas, but Cochise died two years later without seeing the peace last. His body was taken to the Dragoon Mountains and buried in a spot revealed to only a handful of warriors. It is said his horse and dog were placed in the grave with him so they would not wander in search of their owner, and so no one would disturb his rest.
To this day, the tomb has never been found. A different kind of mystery involves a gold mine so rich that men died trying to find it, and no one knows exactly where it lies. In 1857, two men traveling to California stopped near a creek in the Sierra Nevada and found a gold vein so concentrated it seemed unreal. One of them filled his backpack with almost five kilos of the metal, but fell ill on the way and had to sell everything, including a hand-drawn map, to cover doctor bills.
Mark Twain also told a version of the legend, claiming three German brothers fleeing an attack hid in the mountains and found similar deposits. Between 1869 and 1877, two men showed up yearly in Stockton carrying nuggets that left onlookers speechless. When one of them was dying, he confessed to a priest that they had pulled about $400,000 in gold from near Mammoth Peak, but he took the exact spot to the grave. The original mine has never been found, though the legend drove so many prospectors into the mountains that they eventually discovered Bodie, where more than 28,000 kilos of gold were pulled out.
In 1862, Salt Lake City was rocked by a scandal involving its gravedigger, Jean Baptiste, who was caught stealing clothes from the dead before burying them. Authorities searching his house found piles of garments taken from corpses, and the community was furious. Brigham Young tried to calm the Mormon faithful by promising that at the resurrection, everyone would rise fully clothed, even those Baptiste had stripped. Punishment came quickly, and Baptiste was deported to a deserted island in the Great Salt Lake, left with almost nothing, and since he could not swim, it looked like a guaranteed life sentence.
But a few weeks later, when people went to check on him, the prisoner was gone. One theory says he tried to swim and drowned, and years later a skull and a skeleton in chains were found near the Jordan River, but nothing was confirmed. Another story claims he took apart the cabin he was in, used the boards and animal hides to build a makeshift raft, rowed to shore, and vanished, possibly catching a train to California and living in mining camps where nobody asked questions. Reports later surfaced that Baptiste was captured, branded, and mutilated as a grave robber, but no one knows if that is true or an exaggeration from people who love a creepy story.
Tom Horn’s story, made famous by a 1980 Steve McQueen movie, was far more complicated than Hollywood showed. In the 1890s, the cattle business in Wyoming was in trouble, prices had crashed, and big ranchers who kept buying herds needed someone to blame. They found cattle rustlers, and men like Horn were paid to do the dirty work. Horn showed up, handled problems his way, and disappeared, and nobody asked too many questions.
Everything changed in July 1901 when Willie Nickell, a 14-year-old boy, was found shot to death near his family’s ranch, and the whole territory was shocked. Marshal Joe Lefors put Horn on the suspect list, called him in for a talk, got him loaded with whiskey, and according to records, Horn let out lines that sounded like a confession. That was enough to arrest him. In court, Horn’s lawyers argued there was no direct proof, but the jury decided the circumstances were enough, and in November 1903, he walked up to the gallows.
Decades later, a mock jury took another look at the evidence and concluded there were too many holes in the original story. To this day, no one knows for sure who killed Willie Nickell. Albert Fountain was not the kind of man who backed down. A Union veteran of the Civil War, trained in law, a state senator in Texas, a judge, and a sheriff, he had built a career that made powerful enemies.
In February 1896, Fountain left Lincoln headed for Mesilla in the New Mexico Territory with his 8-year-old son, Henry, carrying documents that could bring down a cattle rustling ring tied to influential ranchers. Friends warned him of rumors of an ambush, but he brushed off every warning. The last person to see them was a mail carrier who noticed three riders trailing the wagon at a distance, unhurried, like predators waiting for the right moment. Days later, the wagon turned up abandoned in the desert with a blood-soaked handkerchief inside.
No bodies, no confession, no answers. The case made national headlines and sparked decades of speculation. Some pointed to hired guns, others mentioned the outlaw Blackjack Ketchum, but the name that really split opinions was Oliver Lee, an influential rancher and federal marshal who was put on trial for the crime. His acquittal did not settle anything, leaving the question of who silenced Albert Fountain and his son hanging in the desert air.
In 1863, Henry Plummer fooled an entire town to become sheriff of Bannack, Montana. Nobody did background checks back then, and Plummer, who had rumors of murder hanging over him, used that blind trust to his advantage. He put together his own crew of deputies better at scams than enforcing the law, and the last honest marshal from the previous administration, who tried to push back, ended up with a bullet in his body. Plummer ran a simple, effective setup, seizing gold shipments from miners with flimsy excuses, and when the haul got too heavy, he would disappear into the hills and bury it somewhere secret.
They say fortunes are still buried out there, with reports of $200,000 in gold dust near Birdtail Rock, nuggets hidden along a creek that empties into the Sun River, $50,000 stolen from a stagecoach buried near Cottonwood Creek, and another $300,000 resting somewhere in the hills of Cascade. Generations of treasure hunters have tried metal detectors, old maps, and wild theories, but nobody has ever found a single grain of that gold. Queho, born sometime around the 1880s in the dry mountains of Colorado, had an indigenous mother and an unknown father, and grew up in a kind of limbo. The tribes did not want him, and neither did the white settlers heading west.
Legend has it he killed his own half-brother to settle a blood score, and with that stain on him, he headed down toward a Las Vegas that was still just getting started. There, the name Queho became a synonym for danger, and any unexplained crime or disappearance was blamed on him. Authorities offered $2,000 for his capture, but bounty hunters came back with nothing. In February 1940, workers near the Hoover Dam found a mummified body in a cave, and the detail that stood out was a double row of teeth, something extremely rare.
Authorities called it Queho. The Las Vegas Elks Club saw an opportunity and set up a creepy display, charging admission for the public to see the remains of the legendary fugitive. But between theft and neglect, the bones disappeared, and to this day, nobody knows where they ended up. Pancho Villa started out as an outlaw and ended up commanding thousands of men in one of the bloodiest civil wars in the Americas.
He defeated professional armies and even challenged the United States, but when the dust settled, Villa did something nobody expected, he put down his weapons and became a rancher. In July 1923, gunmen ambushed his car on a street in Parral, and eight shots ended his life. Three years after the burial, someone broke into Villa’s tomb in the middle of the night, and when the coffin was opened the next morning, the head was gone. Nobody was arrested, nobody confessed, and the family only found out about more problems decades later.
In 1976, when the Mexican government moved Villa’s remains to a monument in Mexico City, his granddaughter swore other bones went missing during the transfer. A story that has been going around for years says Villa’s widow got so worried about thieves that she ordered the remaining bones swapped with those of an unknown woman. Theories only get weirder, with a pawn shop in El Paso trying to sell what they called Villa’s trigger finger for almost $10,000, and others swearing Yale’s secret Skull and Bones Society bought the head as a trophy. To this day, nobody has proven anything.
Finally, there is the story of a ship in the middle of the desert. Since the late 1800s, locals in the Colorado Desert have sworn they have seen a Spanish galleon buried in the dunes. The first report ran in the Los Angeles Star in 1870, when a treasure hunter said he had found the ship, and weeks later another man named Charlie Klusker said the same thing, insisting the vessel was in great shape. None of the reports brought solid proof, but the legend grew, and over time the galleon turned into a pirate ship loaded with stolen gold and silver.
The question that will not go away is how a boat ended up so far from the ocean. The answer might be in the land itself, as the nearby Salton Sink has formed huge lakes depending on shifts in climate, and oyster shells in the San Felipe Mountains prove all of that used to be seafloor. Some researchers believe the ship came in through the Gulf of California, ran aground when the waters dropped, and was buried by sand over the centuries, with the crew probably dying in the brutal heat.
Even today, adventurers show up with metal detectors and shovels, but nobody has ever brought back so much as a single coin.
