![]() Some of them helped Freddie Crystal break through these seals, but they only found emptiness and disappointment, like Al Capone’s vault when Geraldo Rivero opened it on live TV.ĭecades later, in 1989, a local Kanab, Utah, resident, Brandt Child, theorized that the caves Crystal found were fakes to throw treasure hunters off the trail. Locals chalked him up as a kooky weirdo, but after a few years, Crystal thumbed his nose at them, for he had found a few caves that had been intentionally sealed off. He devoted his time to poking around the nooks of the canyon. In 1914, a treasure hunter named Freddie Crystal (no relation to Billy Crystal) showed up in the area of Johnson Canyon claiming to have a map with a big red X on it. Montezuma’s men probably didn’t want to go THAT far and, as I said, there are lots of nooks and crannies in the canyons and caves of southern Utah. There are a lot of places north of Mexico, but for some reason, most people believe Montezuma’s treasure is in southern Utah. “Is this too much?” – Montezuma II, probably. So, he got a group of his most trusted men to take the riches of the Aztecs north for safe keeping. Cortés and his men were like, yeah, now we can plunder that booty (in a non-sexual way), but to their dismay, the Aztecs didn’t have piles of gold, silver, and jewels.Īs the story goes, Montezuma could read the Spanish writing on the wall and knew his people were doomed to fall to the Conquistadors. Some epically one-sided battles ensued and, in 1520, Montezuma was killed. Things had been pretty status quo for the Aztecs until the Spanish Conquistadors, led by Hernán Cortés, made an unannounced visit in 1519 and bullied the Aztec people with their guns, armor, Christianity, and smallpox. The year was 1519 and the Aztec emperor, Montezuma II, had reigned over much of what is now Mexico for the last 17 years. This story pre-dates the Old West-era but, if it is true, it is a trove worth billions of dollars and priceless artifacts that, in the wise words of Indiana Jones, “belong in a museum!” What follows is a list of seven lost treasures that, if the stories are true, are still securely hidden in Utah’s rugged landscapes just waiting to be found. ![]() Heck, if I had treasure I wanted to hide, I’d head to the Beehive State.Īccording to legends, I’m not the only one who has thought this. In short, Utah has all sorts of nooks and crannies that could make great hiding places for lost treasures. Within the odd-numbered boundaries of the state, Utah has some diverse geography: rugged mountains, dry deserts, pine-filled valleys, an inland salt-water sea they are trying to pass off as a lake, narrow canyons, an entire meadow made of salt, imposing mesas and buttes, wind-carved sandstone arches and pinnacles, and even sand dunes without the obligatory ocean. Too bad they couldn’t add one more mile … I like even numbers. As the 13 th largest state in the union, Utah covers a total of 84,899 square miles. Answers that would remain lost at the bottom of Lake Mead.Come to think of it, Utah would be a great place to hide something.įirst, it is vast. By the 1950s it was already obvious to historians, archaeologists and anthropologists that the surviving artifacts of Lost City raised more questions than answers. All future study of the area would be limited to the hastily assembled collections and notes of the pre-Lake Mead archaeologists. But for every discovery saved, myriad others were lost. ![]() Luckily, hundreds of sites remained above water and various artifacts were saved from the Lost City to be housed in the Lost City Museum of Archaeology in Overton, Nevada. Not all sites were drowned by the Lake, but the most representative, Pueblo Grande de Nevada (Lost City) was. Harrington was later assisted by members of the Civilian Conservation Corps as they rushed to complete excavations in areas that were to be covered by Lake Mead when Hoover Dam was built in 1938. Initial excavations of the sites were carried out in the mid-1920s by archaeologist Mark Raymond Harrington.
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