When Hughes arrived in Galeyville, Curly Bill was in Charleston. No time was left to report to the outlaw chieftain, and Hughes determined to enrich himself by a coup of his own. Hastily assembling a small band of outlaws, he headed for Skeleton Canyon. Where the canyon opens into the San Simon Valley, he placed his men in ambush in the mesquite along the low canyon wall. Who the men with Hughes were has been a matter of dispute. Milt Hicks and Jack McKenzie certainly; Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds possibly; Ike and Billy Clanton probably. There was one other whose identity is not known. The question of the presence of Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds had an important bearing on the story, later to evolve, of buried treasure at Davis Mountain.
Down through Skeleton Canyon over the Peloncillo Mountains came the Mexican smuggler train, mule bells jingling in the morning sunlight. A half mile from the mouth of the canyon and an equal distance below the Devil’s Kitchen, the scene of Curly Bill’s murderous exploit of a month before, the fifteen Mexicans halted for lunch. While their coffee simmered on a little camp fire and they sat eating on the grass, the canyon wall above them flamed with crashing rifles. Three Mexicans fell dead. Panic seized the others. They sprang on their ponies. Down the canyon they galloped in the midst of a mad welter of pack mules stampeding with wildly jangling bells. Three more Mexicans were killed, it is said, before the smugglers went racing out of the mouth of the canyon and escaped across the San Simon Valley.
Zwing Hunt, it is said, was struck in the shoulder and brought down by a bullet fired by the Mexicans in their flight. Also, it is said, Billy Grounds carried his wounded comrade to an oak tree at the canyon’s mouth and laid him on the ground in the shade. There, it is said, Billy Grounds dressed the wound after bathing it with water fetched from the creek in his hat. It is a pretty story, and it gave the tree, which stands now in Ross Sloan’s corral, the name of the Outlaw’s Oak.
The Mexicans routed, Jim Hughes and his men mounted their ponies and went helter-skelter in pursuit of the pack mules to kill them and save the treasure. The terror-stricken mules had rushed out of the canyon and were running in every direction across the San Simon. Lumbering under their heavy loads of silver money and gold bullion, the animals, one by one, were soon overtaken and shot. Only one mule escaped.
What to do with the ponderous treasure that had fallen into their hands became the problem of the outlaws. It was plainly impossible for six or eight men to carry it away on their ponies. They decided to cache it, it is said, and leave it until such time as they could return for it with a wagon. The dead mules lay here and there over a wide area, some a mile apart. It was slow work to rifle the aparejos and carry the money and gold bars into the canyon. But the job was completed at last, and the spoils of the fight, it is declared, were buried under a group of three live oaks near the mouth of the canyon.
The value of the loot of this robbery has been variously estimated. The Mexican money stolen, according to one story, amounted to $90,000, and the gold bars numbered thirty-nine.
The treasure was lifted by the outlaws within the next few days, it is supposed, and under the guidance of Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds hauled in a four-horse wagon, driven by a Mexican, to the Davis Mountain Canyon and reburied in a pit already half filled with robber loot brought by Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds out of Mexico. The Mexican teamster, it is said, was murdered and the wagon burned.
Whatever may be confused or uncertain in this Skeleton Canyon story, it is a fact that skeletons of the dead mules lie about the San Simon Valley near the canyon’s mouth even now, and the rawhide aparejos are still found here and there, rotted by the rains and suns of years. Certain, too, it is that, for many years after the fight, Mexican silver dollars, scattered broadcast by the runaway mules, were picked up all over the country. Cowboys at the San Simon ranch played poker all the next winter with the money they found in the Skeleton Canyon neighbourhood. Every now and then, even today, these tarnished old silver pieces are discovered, and only a little while ago, Mr. Joseph Wheeler, wealthy cattle man, whose ranch is within a few miles of the canyon, found six coins that are relics of the attack on the smuggler train nearly a half century ago.
A mysterious old German appeared in Skeleton Canyon early in the ’nineties. He built a little hut at the forks above the Devil’s Kitchen and for two years lived alone in his wilderness hermitage. Who he was, or even his name, never was learned, and he is known in the buried treasure tradition only as the Old Dutchman. But the Old Dutchman was a busy fellow, and he was forever digging holes. There was little travel through Skeleton in those days and few people ever saw him. But an occasional cowboy, combing the hills for cattle during a roundup, would stop and talk with the Old Dutchman smoking his pipe beside his cabin door. From stray hints dropped in these infrequent conversations with cowboys grew a story that the Old Dutchman had been with Jim Hughes
