Chests bursting with gold and jewels, skeletons languishing in the darkness, a secret government coverup, and Watergate. The Victorio Peak Treasure Tale has it all. The legend of gold in Victorio Peak is one of the most intriguing gold legends in New Mexico, and it endures to this day, with Ova Noss’s family still fighting the US government for the right to excavate the peak.
Before I wrote about Arthur Rochford Manby, an eccentric character from Britain who dabbled in land prospecting and gold mining in New Mexico in the early twentieth century. Doc Noss was a similar such character in twentieth-century New Mexico. Though he was not as odious as Arthur Manby, he had a dubious reputation and his claims of a fantastic gold bar stash in a New Mexico peak have never been verified. Some think he was a con artist, others think he was a legendary explorer. He also met an unpleasant end at the hands of another person, like Manby did.
Let’s delve into the Doc Noss and Victorio Peak Treasure story.
The Start of It All
Milton “Doc” Noss, his wife Ova “Babe” Noss, his friend R.L. Cokler, and three others were hunting deer with a group in the Hembrillo Basin in 1937. The Hembrillo Basin is a dried-up desert lake in the San Andres Mountains, roughly between Truth or Consequences and Alamogordo. Sometimes water still collects in the lakebed, especially after a good rainy season. Victorio Peak is a lumpy, craggy mountain in the center of the basin, full of tunnels and caves. It once served as a hideout for Apache Chief Victorio and his men. The basin was the scene of the brutal 1880 Buffalo Soldiers battle between the Apaches and the US Army Ninth Cavalry.
Doc Noss perched alone on a rock on Victorio Peak near a spring, waiting for his prey to appear. He felt a breeze on his leg and panicked, thinking it was a rattlesnake about to pounce and bite him. But there was no snake. He realized the breeze came from under a rock, so he dug around it to free it and moved it to the side, and discovered a cave leading into the peak. Doc Noss climbed down into the tunnel and emerged later breathless, exclaiming about seeing a mine shaft.
He only told his wife, Ova, about this. They were both treasure hunters, so they decided to return later and explore the peak themselves. They brought ladders and flashlights. Ova stayed at the surface, acting as lookout, because she could not fit in the tunnel. Noss used a rope to climb 60 feet down into the darkness, when his flashlight beam illuminated a room hewn out of the rock and a kneeling skeleton tied to a stake. I would have noped out of there right then, but Doc Noss pushed on. He discovered interconnecting tunnels and rooms hewn in the rock and with Native American petroglyphs painted on the walls. There were more skeletons, too, and reports range from 16 to 27.
In one of the side rooms of this elaborate tunnel system, Doc Noss nearly fell over in shock. There his flashlight revealed tons of gold coins, swords, pig iron bars, and Wells Fargo chests bursting with money. He also saw more skeletons, rotting in the darkness.
He grabbed a sword encrusted in jewels, scooped gold coins into his pockets, and picked up one of the “worthless” pig iron bars. Then he scrambled back to the entrance, where he breathlessly told his wife about what they had discovered. She was elated. When he pulled the pig iron bar out of his pocket, it glinted gold in the sunlight.
They immediately filed a mining claim and it was granted. Staying in a tent at the base of the mountain, Doc Noss explored the caves every day and pulled out jewels, a jeweled crown, historical documents naming Pope Pius II, and countless gold bars. He then buried them at some undisclosed location in the desert to protect them from thieves. It didn’t help that the Gold Act of 1933 made it impossible for him to sell gold, and he and his wife were not rich people, so he hoarded the treasure and carried on with mining it all out of the peak where it had lain for centuries. He didn’t even trust his wife enough to tell her where he was hiding the loot. Ova claims she saw some of the specimens he brought up to the surface, but honestly it is not clear if anyone actually laid eyes on any of the treasure.
Police began to arrest Doc Noss on bogus charges, in the hopes he may have gold on him that they could confiscate. But the gold he carried on him was always fake, gold-plated bronze bars. His wife, Ova, later claimed this was because he was smart and knew to carry decoy bars. I wonder if it’s because he didn’t really have any gold, though.
The US Treasury Department soon caught wind of their fantastic finding and ordered them to make a safer entrance into the peak so that they could enter and take inventory for taxation purposes. At the time, it was illegal for unlicensed private citizens to possess gold between 1933 and 1974. Noss complied and in 1939 he hired an engineer to blast an entrance into the peak with dynamite – and this move caved in the top of Victorio Peak. Supposedly this is when the trouble all started.
You see, no one but Doc Noss ever saw any of the booty he claimed lingered there in the darkness with the skeletons. It is understandable that he might want to keep such a find to himself – but then why did he involve so many others in the endeavor? He involved engineers, friends, and investors. The dynamite blast was a convenient reason for him to lose access to all this gold so he wouldn’t have to prove its existence to anyone. He became a bitter man, according to those who knew him, and a terrible drunk after the mine was sealed off. This offers some evidence that maybe there was something in that peak. But there has never been any physical evidence.
At some point in 1945, Doc Noss vanished for 18 months, abandoning his family. He returned with a younger, thinner wife named Violet Lena Boles. This broke Ova’s heart. In her forties, she felt that no one else would want to marry her. To add insult to injury, Doc Noss never filed for a legal divorce from her. The divorce he got was fraudulent. Ova tried to fight it in court but was told to just accept what he had done to her. Such was the treatment of women in the 40s. She moved in with a family in Clovis and filled her grandson Terry Delonas’s ears with tales of treasure. He is now a passionate believer and seeker of the Victorio Peak treasure. Terry Delonas now fights to get access to the peak, even though Ova Noss is now resting in peace.
Meanwhile, Doc Noss began to dig up his treasure from the desert and take it to Arizona to sell on the black market he apparently found there. This is also how he got mixed up with Charley Ryan. Ryan was a rich Texan who agreed to invest money mining the peak, hoping to become even richer with the treasure alleged trapped inside.
The Murder
In true Manby fashion, Noss convinced Charley Ryan to invest some money in mining the peak, despite furnishing no proof of the gold inside. Ryan was promised fifty bars of gold in exchange for his investment of $28,000 in an airstrip and drilling decoys to get into the collapsed peak.
When Doc Noss got to the peak, he saw that mining activity was going on, under the direction of Ova Noss. People told him Ova Noss had taken over the claim and had him removed from it. Doc Noss was furious. He got a mining claim to land directly across from Victorio Peak so he could watch the activity. He and Ova Noss got into a screaming match one day, during which Ova Noss revealed that she had never removed him from the claim. Even though Doc had cheated her and betrayed her with his new wife, she still wanted his help on the mine.
However, the courts halted all mining activity on the peak while they settled the dispute between the ex-spouses and various other claimants that had popped up over the years. This made Charley Ryan very angry. He sensed that he was being cheated.
When the gold failed to materialize and setback after setback prevented forward motion with the mining, Ryan accused Noss of swindling him. To protect his interests, Noss supposedly hired a young rodeo bronco rider named Tony Jolley to help him stash 110 bars of gold where no one could ever find them in the New Mexico desert. Jolley later affirms that he helped dig up and move over 20 bars of gold from near a windmill in Hatch and then 90 bars of gold stacked inside Victorio Peak, and then buried them throughout the Hembrillo Basin and along the road to Truth or Consequences. Noss and Jolley apparently did this overnight on March 5, 1946.
Later on March 5th, Ryan confronted Doc Noss for swindling him. He demanded that Noss show him where the gold was hidden before he handed over any more investment money. This led to a violent fight. When Doc Noss walked away toward his truck, Ryan fired a warning shot. But Doc Noss did not heed it. So Ryan then shot him in the back of the head.
Later on, he was acquitted on murder charges on grounds of self-defense. He claimed that he thought Doc Noss was going to his truck to get a gun and kill him, so he shot first. The evidence doesn’t match his story and it is believed that the court was biased against Doc Noss. The entire trial was more of a character assassination of Doc Noss than a murder trial, according to an attorney who reviewed the court documents for Gold, Lies, and Videotape, a documentary made about Victorio Peak.
After finding the treasure, Doc Noss apparently became a paranoid man, certain everyone was out to steal his treasure. He also became an alcoholic and was arrested multiple times for alcohol-related offenses. Ultimately, his paranoia proved not to just be the delusions of an old drunk. He did die for the gold, whether it was real or not.
Ova carried on the gold fever. Whether she was continuing her ex-husband’s scam for him or she really believed that the treasure existed is unclear. The one thing that was clear was her passion and obsession with the peak. She continued to try to find ways into the collapsed peak until 1955, when the federal government purchased the land for White Sands Missile Range and told Ova Noss she could no longer occupy it in any way. She attempted to still access her mine to clear away the rubble with work crews, and the military always appeared and escorted her off of the land.
Ova died in 1979 and her daughter, Letha Guthrie, and her sister, Dorothy Delonas, spread her ashes over Victorio Peak. They know that place was the center of their mother’s life for decades and she would not want to lie anywhere else. Maybe her spirit managed to find out the truth.
Was Doc Noss a Conman?
There are many things that make Doc Noss seem like a dubious character. For one thing, he always claimed to be a doctor and he even had a podiatry practice. But there is no evidence he ever went to medical school or even had a proper license to practice. If you carefully look into the wording of his advertisements, you will realize that he is careful never to directly claim he is a doctor.
He also claimed Native American lineage. But a thorough examination of his genealogy does not find any evidence of that. Instead, he appears to be of European descent. He married Ova Noss because she was white and he believed she would help him get farther in life. Why did he do that if he wasn’t even half Native American as he claimed?
He had been involved in various scams in the past which had resulted in lawsuits. People knew him as a shifty character. In addition, he had a habit of disappearing and he pulled this on Ova Noss when he vanished and married Violet Lena Boles.
Here’s the interesting thing. The Army had legal claim to use the surface of the land; the mineral rights and things under the surface of the land still belonged to the state of New Mexico or any mine claimants. But a search of records turned up no legal filing owned by Doc Noss, despite the fact he claimed he had gone to Santa Fe and filed a legal mining claim here. The real owner of the land was a rancher named Roy Henderson and he was leasing it to the Army that now occupied it. So this led to a lot of legal back-and-forth over who really had the right to excavate the collapsed Victorio Peak. Eventually, the courts decided that no one was to access the gold, not the Army and not Ova Noss. Ova Noss ultimately would not be allowed back onto the peak until 1977.
More on that later. But first, let’s talk about what happened when the Hembrillo Basin became part of the huge White Sands Missile Range and the government’s messy involvement in the whole affair.
The Military’s Involvement
Hearing the fantastic legends of gold in Victorio Peak, two young airmen named Airman First Class Thomas Berlett and Captain Leonard V. Fiege managed to find their way into the peak in 1958. They said there was another tunnel on the other side of Victorio Peak that led straight in. And they claimed to have found tons of gold bars in Victorio Peak’s bowels. They used dynamite to collapse the end of the cave they used for entry so no one else could find their way in. Then they approached their commanding officer for permission to mine the gold. They even formed a corporation to protect their interests. White Sands Missile Range wasn’t having it, however, and denied them access to the peak per a formal edict.
That all changed in 1961. The Director of the Mint allowed the two airmen, Major Kelly, Colonel Gorman, and Captain Orby Swanner to try their hand at mining the peak. However, the group couldn’t find their way back into the peak due to the way Fiege and Berlett had closed off the tunnel. This sounds just like Doc Noss’s story. They couldn’t even make up their own elaborate lost treasure myth! I also find it hard to believe that no one discovered this second entrance, when Doc and Ova Noss had people all over Victorio Peak for years, searching for alternate ways in.
After that, General Shinkle at White Sands Missile Range lost his patience and ordered the airmen off the land. The treasure seekers were not allowed into the area. However, Fiege took a polygraph to prove that he was not lying. This triggered the Army to start a mining operation to try to recover the gold. Ova Noss caught wind of this and had a few friends sneak onto the land to see if the military really was mining her claim. Her friends were immediately caught and escorted from the Basin, but they reported tons of activity in the Hembrillo Basin, including trucks and helicopters. They believe that the military was excavating the peak for the gold treasure, despite being told not to by the courts.
The military eventually brought in the Gaddis Mining Company from Colorado. These guys were experts in getting to minerals. But they excavated the peak and said there was nothing inside it. Seismologists who surveyed the area did report a sizable cavern under the peak, which lends some credence to Doc Noss’s story. Yet no one recovered gold – at least, officially.
In 1972, Fiege, Berlett, Ova Noss, and others banded together to pressure the military to allow them access. The military conceded and they opened a large-scaled mining operation in 1977. Again, nothing was found. Ova Noss swore that the military had already gotten to the gold and there was nothing left for her.
Captain Swanner was stationed at White Sands during the 1960s and oversaw the original 1961 mission to find the gold. He came forward after Ova Noss passed away in 1979 and admitted that the military had scoured reports by Airmen Berlett and Captain Fiege and found them to be accurate. They then gained access to the peak while it was “off-limits” and inventoried the contents and then sent them all to Fort Knox for “safekeeping.” Others in the military deny Captain Swanner’s claims as baloney.
Dick Richardson, an engineer employed by the military to help mine the gold, states that he counted at least 18,888 gold bars recovered from Victorio Peak during his employment. Many other people who worked at White Sands during the time have tales of seeing gold or being escorted from the Hembrillo Basin or even receiving death threats if they talked about the gold. This had led to a wild conspiracy theory that the military stole all the gold.
The Lorius-Herberer Connection
There are also some claims that Lorius and Herberer somehow became entangled in Doc Noss’s scheme and this is why they disappeared. There have been endless attempts to identify what happened to the two affluent couples traveling through New Mexico to the Hoover Dam, who disappeared off the face of the earth after eating breakfast in Vaughn, NM, in 1935. After their luggage was found on fire on Albuquerque’s West Mesa and near El Paso, and their car was found totaled in Dallas, it is pretty certain that they were robbed and murdered. But their bodies have never been found and this has led to a wild maelstrom of theories. Some people posit they got in over their heads with Doc Noss, which ultimately led to their demise.
It is said that Herberer and Lorius pairs were staying at a motel in Vaughn. They overheard a conversation about the Victorio Peak Treasure through the paper-thin walls. Then they approached the guests, called the Palmer Brothers, who were staying next door to them at the motel and who had access to a map to the Victorio Peak. The brothers claimed this map would make the two couples instantly rich. Apparently the couples agreed to go with the Palmer Brothers to Victorio Peak, where they apparently found lots of money. Inside or outside of the peak, however, there was a dispute that ended up with all four tourists being shot.
I have found no conclusive evidence that the Lorius and Herberer couples even heard the name Doc Noss, let alone met the man or drove to T or C to take a look at Victorio Peak. It seems highly unlikely that their disappearance has anything to do with the claims of gold. I think people just like to make up conspiracies in an attempt to make sense of our crazy world.
Watergate
The story gets better. The Victorio Peak Treasure was featured in the Watergate Scandal.
In 1972, an attorney named F. Lee Bailey represented over 100 people in lawsuits surrounding Victorio Peak. During the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings, White House Council John Dean reported how some of Bailey’s clients claimed that over 36.5 tons of gold were removed from Victorio Peak and sold by the CIA overseas to the US’s profit. It was claimed that the president and the White House knew about this gold and allowed it to be mined, despite the fact courts had ruled that the military had no right to mine the land around Victorio Peak already.
This eventually led to Operation Goldfinger, a real effort in March 1977 by the US government and Ova Noss to excavate the peak. Guess what? The tunnels in the peak were empty. Ova claimed that the government must have stolen her gold, estimated to be worth millions then and billions now. I certainly wouldn’t put it past the US government to help itself to this gold, but I have never seen convincing proof anything ever existed in Victorio Peak. However, it does appear that there were many shafts found within the peak, which matches the description of the peak’s innards according to Doc Noss. The miners were frustrated that they could not gain access to one large shaft or a deep cavern that they detected under the peak. Who knows what might lie in there?
1992 Attempt to Find the Gold
Ova Noss’s grandson, Terry Delonas, finally managed to reopen interest in the peak after submitting a 150-page petition to the government in 1988. After much legal stress, he got the right to start excavating in 1989. Starting in 1992, he led another mining expedition into the peak. The gold coins and other artifacts were supposed to go to New Mexico state for museum preservation.
This renewed effort to find the Victorio Peak Treasure was documented in the show Gold, Lies, and Videotape. The documentary follows Terry Delonas and other constituents digging through the rubble from the ill-advised dynamite blast that Noss’s engineer used to collapse the peak. While they made significant progress into the shaft that Doc Noss had once used to reach the chambers of treasure, they also met lots of resistance from the military. They were eventually shut down and escorted off the peak. They didn’t find anything at all.
Here is aerial footage of the peak and the activity in 1992:
Of course, many people claim that the gold has all been stolen by the military, hence the disappointment of the 1992 expedition. Terry Delonas says that he has been working hard to cultivate a good relationship with the military and does not want to throw around the word “theft.”
My question still is: Was there even gold there in the first place?
The Lost Padre Gold Mine
Some people think that the place Doc Noss found was actually the Lost Padre Gold Mine. According to legend, a Catholic priest named Father La Rue was giving a dying man his last rites at his station in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1797. The dying man told him about a fantastic gold vein that could be found somewhere in the Chihuahua desert. The man directed the priest to go one day north of El Paso until he saw three small peaks. Then he should turn east toward the first mountain range, until he found a desert basin with a spring at the bottom of a peak. Inside of this peak, he would find an amazing motherlode.
Now this very closely matches the location of Victorio Peak. One day north of El Paso would be about 35 miles on horseback, maybe a little farther, which would place the site near Las Cruces. The three little peaks may refer to the Picacho Hills, visible over the Mesilla Valley and Las Cruces. The first mountain range that lies east of Las Cruces would be the San Andres, wherein lies the Hembrillo Basin. Victorio Peak is in the center of the basin and it used to have a spring at its base, though the recent drought has effectively dried that up.
Apparently Father Larue was very tired of the famine and poverty in his area, so he decided he had nothing to lose by searching for this gold. He assembled a colony and they traveled to Las Cruces and then through the Jornada del Muerto (literally Spanish for “Route of the Dead Man”), a 100-mile corridor of extremely hot and dry desert between Las Cruces and Socorro, NM, that claimed the lives of many people back before highways and cars. After a few days in this treacherous area, the crew managed to locate a basin with a peak at its center inside the San Andres, which they began mining. Just as the dying man had promised, the people rejoiced at finding a rich gold vein inside the peak. They tunneled down into even richer ore and mined the gold and melted it into ingots. They then stacked these ingots against the walls of the tunnels they dug into the peak. The colony consisted of Mexican people but also enslaved Native Americans.
The Spanish government received word of the gold and sent an army to collect their tax from Father Larue. Larue heard the army was in Mesilla buying supplies so he and his people scrambled to conceal the mine and its gold ingots. When the Spaniards arrived, Father Larue refused to reveal where the gold was. He and many others were tortured until they died. None of them gave up the location. The Spaniards searched the area exhaustively but did not locate the gold, so they eventually gave up.
However, this area is not conducive for the natural formation of gold. Gold is really only common in a few areas of New Mexico and even there it wasn’t particularly flourishing. The rock and soil in the Hembrillo Basin is not likely to carry much gold mineralization.
Chief Victorio’s Stash Spot
Due to the fact that gold is not likely naturally occurring in Victorio Peak, most people believe that the gold was put there by people in the past, not actually mined there. Many think that this was actually the treasure trove of Chief Victorio, a proud Apache war chief who lived in the nineteenth century.
Chief Victorio did not care about gold. But he did care about his land and he was not interested in being ensnared by the US government, stripped of his land, and banished to the San Carlos Reservation in AZ. The US government told him he could stay in New Mexico – then rescinded their deal. So Chief Victorio fought for his rights and this led to the Buffalo Soldiers battle of 1880. He was eventually killed in the Battle of Tres Castillos in 1880. Before his death, he and his band of about 200 warriors would often ambush and attack white settlers and wagoneers, stealing their possessions and gold. They would also take prisoners and torture them and then kill them. Since Victorio Peak was his main hideout, it is possible he stashed the loot he got in the peak’s caverns, and the skeletons in there may have been the people he imprisoned and tortured.
Emperor Maximillian and the Lost Treasure of Mexico
Early in the days of American settlement, Mexico was a rich resource that many European powers vied for control over. After Mexico attained independence from the Spanish crown, there was much upheaval. France established a military base in Juarez to assume control of the tumultuous country, which resulted in the collapse of the Mexican government. Mexican elites moved to get Archduke Maximillian from Austria into the position of power to maximize their interests in the country with its many resources. Emperor Maximillian may have been called emperor, but really he was a puppet, played by the Mexican elite.
Maximilian obviously was not popular with the Mexican people. They resented how the Mexican elite and the French basically ruled Mexico. This felt just like teh Spanish rule they had already rebelled against. For three years, Maximilian was perhaps the most hated man in Mexico.
President Andrew Jackson decided to block the Gulf of Mexico from trade to force French forces out of Mexico. This worked and the rule fell entirely to Emperor Maximillian. Since he was so unpopular with the natives, they soon revolted against him and assassinated him in June 1867.
But during his three brief years as emperor, Maximilian wasted no time robbing the Mexican people and Mexico itself of its rich mineral resources. He amassed quite a nice treasure trove of gold, silver, jewels, and other precious things. By some accounts, he had over $10 million dollars worth of treasure, though I’m not sure if that ten million is adjusted for inflation or if that was its supposed value back then.
Knowing that the people were gunning for him, Maximilian loaded his treasure onto ox carts. These carts were then driven in different bizarre routes toward Texas to avoid capture. They arrived safely in Texas and crossed the Rio Grande. That’s when they met Confederate soldiers. The soldiers were more like renegades, as were many soldiers in Texas at that time. They agreed to escort the ox carts for safety until they learned hte value of the cargo. That’s when they killed the Mexican and Austrian people leading the convoy somewhere near Odessa, TX, and buried most of the treasure to come back for later. They were only able to take a few gold bars on their person.
The six soldiers decided to head north to Missouri, where they would gather the appropriate means to collect and transport all the treasure. One solider of the crew became very ill and had to rest in Texas. When he recovered, he rushed to catch up with them, only to find them all slaughtered, apparently by Comanche Native Americans. He realized he was dying himself from his illness, so he went to Denton, TX, to die. He wrote his doctor a letter and drew a map describing where the fantastic treasure was buried.
Since then, many people have searched for this treasure, unsuccessfully. It is probably just another treasure myth, with little to not truth behind it. But some people think that somehow, the treasure ended up in Victorio Peak, a good 337 miles out of the way from Odessa, TX.
Don Juan Onate’s Treasure
Another theory about the source of the Victorio Peak treasure is that it is the loot of Don Juan de Onate. Onate is a famous figure in New Mexico history. He was born in New Spain around 1550 and married the granddaughter of Hernan Cortes, given him practically royal status in what was to become Mexico. In 1595, he applied to the Spanish government for the right to conquer what is now New Mexico. They approved this request and he led a colony of over 400 people across the Rio Grande in what is now El Paso, eventually settling at the headwaters of the San Juan River in Chama. This happened in 1598.
Thence, he became the self-appointed Spanish governor of the territory of New Mexico, claiming the region for Spain. A brutal dictator, he often killed Native Americans in his quest for ultimate power over the new land he had entered. He led an active campaign against the Pueblo people and participated in the slaughtering of over a thousand Pueblo People in what is known as the Acoma Massacre. His colonists from New Spain did not enjoy the hard living they had to eke out in New Mexico. Many wanted to return to New Spain, so Onate would execute them, classic dictator-style.
Onate became obsessed with legends of the Quivira treasure, which was reportedly stashed in Kansas. He led some people from his colony with him to find this treasure but was unsuccessful, which is probably a good thing, because during his absence many of his colonists managed to escape the Chama settlement and return home to New Spain. In 1604, Onate felt that his reputation was dwindling and people were losing respect for him, so he led some soldiers to what would one day become Colorado in an attempt to find treasure there. But he never did.
He resigned as governor in 1607 and was tried and found guilty of cruelty, false reporting, and immorality. As punishment for his crimes, he was exiled from the colony and deprived of the royal title he carried. He appealed and was successful, but he was never made governor again.
There is a high school in Las Cruces that was named in his honor as well as a shopping plaza in Anthony, NM. But fortunately, most people don’t want to honor his memory. A statue of him stood in Old Town, Albuquerque, part of a statue collection called La Jornada made by Reynaldo Rivera and Betty Sabo. In 1997, someone cut its right foot off as a protest. In 2020, Black Lives Matter protestors attempted to pull it down with chains, while a vigilante militar group calling themselves the “New Mexico Civil Guard” attempted to protect it. An altercation occurred between one of the protectors, Steven Baca, and one of the protestors, Tim Williams. This led to Baca shooting Williams. Thankfully, Williams survived. The protest was subdued by the police with rubber bullets and tear gas. The Albuquerque city government thereafter agreed to pull down the statue and it came down in June 25, 2020, and it now stands in storage somewhere.
Many people don’t want this mass murderer of indigenous people to be honored like royalty around New Mexico. While I’m inclined to agree, I also think we shouldn’t forget our history. Onate’s name should be kept in the history books but I don’t think he deserves statues around the state glorifying his brutality and abuse and mass murder. I’m sure indigenous people of New Mexico don’t appreciate that painful reminder of their history whenever they see these statues up.
But anyway, little side story over, let’s get back to the gold. I’m not sure why people think the Victorio Peak treasure could be Onate’s treasure when he never found any treasure. I assume people think that he really did find treasure and hide it in the peak to avoid sharing it with his colonists or giving it up when he faced trial for his crimes as governor. I have not managed to find any convincing evidence that Onate ever visited Victorio Peak or discovered any gold, though.
Legend or Legit?
There is still a lot of debate about whether the Victorio Peak Treasure is real or a legend perpetuated by a desperate conman and his bitter ex-wife. For every thing that disproves the gold’s existence, something else counters the disproof. For instance, no one ever saw Doc Noss with gold except Ova, but this could be explained by the fact Doc Noss knew people would steal his gold and he was careful to hide it in the desert. No one was able to gain access to the peak, but this could be explained because people kept using dynamite on it, making it impossible to confirm or deny the contents. Lots of people claim they saw the gold without being able to furnish proof, but that can be explained by the alleged death threats they received to keep them silent. Recent attempts to mine the peak have turned up nothing, but that could be explained by the government’s highly secretive mining activity in the 1960s and Swanner’s claims that the gold was transported to Fort Knox. It’s certainly convenient to explain everything away when you bring in a government cover-up.
There was an ugly rumor that Doc Noss would take bronze bars to Orogrande, between El Paso and Alamogordo, and have them plated in gold. He then used these gold bars to show people and create the mirage that his treasure really existed. In a time when gold fever was still hot, people believed the gold bars were legitimate without checking them out carefully, and they fell head over heels with the promise of great riches. Charley Ryan was one such person who caught gold fever for the Victorio Peak Treasure.
In the 90s, seismologists conducted an environmental and seismic study on the peak and confirmed that there is a big cavern under it. That would lend a lot of credence to Doc Noss’s claims of interconnected tunnels and rooms underneath the craggy peak. But the presence of a cavern does not mean that there was gold stashed inside. Doc Noss may have found a cavern, maybe even an abandoned mine shaft, but whether he found anything else will probably never be confirmed. It is possible he found a few things stashed there by Chief Victorio, who was known to capture and pillage his white enemies, but I’m not sure there were billions of dollars of gold in those rooms and tunnels in the peak’s depths. Like most legends of gold, things get exaggerated and seem to grow bigger and bigger with time.
I do find it interesting that Doc Noss found this gold immediately after the passing of the Gold Act. The Gold Act made gold rare for people since they were not allowed to possess it without a license, and licensure was often only available through corruption. It’s the scarcity principle: tell people they can’t have something, and suddenly that’s all they want. The Gold Act created a significant black market for gold. It also created the perfect environment for gold fever and for treasure tales to take hold. Either Doc Noss had the worst timing in the world, or he cleverly took advantage of the political environment to try to get investors to give him the money that he sorely lacked. After all, he was an alcoholic podiatrist in Hot Springs, now Truth or Consequences. He and his wife Ova, and later his wife Violet Boles, were not rich people. Maybe Doc Noss pulled an Arthur Manby, another man who liked to entice investors with land he didn’t actually own and gold he didn’t actually mine.
My theory? Doc Noss was a conman, and his ex-wife has been trying to carry on the con. She was indignant that no one believes her but she and her husband didn’t produce sufficient evidence for us to. If the gold was real, then there should have been enough evidence. Maybe there was gold in the peak, but if there was, it was probably a few bars or coins from a bank train robbery by Chief Victorio. I certainly do not believe that there were billions of dollars worth of gold down there. While I wouldn’t put it past our US Defense Department to take any found gold from the peak for its coffers, I doubt that they found that much to begin with, if they found any at all. The dynamite accidents and the military “theft” certainly were convenient excuses for the lack of a discovery. And all of the people who later spoke up about seeing the gold and signed affidavits that it existed? Well, White Sands Missile Range is a pretty boring place, and I think these people wanted to feel the excitement and importance of being involved in a cool treasure tale.
All the same, it’s a really fun fantasy, thinking about gold lying buried in the desolation of the desert. It appeals to human nature, to be the one to crack the case and found something long lost. Getting rich quick with such a treasure is not an unpleasant thought, either.
Comment with what you think about this treasure tale. Is there (or was there) ever gold in Victorio Peak?
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-06-16-vw-1352-story.html
Sources
https://www.grunge.com/616629/the-mystery-of-the-lost-victorio-peak-treasure/
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2020/09/the-strange-mystery-of-the-victorio-peak-treasure
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