Mystery of Wild West Lingers at Vasquez Rocks

A Mexican bandit gave his name to Vasquez Rocks County Park, but the legend of a U.S. senator’s buried 500-pound silver ingot is what first lured crowds to the place.

No piece of Los Angeles real estate is more evocative of the Wild West than the cowboy-movie outcroppings of granite boulders in Agua Dulce named for 19th century cattle rustler and stagecoach robber Tiburcio Vasquez, who boasted of hiding treasure there.

The setting in Santa Clarita’s Escondido Canyon is dramatic enough, especially for a park named for an outlaw. But the tale of what may lie hidden beneath its striking geological shapes is just as mysterious as the jagged topography.

Now it is hikers, picnickers and movie companies that haunt the place, but in the past century treasure hunters flocked there, never quite sure whether they were pursuing myth or reality as they dug for a buried cache of silver, supposedly dropped into a crevice by Vasquez shortly before his date with the hangman.

During Death Valley’s brief silver mining boom of the 1870s, a former California attorney general and U.S. senator from Nevada named William Morris Stewart was, along with his partners, laying the foundations of the Panamint Mining Co.

Stewart was a Yale dropout lured west by the Gold Rush. Later, when he took up the law, his rough-and-tumble courtroom methods quickly earned him a reputation as a man not to be trifled with, particularly after he knocked an opposing attorney unconscious on the courtroom floor.

Stewart was trying a case when a local bad guy who was a witness burst into the courtroom, armed. Stewart drew two derringers and, at gunpoint, put the man on the witness stand, saying: “If you attempt any of your gunplay or give any false testimony, I’ll blow your fool brains out.”

A whiskered lion of a man with an imposing presence and a voice that could change in an instant from a soft growl to a fearsome roar, Stewart soon conquered the finer points of the law and in 1854 was elected state attorney general. He would later help create the state of Nevada and serve as one of its first two U.S. senators.

By the 1870s, Stewart’s mining fever had reemerged. For the miners working his Death Valley silver claims, Stewart built a boom town where lots sold for $500 to $1,000.

There, 800 rowdy miners eagerly welcomed the buxom queen of beauty, the madam Martha Camp and her bevy of painted, frilled and scandalously clad ladies. The miners found them just as alluring as the silver.

Not wanting to be left out of the Death Valley silver boom, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce quickly grasped the chance to benefit from the bullion flow by funding a road from Santa Clarita to the silver mines.

The chamber’s efforts paid off when French Canadian Remi Nadeau’s teamster operation brought tons of silver to Los Angeles and carted lumber, grain, flour, machinery and whiskey back to the miners to be sold at a hefty profit.

As Los Angeles enjoyed the silver surge, the notorious bandit Vasquez, who had battled the Yankee presence for 20 of his 39 years, decided in 1874 to snatch some of Stewart’s profits.

Although Vasquez came from an accomplished family and had the potential to become a lawyer, businessman, rancher or politician, he chose the outlaw path. He dreamed of reclaiming California from the Yankees, and for that he needed a windfall, which Stewart’s silver would accomplish.

When Stewart got wind of Vasquez’s intentions, he thought he had a way to foil the bandit. At his Death Valley smelter, Stewart poured 1,000 pounds of molten silver into two 500-pound molds, then grinned and retreated with his men to a nearby hill, waiting for Vasquez to arrive.

Instead, two of Vasquez’s desperadoes showed up with two mules in tow to carry their booty. Finding the quarter-ton ingots, they cursed their luck and built a crude tripod with a pulley and sling to hoist the goods. After three failed tries, the would-be robbers gave up and rode away, leaving the huge ingots on the ground.

The next day, the ingots were loaded into Nadeau’s wagon, which was pulled by a team of 14 mules and flanked by four armed guards. Winding their way down the twisting mountain trail, the men were halfway through the jumbled boulders of what is now Vasquez Hills when they were attacked by Vasquez and his men.

Vasquez backed his wagon up behind Nadeau’s and his men rolled one of the ingots into it. Then Vasquez rumbled away, leaving his men and the other ingot behind. After giving Vasquez a 20-minute head start, his gang released the driver and the guards and ordered them to hotfoot it to Los Angeles.

A month later, Vasquez--who fancied himself a Robin Hood-like character, even though there’s no evidence that he gave to the poor--was captured by lawmen in Hollywood and tried for murder and robbery committed over the course of his 20-year criminal career.

From jail, Vasquez told Nadeau that he had dropped the ingot down a hole not far from where he stole it. After several fruitless searches in what would one day be named the Vasquez Hills, Nadeau and Stewart gave up. (Over time, the legend would draw hundreds of treasure seekers.)

In the meantime, Vasquez appealed to the Mexican community for support, but no one responded. He sold the Yankee press his “jailhouse confessions” glamorizing his life, but without mentioning the ingot.

A few days later, he was publicly hanged for his misdeeds. He did not go quickly. It took him 14 minutes to die.

Vasquez left behind a reputation of having buried bullion and other loot all over California, and many of the rumored sites were chronicled in the book “Buried Treasures of California” by W.C. Jameson. None has been found.

Although Vasquez Rocks played host to some colorful film and TV moments, among them the opening shots of the 1950s “Lone Ranger” TV series, no fiction could match the drama of the rocks’ namesake: the rough and ready Tiburcio Vasquez.