Lost treasure · Arizona
The Lost Dutchman's Mine
Jacob Waltz died in Phoenix in 1891 with a secret, or so the story goes: a gold mine somewhere in the Superstition Mountains. Prospectors have searched for it ever since.
Book II · Treasures · Heroes · Mysteries
The Lost Legends of America
Where the truth ends and the legend begins
Gold that was found once and never again. A steel-driver who raced a steam drill. A hijacker who stepped into a November storm with $200,000 and was never seen again. These are America's great tall tales, lost treasures, frontier heroes and unsolved mysteries, and for every one we show you where the record ends and the legend takes over.
- 82 legends from all 50 states and D.C., in ten chapters
- Tall tales, lost gold, outlaws, explorers and great mysteries
- “The truth behind the legend” with every entry
- A full-page photographic illustration for every major legend
- Hardcover · 8.5 × 11 in. · 240 pages
€45,00
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Every legend has a true story
Some legends grew from a single newspaper story. Some from a man who really lived. Some from gold that someone, somewhere, really did find. We went back to the records to show you where the truth ends, and then we let the legend ride.
The Lost Legends of America
Folk hero · West Virginia
John Henry
The steel-driving man who raced a steam drill through a mountain and won, then laid down his hammer and died. Historians are still searching for the real man.
Tall tale · The Northwoods
Paul Bunyan
The giant of the logging camps, with Babe the Blue Ox at his side. Lumberjacks told his stories before a timber company's advertising made him famous across America.
Folk hero · Ohio
Johnny Appleseed
He was real: John Chapman, a nurseryman who planted apple orchards across the frontier ahead of the settlers. The tin-pot hat may be legend. The trees were not.
Outlaw · New Mexico
Billy the Kid
Henry McCarty, alias William H. Bonney, was shot dead by Sheriff Pat Garrett at Fort Sumner on July 14, 1881, at about twenty-one. The legend has never stopped riding.
Wild West · Arizona
The O.K. Corral
About thirty seconds in Tombstone on October 26, 1881, fought not in the corral at all but in a narrow lot nearby. It became the most famous gunfight in American history.
Wild West · Missouri to California
The Pony Express
From April 1860, riders carried the mail nearly 2,000 miles in about ten days. Eighteen months later, the telegraph put them out of business.
Lost city · New Mexico
The Seven Cities of Cíbola
In 1540 Francisco Vázquez de Coronado marched north in search of seven cities of gold. He found the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh, built of stone and adobe, and no gold at all.
Legend · Florida
The Fountain of Youth
Juan Ponce de León reached Florida in 1513. The story that he was searching for a fountain of youth was attached to him by later writers, and it has never let go.
Mystery · Washington
D.B. Cooper
On November 24, 1971, a man in a dark suit hijacked a jet, collected $200,000 and four parachutes, and jumped into the night. He has never been identified.
Mystery · The Pacific
Amelia Earhart
On July 2, 1937, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan vanished near Howland Island on one of the last legs of their flight around the world.
Mystery · New Mexico
Roswell
In July 1947 a rancher found strange debris in the desert, and the Army announced it had recovered a “flying disc.” The next day it was a weather balloon. The argument has never ended.
Where the legends lie
A treasure map of America.
Lost mines, last stands and vanishing acts, pinned to the places where the stories began.
Superstition Mountains · 1891The Lost Dutchman's Mine
Tombstone · 1881The O.K. Corral
Talcott · 1870sJohn Henry
The NorthwoodsPaul Bunyan
The Ohio frontierJohnny Appleseed
Fort Sumner · 1881Billy the Kid
Hawikuh · 1540The Seven Cities of Cíbola
July 1947Roswell
1860–1861The Pony Express
1513The Fountain of Youth
Southwest Washington · 1971D.B. Cooper
The Pacific · 1937Amelia Earhart
Look inside
Read it by the campfire.
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Lost Mines & Buried Gold
The Lost Dutchman's Mine
Every legend of lost gold needs a man who knew the way. In Arizona, his name was Jacob Waltz.
Born in Germany, Waltz came west like thousands of others to prospect, and by the 1870s he was farming a homestead outside Phoenix. Neighbors called him the Dutchman, the way Americans of the day called almost any German. He was not rich. But in town, the story goes, he sometimes paid for his supplies with high-grade gold.
Waltz died in Phoenix in October 1891. Julia Thomas, who had cared for him in his last days, went looking for the mine she believed he had described to her, somewhere in the Superstition Mountains east of the city. She never found it.
Others followed, with maps and clues and the volcanic spire of Weaver's Needle as their landmark. In the summer of 1931, a treasure hunter named Adolph Ruth walked into the Superstitions and did not come out. His skull was found that December.
The mountains are a wilderness area now. People still go in. The gold, if it was ever there, is still waiting.
Superstition Mountains, Arizona
Tall Tales & Folk Heroes
John Henry
The ballad is older than anyone can remember: John Henry was a steel-driving man.
In the years after the Civil War, the railroads cut through the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia by hand. Steel-drivers swung heavy hammers against long steel drills, held by a partner called a shaker, to open holes for the blasting powder. It was brutal, rhythmic, dangerous work, and many of the men who did it were Black.
The legend tells of the strongest of them all. When the company brought in a steam drill, John Henry put his hammer up against the machine. They drove side by side into the mountain. When it was over, John Henry had gone deeper than the steam drill. Then he laid down his hammer and died.
Tradition sets the contest at the Big Bend Tunnel near Talcott, West Virginia, where his statue stands today. Historians have argued for other tunnels, and for a real man named John William Henry. No one has settled it.
What no one doubts is the song, sung for a century and a half about a man who would not let a machine beat him.
Talcott, West Virginia
Vanished
D.B. Cooper
On the afternoon before Thanksgiving, November 24, 1971, a quiet man in a dark suit and tie bought a one-way ticket from Portland to Seattle under the name Dan Cooper. He paid cash. He ordered a bourbon and soda.
Soon after takeoff he handed a flight attendant a note. He had a bomb in his briefcase, he told her, and he wanted $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills and four parachutes.
In Seattle the passengers walked off unharmed, and the money and the parachutes came aboard. The jet took off again, heading south with the crew flying low and slow, as he had instructed. Somewhere over southwest Washington, in the dark and the rain, the rear airstair of the Boeing 727 came down. Cooper stepped off into the night.
He has never been found. In 1980 a boy digging on a sandbar of the Columbia River turned up $5,800 of the ransom, rotted bundles of twenties with matching serial numbers. The FBI ended its active investigation in 2016.
No one knows if he lived. No one knows who he was. That, the legend says, is exactly how he planned it.
Southwest Washington
Inside the book
Ten trails into the legend.
Eighty-two legends from all fifty states and D.C., arranged by kind of adventure: tall tales, lost gold, outlaws, explorers and the questions America still can't answer.
- I Giants of the Tall TalePaul Bunyan, Pecos Bill and the America that was too small for its heroes 8 legends
- II The Edge of the MapThe Fountain of Youth, the Seven Cities of Cíbola, Colter's Hell 8 legends
- III Legends of LibertyMidnight riders and the myths of 1776 7 legends
- IV Bigger Than LifeJohn Henry, Johnny Appleseed, Davy Crockett, Casey Jones 11 legends
- V Rivers, Seas & IceBlackbeard, the Great Steamboat Race, the Serum Run to Nome 8 legends
- VI Lost GoldThe Lost Dutchman, the Beale Ciphers, Lafitte's and Captain Kidd's treasure 11 legends
- VII Outlaws & DesperadoesBilly the Kid, Jesse James, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 6 legends
- VIII Lawmen, Sharpshooters & RidersThe O.K. Corral, Annie Oakley, the Pony Express, Wild Bill Hickok 9 legends
- IX Landmarks of LegendStones, spikes and staircases with stories 6 legends
- X UnsolvedD.B. Cooper, Amelia Earhart, the Bermuda Triangle, Roswell 8 legends
The edition
Made to be kept.
- Format
- Hardcover, 8.5 × 11 in.
- Pages
- 240
- Legends
- 82, from all 50 states and D.C.
- Illustrations
- Full color, photographic
- Every entry
- The legend, then the truth behind it
- Edition
- First Edition, first printing
- Ships from
- Our US warehouse
The complete collection
All three legends. One shelf.
The history, the wonder and the dark, together. The Collector's Edition arrives in a black linen slipcase stamped in gold.
- AMERICA: Land of the BraveHardcover · 280 pages
- The Lost Legends of AmericaHardcover
- Dark Legends of AmericaHardcover
- Free US shippingIncluded
€99,00€135,00You save €36,00
Add-ons
Complete the experience.
The Dark Legends Map of America · Art Print
Where they are said to walk. A dark vintage-style map of the United States in bone-white ink on black, with the legends...
€34,00
Legend Bookmarks · Set of Three
Three engraved metal bookmarks with silk tassels, one for each book: the Eagle, the Watcher and the Rider. Made to live between...
€24,00
Questions
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Is this a children's book?
It's written for adults and older readers, but these are adventure stories, and families read them together. We'd say 10 and up.
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