The Lost Adams Diggings is a legend of a canyon of nuggets reached by following the White River into the White Mountains in 1864. Nobody has found it, and the story comes mostly from one 1939 book. It is the one Arizona gold legend whose trail starts in the country around Show Low.
Checked · Edited by Sam Ridley · Sources · How we check
Not confirmed: This is a legend. Its details trace to one 1939 book that we have not read, and no location has been confirmed. We read a Wikipedia outline of the story.
The Story Goes
This is the legend as the Wikipedia article summarizes it. It is a told story, not a documented history.
- In August 1864 a man known only as Adams, travelling from Los Angeles to Tucson, has his wagon burned by Apaches. He reaches Sacaton, Arizona, with about a dozen horses and meets John Brewer’s party of 21 miners.
- A Pima-Mexican guide promises to lead them to a canyon of large nuggets he says he saw on an Apache raid in 1862. Twenty-two men set out on August 20, following the White River into the White Mountains and on into western New Mexico.
- The guide points to two sugar-loaf peaks: “The gold canyon lies at the foot of those peaks.” They enter by a narrow gap Adams calls “the Little Door”, climb down a Z-shaped trail, and find a spring and a low falls.
- They cache gold and start mining. In the legend, the Apache leader Nana appears and warns them off the ground above the falls.
- Brewer and five others leave for supplies at Old Fort Wingate. Men who ignored the warning are killed, the camp is attacked, and a patrol from Fort Apache finds the two survivors.
- Adams spends the rest of his life looking and never finds the canyon again. In 1949 a newspaper quoted Bob Lewis, then 83, who said he found the skeletons and a cabin in 1918 about 35 miles northwest of Magdalena, New Mexico, but no gold.
Where People Say It Is
None of these is confirmed. The Zuni Mountains were long the favorite. Others point to the Reserve, New Mexico area (the headwaters of the Black, Gila or Prieto rivers), the Datil and Gallinas mountains, or south of Quemado, New Mexico. In Arizona, a 1992 Arizona Highways article described a narrow, steep-walled canyon near Clifton that searchers say fits the description, though no gold was found there. The article says government geologists searched between the wars and found nothing, and that uranium prospectors covered the ground in the 1950s.
From Show Low, Reserve is about 82 miles in a straight line and Clifton about 93.
Legend or Record?
Almost every detail of the tale, including Adams’s background, the guide, the quoted lines and Nana’s warning, comes from J. Frank Dobie’s 1939 book Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver, a literary retelling. The Wikipedia article itself says it needs more citations. We read the Wikipedia outline, not Dobie’s book.
The land in the story is the homeland of the Western Apache. The White Mountain Apache Tribe tells its own history on its own pages; see the history of Show Low and the White Mountains. Nana was a real Apache leader; the words and warning the tale gives him are the storyteller’s.
Local Legend: The Lost Adams Diggings
What is actually true: A U.S. Forest Service history, Men Who Matched the Mountains, treats it as lore: Adams found nuggets but could not find his way back, searchers have looked since the 1870s, and the gold may lie in the Gila or Apache forests, or even the Cibola. Ranger Henry Woodrow searched near the head of Mogollon Creek on the Gila and wrote after he retired in 1942 that the mine “can stay lost now.” Much of the story is set across the line in New Mexico, so it is a tale of the whole Mogollon country, not of Show Low. No mine has ever been found. Sources: U.S. Forest Service: Men Who Matched the Mountains, chapter 19
Questions People Ask
What is the Lost Adams Diggings?
A legend of a canyon rich in gold in the White Mountains region of Arizona and New Mexico. Adams and a party of miners are said to have found it in 1864; most were killed, and Adams never found it again.
Has the Lost Adams Diggings been found?
No. Searchers have named the Zuni Mountains, the Reserve area, the Datil and Gallinas mountains and a canyon near Clifton, Arizona. None is confirmed, and government geologists reportedly found nothing.
Where does the story start?
At Sacaton, Arizona, then up the White River into the White Mountains, according to the legend as Wikipedia summarizes it.
Sources
Checked October 22, 2026 by It’s Show Low. Cite this page: It’s Show Low (itsshowlow.com), checked October 22, 2026. Free to quote with a link.
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