Posted December 19, 2011..................Below is a chapter from a book titled MYSTERIES AND MIRACLES OF TEXAS, written by the deceased Jack Kutz and published by Rhombus Publishing Company. I called the publishing company to ask permission to reproduce this chapter and the the company told me that the author was dead and the widow had no interest and the book is no longer being published. I therefore acknowledge that I have tried and failed to get permission to reproduce but no one has yet to tell me no, for lack of interest. ----Note: I have finally discerned there are no newspaper archives going back to 1873 that would document this event. However, I have learned that California tracked the number of wagon trains both coming and going in those days, but I could not access all those records, and those I did access gave no clues to this mystery. If there are ever any clues forthcoming I suspect it will be from California records.
When I was a small tyke living in Notrees and first heard about the 1901 discovery of a 40 unit wagon train found in the Monahans sandhills, I was amazed. I have heard over the years various second hand recollections from people from Odessa who also heard of the event, but over the years I have never seen a written story or book or article on the wagon train until I found this book published and released in 1994. I thought nothing much about it until I became aware of a historical marker in Odessa about a character named William C. Sublett, a man who lived in Odessa in the late 1800s and who alledgedly spent gold nuggets there to buy rounds of drinks for the house and bragged that he found nuggets in the Guadalupe Mountains in far west Texas. J. Frank Dobie, a revered Texas writer and semi-historian, even wrote a piece about William C. Sublett and made as many people as possible believe their might be a gold mine in them thar hills. Baloney. There never was and never will be. The only gold found around Odessa is black and liquid, and it is called oil, so Sublett was lying to a naive bunch of people and for a reason. I think he found the wagon train and scoured through it and found some nuggets among the massacred remains of that wagon train, and why no one has ever put two and two together on these two subjects is beyond me.
Below is an article from the archives of the Monahans newspaper sent to me by email by historians in that city in 2011. It is written by Judge Arther Hayes and his wife in 1937. There are minor discrepencies with respect to facts outlined in the story put together in the book about Texas Mysteries. However, it is an article by the man who found the remains first, except for the theory that William C. Sublett might have been the first to find the remains!
There is a considerable amount of hogwash on the web about this wagon train. In fact, I found an article in the Lubbock newspaper written in 1933 that was laughable in his treatment of the story. Another article on the website has the wagontrain being found in the '30s and originating in Fort Worth! Of course it was carrying tons of gold. I don't know what that author was smoking.
leaving California to go eastward and taking the southern route through Indian territories. But what if that wagon train organizer did not want the attention because they were carrying their life savings with them and did not want that fact widely known?. But, I thought that is why they traveled in large groups anyway, and carried their own guns with them.
This is truly a mystery. Therefore, my interests are to validate the article in Yuma because I had two conversations with notebable historians in west Texas who doubt there ever was a wagon train, but I don't think either one of them ever scoured the archives at Monahans to uncover the information about Arther Hayes as I have done. Neither of them offered any reason to doubt the wagon train, but they nevertheless do so.
Hayes was a prominent and honored citizen in Monahans during the oil boom days just prior to World War Two, according to some of the many articles written about him in the local newspaper. To me, this makes him a valid source because my deceased parents lived in that area while he was still alive and they could have known him. I remember that they certainly believed in what they read about in those days, but as time goes on, Mr. Hayes and his legendary tales pales into obscurity for lack of any written information beyond him. To me, that fact is just indicitive of the times. Communication was mostly local in those days. There was no TV or radio or websites in the late 1880s. I guess what keeps me interested in the subject is that so many local historians discount the validity of the wagontrain incident in spite of the obvious integrity of the wagon train's most vociferous personality, the discoverer of it, Arthur Hayes. I must be missing something. I have talked to several writers who downplay this event saying there is nothing to research, and they imply that it probably did not happen. I have thought that myself, but to think that it ddid not happen is to also imply that Judge Hayes was a hoax and had an ulterior motive for planting his stories in the local newspaper and colleges. But I cannot imagine what his motive would be unless it was to attract people to the area to sell them land. But if you are in the land selling business in the early 1900s, why would you choose to sell real estate in an area that has no water or crop lands? It takes 10 acres of grass in that area to support one cow, and that rule could be questionable in drought years, which is nearly all the time in the desert! That does not make a lot of sense.
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