In search of Tuolumne County’s legendary ‘Blind Belt’

Scholars have long thought that 90 percent, more or less, of California’s vast yellow wealth remains hidden deep beneath the earth’s surface, still waiting to be discovered.

Accordingly, they tell us that Tuolumne County has three large, gold-bearing quartz veins instead of two. The third, known as the “Blind Belt,” or the “Lost Lode of the Sierra,” is situated high on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, somewhere within a 160-squaremile wilderness bordered on one side by what we know today as Highway 108 and on the other by Yosemite National Park.

Since its chemical makeup is more complex and richer in grade than that of the Mother Lode (which has earned world fame as the most productive gold-producing district in the United States), one can hardly imagine the unspeakable riches that lie within the Blind Belt’s tellurium slates.

Oddly enough, although professional and amateur treasure hunters have known of this elusive lode for more than 150 years, its precise whereabouts remains a mystery, and no mention of it can be found in history books.

Just the other day however, while turning old, yellowed pages in The Union Democrat’s archival library, I chanced upon the following newspaper article dated July 24, 1897. It reads in part:

Boundless wealth

“It is said that many years ago a small band of nomadic Indians discovered, while hunting far off in the mountains above Sonora, a cave that led by a steep incline down deep into the bowels of the earth; that this subterranean passage terminated in an immense stone chamber right up against Tuolumne County’s legendary Blind Belt, where gold glistened all over its walls. For decades this band annually visited the mine and dug out enough to satisfy their wants, and to no one else would one of them reveal the location of their treasure.

“At last, death one by one claimed them all but for the Chief, in whose bosom alone was locked the secret of boundless wealth. Bribes of whiskey and threats were used to make the venerable savage reveal the Blind Belt’s location, but to no purpose, while attempts to follow him during his yearly pilgrimages to his natural vault of precious metal always resulted in dismal failure.

“Twenty years ago a party of prospectors came across the dead body of the old man at the foot of a cliff from which he had fallen, and tightly clasped in his arms was a large buckskin sack full of ore containing more gold than rock. Merciless death had claimed the aged Chief on the return journey from his hidden bonanza, and the Blind Belt was lost forever to the world.”

It might be of passing interest to note that as early as the 1860s stories were told in saloons and around the campfires of a so-called “Lost Lode of the Sierra.”

Sacks of gold

According to one favorite version, three Mexicans who used to travel the old Mono trail would occasionally show up in Sonora, their mule team heavily laden with 20-pound sacks of gold bound for the San Francisco mint.

Upon their return to the mountains, the Mexicans were frequently followed by shadowy characters hoping to learn the whereabouts of their secret pile. The Mexicans being very clever, however, always managed to give their unwanted friends the slip.

One morning a pack mule strayed into a hunter’s camp in the vicinity of Strawberry Flat, near what today is Pinecrest Reservoir. Having recognized the animal as belonging to the Mexicans, the hunter tied it to a tree thinking its owners would soon come calling.

They never came calling, so the next day he set out to find them. After a long search he found their bloody corpses hacked to pieces with a machete the murderer had left behind at the crime scene.

For many years after fortuneseekers combed Tuolumne County’s high country from Strawberry Flat to the Emigrant Wilderness to the top of the Pacific Crest draining west, but to this day the legendary Lost Lode of the Sierra (i.e., The Blind Belt) remains an unsolved mystery.

Stories of extraordinary gold strikes, lost lodes, hidden treasures and murder are vivid reminders of a stirring and turbulent era in the Old West.

This story originally published as a “From the Past” column in The Union Democrat on May 13, 2015.