Excerpt from THE LOG OF A TIMBER CRUISER by WIlliam Pickney Lawson
Published 1915 (picrel is 1926 edition)
>"We had time for exploring and sight seeing in addition. For the country of the Animas was rich in localities connected by tradition with stirring events of Indian and outlaw fighting. We visited among other places " Vic's Park," a pleasant, open glade on the very top of a high mountain. Here, in frontier days, the famous Apache war chief Victorio was followed, it is said, by a regiment of U. S. regulars, whom he ambushed and practically annihilated. >One of the few survivors was a negro horse wrangler. The story goes that this man afterward told a wonderful tale of how, while hunting horses on the morning of the massacre, he ran across a marvellously rich mass of gold bearing "float rock." He exhibited a piece of this as evidence of the truth of his story and announced an intention of returning before long to find the main vein. But he disappeared shortly after without leaving any more information than that. >This is the local legend, and many have been the hopeful prospectors to toil away an arduous season in fruitless search for the fabulously rich "nigger diggins," as they were called. We contributed our mite of labour to this myth, but found no gold. Brown, however, did discover in Vic's Park an old nearly decomposed army pack saddle, and nearby the bones of the animal which had, we supposed, carried it.https://archive.org/stream/logoftimbercruis00lawsrich/logoftimbercruis00lawsrich_djvu.txt 