Somewhere Out There: The Wickenburg Payroll Traditional Cache

Arizona is home to countless lost mine legends and misplaced treasure stories. This cache is part of a series, with the stories and maps prepared by Kearney Egerton and Sterling Ridge in the book "Somewhere Out There... Arizona's Lost Mines & Vanished Treaures."

A stagecoach left Wickenburg on the morning of November 5, 1871 for San Bernardino, Calif. About nine miles west of town the coach was shattered by gunfire.
Killed were:
Fred W. Shoholm, a Prescott jeweler
W.D. Salmon and P.M. Hamel, civilian employees of the army.
C.S. Adams, a San Francisco businessman.
Frederick W. Loring, a reporter for The New York Tribune.
Dutch John Lentz, the driver.

The survivors were:
Mollie Shepherd, a bawdy house madam who had sold her Prescott girlie joint for a reported $40,000. She suffered a powder burn on her left arm.
William Kruger, cashier of the army's quartermaster corps in Arizona who was taking $100,000 in payroll money to California. He exhibited a flesh wound in a shoulder.

It was an Indian ambush, Kruger reported, and was probably carried out by renegades from the Date Creek reservation . Gen. George Crook, commander of all army troops in Arizona, believed him and so testified in a number of reports and interviews. So did most Arizonans, conditioned as they were to Indian warfare.

But others were not so sure. Among the doubters were Capt. Charles Meinhold, an officer from Fort McDowell who investigated the homicides, and his superior, Col. N.A. Dudley, who wrote "I do not believe there was an Apache near the scene of the murders." The San Diego Union, The Los Angeles News and The Prescott Miner, lead ing newspaper of the territory, all claimed to have evidence that the killers were Mexican bandits, Americans masquerading as Indians or "a party or parties unknown."

The doubters cited this evidence:
1. The scene of the tragedy was a poor location for an ambush. It was open country, with no cover - brush, trees or large rocks - for the waiting assassins.
2. Miss Shepherd and Kruger, who were found wandering near the scene by one Nelson, a young teamster, gave accounts of the attack that did not agree.
3. The stagecoach horses were still nearby - and marauding Indians always took their victims' horses . The trunks and valises were opened, but no clothing, blankets or shawls were taken . The only items missing were the strongbox containing $100,000 of army money, Miss Shepherd's $40,000 - and the stagecoach shovel, which could have been used to bury the money.
4. None of the Date Creek Indians seemed to have any extra money in the months that followed the killings. Despite their continued poverty, the Indians were "punished" a year later by General Crook's troops in two bloody fights.
5. The coach was riddled by gunfire from the front, rear and the right. Would Indian warriors have subjected themselves to that kind of crossfire? Were several of the victims killed by someone in the coach and the others shot down when they tried to run for it? The interior of the coach was spattered with blood.
6. Mollie and Kruger said they jumped from the coach and ran up a sandy wash when the attack came. Kruger said he stood off nine mounted Indian riflemen "for hours" with a sixshooter.
Can you believe that?

Captain Meinhold didn't believe it, either. He interviewed the survivors repeatedly during the two months he managed to have them detained at the Date Creek army hospital. Did he suspect that Kruger was the killer, with Mollie as his accomplice? And that they buried the $140,000 nearby? And did Kruger inflict minor wounds upon himself and Mollie to make their story more credible? Meinhold probably did. Kruger and Mollie were known to the Prescott demimonde as playmates.
When Mollie and Kruger finally reached California they found they were celebrities. The "massacre" continued to be a big story in the California newspapers and months later San Francisco reporters sought out Kruger for further details. They found him living "on his inv estments" in the Barbary Hotel. In the course of the interview they asked him about Mollie's whereabouts.
Kruger shed a large, quiet tear and said that she had died in Los Angeles "about a month ago, from the wounds she suffered in the attack." She had requested a quiet funeral, he said, and so he had not mentioned her departure for that big honky-tonk in the sky.
Newsmen in Los Angeles were asked to check on Mollie's death, but they could find no record of it. San Francisco newsmen again visited the Barbary Hotel. Kruger had checked out.
In December of 72 a gunfight broke out in a Phoenix saloon. Two men were killed - one of the gunfighters and a bystander at the bar. On him were a few dollars and a hotel key. The hotel clerk said the luckless bystander had registered as William Kruger of San Francisco. He was en route "to the Wickenburg district for a little prospecting." At a nearby livery stable was his horse, pack mule and camping gear.
Was he the same William Kruger of the Wickenburg massacre? The description - short, stocky, in his late thirties - fits. If he was, he had no chance to gasp out deathbed directions to a buried bonanza. If the $140,000 was buried in the hills or arroyos west of Wickenburg, it's still there.

Somewhere Out There Cache Series
GC6ZVBF- The Hassayampa Strongbox
GC6ZVBB- The Organ Grinder's Ledge
GC6ZVB7- The Wickenburg Payroll
GC6ZVB9- The Black Prospector's Secret
GC6AV5B- The Lost Frenchman
GC6BDGK- The Jabonero Waybill
GC7EGMW- Four Peaks Gold
GC7EGKH- The Tonto Quartz
GC7EVJX- Lost Gold of Sanders

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