On 7 April 1880, Victorio engaged in a fierce battle with a troop of the 9th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers at the mountain. After a bloody standoff that resulted in the deaths of many of the soldiers, the Army retreated. The peak was thereafter known as Victorio Peak in honor of the great chief. Many researchers believe that Victorio and his Apaches had an entrance into the mountain and that they used the cave to conceal the booty they looted from the surrounding areas. It would also explain the presence of the Wells Fargo bags, the pack saddles, the letters and other artifacts dating to Victorio’s time. Did the Apaches fight hard to protect their cache of treasures within the mountain?

It is doubtful Doc Noss cared anything about the historical value of the fortune inside the hollow peak. The pouches and packs, artifacts and leather goods were mostly ignored, while he concentrated on the gold coins and bars. Ever since he found the treasure, he worked stealthily to remove what he could of it. He never told any of friends what he was doing.

Finally, in the spring of 1938, Doc Noss and Babe went to Santa Fe to establish legal ownership of his find. He filed a lease with the State of New Mexico for the entire section of land surrounding Victorio Peak. Subsequent to that, he filed mining claims on and around Victorio Peak. He had it surveyed for an exact location, and then filed a treasure trove claim, which has become the historic Noss family claim to the treasure in Victorio Peak. With legal ownership established, he worked his claim openly, but he became super cautious. He took the gold bars out of the cavern and then hid them from everyone, including his own family, in a variety of locations all over the desert. Some were right by the county roads by certain marked telephone poles. Some were dropped in horse tanks at the nearby ranches. Some were just buried in the sand, and Doc would put a different colored rock over the top than was natural to that surrounding.

There was a lot of fear and probably some increasing paranoia in both Doc and Babe. As they solicited more and more help from friends, neighbors, and supporters, they became afraid that some of these people might try to steal some of the bullion that they had hidden around the Peak.

It was the Fall of 1939 when Doc made his great mistake. He decided to enlarge the passageway into Victorio Peak, reasoning that if he could rid the narrow quarters of the confining huge boulder hanging at the lower portion of the shaft, he could removed the gold much easier and, more importantly, much faster. He hired a mining engineer named S.E. Montgomery to go with him and help him blast out the shaft. Although Doc claimed the mountain was rotten, and the two men argued viciously about the charge to used, Montgomery won the argument. The choice was eight sticks of dynamite.

The blast was disastrous. Instead of widening the passage as Doc wanted, it caused a cave-in, collapsing the fragile shaft and effectively shutting Doc out of his own mine. Doc tried several times to regain entry into his mine, but the shaft was sealed with tons of debris. All attempts failed, leaving him embittered and angry. He took to taking his frustrations out on his wife, and it was not long before Babe and Doc divorced. Now, instead of having thousands of gold bars to draw from, he only had those few hundred that he had brought to the surface. He became very protective of those gold bars. Two years after his divorce from Babe, he married Violet Lena Boles, which would further complicate ownership of the treasure rights in the years to come.

When Doc became desperate for cash, he took into his confidence a man named Joseph Andregg. The two of them transported gold bars, coins, jewels, and artifacts into Arizona, selling them on the black market. For nine years, Doc attempted illegally to sell his gold, but it was difficult finding buyers. He was afraid of getting caught and ending up in prison. His paranoia increased daily.

In 1949, Doc met a miner named Charley Ryan from Alice, Texas. He became convinced that Ryan could reopen the shaft, and he arranged to exchange some of the gold bars for $25,000 to fund the venture. Meanwhile, Babe Noss had filed a counter-claim on the entire area. Denied entry by the courts until legalities could determine the legal owner of the mine, Doc feared Ryan would back out of the deal. Sensing a double-cross and that Ryan would abscond with fifty-one bars of re-hidden gold, Doc asked an acquaintance, Tony Jolly, to help him rebury the gold in a new hiding place. The trip made a believer out of Jolly.

“We got in the pickup, and we went out across the desert a long ways,” said Jolly, “and we started digging. We dug twenty bars of gold out of the ground right there. I said, ‘Doc, what’s going on?’ and he said, ‘Well, there’s a fella coming tomorrow who’s gonna fly in here, and he’s supposed to take this gold and sell it, and he’s supposed to split with me. I got word that he’s gonna sell it and keep right on going with the money.’ We reburied those bars of gold. There turned out to be ninety more. I handled, and I saw one hundred and ten bars of gold.”

The next day Doc and Ryan got into an argument, and Ryan pulled a gun on Doc. Ryan insisted that they discuss the problem of what happened to the gold that Doc had re-hidden, hinting that if Doc did not reveal its new hiding place, Doc would not live to enjoy the gold. A fight ensued. As Doc Noss headed toward his car, Ryan, fearing Doc was getting a gun, shot in Doc’s direction. The bullet struck Doc in the head, killing him instantly. The date was 5 March 1949. Just twelve years after discovering the treasure, Doc Noss died kneeling in the dust with only $2.16 in his pocket. Ryan was charged with murder, but was later acquitted.

As the years passed, Babe Noss held onto her claim at Victorio Peak, occasionally hiring men to help her clear the shaft. Things were plodding along until 1955, when White Sands Missile Range unexpectedly expanded their operations to encompass the Hembrillo Basin. The military locked Babe out. Although Babe corresponded regularly with the military requesting permission to enter the range and work her claim, she was always denied. The military was afraid that allowing her permission would set a precedent that would allow others to petition and make similar claims. It would hinder the Army’s mission, which was missile testing. From that moment onward, every attempt of Babe’s to clear the rubble from the plugged shaft met with a military escort out of the area.

The real problem with the military claim on the land stemmed from a statement made by state officials in New Mexico. On 14 November 1951, Public Land Order No. 703 was issued, which withdrew all the White Sands Proving Ground (later to be called the White Sands Missile Range) from prospecting, entry, location, and purchase under the mining laws and reserved their use for the military. But the state officials claimed that they leased only the surface of the land to the military. The underground wealth, in whatever form it took, still belonged to the state, or to the holders of the various types of licenses. If there was treasure on the land, it did not belong to the Army, but it might not have belonged to Doc Noss, either. A search of mining records in December 1950 failed to turn up any existing mining claims, which Doc claimed he had filed. Further, Roy Henderson owned the land where Victorio Peak is located, and he had leased it to the Army. Before him, the Gilmore family had lived there. In other words, much of the disputed land belonged not to the Noss family, but to someone else.

Babe Noss then contacted the two senators from New Mexico, hoping to enlist their help in mining her claim. In December 1952, Senator Dennis Chavez wrote to Brigadier General G. G. Eddy about the problem on the White Sands Proving Grounds. Senator Clinton P. Anderson also wrote to General Eddy, but the general ruled that no further operations would be allowed on the peak because the paperwork was already being prepared to transfer all mineral rights to the government. The dispute was finally worked out in federal court which settled on a compromise of sorts. The Army would continue to use the surface of the land, but no one would be allowed on the Proving Grounds without the Army’s consent. In effect, no one could mine the treasure, and that included the Army and Babe Noss, but that did not deter Babe. She refused to leave, claiming that all she wanted, according to all the letters and documents she sent, was to recover what her late husband had discovered.

By 1958, few people believed in Babe’s claim of hidden gold. Doc was dead, and with his death went the location of all the buried bars of bullion he had removed from the peak before sealing himself out of the mountain. With the passage of years, few people could claim to have seen any of the treasure. Even though the military always refused any of Babe’s efforts to work her claim, it apparently did not refuse other military personnel from exploring portions of the White Sands. The fat hit the fire when two airmen from nearby Holloman Air Force Base said they had penetrated the gold cavern from another natural opening in the side of Victorio Peak.

The soldiers, Airman First Class Thomas Berlett and Captain Leonard V. Fiege, said they had penetrated a fissure which led to a small cavern filled with approximately one hundred gold bars weighing between forty and eighty pounds each. The bars were shaped like house bricks. Neither man was familiar with laws governing the discovery of treasure on a military reservations, nor were they aware that the Whites Sands command did not hold the mineral rights to anything found on the Range. Fiege told several people that he had caved in the roof and walls to make it look as if the tunnel came to a dead end, and then both men covered the entrance with rocks and dirt to disguise the location. Fiege then went to the Judge Advocate’s Office at Holloman Air Force Base and conferred with Colonel Sigmund I. Gasiewicz.

There was now two separate military commands involved. Gasiewicz called the Land Office in Santa Fe and spoke to a Land Office attorney named Oscar Jordan, saying that an officer assigned to the command at Holloman Air Force Base had found a gold bar on White Sands Proving Grounds, an Army post. Jordan suggested the gold bar be sent to the Department of the Treasury or to the Secret Service, since Jordan was under the impression that Fiege had carried a gold bar to the JAG office at Holloman. Both Fiege and Gasiewicz denied that this happened, but they did form a corporation to protect what Fiege had found. They planned to contact the various governmental agencies to make sure they violated no laws, and they planned to make a formal application to enter White Sands for a search and retrieval of the gold. Although the military issued an edict forbidding them to go back and remove any gold, gold fever still struck. This time the gold seekers were the U. S. Army.

In the summer of 1961, Captain Fiege, Captain Orby Swanner, Major Kelly, and Colonel Gorman were instructed by Major General John Shinkle of White Sands to work the Noss claim on advice from the director of the Mint, who had been bothered by many requests for additional information on the treasure. General Shinkle did not want anyone on the installation not authorized to be there, but he was interested in solving the mystery once and for all. However, he was unwilling to set a precedent that would haunt all of them in the future, so he requested the permission from the Department of the Army to allow a search. On 5 August, Fiege and his party returned to Victorio Peak, accompanied by the commander of the Missile Range, a secret service agent, and fourteen military police. Try as he would, Captain Fiege was unable to penetrate the opening he had used just three years earlier. General Shinkle finally had enough of it and ordered everyone out. Fiege took a lie detector test, and the results of that test prompted General Shinkle to allow Fiege back on the missile range. This time, the military to began a full-scale mining operation at the Peak.

In October of that year, fueled by increasing suspicions that the military was working her claim, Babe Noss hired four men to surreptitiously enter the range. These men were caught trespassing, and after being escorted from the area, they reported to Babe that they observed several men in Army fatigues on the peak. In an affidavit dated 28 October 1961, one of the men, Judge H.L. Moreland of Loveland, Texas, claimed they saw a military jeep, a weapons carrier, a number of poles about the width of telephone poles, and other timbers which were cut and notched.

In his affidavit, Judge Moreland testified that his group talked to Captain Orby Swanner, who ordered them to leave the missile range. As soon as he could, Moreland reported the Army activity on Victorio Peak to Babe Noss. She told Oscar Jordan with the New Mexico State Land Office, and Jordan contacted the Judge Advocate’s Office at White Sands Missile Range. In December 1961, General Shinkle shut down the operation and excluded all from the range who were not engaged in missile research activities

Thirty days later, under cover of darkness, Moreland and his friends returned to the Peak. It was totally deserted. Moreland saw the remains of extensive excavations, apparently carried out by the government. There were roads and scaffolds and tunnels, but as for Babe Noss’ gold treasure, there was no sign of it.

The Gaddis Mining Company of Denver, Colorado, under a $100,000 contract to the Denver Mint, and working with the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, obtained permission from the military to dig the site in 1963. Since it was a state sponsored research trip, designed to uncover artifacts of archaeological significance, the Army readily agreed. For three months, beginning on 20 June 1963, using a variety of techniques, they mapped the peak, searching for large void area that would indicate caverns. They removed tons of earth, dug their own tunnel into the side of the peak, but no entrance to any treasure cache occurred. They also dug a number of small test holes ranging in depth from 18 to 175 feet. When they ceased operations, they were a quarter of a million dollars poorer for their searching which failed to turn up anything.

It was during this same period that the Department of the Army asked Babe Noss to sign a consent document allowing the Army to search. What it said was that she waived all rights to sue the Army or the government “for alleged unlawful taking and withholding of her personal property.” Under advise from her attorney, she was advised not to sign, but she had already signed the document when her attorney learned of it. What he wanted to know was why the Army would insist on such a waiver? Was it an indirect admission that there had been unauthorized intrusion into the cavern by military personnel?

It turns out that there are two theories to this document. First, only Doc Noss had ever been inside the peak, and it is only his word that gold bars were stacked there. Although Leonard Fiege had been inside a cavern, he had been feeling sick the day he was there, and all he saw were bricks covered in dust. They may or may not have been gold bars. There are some who think that Doc salted the cave in an attempt to defraud others. So, for the Army to have Babe sign such a waiver document, might not they be guarding against a real possibility that once the cavern was opened, nothing would be found in it? If Babe then believed that the Army or the government had beaten her into the cave and “stolen” the treasure that belonged to her, she would not be able to file suit. It would make no difference if the gold had been there or not, or even if the treasure cave was a myth or not. What mattered was that the Army would be protected from lawsuits.

In 1972, F. Lee Bailey, a nationally known attorney, became involved. He claimed to represent fifty unidentified clients “who knew the location of the cave with one hundred tons of gold stacked within.” These claimants had retained Bailey to help them find a legal means to work the claim on the federal reservation. Bailey was skeptical, but was provided with one of the bars for analysis. He sent it to the Treasury for testing. It was sixty percent gold and forty percent copper. The problem is that fourteen-karat gold is about fifty-eight percent gold and forty-two percent copper. It was noted that old gold ingots were often far from pure. No real conclusion could be drawn from the tests. Also, the Senate Watergate hearings were in progress, and the matter was not pursued through Federal channels. Again, Babe Noss was not one of the claimants.

Meanwhile, there were now all sorts of claimants in the issue. Along with Babe Noss, there was the group formed around Fiege, Violet Noss Yancy, something called the Shriver group, the Bailey claimants, and Expeditions Unlimited (a Florida based treasure hunting group). The Army, suffering a guilty conscience perhaps, finally allowed Expeditions Unlimited, representing all of the groups, including Babe Noss and Airman Thomas Berlett, to excavate the peak in 1977. Berlett reported that ‘if the mountain has not been penetrated and no materials removed from the mountain, this will be the biggest thing that this country has ever seen.’ However, the Army placed a two week time limit on the group, and they had hardly started before they had to quit. What was most valuable, from the Army’s point of view, was that those claiming something was hidden in Victorio Peak had had their chance to search. They had found nothing. The Army then shut down all operations and said no additional searches would be allowed.

It was not the end of Babe’s quest for her mine. Her story spread like tentacles across the land, becoming profiled in several magazines and newspaper articles. Although Babe died in 1979, he grandson, Terry Delonas, fully intended to continue the family tradition. He formed the Ova Noss Family Partnership. By 1989, the story of the Noss family treasure claim had reached millions of Americans. Incredibly, another piece of the Victorio Peak puzzle then surfaced.

It came from a retired couple living in Baytown near Houston, Texas. Captain Swanner was stationed at White Sands Missile Range in the early 1960’s, and he apparently told member of his family about the Victorio Peak mystery. He said that he had gone to inspect and confirm that the treasure as reported by Airman Berlett and Captain Fiege did exist. He was Chief of Security at the time. When he determined the accuracy of the two men’s reports, he put the entire area off-limits until an official investigation could be conducted. His superiors notified the Pentagon.

Supposedly, the military was able to penetrate at least one of the secret caves and inventory the contents, although the gold bars were supposedly removed to Fort Knox. The Pentagon confirmed that Captain Swanner had served as an officer assigned to security at White Sands Missile Range in 1961. However, Gordon Hobbs, from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army, responded to the allegations reported of Captain Swanner by his relatives by saying that he really did not know anything. He had never seen any such claim in any of the records he had examined, and he had heard nothing of any such claim in the inquiries he had conducted. It did not mean it had never happened, it just meant that Gordon Hobbs could find no record of it.

For Gordon Hobbs to be telling the truth, and there is no reason for him to lie, the official records may have been altered or destroyed or there was never anything in the peak in the first place. On the other hand, what was all the covert military operation on the peak that Judge Moreland and his friends witnessed in 1961? Furthermore, the Army certainly knew of the Noss claim. Babe Noss had been in contact with them for years to gain access to it. If it could ever be proved that the Army stole Babe’s treasure, would not the Army then be liable for restitution? Under that assumption, would not it be better for the Army to conveniently lose, misplace, or destroy any records that might have existed to support that accusation?

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