What Men Call Treasure

by David Schweidel, Robert Boswell

Overview

Legend says treasures lie deep inside Victorio Peak: A parable about obsession, hope, and humanity.

In 1937, Doc Noss—part-adventurer, part-conman—and his wife Babe discovered fabulous treasure inside the caverns of New Mexico's Victorio Peak. They dynamited the tunnel to hide the treasure from other treasure hunters. At least that's what they said happened. Babe's grandson Terry Delonas grew up listening to his grandmother's magical stories about her dead husband and Victorio Peak. Her stories were his legacy. In the 1980s, Terry, a gay man, tested positive for HIV. He decided that searching for Victorio's lost treasure was the only dream that would give his life meaning. With his grandmother's grit and her gift for talking her way through tough places, he found money and support to follow his dream and overcome many obstacles—bad weather, broken equipment, the army, Congress, and other fortune hunters. But Victorio Peak, that inscrutable and mysterious mountain, would not give up its treasure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933693217
Publisher:	Lee & Low Books
Publication date:	08/01/2008
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	326,553
Product dimensions:	9.68(w) x 11.06(h) x 1.27(d)

About the Author

David Schweidel grew up in El Paso, Texas, three miles from the Mexican border. He remembers feeling like an anthropologist long before he knew what an anthropologist was. His first novel, Confidence of the Heart, won the Milkwood National Fiction Prize in 1995. Currently, he lives in Berkeley with his wife Linda and works at the University of California. Robert Boswell is normally a fiction writer. He is the author of seven books, most recently Century's Son reprinted by Picador in 2003. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and many other magazines. He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, writer Antonya Nelson.

Robert Boswell is the author of eight works of fiction, most recently Century's Son (Alfred A. Knopf). His book on craft, The Half-Known World (Graywolf Press), has just been published. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. He teaches at New Mexico State University and shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, the writer, Antonya Nelson.

Editorial Reviews

In What Men Call Treasure, authors David Schweidel and Robert Boswell, spin a yarn about the treasure hunt that began in 1937 when Ernest "Doc" Moss, an ersatz podiatrist, and his first wife Babe, claimed to have discovered the fortune. A careless mining explosion re-buried the treasure, and frustrating attempts to re-unearth the wealth carried on through the 1970s. Terry Delonas, Babe's grandson who grew up on tales of the treasure, decided to rekindle the search for the fortune.

Delonas's hunt makes for a sometimes quirky, always entertaining tale, full of strange characters, government intervention, and no small number of mistakes. Public libraries in which travel and adventure accounts are popular will want to buy this one. — Foreword

"What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak is the in-depth true story of one family's legendary brush with riches. In 1937, con man and chiropodist Doc Noss ventured inside a New Mexico mountain named after the Apache chief Victorio. He discovered a cavern of incredible riches — statues of saints, swords, a crown, a chest of jewelry, twenty-seven skeletons, and roughly 16,000 gold bars of varying types. When the Doc and his wife tried to gain better access to the cavern, one of their dynamite blasts destroyed the narrow passage, and the U.S. government claimed the land for missile testing shortly after.

A saga of discovery, lost treasure, and phenomenally questionable acts of the U.S. Government, What Men Call Treasure is a fascinating true story of lost mysteries, doubly remarkable in today's modern era when most corners of the earth have been thoroughly explored." — Midwest Book Review

Starting with a nod to "Treasure Island," and winding down with a nod to Odysseus, this book is filled with enough pitfalls and promises to make any would-be treasure-seeking throw down their shovel and give up the hunt. — Lisa Kay Tate — El Paso Scene

Spur Award Finalist, Best Western Nonfiction Contemporary, 2009

From the Publisher