From the time Fray Marcos de Niza preceded Coronado in his search for the Seven Cities of Gold, New Mexico has been a magnet for treasure seekers and a hotbed of treasure tales; no matter that the treasure has most always proven elusive or non existent.

Perhaps the most persistent of these tales is that of the lost mine of Padre Larue. As the story goes, Larue was ministering to a poor Indian village in northern Mexico. Times were hard and a drought had worsened conditions. The good Padre befriended and ministered to a dying old man (or soldier in some versions) who told him of a rich vein of gold that lay in a mountain two days north and east of El Paso del Norte. Larue set out north with the able-bodied members of his flock and found the vein where the dying man had said it was. They extracted the ore and smelted it down into hundreds of gold ingots that they stacked in an empt...
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