Peralta Stones

Some people named Peralta owned a cattle ranch that included what is now Oakland, California at the time of the Mexican–American War.

Reavis popularized the idea of a rich Peralta family in Arizona in 1882 when he tried to assert a phony Peralta Spanish land grant which included a huge swath of Arizona and New Mexico, including the Superstition Mountains.

According to current legend, but not supported by the historical record, some Peraltas mined in the Superstition Mountains.

The white sandstone has a side showing a Priest who is assembling the Peralta Stones to form the map.

Father Charles Polzer, an ethnohistorian associated with the Arizona State Museum, is convinced the stones are fakes.

[5] According to local lore, the stones contain a map indicating the location of the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine.

[6] Danny Adams, in 2005, read the map as a coded message and claims the stones were made by Ted DeGrazia, a painter and art collector rumored to have burned (or buried) a collection of art worth $5 million rather than pay taxes on his property; Adams claims one of the stones reads "Be ready boy, are on a map on Arizona county scale, scale map" and aided by numerological analysis locates the mine in Upper Labarge Canyon.

The treasure of paintings, supposedly hidden in the mine, is also connected, somehow, to a conspiracy of 50 businessmen from the Phoenix area to hide DeGrazia's work.

[7] In 2007, William and Michael Johnson (originally from Massachusetts) said that they had identified a privately owned cave as the mine, based on the clues left in the Peralta Stones.