Barry Storm
Thunder Gods Gold. 1945.
Barry Storm's famous work, the one the movie Lust for Gold (starring Glenn Ford) was based on. A wonderful book bursting with Storm's enthusiasm and speculations. A book from another era, great stuff, one work everyone interested in the tale must have. And the movie! just as melodramatic, romantic, and cockeyed as Storm.
How much of the accepted interpretation of the Lost Dutchman story really springs from Storm's works in the late 1930's and 1940's? It has lots of on the spot work in the mountains reading treasure signs, trail markers, maps and such. Great photographs. It doesn't get any better than Barry Storm traipsing all over the mountains looking for lost Spanish treasures. Storm clearly was a promoter, so it is hard to judge if he really knew his stuff, but the telling of it is infectious and one starts to believe despite oneself.
Swanson and Kollenborn cryptically remark in their In the Shadow of the Superstitions that a young mining engineer, Alfred Strong Lewis, "...was the author of Rain Gods Gold, and his manuscript was probably the source of Barry Storm's book Thunder God's Gold."
CM: "Probably the best known book ever written on the Lost Dutchman Mine. Much worthwhile information and the author's suppositions and conclusions regarding the famed lost mine. This book was used as a basis for the motion picture, 'Lust for Gold,' starring Glenn Ford."
