According to family lore, Marvel and Lawrence met while she was working at a relative's fruit stand. Marvel Retter was born in Wakefield, Kan., in 1914. That charm must have worked on the woman for whom Marvel Maps was named. “He was like a Frenchman who would kiss your hand - he was just amazing,” Donna Retter said. He did it all while cutting a suave figure. The mapmaker was something of a Renaissance man - relatives said he pursued photography, worked as a chauffeur and served as an executive with the Screen Extras Guild, then a union for background actors. 'Dark hair, mustache, looked like he could’ve been a movie star but he never was.' The map featured only one local point of interest in a desert: Mt. "I think he was - in his own right,” said Donna Retter, a niece. His relatives didn’t know the answer, but they knew this: Lawrence had been a treasure hunter. “He would investigate, did all the artwork,” Retter said.īut a question loomed: Did Lawrence’s treasure map actually lead to a trove? “Dark hair, mustache, looked like he could've been a movie star but he never was,” said Steve Retter, a nephew.īill Retter, another nephew, has a copy of one of Lawrence’s other maps - “Ghost Towns of the Old West” - hanging in his home. He died nearly 50 years ago, but the actor’s relatives could still easily summon gilt-edged memories of him from their teenage years. He hailed from Utahand dreamed of making it in the movies, andeventually carvedout a decades-long career in Tinseltown. Lawrence, I’d soon learn, had been a mapmaker, actor andHollywood executive. In another corner was a man's name: John D. One day in April 2020, I found myself staring at it, lost in the intricacy of the artwork, when something printed on the bottom right corner caught my eye: “Marvel Maps, 1410 North Stanley Avenue.” That was just a few miles from where I lived. Kokoweef.Įnchanted by its suggestion of swashbuckling adventure, I acquired the map in December 2019. Among its points of interest was a lost mine in Texas where Jesuits had hidden silver bullion, an island off Central America that was home to the $60-million “Loot of Lima,” and, of course, the abundant “gold bearing sand” of San Bernardino County’s Mt. Published in 1952, the map highlighted 63 spots. Lawrence and published by his Marvel Maps company in 1952. "The Americana Treasure Map" was created by John D. The tale of that man, his map, and the place it led to is really one about Southern California’s twin mirages - fame and fortune - and the people who seek one or the other. Among them is a surprising figurewhose treasure map would, decades after its publication, jump-start a new adventure in the Mojave Desert. The story of how a handful of 21st century “forty-niners” wound up searching for gold on a singed landscape studded with Joshua trees arcs back nearly 100 years, entangling an eclecticcast of characters. With funding from about 900 investors, he's chasing what he believes is a $1-trillion strike. The miners areled by an 84-year-old who has spent more than half his life looking for the bonanza beneath 6,038-foot Mt. These days, a different mining outfit is trying - on land it leases from a private company that owns the property. But he and his contemporaries never extracted any treasure from the mountain. The notion that there’s a mother lode beneath the California peak, which is about 100 miles northeast of Barstow, was popularized in the 1930s by a miner who claimed to have seen it during a daring, four-day voyage. Kokoweef's tunnels is meant to deter trespassers at the 6,038-foot peak.
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