Last summer, Oregon made national headlines as timbers from the infamous Beeswax Wreck were discovered along the North Coast near Manzanita. The Beeswax Wreck, named for one of the products the ship carried, is said to be one of the inspirations for the beloved film “The Goonies.” The wreck has also attracted the attention of treasure hunters in the past, searching for signs of its wreckage or anything it may have been carrying onboard.
Now, a new documentary and podcast series shares the story behind one of those treasure hunters in its first episode. “The True Quest for Fabled Treasure on the Oregon Coast” is Episode 1 of the new series, “Secrets of the Mysteries.” The documentary will be screening Dec. 10 at the Clinton Street Theater. JB Fisher is the executive producer for the series. Tony Altamirano is the director. They both join us to share more on the supposed treasure lost along the Oregon Coast.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon made national news last summer when timbers from a 17th century shipwreck were recovered from caves on the north coast. Experts say they are likely from what’s been called the Beeswax Wreck. The wreck was one of the inspirations for “The Goonies,” but it’s also attracted real life treasure hunters on the Oregon Coast for decades. A new documentary tells this story. It’s called “The True Quest for Fabled Treasure on the Oregon Coast.” It’s the first episode of a new series, “Secrets of the Mysteries.” The documentary will be screening on December 10th at the Clinton Street Theater. Tony Altamirano directed the new documentary. JB Fisher is one of the executive producers for the series and they both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Tony Altamirano: Thanks for having us.
Miller: JB, first. Where did the story first start to emerge that treasure was buried somewhere on the Oregon coast?
JB Fisher: It’s really an interesting legacy because it actually goes back to Indigenous accounts. Basically, eyewitness accounts of what seems to be a fairly consistent story about ships. They were described as winged canoes, blowing smoke at each other, and then a ship coming ashore and people getting off and going up Neahkahnie Mountain and bearing a chest. And then basically this passed along for a number of generations through the 19th and 20th centuries, fueled this pursuit of treasure. But the interesting thing about it is it goes hand in hand with what archaeologists and historians have now determined to be very real material, concrete evidence of shipwrecks, beeswax, porcelain, and other kinds of materials. And all this kind of reinforces this idea that, whether or not that’s the same story, that there’s something there. So a lot of the treasure hunting kind of came out of that kind of one, two punch of both these eyewitness accounts and this actual archaeological evidence.
Miller: Tony, can you describe what the trade that the Spanish ship, that’s presumed to have been shipwrecked off the Oregon Coast, what they would have been doing in the Pacific Ocean?
Altamirano: They were going from the Philippines to Acapulco, they were pretty much cargo ships and traveling back and forth from the Old Kingdom, which was the Philippines, down to the New Kingdom of Acapulco and just distribute goods from there. This ship was blown off course by some kind of tragic, catastrophic event.
Miller: Because there’s no reason otherwise for it to be all the way up in Oregon’s North Coast, if they were going to Mexico.
Altamirano: Yeah, in a normal event, they would have been south of San Francisco per se. They had no business being this far up north. Some event happened, they were blown off course and Neahkahnie Mountain is the highest point in that side of the northwest. And it’s always been a point of reference for sailors. And that’s where the ship ended up, for some reason. That’s what we wanted to kind of dig in and discover why.
Miller: Why did you want to be a part of telling this story?
Altamirano: Escape from the world.
Miller: That’s true of a lot of different stories though, right?
Altamirano: Of course, this story specifically has to do with adventure, has to do with a legend, and it has incredible real life characters. For a filmmaker, that was a gift. And what initially grabbed me more was, JB was an acquaintance of mine that I hadn’t seen in years and he sends me an email with the subject line reading, “Real Goonies.” Goonies was a big part of my life, in my childhood. I’m a child of the ‘80s. So as a film geek, that movie played a big part of my life and knowing that the story had basis on that legend drew me to this.
Miller: You also say at the beginning of the movie, that part of the draw was the Pacific Ocean itself. In what way?
Altamirano: It holds a lot of deep childhood memories. I’m from Peru and we grew up in Lima and that held a lot of deep, fun, happy memories in my life. And as an immigrant, realizing that the Pacific Ocean is still here, just an hour away, was a realization that I kind of wanted to document. It was like my new sense of home is here and I wanted to tell stories that had to do with Oregon. Oregon, it’s a new state, really. As far as history goes worldwide, we’re a new country. We’re a new state and the history that has occurred in the last century, which was not that long ago, is part of history. And I had no idea about this treasure even though I’ve lived here for 22 years. So coming up, having JB and Doug reach out, was just a gift and I mean, this was only a year ago, actually over a year ago, right?
Fisher: Just a little over a year ago.
Altamirano: Yeah.
Miller: JB, Tony mentioned that as a filmmaker, he also looks for great characters. The biggest character who you introduce us to in this movie, who actually probably would have been well known to Oregonians reading the newspaper in the 1960s or 1970s or watching TV, is a man who had two names: Tony Mareno, later known as Ed Fire. Who was he?
Fisher: So this was really my draw to this whole story because for over a decade, I was kind of researching these treasure hunters and this particular person was sort of so above and beyond everyone else in terms of what he was doing. So he was actually a Salem house painter, he came originally from New York. And in the mid [to] late ‘60s, he came to Neahkahnie Mountain, drawn there basically by this idea of this treasure story. He’d actually done some searching at the Lost Dutchman Mine in Arizona. And he came in, I think in ‘66, to Manzanita. And almost immediately, he takes a Caterpillar out on the beach and starts digging and apparently right away, of course, as you can imagine, officials came and checked in with him. And his response was, “I lost my watch,” and then it pretty much went from there.
Miller: He gets an excavator on the public lands.
Fisher: Exactly. And it gets wild from there because basically he manages to secure what becomes known as the Tony Mareno Treasure Trove Bill. It turns out he knew Governor McCall and he arranged this unprecedented bill to be passed that gave just huge rights for the treasure hunter, as far as their percentage of the claim and also huge rights to dig. He was able to, he apparently had seven miles of access on the beach.
So anyway, he was this really interesting character, as you mentioned, he was well known, he had been very widely covered in the news media in the ‘60s. And then he, after a while, faced a lot of pushback from the community and gave up for a while. And then he came back as Ed Fire and he came back and he dug on the mountain. And that’s really the story that I was fascinated with documenting, was he found, just apparently found all of these wild things.
Miller: Right. And this is where we get into the realm of, we really have to sort of underline and italicize the word “apparently,” right? But let’s stick with what he said he found or what family members of his that you talked to say they found. Tony, what’s their story?
Altamirano: They found - apparently, this is a big apparently - they found tunnels under the mountain, six miles worth of tunnels.
Fisher: Well, I guess it’s a little unclear because it was some certain number of acres, but it wasn’t necessarily all continuous, right?
Miller: They found tunnels.
Altamirano: They found a network of tunnels, they found a mural, apparently they found a mural on the wall of the cave of the tunnel. And it had a picture of some North African folk and Moors. And yeah, and I mean, this is apparently what they found but…
Miller: And the “Lost Ark of the Covenant,” which made famous, I guess in biblical stories, also made famous in the “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” all under Neahkahnie Mountain?
Fisher: Yeah, basically. So I guess there’s a central chamber which apparently he never made it to. But that was where the ark was supposed to be. And a lot of what he kept coming back to was he found timbers that were hewn by man. He would always use that term. And basically the idea was that Moors from North Africa came along with Spanish ships and dug these tunnels. Essentially, Ed Fire believed, and he was very religious - he claimed that he used all sorts of decoding of these rocks that have also been found there, which these treasure rocks that have markings that kind of fueled the story as well because they’re actually physically there. And he said he followed this to kind of lead him toward this mystery, which he said was renegade members of the Catholic church, monks basically coming here on some ship, hiding this treasure that included these relics, basically.
So there is definitely this ‘out there’ element to it. I also kind of find it fascinating because it’s like this was, this place, at that time, for people coming from abroad, would be seen as a very promising place to, for example, hide things. And so from that vantage point, you go to Neahkahnie Mountain today and you sort of think this would be a place to hide treasure, if someone was needing to do that.
Miller: Another big issue that is prominent in the second half of the movie is something that people call “The Curse of the Neahkahnie Treasure.” Tony, what kinds of stories did people tell you?
Altamirano: Well, there have been treasure hunters who have actually lost their lives seeking this treasure, which has accumulated into the myth of the curse. And also, I mean, there have been actually more eyewitnesses and of strange occurrences around the Neahkahnie Mountain, energy of lights, unknown sort of apparitions and all that was what, what kind of went its own course, while we were researching for this, because it was more than one person was telling us about this stuff.
Fisher: Yeah, Ed Fire’s family definitely, we spoke with several of his descendants, some who wanted to participate and others not, but they all talked about that as a huge part of this. And we were, and I think even to the extent that some of it was sort of like, OK, you shouldn’t mess with this story because there’s this curse. And we always thought as a team, we always thought, well, we’re not seeking treasure, we’re not interested in that, that’s not our pursuit. So as long as we’re kind of on the side of documenting the story, we should be OK.
Miller: And indeed, did you encounter an increase in supernatural behavior as you were making the movie?
Altamirano: No, not really, which was a shame because I was wanting that. Yeah, I mean, the curse kind of was more of a personal thing that happened during the making of this and that’s in the film, so I don’t want to give it away. But definitely there were ups and downs, there were times where we were even questioning why we’re even doing this. But it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, this past year and a half. I went places I never even knew existed before, and it was just magical. It just was more of a reminder of how magical the Oregon Coast is.
Miller: Well, I hope what you’re getting to, makes me think that you won’t mind me bringing this up. But at the end of the movie, you say that you did find treasure of a sort on the Oregon Coast, but not a chest full of gold. Do you mind telling us what you mean?
Altamirano: The treasure, ultimately, that I personally found, that I wanted to portray and to come across during that last part of the movie was the treasure of the inner feeling of being at home. As an immigrant, I had no sense of home for a long time. And even though I’ve lived here for 22 years, I’ve always felt as an outsider or just somebody passing through. But being there, doing this story, kind of enforced my recognition that wait, I am home, this is home and this story is home and that was the treasure for me at the end.
Miller: JB, I mentioned this is the first installment of this new series. We have just about a minute left. But what else can people expect in the coming months or years?
Fisher: So we’re really excited about telling stories that might have some familiar elements and then also bringing in some unknown things. And then some stories that are completely or less familiar. And one of them is a story that kind of put me on the trail of everything that I’ve been involved in over the last decade. And that’s about a missing family that disappeared in the Columbia River Gorge in 1958. And that comes up in this episode, but we’re going to devote some more to that story because that’s still very much an active story involving searching for this vehicle that’s believed to be in the river.
Altamirano: We also want to incorporate local musicians, independent musicians into our screenings and events and in the soundtrack itself. Me and JB scored the soundtrack to this, and coming from like a music background, we wanted the screenings to be more of like a local community kind of gathering spot for musicians and just to feature music and film, independently.
Miller: Tony and JB, thanks very much.
Altamirano: Thank you.
Fisher: Thank you.
Miller: Tony Altamirano is the director of “The True Quest For Fabled Treasure on the Oregon Coast.” He’ll be screening December 10th at the Clinton Street Theater. JB Fisher is one of the executive producers of the series, “Secrets of The Mysteries” along with Doug Kenck-Crispin.
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