You want questions, ok, I've got one about an old B Western (or it may have been a serial from the late years before they stopped making serials).

The story involved a group of people hunting a old Spanish colonial gold/silver mine in the SW US. The consquistadors had served as guards for a slave crew of Indians forced to dig the ore but all was under the supervision of the Church (Catholic obviously). The Indians rebelled and defeated the slave drivers, put all the gold/silver not yet hauled off by the Church into the mine, then sealed it up with rocks. All this was told in flashback depiction with a voiceover by a character that wanted to mount a search for the mine. He believed he could find it because the Church had created a treasure map of sorts in the form of 4 or 5 icons (crucifixes) that had clues carved on them. The crucifixes were hidden in various spots and deciphering the first one led to the next and so on. The treasure seeker thought he had the first cross.

I don't remember the details of most of the search other that the fact that the group's solidarity fell apart and the hunt became a race between different disagreeing parties trying to see who would find the next clue.

I remember the character who figured out the final cross (the hero of course) discovered that the final cross wasn't an icon at all but the shadow cast by a man standing at sun rise on a specific date of the year in a natural stone arch formation. The "+" center on a cliff face west of the arch showed the location of the sealed mine entrance. (The same principle used by Indiana Jones to focus the rays of the sun on a specific tomb/shrine depicted in the Egyptian map room when he was trying to beat the Nazis to the Ark of the Covenant.)

I saw this back in the mid-50s and thought it was just the most exciting show I had ever seen. It caused me to have this life-long curiosity about secret codes and symbols (cryptography as practiced other than by the military) and lost treasure legends.

I've done a number of web searches in IMDb and a few other genre sites that post old movie info but haven't ever seen anything that really seemed to match.

Got any idea what this movie/serial was called and whether it might be available today VHS or DVD?

Thanks

I never heard of this one even though it sounds famillar to something else.

Since it's been so many years since I saw the movie, could I be mixing any memories of elements from "Treasure of Sierra Madre" with another less-classic western? I've been meaning to try to find "Treasure..." either on a cheap DVD or on rental, but just haven't gotten around to it.

Lately, I've had so much non-entertainment stuff going on, I've had to just shuck some of the more important chores in favor of some chill-out time to catch up on viewing new DVDs that I bought and haven't watched yet.