Felipe La Rue

Felipe (Philip) La Rue was a French Catholic missionary priest, either of the order of Franciscans or Jesuits, who was sent to New Spain in the late eighteenth century, where, it is claimed, he mined for gold at an uncharted site now referred to as the Lost Padre Mine.

The Story

While ministering somewhere in the region of Paso del Norte, La Rue was said to have encountered an elderly Spanish soldier who told him the location of a gold prospect some distance north, which La Rue and his followers would reputedly, some years later, re-discover and mine for themselves. La Rue's activities were then, according to the story, somehow exposed to Church authorities in Mexico City, who dispatched a party to track down the padre; the party were said to have soon found La Rue and his followers, allegedly torturing and killing several of them in an attempt to extract information about the mine, but were ultimately unable to ascertain the location of any gold or the mine itself.

Reading

• James, Henry (1973), Seven was the Padre's Number: the Dramatic Story of an Early Nineteenth-Century Search for Gold in the Territory that is now New Mexico, New York: Exposition Press, https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Padres-Number-Henry-James/dp/B000O0OQWO/?tag=apopheniacs-20 
• Clemons, Russel E. (November 1988), "The Lost Padre Mine: Fact or Fiction?", 9th Annual New Mexico Mineral Symposium, Socorro, New Mexico, https://geoinfo.nmt.edu/museum/minsymp/abstracts/viewPDF.cfm?aid=101