#2328 - Luke Caverns

Joe Rogan (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

SPEAKER_3 (0:06)

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

What's up? How are you, man?

Luke Caverns (0:15)

How are you?

Joe Rogan (0:15)

It's a pleasure to meet you.

Luke Caverns (0:16)

It's a pleasure to meet you as well.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

I really enjoyed you on the Jesse Michaels podcast. So I had to have you on.

Luke Caverns (0:21)

Yeah. Well, thank you so much, man.

Joe Rogan (0:22)

I love it when young people know so much about ancient history. Like, how did you get started in this?

Luke Caverns (0:29)

Well, it's quite literally in my blood. Back in the late, well, I should say the 1890s, my family, they were cattle rustlers right here in the Hill Country, actually, maybe a little bit further, quite a bit further west of San Antonio.

Joe Rogan (0:45)

Damn, you come from a lot of criminals?

Luke Caverns (0:48)

Probably. Yeah, there's a lot of dark history in here.

And so, they are cattle rustlers that are out in Dryden, Texas, in Sanderson, Texas, and I mean, right on the Rio Grande. And they were, that's how they made their money. They were fascinated, kind of like everybody, with finding gold, with finding lost Spanish treasure, and Native American artifacts. So they're living in this area called the Reagan Canyon. And I've seen it all over the place. If you look on, I think like the Smithsonian did something on the top 10 forgotten places in the United States. It's like the most remote areas of our country. And somewhere in there is Reagan Canyon. And so out there, they developed this fascination for looking for lost Spanish gold. And, you know, there are bandits that would hide up in the hills, and they would sack Spanish caravans, and drag the gold up into the hills to not get caught, to hopefully come back for it later. And the Spanish are out there mining for gold and everything. So my family gets caught up in one of the biggest mysteries of Texas history. Like, if you were to look up, if you were to go to some bookstore, there's a popular one called The Sons of Coronado, and it's like this legacy of people looking for Spanish gold. Somewhere in there, my family will be in there. And so this started in the 1890s, and it's this long saga of the gold being, the treasure being dragged to San Antonio, and all these people get killed, and only one of these four Reagan brothers makes it out. He gets involved in oil drilling out in East Texas, and then so my family moved out to East Texas, and then his son was born, which is my grandfather. And then he continues this legacy of continuing his father's oil company, but then he also begins gold mining in New Mexico. And while he's out in New Mexico, he hears these legends of these seven lost Spanish gold mines. And because this local, there was a local police officer who was like a treasure hunter, and he knew who my grandfather was and the story behind our family. He sought him out, and they went off looking together. And I don't know how long it took them to find it, but he found the seven lost Spanish gold mines of New Mexico. And he opened up this company called Three Bells Mining and Milling Company. And that was open for about eight years. And they opened up these, they opened up these mines that go back to probably about the 1530s. So the Spaniards were up all the way in New Mexico in the 1530s, and they were opening up Native American gold mines and expanding them. And so he found these gold mines that go hundreds of feet into the ground as this huge expansive gold mining operation. Well, somebody dies after a smelter explodes and the company goes under, they lose everything, my family falls into poverty. My dad's born during that time, and my dad didn't really get to experience like all of that excitement. He had to spend his life climbing out of poverty.

But he had this love for history, he had this love for American history really, and he instilled in me the importance of history growing up. And that fascination of exploration and kind of ancient American history, hearing those stories carried over into me during my childhood. And so I've just, I have always been fascinated by this. And I guess getting to where I am now, I was halfway through my marketing degree in college, and I'm sitting on my bed in my dorm room with my girlfriend at the time, who I'm married to now. And we watched the movie The Lost City of Z, about Percy Fawcett. And something about that guy's journey reminded me so much of my family, kind of reminded me of my dad, reminded me of my grandpa. And it changed something in me. Like that day, I could not ignore, I was probably 20 at the time, I could not ignore this love that I'd always had for ancient history. But archaeologists are poor. You know, they're, it's an extremely hard life, and it's really hard on your family too. And I just knew I had to create a life for myself where I could do what I loved, because I had like a 1.7 GPA in college, and I was not going to make it through my classes. And so I changed, I got a degree in cultural anthropology. I wrote, like we had a mock thesis statement, and I wrote it on the Amazon and the lost civilizations and how they were wiped out from Spanish influenza and yes, that's where I'm at today.