As a five-year old boy Dan Dillman sat at the feet of his grandpa Raymond Dillman in 1977 and heard the tall tales of an actual national treasure being buried near southern Utah.
This is nothing new, as tales of Montezuma’s gold have been shared around many Kane County kitchen tables for many years, but he says most of those stories asked the wrong question of where is Montezuma’s treasure buried, instead of where is Montezuma buried? That’s the question Dillman asked his grandpa decades ago and is still asking today, with the help of the History Channel as they document it in a new series called Lost Gold of The Aztecs.
Lost Gold of the Aztecs premiers Tuesday, March 29, at 10 p.m., on the History Channel, and follows three families determined to break the 500- year-old curse of Emperor Montezuma and find the treasure.
The Aztec Empire came to an end at the hands of Conquistador Hernan Cortes, but not before Emperor Montezuma and his people were able to sneak their mass amounts of wealth north to seven separate locations in what is now the American Southwest. For five centuries, thousands have searched for Montezuma’s treasure and the ‘7 Cities of Gold’. The treasure is believed to be made up of an enormous quantity of gold bars, silver, precious stones, jewelry, and other Aztec artifacts. Historians estimate the value of all these items to be worth over $3 billion dollars.
The series will follow each family’s epic adventure as they search for the ‘7 Cities of Gold’ on three different properties in three different states: the Dillmans in Utah, the Hoaglands in Nevada, and the Villescases in New Mexico. Who will be the first to find the Aztec Gold?
Dan Dillman and his family have been searching for it for decades. “I was born into it,” he shared. “It’s in my blood.” While Dillman wants to find the treasure, he is more interested in uncovering where Montezuma is buried, saying, “Montezuma was an emperor, and in Aztec culture, a shrine or a monument would have been built honoring the great leader, but there is nothing of record in Tenochtitlan, or modern-day Mexico.” He believes Montezuma took his gold with him and traveled north and was buried with his treasure. He said the artifacts, pictographs, hieroglyphics, and Spanish writings his family and others have found in southern Utah, provide evidence the Aztecs made it this far north.
Dillman is interested in preserving that heritage and history, respecting the land, and keeping these sites sacred and protected, along with The History Channel. Dillman said, “I’m excited, because the History Channel is concerned in preserving history and learning from it and that’s exactly what my family and I are interested in.”
He said Kanab is sitting on a wealth of treasure beneath their feet, and they may not even realize it. The ancient knowledge of what happened to Montezuma is treasure itself, but Lost Gold of the Aztecs is an eight-episode series that sets a new standard in treasure hunting shows, and the race is on to find it.
