Ted DeGrazia rode into the Superstition Mountains, a string of packhorses in tow. The packs were loaded with sleeping bags, camping gear, cameras and food. A bottle of scotch.

It was early May of 1976, sunny and warm but not yet hot, and a group of the artist’s friends came along. They rode all afternoon and made camp in a valley of prickly pear and manzanita. There were ancient Indian dwellings in the cliffs above, a bright moon in the night sky. All his life, DeGrazia had struggled to earn a living as an artist. For years, the public ignored him, galleries rejected him and critics had little good to say about his work. But he continued to paint, surviving a failed marriage, the Great Depression and lukewarm sales until at last his work caught on with the public. By that warm day in 1976, his work was worth so much that the Internal Revenue Service told him it might create a tax problem for his heirs.

DeGrazia decided to make a statement to the agency. He invited some of his friends to ride with him into the Superstitions and they set up camp. Some of the horses had carried unsold paintings in their saddlebags, which DeGrazia gathered up and took over to the stack of wood. Sometime around noon, he lit a match, and the wood caught fire.

One by one, DeGrazia started to burn his paintings.DeGrazia rode into the Superstitions “with an entourage of 20 people,” the Johnsons write. They stopped for a snack around noon, got back on their horses and rode deeper into the desert. They could see Weavers Needle in the distance as they came over a rise and dropped into a valley of desert scrub. They made camp under tall cliffs, the valley bathed in moonlight.

DeGrazia loved the Superstitions, their tales of lost gold and hidden treasure, their rugged beauty. He made frequent trips there, searching for gold, riding horses. He even started to build a gallery there but abandoned the project.Whatever the burning was, a publicity stunt or a political statement, it seemed to affect DeGrazia emotionally, perhaps because the artist painted not just what he saw, but what he felt.

“I think it was like destroying his own children," Laber said. "That’s the kind of person he was."

DeGrazia didn’t paint again for another two or three years. The story is he took two racks of paintings in cylinders and hid them in the mountains . A map was supposed to be given to his wife of the location . The paintings where never found .

--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/jeffrey-schreckler/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeffrey-schreckler/support

Get the future of podcasts.