Prologue

Jason Hawke was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Born into a family of wealth, prestige, and power, he never wanted for anything. He was also a trust fund baby. Due to the very forward thinking of his fourth great grandfather, his financial future was totally secure. Joshua Hawke had fought for the U.S. Army during Mexican-American War between 1847 and 1848. When hostilities ceased, he settled in the town of Bisbee in the territory that would eventually become, first, the Arizona Territory, and finally the State of Arizona. A very ambitious young man, he first tried his hand at prospecting for gold, and after achieving moderate success in this venture, bought another claim that was thought to have been nearly mined out. That claim would eventually yield an enormous amount of high-grade cooper ore. By the early 1880s, he sold his mining operations to a large mining corporation, becoming one of the wealthiest men in the territory. At that time, he divided his wealth into seven parts. Keeping one part for himself and gifting one part to his only son, he set up five trusts for future male heirs; his direct linear descendants. The J.S. Morgan Company, which would later become the J.P Morgan Investment Company was chosen as the investment manager for these five trusts and given free rein to invest the assets as they deemed prudent.

Jason Hawke was the sole beneficiary of the last of those trust funds. However, you would never know it based upon his life style. Always dressed in jeans and a tee shirt, in school he was not considered a prime catch. He was below average height at five feet seven inches tall and weighed no more than one hundred thirty-five pounds. He was a good-looking kid, with fashionably long dark brown hair and a relatively dark complexion that came from his Native American heritage. A very good student, he finished in the top five of his high school graduating class and graduated with highest honors from the University of Arizona with a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree in American History. Jason’s passion was the history of Arizona and of its early inhabitants. Although not pursuing a doctorate degree, he was a constant visitor at the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records Department.

For the last several weeks, Jason had been following the correspondence of three historians from the early twentieth century pertaining to the Hohokam Indians, one of the earliest known inhabitants of the Valley of the Sun, dating back to the time of Christ. The Hohokam had settled the land between the Salt and Gila Rivers and had built the most complex system of irrigation in the New World. They were farmers who lived mostly on the food they grew and the meat from small game that they hunted. Based upon the artifacts that they left behind, their civilization thrived for nearly fifteen hundred years and then vanished. The discussion was what had caused them to leave. The most common cause was thought to be the Great Drought from 1276 to 1299 followed by a major flooding event in 1358 that destroyed their irrigation system. Two of the three historians held fast to that belief, but one had a different and extremely controversial belief. He claimed that, according to his great grandfather who lived with the Pima Indians for over a year, there was an oral history of the existence of a fierce tribe of warriors called the Amazonians that had swept down from the Superstition Mountains and had wiped out the Hohokam before the flood.

‘What if that were true’, Jason thought. ‘Wouldn’t it be something if I could find actual evidence of a lost tribe; one that has never been heard of before?’