Forbidden Territory.

Long, long ago, I watched an episode of a television western series where someone was searching for gold in a forbidden territory of the west.

Later, when I learned about western history, I deduced that the forbidden territory where the characters looked for gold in the episode would probably be either the Black Hills of South Dakota, held sacred by the Sioux Indians, where gold was discovered in 1874, leading to war, or the Superstition Mountains in Arizona, in Apache territory - the reputed location of the legendary Lost Dutchman Gold Mine.

In "Apache Gold", 9 September 1957, the third episode of the second season, Jim Hardie is sent to help a Wells Fargo stockholder search the Superstition Mountains in Arizona for his son who bought a map allegedly showing the way to a legendary lost gold mine.

Where the episode definitely gets its history wrong is in saying the story all began in 1864 with the story of the Lost Adams Diggings, the bonanza sought in the novel and movie MacKenna's Gold (1963,1969). Since the Lost Adams Diggings were lost and never identified, nobody knows where they were, but the legend puts them hundreds of miles northeast of the Superstition Mountains, in southwestern New Mexico or possibly in eastern Arizona.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Adams_Diggings

The legendary mine of the Superstition Mountains is the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine (not to be confused with other legendary Lost Dutchman's Gold Mines in Arizona, Colorado, and California), allegedly discovered by the real Jacob Waltz who came to Arizona in the 1860s and died in 1891. Some versions of the legend have people following Waltz trying to find the location of his gold source, which if true means that people would have been searching for the mine at least as early as the 1880s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Dutchman%27s_Gold_Mine

According to some versions, a member of the Peralta family gave Waltz the secret location of the equally legendary Peralta mine. And perhaps people were already selling fake maps to the lost Peralta mine when Jim Hardie was still working for Wells Fargo. So the writers of the episode could have made it a bit more probable by mentioning maps to the Lost Peralta Mine instead of to the Lost Adams Diggings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peralta_massacre

At the end Jim Hardie says that years later a large expedition went into the Superstition Mountains and found the lost valley of gold defended by seven desperate men, something which I don't remember reading about in any other version of the legend.

Anyway, I wonder if "Apache Gold" is the episode I dimly remember watching long ago.