Relics of a Day Gone By

If you find yourself wondering in the desert near Beatty, Nevada you might want to take a shovel and a metal detector with you. You also might want to be asking yourself, “why the hell am I wondering around in the desert?”

If you like to hunt relics then this could the payday you have been looking for.

In the late 1800’s there was a wagon train carrying 20 barrels of whiskey and general goods merchandise from the town of Ludlow to a new upstart town named Rhyolite. During the trek from point A to point B the wagon train followed a road that skirted around the Amargosa Desert. I guess going around the desert was better than going through the desert however, the wagon train was besieged by an unrelenting sandstorm that began to make dunes so deep that the wagons couldn’t be pulled through them. Fearing for their lives the leader of the wagon train decided to have the men unhook the horses and mules from the wagons and ride them out of the storm, leaving the wagons and all of the merchandise behind.

The storm continued to rage on, completely burying the wagons and their cargo. Once the storm had subsided the men returned to the site to retrieve the goods but they were no where to be found. The sandstorm had changed the landscape so much that they weren’t even sure where the goods should be.

Here in lies the problem with finding this cache of relics (and some really aged whiskey!) Stories place this cache at a spot seven miles south of the town of Beatty, Nevada while another story says it was eighteen miles south. If that isn’t enough for you then there is one more story that says the cache of goods is twenty-three miles south of Beatty. No wonder they couldn’t find it!

A little research to determine where this road was in the 1800’s would go a long way to finding the spot where the goods disappeared in the sand. An old topographical map of the area should help considerably.

Watch out for those sand storms, I don’t want to be writing about a wayward treasure hunter who was buried in the sand with his new 4x4 truck.