Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Gold in Graham County, Kansas

Ahh, the land of flat ground, prairie grasses and bugs, lots and lots of bugs.

If you aren’t bothered by the bugs or like me, you do the majority of your hunting during the winter months when the snakes and bugs aren’t around; you might want to venture into the state of Kansas to search for treasure.

This story takes us to the Solomon River near Morland Kansas where a band of merry travelers were ambushed by Indians. Is it just me or would you think that somewhere somebody would have realized that when you were traveling through Indian lands you might get attacked.

This story has two versions. The first version says the group of merry travelers were Spaniards traveling with a chest of gold when they were attacked. The second version says the merry travelers were a group of gold miners retuning from California with a chest of gold. OK, neither story said they were actually merry but if I had a chest of gold I would be pretty damn happy!

As the stories go, the group, whoever they were (research people, research) were traveling along minding their own business when they were suddenly and unexpectedly attacked by a band of not so merry Indians. During the melee the group of men chose to throw their treasure chest of gold into the Solomon River to keep it out of the hands of the Indians, thinking that they would be able to come back for it later.

Unfortunately for the majority of the men, they didn’t survive the attack and the few that did decided another trip in to Indian territory should wait a while until it was safer. By the time that day had come the members of the original party had all died and had only left behind stories that were handed down through the family.

As far as I know only one attempt to find the gold filled chest occurred, many years after the fact, and it could not be found. This is where the story came from, relatives of one of the original party members coming to the area to recover the treasure. The story says that the gold was in bar form and was valued at $400,000 in the 1970’s.

The one thing that the relatives did not take into consideration is that the river changed course over the years so the treasure is now probably on dry land somewhere. If you go looking for this one you will want to keep that in mind. You also might want to check the soil survey of the area and see what the ground is made of just in case the treasure chest slowly sank to bedrock over the last several decades.

I’m thinking a really good pulse induction unit with a 48 inch coil might work well on this one!

1 comment:

loving dogs said...

I just was going through boxes of my families photos etc. I ran across a newpaper long article by the Wichita Beacon with a picture of my dad and granddad (Weston Smith & Francis Smith in Morland Kansas for which they were digging a well and after several feet found a chest. They mentioned that a it might have been from the Solomon River changing course. The articles story ended before it said what they found, but my grandfather started a company selling stocks in lew of what it contained. I've tried to google a conclusion.