Finding old with new

Have you ever found that great lead to lost Spanish galleons, buried pirate gold, Wells-Fargo robberies, the rediscovery of long, lost mines, or the mattress-hordes of an eccentric old prospector? Then you run into a hitch in your giddy-up. The town or place that you need to find is no longer on any map? I myself have ran into that problem more than once. Now one of your best resources are the “old timers” in your area. They probably have more stored back for a rainy day conversation than you can shake a stick at. If you have that resource, use it. If you don’t though here is a great resource that I myself have used at my desk in my house while drinking a cup of coffee. This can save you hours if not days of foot work in the field. It’s a hobby that even some treasure hunters may have. It’s called “Geocaching”.

You can think of it as a modern-day hunt for treasure. It starts out with satellites above the earth. Using a GPS, they can tell you where you are within a few feet. A few years back, someone took that technology and started hiding things to find throughout the world and posting those so-called treasure coordinates on the Internet. Now, anyone can search for these geocaches.

I discovered through a good friend of mine that these folks where hiding some of these geocaches in old forgotten places like ghost towns, old canyons, creeks, and caves. What’s great about this is that they have posted the coordinates to these place on the internet and with the use of a hand held GPS ,or heck even now a day’s your cell phone probably has a application for it, you can probably find the place you’ve been looking for. I have even emailed the person who had hidden the geocache near the particular area I was looking for and he was able to give me exact location of a building I was looking for in the old ghost town.

You can take it a step further and enter the coordinates into the mapping program of your choice and probably get a bird’s eye view of the place before you even head out into the field. You can also share your research this way with your hunting partner if needed through email.

What it boils down to is when you are searching for a treasure site, don’t be afraid to think outside of the box a little and use resources that you might not normally consider. Mix a little old tactics with some new. Along the way you may even pick up a new hobby or two

Happy Thanksgiving!!

We'd like to wish our readers and their families a very safe and Happy Thanksgiving!

I promise to get back on schedule with some regular postings this next week. It has been a busy time around here with the nice weather. We have been working on a few different outlaw and Spanish sites and were beat to one by somebody else. That happens in this hobby/business. There's always somebody else that has looked for what you are looking for and sometimes they find it.

Out in the field

The fall weather here in Oklahoma has been outstanding, giving us plenty of time to be out in the field. This is one reason we haven't kept up with posting on the blog. When you are studying signs and symbols, blogging isn't on your mind. The good thing is that we now have many more treasure related photos in our archives. Previous treasure hunters had beat us to spot or two that we were working. At least these guys were kind enough to backfill the holes many years ago. They were a bit greedy and didn't leave us any scraps for our effort, but an empty hole isn't a total loss. You get the satisfaction of knowing you were working a good site. We were just a day late and a dollar short.

Winter is fast approaching and we will be once again thinking up stories to post and researching next years sites to work. I'm working on some new tools to aid us in treasure hunting, so I'll be busy out in the work shop. Watching Meteorite Men on tv gets me motivated to add to our treasure toolbox. Those guys are always coming up with new tools to hunt space rocks.

Stay tuned for some interesting stories!

My bad

I have been notified by more than one reader that my post about underwater treasure hunting on November 7th had a small flaw in it. Nova Scotia is not a country but a province of Canada. I apologize for the mistake, I just got so wrapped up in being mad at the pinheads I wasn't paying attention.

Thanks to the readers who brought this to my attention. I hate to look stupid but sometimes it just happens. OK, maybe it happens more than just sometimes!

I guess I won't be winning the big money on Jeopardy any time soon.

Something a little different

As treasure hunters we are always looking for gold and silver and maybe, just maybe, the occasional cache of jewelry. It’s the same thing day in and day out, interpret the clues, dig a hole, blah, blah, blah.

Just in case there are those out there that feel this way I have something different for you to look for. You will have to travel to Smith County, KS to look for it but that may not be too far for some of our readers.


Located about two miles from Smith Center, KS is what used to be an Indian trading center where different Indian tribes would come to trade with each other. The Indians spent a lot of time in this area and while there some of them spent their time making flint arrowheads and knives that they could trade to the other tribes.


This site is also known as “Sitting Bull’s Fort” and “Plaster’s Castle”. The “fort” was made of stone and existed for a long time. It is said that Chief Sitting Bull used the location in 1867 as his own personal bank to hide knives, arrowheads and “illegally obtained weapons”. Illegally obtained weapons? I can’t imagine!


Winter is coming and the grass will die down soon and make it easier to see the ground. If you've never found an arrowhead it can be almost as fun as digging a hole at the end of a treasure trail.

So there you have it. If you are bored with looking for shiny metal then maybe you should venture to Kansas and see if you can find a few arrowheads. Those “illegally obtained weapons” could be worth a lot of money if they happen to be rifles.

Underwater treasure hunting on the ban list?

If you like to dive for your treasure then you may want to start keeping a closer eye on the United Nations. The international pinheads have decided that they want to ban all underwater treasure hunting, well, commercial treasure hunting that is, in an effort to “protect underwater cultural heritage”.

According to the UN convention it will still be legal for the archies to do their thing but anyone wanting to actually hunt for a profit will be banned from doing so. They say they are trying to protect the underwater artifacts for future generations however if nobody is looking for them then they won’t be very protected as they sit on the bottom of the ocean and slowly dissolve away with time.


In my opinion the pinheads don’t care about cultural heritage. If they did then the different countries that have joined this convention would spend a lot more money each trying to locate and recover these “cultural” artifacts but they don’t. They just sit like vultures waiting for someone who has spent their own hard earned money and time to find them and then they swoop in and try to take it all away. Do I sound bitter?

I agree that some laws are needed to govern the unscrupulous treasure hunters but they always go overboard and I sure don’t think there should be some international law defining what each country can and cannot do.


Nova Scotia is the latest country to jump on board with the U.N. convention, banning all commercial underwater treasure hunting beginning 1 January 2011.


If I were a lawyer I think I would come up with a new interpretation of “commercial treasure hunting” and find away around this stupid law. Governments are notorious for not looking for these so called cultural artifacts and the majority of them are only found by pure accident or by professional treasure hunters. I think this will drastically decrease the amount of the “cultural heritage” found in the future.


As far as I can tell our own pinheads in D.C. have not joined this convention, not yet anyway, but you might keep your eyes open for any kind of legislation in the future. How long will it be before they decide that the ground we walk on contains “cultural heritage” and ban us from any type of treasure hunting? They have done this in some areas already but the pinheads are notoriously ignorant of real life so one of these days we may all be fighting to keep our hobby/profession from being killed off by these morons.

One of the largest cash robberies in U.S History

Here is another tale of modern day outlaws where the loot was never found. Our story begins in sunny California in a little city called Los Angeles. In 1997 a regional safety inspector for “Dunbar Armored” decided that he would mastermind a little heist of the “Dunbar Armored” facility. He then decided to recruit five of his childhood friends to help. Lots of planning and timing went into this heist. The safety inspector timed the cameras and determined how they could be avoided. He also knew how many personnel would be on duty at the facility. They waited until they knew that the facility vault was open due to the large quantities of money being moved. On Friday, September 12, the safety inspector and his little gang of childhood friends entered the facility using the safety inspector’s access key. They then proceeded to ambush the guards one by one from the staff cafeteria. Once they had the security personnel down to a minimum, they rushed the guards in the vault before any alarms could be sound. They spent the next thirty minutes loading a U-haul truck with nearly $20 million in non-sequential bills. Well the police soon figured out that this had to be a inside job and a short time without any leads they finally got a break. One of the childhood chums that helped in the robbery gave a stack of bills from the heist to another friend. Well this guy wasn’t real bright because the stack of bills still had the original cash straps on it. Once this little piece of evidence was turned over to the authorities the rest of the gang was picked up along with the mastermind safety inspector. They were all given 24 years in prison. Only $10 million of the money was every accounted for. Nice little payday when parole day comes in 2021? Maybe not if you can find it first.

Now if I was a treasure hunter(hint hint) I would probably start out researching our safety inspecting mastermind (did I mention his name was Allen pace?). Then I would find out where he and his friends grew up. Maybe start looking around some area that was familiar to him and his childhood chums. Maybe a place they all hung out as kids or maybe a place they all might have spent weekends together. Chances are they might have hidden that nice little haul in a place they all knew well and a place that felt safe to them. Don’t we all have memories of some place that we like to return to every now and then and treasure in our minds?