1. Scotts Bluff

A Scott? Bluff hotel owner by the name of Bolton found a unique way to pay off the large gambling markers he had run up about town: he simply murdered wealthy guests in the hotel and buried their bodies in the cellar. Bolton paid off his debts; but since travelers continued to disappear, it can only be assumed that he began building up a sizable fortune which he mostly likely concealed in the basement with his victims. Eventually enough travelers disappeared that people began to notice how many guests checked in ·but never out ·of Bolton? hotel. When Bolton turned a posse of searchers away at Rifle Point, enraged citizens set the hotel on fire and Bolton perished in the flames.

Later construction uncovered several of the skeletons of Bolton? victims, but the treasure was never found and the exact location of Bolton? hotel is no longer known.

There are many other cache and treasure stories associated with the Scott? Bluff area, the most famous being the story of the wealthy Bertrand family. The Bertrand? were headed for Oregon to establish a mercantile house when all, save ten year old Bertha Bertrand, succumbed to disease on the Oregon Trail just west of Scott? Bluff. The girl remembered that the family had buried a fortune in gold coins near the area where they were struck down, but she could not relocate the site. Numerous searches have been made for this and other caches left in the area by immigrants who died of cholera or during Indian attacks when the area was a favorite campsite for travelers on the Oregon Trail.

2. Doc Middleton? loot Doc Middleton got himself into trouble in Sidney for killing a soldier in a gun fight. This was not normally a serious offense, but the soldier had friends on the Vigilance Committee who intended to see Doc decorating a telegraph pole, so he lit out for the rough country between the South Loup and Niobrara where he teamed up with others outside the law and formed a gang of rustlers known as the ?ony Boys.·It was said of Doc, ?e knew the locations of more good horses than any other man on the western range.· Under Doc? leadership, the ?ony Boys·got to be such a nuisance that local ranchers chipped in a $1,000 to hire WSGA detective Billy Lykens to bring him in dead or alive. Lykens·plan was simple: another WSGA detective and a US Department of Justice official convinced one of the ?ony Boys·to take them to Doc? hideout outside of Carns. The officers offered Doc amnesty, and he and a ?ony Boy·named Kid Wade agreed to accompany them back to town. The plan called for Lykens, who was lying in ambush along the route, to shoot Doc; but Lykens· gun misfired.

Nevertheless, Doc was wounded in the gun fight that followed, and while he was recovering in Carns, a group of soldiers from Fort Harstuff arrested him. Fortunately for Doc, he was tried in Wyoming and got off with only a five year sentence. After his release from prison, he became a deputy sheriff under Sheriff John Riggs in Sheridan County. Although Middleton did a good job, the sudden switch to law and order didn? set well with a lot of people in neighboring Cherry County, and Doc knew better than to risk going back to his former headquarters near the junction of the Niobrara and Snake Rivers southwest of Valentine for the cache he is said to have buried there.

3. Kid Wade? loot

After Doc Middleton? arrest, the leadership of the ?ony Boys·outlaw gang fell to a youngster barely out of his teens. He was known to the Vigilance Committee as Kid Wade. Within a few years large scale horse stealing had become such a problem in Holt County that the Kid found himself ?umero uno·on the vigilante hit list. Warned of his imminent date with a lynch mob, Kid Wade escaped to Iowa, but four members of the vigilantes from Holt County followed him and brought him back to Nebraska. Their stated intention was to bring Kid Wade back to the county seat for trial, but somewhere along the twisting route that led from Carns to Long Pine to Morrison? Crossing to Bassett, the Kid started confessing to his interrogators. What he confessed was that many prominent Nebraska citizens had been involved with the gang as backers and recipients of illegally gotten stock. Another group of masked vigilantes seized the Kid from the first group and hanged him. After that, the vigilantes went after ?lyspeck Bill,·Jack Nolan, Count Shevalof, and the other ?ony Boys· with a vengeance. Men were gunned down in their jail cells or hanged in their own barns; and although it was never proved, it soon became evident that the vigilante campaign was more directed at silencing those who knew too much than breaking up the horse theft ring. Kid Wade? cache of gold coins buried along the Elkhorn River just south of Bassett in Rock County, where he was found hanging from a railroad whistling post, has never been recovered. It has been suggested that the Kid was leading his original captors to this cache when he was taken from them at gunpoint to meet his fate. Perhaps it contains something that was more important to the shadowy faces behind the ?ony Boys·than gold.

4. Flyspeck? loot

"Flyspeck Billy·was a hardcase outlaw long before teaming up with Doc Middleton to form the ?ony Boys.·The last job that he and his boys pulled before joining up with Doc was the 1878 robbery of $300,000 worth of gold bars from the Deadwood-Sidney Freight Line. The hoard of gold bars was supposedly hidden in a cave along the Niobrara River due south of Gordon in Sheridan County. After Kid Wade? lynching in 1884, ?lyspeck·and the rest of the ?ony Boys·fell victim to the vigilante vendetta that followed. In any case, he wouldn? have wanted to return to Sheridan County where Doc Middleton ·a renowned marksman ·became sheriff after his release from jail. Doc had a lot of suspicions about who might have been behind the underhanded way in which he had been captured. ?lyspeck Billy?·cache of gold bars was never recovered.

I used to be skeptical about the number of caches of gold bars allegedly hidden by outlaws throughout the west. Eventually it dawned on me that there weren? too many places where a saddle bum could plunk down a 50 pound bar of gold and order drinks on the house without getting his neck stretched. Butch Cassidy, the consummate bank and train robber, preferred paper money and negotiable securities to gold ·it made the getaway a lot easier. It is pretty easy to imagine a gang of rough, unthinking gunmen holding up a stage for a couple of hundred pounds·worth of gold bars that they have no idea what to do with. When the fleeing bandits realized how much the weight of all that gold was slowing down their getaway, it was cached for later retrieval. And, outlaw life being nomadic as it was, that ?ater·often never came.

?lyspeck·can? have been a mental giant. He readily submitted his own gang to the leadership of Doc Middleton and allowed a rather green Kid Wade to take over the ?ony Boys·after Middleton? arrest. And if their leader was this dull, it is not likely that any of Flyspeck? followers could have figured out what to do with the gold bars if they did manage to survive the vigilante activities of 1884 and 1885. In all likelihood a fortune in gold still awaits in a cave along the Niobrara River.

5. Devil? Nest

Devil? Nest in Knox County was a famous outlaw hideout with several generations of outlaws occupying the hideouts in the region in turn. The Nest itself is a rough tract of woodlands along the Missouri River located seven miles north of Crofton, but the entire surrounding area is bespeckled with hidden caves that served as a sanctuary for a legion of infamous names ·many of which are thought to have buried treasure therein. No less a luminary than Jesse James is said to have cached a load of gold of silver coins around the Nest. But the biggest treasure is a hoard of gold bars hidden by an outlaw named McGuire in the 1800s. Part of this area is now a state park, so be sure to get permission before instituting a search.

Please Note: It is the responsibility of the treasure hunter to gain permission before detecting.

SOURCES:

Creigh, Dorothy Weyer. Nebraska. W.W. Norton & Co., 1977.

Penfield, Thomas. Lost Treasure Tales. Grosset & Dunlap, 1954.

Terry, Thomas P. U.S. Treasure Atlas. Specialty Publications, 1985.

Yost, Nellie Snyder. The Call of the Range. Sage Books, 1966