Mystery Hill

?ne express messenger filled his treasure chest with live rattlesnakes, deliberately permitting a band of highwaymen to capture it.·From Lost Treasure Trails by Thomas Penfield.

1. Mystery Hill

About midway between Crow Lake and Waterbury in Jerauld County, South Dakota, is a sugarloaf hill that was owned by a man named Reaser in the 1880s. It is therefore generally known as ?easer? Hill.·Reaser later leased his hill to a couple of ranchers named Coombs and Harris who built a 14 foot by 22 foot bunk house partially dug into the southeast corner of the hill. Shortly after building the bunkhouse, Coombs and Harris returned to Reaser asking to break the lease and purchase the hill outright. This accomplished, Coombs and Harris installed Peter Rohbe and Ben Solomon, the two men with the most violent reputations in the county, in said bunk house. As could be expected, the Coombs-Harris Ranch received very few visitors after that, which suited Coombs and Harris fine as they were seldom there themselves. On November 18, 1885, Peter Rohbe awoke in a foul humor. When a spaniel dog belonging to Harris wouldn? quit barking at his command, he beat it to death with a piece of firewood.

Solomon allowed as how the boss might disapprove of Rohbe? pet-sitting methods. A scuffle ensued which ended with Solomon getting his ear sliced off and Rohbe getting shot dead at close range (never bring a knife to a gun fight). Solomon served four years in jail for defending himself and left South Dakota to seek a violent death in Iowa. Shortly after this incident, Harris disappeared and was never seen again. Coombs, who testified for the defense, found himself the target of a certain kind of look that convinced him he might be better off seeking his fortune in Arkansas. He never seemed to be much of a rancher anyway ·or so they said. But then again, maybe Coombs wasn? all that interested in ranching, at least not after he and Harris dug the foundation for the bunk house.

Reaser? original lease contained strong language protecting his mineral rights. After digging for the bunk house, Coombs and Harris purchased the property outright but were seldom around to oversee day to day operations at the ranch. The simplest explanation for their behavior would seem to be that what they found under the hill was more valuable than the land on top of the hill, but whatever schemes they were developing for exploiting their find quickly fell apart. Perhaps they quarreled and perhaps Coombs relocated to Arkansas before anyone could ask too many questions about the whereabouts of his vanished partner. An article describing the duel between Rohbe and Solomon appeared in Frontier Times magazine in 1976, the tracings of the old bunk house could still be seen on Reaser? Hill.

2. Old Ironsides·loot When the Homestake Mining Company began shipping gold bullion out of the Black Hills of South Dakota, a special armor-plated stage was constructed for the task. Built along the same basic lines as a modern-day armored car, it was officially known as the Treasure Express, but everyone knew it as ?ld Ironsides.·Five to eight heavily armed guards traveled along with this armor-plated behemoth that typically hauled between $100,000 and $200,000 worth of gold per shipment. Before the railroads took over the job, ?ld Ironsides·hauled an estimated $60,000,000 worth of gold out of the Black Hills. Many attempts were made, but only once was ?ld Ironsides·ever successfully robbed.

On September 28, 1878, five outlaws seized the relay station at Canyon Springs, Wyo., (37 miles southwest of Deadwood near the Wyoming-South Dakota border) about half an hour prior to the arrival of the Treasure Express coach which was carrying 400 pounds of Homestake Mining Company gold. After a wild shootout in which one of the bandits was killed and another wounded, all the guards were either killed, captured, or driven off. The entire shipment was taken by members of the Carey Gang ·Jim Carey, Al Speer, Doug Goodale, and an unidentified wounded outlaw. Bandit Frank McBride had been killed at the scene. The bandits fled east into South Dakota, but the heavy gold was slowing them down so they decided to bury most of it a few miles away from the scene of the crime. The wounded outlaw died, and each of the bandits took a pair of gold bars and went his way knowing they were being pursued by acting Deputy U.S. Marshal William Ward, the Superintendent of the stage line. Ward traced Goodale to the town of Atlantic in Western Iowa where he found Goodale? gold bars still marked with the Homestake logo on display in Goodale? father? bank. Douglas Goodale confessed to his part in the robbery, but stated that the outlaws had been in such a hurry, he doubted that any of them would be able to find the site of the treasure cache again. Even knowing that his cooperation could help procure a lighter sentence, Goodale could only offer the vaguest description of the treasure site. Goodale later escaped by jumping off a train in Nebraska; and, despite a manhunt, neither he nor his accomplices were ever seen again. It is unlikely that they would have risked execution or life imprisonment by returning to the scene of the crime once their identities were known ·especially since, according to Goodale? confession, there were no markers to identify the treasure site.

However, a single gold bar was later reported found near Pinto Springs on the Boxelder Creek in Pennington County, South Dakota. It is not recorded as being a Homestake Mining Company bar, but on the day of the robbery the Treasure Express was also carrying an undisclosed amount of bullion from other mines in the Deadwood area. The empty wagon with which the outlaws tried to haul away both the treasure and their wounded accomplice was also found in this area, so it is assumed that at least some of the gold is hidden nearby.

3. Rustlers·paradise

Like a pair of favorable planetary conjunctions, two events in 1876 conspired to turn the Sand Hills in the vicinity of Forestburg into a rustlers·paradise. First, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who were just getting started up in Canada? Northwest Territory, discreetly put out the word that they would pay $150 to $200 a head for good horseflesh with very few questions asked. Second, the Chisholm Trail up from Texas to Montana was replaced by a newer trail that dog-legged through South Dakota via the White and Bellefourche Rivers.

Sanborn County? Sand Hills provided a number of excellent hideouts from which rustlers could move stolen beef and horseflesh up to the wild Missouri Breaks country in North Dakota and Montana for eventual disposal to crooked buyers. A cave near Forestburg was said to be the rendezvous point for these desperadoes and the site of several treasure caches, but the location of this cave was never given and is not known today.

4. Uprising cache

In the summer of 1862 the United States Congress, preoccupied with the ongoing Civil War, delayed the appropriation of funds needed to feed starving Sioux Indians at the Yellow Medicine and Redwood Falls Indian Agencies in Minnesota. On August 17 a dispute with a white farmer over some stolen eggs precipitated a bloody uprising which racked Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota for over a month. By the time the Army restored order, 48 Indians and 732 whites (mostly civilians) had been killed. Many of the white casualties were women and children, and an additional 200 white females ·some as young as ten years old · had been taken captive and cruelly abused.

Military authorities were not in a forgiving mood, and of the 425 Indians arrested and tried in the aftermath, 303 were sentenced to death. President Lincoln would later commute the sentences of all but 38 of the condemned Indians, but back in South Dakota an Indian named Gray Foot had no way of knowing that. During the uprising, Gray Foot had been with a band of Indians that had stolen an Army payroll consisting of $56,000 worth of gold coins during the attack on the Minnesota agency. When he heard that the soldiers were searching every teepee and arresting any Indian found to be in possession of gold, he buried his share of the loot near the east shore of Long Lake east of Lake City in present day Marshall County. Years later, an aging Gray Foot told his sons of the hidden cache, but they were unable to locate the site, and subsequent treasure hunters have been equally unsuccessful.

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

SOURCES:

Barkdull, Tom. ?ortal Duel on the Crow Lake-Waterbury Road.·Frontier magazine. November, 1976.

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

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