By Phil Brown, Commentary
Published: April 30, 2008 12:26 am
The time was 158 years ago. The place was Great Salt Plains and five guys returning home from California, where a gold rush was under way, were running for their lives. They were being pursued by a band of Cheyenne-Arapaho Indians bent on killing them, and taking whatever they had.
Salt Plains
We’re not absolutely sure the Indians knew what the five guys were carrying. It’s a good bet, too, considering the date — 1850 — and the fact they were returning from California, and headed for their homes in Missouri, they had been participants in the California Gold Rush, and their cargo was slowing them down.
According to the story, they were carrying 14 gold bars with them, which just might have been heavy enough to slow them down. Fourteen bars of gold would weigh about 400 pounds. Figuring it might be better to get away and live to spend their gold another day, they decided to bury it there in the shifting quicksands of Great Salt Plains.
According to the story, the five guys wrapped the 14 gold bars in the hide of a buffalo calf. I don’t know how they had time to bury the gold if they were in a running fight with a band of Indians.
Maybe they circled the wagons.
So here they were, trapped on this vast white plain of salt — the remains of what once was a geologically ancient inland sea — with a fortune in their wagon. It represented enough money to change their lives dramatically, but the relentless Indians had them cornered. It would be like winning the lottery, having the money in your hand, and then being told “uh-oh, big mistake, you gotta give it back.”
Like I said, in the beginning there were five guys, but along near the end of the fight there were only two. Three of them were killed in the fighting with the Indians. The remaining two now were even richer than they were at the beginning of the fight. Each now owned half of the gold instead of one-fifth.
It probably didn’t take them long to decide they were going to be killed if they stayed and fought it out with the Indians, but it would be useless to try and make a run for it on horseback, carrying 200 pounds of gold with them on each horse.
So, they buried the gold, wrapping it in a buffalo skin, according to the story, and marked the spot with an end- gate rod from their wagon. It’s unknown whether they stole away on their horses, under cover of darkness leaving the wagon behind, or just galloped away, distancing themselves from the Indians, who were more interested in what they left behind.
Now it wouldn’t be difficult for a band of savvy Plains Indians to determine they buried something there. Maybe they buried their three dead buddies with the gold so the Indians might think the newly broken ground was just graves.
Maybe!
It all sounds a lot like a poorly constructed movie plot, but then again it all seems to make sense, especially since, in 1901, 54 years after the fact, a man named Carl Sheldon, who identified himself as one of the two survivors of the Indian attack, returned to Salt Plains to reclaim the gold.
He reportedly had a treasure map, and when he sunk a drill bit into the ground in an effort to pinpoint the gold’s location he came up with traces of gold and buffalo hide.
But that is as close as Sheldon got to finding his cache of gold bars. The shifting quicksand found in some parts of Great Salt Plains was the biggest problem. His associates continued to search for the gold until 1940, when they were forced to abandon the site because of the construction of the dam that created Great Salt Plains Lake.
I wonder why Sheldon waited 51 years to return and search for his fortune?
My theory is the Cheyenne-Arapaho knew what these guys had in their wagon. All they wanted was the gold. They knew Sheldon and his surviving partner buried the gold at the site of the fight. They just let them escape, and it was the Indians who got the gold.
Brown is a former managing editor of the Enid Morning News.
