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My Grandfather's Tale Of A Privateer & Hijacked Gold Shipment


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  • The title was changed to My Grandfather's Tail Of A Privateer & Hijacked Gold Shipment

now days i would not be surprised if that area is subdivided and urbanized , been 35 or 40 years since i have been up that way .

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13 minutes ago, beatup said:

now days i would not be surprised if that area is subdivided and urbanized , been 35 or 40 years since i have been up that way .

Do you think there are any remote back roads?

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   I remember my grandfather telling this story more than once when I was a little kid. I don't think my father ever believed it or maybe he thought it was only partially true. However, he thought enough of it to write down all the details my grandfather told him. I remember wanting to go look for the gold. I was about 10 yrs old. My father just laughed & said it would be a waste of time & money. My dad was a WW2 vet and became a prison gaurd & eventually got into industrial production with a big company. He had no time for things like this nor was he interested. I think if it was buried it probably wouldn't be very deep. I have a few ideas of where it might be because my grandfather took me aside one day about a month before he died. He told me a few things that he hadn't told my father because he said he didn't believe him. He gave me some landmarks to look for and very vague locations to check. I'm not sure how much of the story I believe either. My father said that my great great grandfather was a part owner of a gold mine in California but there were several other partners. I was only able to verify one descendant of one of them and when I contacted them they thought I was completely off my rocker. That was the end of that LOL. I've always wondered about the story and now that I have a grandson who is 2 yrs old i'm thinking of telling him about it when he's older. Maybe when he's old enough the two of us will go looking for that buried cache of gold. Perhaps we just might find it.

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Be an adventure a young fellow would carry with him for life if nothing is found, but if something is found be a treasured treasure hunt. Go for it GM.

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19 hours ago, peterinaust said:

Go look GM, before it's to late. You have my attention LOL

Just might do that someday,

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  • 2 weeks later...

GM-

You can research through the US Copyright office old newspaper articles... I think this was the link I used:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/

I  was involved in a historical case from 1909 and had to prove the facts in existence from that time, which were slim. It would have been very easy had I been able to show the actual legals published in the local newspaper back then, which I easily found 3 years later in the local newspapers archived on that website. The pdf files are scanned, but searchable on OCR. Finicky, but with careful tailor of a specific word to search, you may find that it can be quite helpful... I was able to find all three published legals associated with my case, which I did get a positive outcome on,  and then later was able to print off copies of the scanned old legals to put in the case file.

So I also have several legends of Lost Gold in my local area. One is a tale told to me as a young lad by an old guy who used to work at the Forest Service who truly believed the legend, but had no way to get better info or verification. He told of a rich lode find in the 1890 era and only a hint of where in the mountains northeast of town, but nobody knew the location where as the prospector died when he came into town. Using the prospector's last name which was unusual and unique, I was able to find 3 short newspaper articles from November 1889 which told his tale of death by unintended cremation in a structure fire. I had searched local cemetery records decades previous to try and find his name with the thought of proving to myself and my dad that his legend might be real and possibly uncover a few clues to the question of where to search. What I did find in the newspapers was that he and his legend are real, he had a huge haul of rich ore on his mule when he came to town and the names of two local important people who grubstaked him - and I was later able to find their burials in the local cemetery records. Nothing of this fellow's story was in a local paper that I could find, so I searched further away and found two southern Idaho newspapers carried articles published 4 days after the fire and one newspaper in Washington 2 days after the fire- I guess the event may have been too close to home and not newsworthy as everybody in town here would have already known all about it.  I did not come up with any better clues on the location to search, but the "legend" is no longer just a yarn. I've a good idea for search areas and have made 3 hikes in previous years and plan to make some longer forays with detector and sampling equipment this year. So be sure to search using single "unique" names to the story far and wide, both in the local area and further abroad and look at later time periods also - you may be able to uncover a mountain of details which were lost to time... reprints are possible too. Even search further away such as  the Seattle and Spokane Washington newspapers... who knows, it may well validate the case and clues passed through to you and help your grandson take the search to success someday.

 

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Thanks for the great advice. It's fun playing detective & you just never know what you may find. 

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  • The title was changed to My Grandfather's Tale Of A Privateer & Hijacked Gold Shipment

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