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

[GhostMiner]

   This is a story that originated with my great great grandfather & was told to me many years ago by my grandfather. It has never been verified  :  A raw gold shipment from a mine in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California bound for processing was hijacked on a lonely mountain road & taken to a port on the west coast. The haul was purported to be somewhere between $50,000 - $75,000 at the time of the theft. A ship sat waiting to be loaded and a man by the name of William Shears was the captain. They sailed north along the coast all the way to Washington state where they unloaded the booty & buried most of it. My grandfather told me he believed it is still there. 

   According to my grandfather the shipment was placer gold & was heading for a small smelting operation not too far from the mine. Someone had advance knowledge of the date of shipment and planned the robbery. He said there were five armed men on horseback who did the strong arm robbery while taking the two freight men hostage. By the time the mine owners were notified of the heist it was too late to find it. The thieves had planned everything out. They took it by water to a remote location far from the place of the robbery.

   How did my grandfather know this? It seems my great great grandfather was one of the mine owners. My grandfather called the ship captain a privateer. According to his story the  thieves ran into problems moving the raw ore once back on land in Washington state & buried a good part of it. He said there was information given to the family back in the early 1900's that the gold was never found due to changes in terrain due to severe storms. However, my grandfather told me he thought he had a good idea of where the gold was hidden but was too old to look for it & my father had no time or interest in conducting a treasure hunt. 

   My grandfather believed a man named William Shears was responsible for the planning of the heist. He said he was a sea captain from England with a bad reputation. As he told the story, Captain Shears took the ore into the harbor at Bellingham, Washington where it was off loaded into a freight wagon to be transported into Canada which he said was about 30 miles north. He said something happened on the way to Canada but refused to tell me what for some reason. At this time in his life he was very sick & frail and I didn't want to push him for more than he wanted to give. He said the gold was hidden in freight containers that were disguised as other items. He said there was an old road up there where the freight wagon stopped and the gold was burried not too far off the road. Why they didn't make it into Canada & who was waiting for it there is a mystery.

   With some help in research I found out there was indeed a Captain William Shears recorded in the 1851 census records. His address was Elliot Court Enumeration District Marlborough King in Devonshire county. His place of birth was Devonshire England and he was 46 years old in 1851. He was listed as married to wife Sarah age 43 & had a son James age 7 & daughter Mary age 2. Occupation was listed as Master Mariner. I have no idea if there really is a buried cache of gold somewhere between Bellingham & Canada but the story is intriguing.

[GhostMiner]

Anyone familiar with this area and back roads to Canada?

[beatup]

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 .

[GhostMiner]

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?

[GhostMiner]

   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.

[Norvic]

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.

[peterinaust]

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

[GhostMiner]

19 hours ago, peterinaust said:

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

Just might do that someday,

[IDMineralSurveys]

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.

 

[GhostMiner]

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