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.

This article was published on 04.10.08.

Of the Grosh brothers who discovered the Comstock Lode, one historian wrote, “No one else in that region was so well equipped for the prospector’s work, none better deserved success, and none were so unfortunate.”

On Sept. 7, 1857, a grieving gold seeker in Gold Cañon, Nevada, wrote a letter to Pennsylvania.

“Dear Father,” wrote Ethan Grosh. “I take up my pen with a heavy heart, for I have sad news to send you. God has seen fit in his perfect wisdom & goodness to take Hosea, the patient, the good, the gentle to join his Mother in another & better world than this.”

 

Ethan Allen Grosh and Hosea Ballou Grosh had left their father back East to travel to the West where, shortly before Hosea’s death and the writing of this letter, they had discovered the Comstock Lode, the greatest find of silver in human history. Nevada has been trying to obtain their letters, a treasure trove of information on a little-known period of state history, for the past 11 years, and on April 16 Nevada Historical Society officials will announce that the effort has been successfully concluded. Included in the sale along with 200 letters are photographs, news clippings and miscellaneous documents such as articles of incorporation for a Grosh mining company.

 

The sellers of the letters are surviving family members Charles Wegman and Naomi Thompson, who will be on hand for the announcement. The family over the decades has often made the letters available to researchers, such as Charles Howard Shinn for his book The Story of the Mine (1896) and Sally Springmeyer Zanjani for her Devils Will Reign/How Nevada Began (2006).

 

“They didn’t raise the price in the 10 years we were trying to raise the money,” said the Society’s Eric Moody, praising the Grosh descendants for honorable conduct and for selling the cache of letters below its appraised value. The Society will pay $210,000 for the material, which is the price it was appraised at in the late 1990s. This is the only money the Grosh family has ever realized from the Grosh brothers’ fantastic mining discovery. Both brothers were dead soon after they found the lode. “With the demise of the two brothers, it takes a couple of more years before the word gets out about the discovery,” said Nevada State Archives administrator Guy Louis Rocha in 1997.

 

The Groshes left Philadelphia for the California gold fields in February 1849 and by 1853, they were in what was called the Washoe country, “steadily at work searching from cañon to cañon for silver, gold, and other minerals,” as an 1896 historian wrote.

 

The sons of a Universalist minister, the Grosh brothers had studied metallurgy before striking out for the Western mining fields. Their specialized knowledge stood them in good stead when they started prospecting in western Utah, which is what Nevada was then. While other prospectors overlooked or discarded black and gray material, the Groshes found it interesting.

 

The Groshes kicked back and forth from California to Utah, earning just enough to keep going, and in March 1856 they had, according to one letter to their father written from California, begun zeroing in on silver in Gold Cañon: “Ever since our return from Utah we have been trying to get a couple of hundred dollars together for the purpose of making a careful examination of a silver lead in Gold Cañon. … Native silver is found in Gold Cañon; it resembles thin sheet-lead broken very fine, and lead the miners suppose it to be.” In September they reported, “One of these veins is a perfect monster.”

Although many prospectors were combing over the Washoe region (the Groshes sometimes were accompanied by acquaintances) in the 1850s, very little is known about mining exploration there from 1850 until about 1858. “The records of those pre-Comstock years are very scarce,” historian James Hulse has written. “Only a few of them [miners] left any testimonials to their activities, and those are dubious.”

 

And Rocha says the Grosh letters are not just another batch of letters, that their quality is above average. “It is a snapshot of life here that has never been produced before, and it comes from educated, articulate miners.”

 

Former Eldorado County Museum director Denis Witcher, who was instrumental in finding the letters, said in 1997, “The description of life in the camps is just nonpareil. I’ve never read anything like them.” The museum is in Placerville, where the brothers sometimes prospected.

In June 1857, Ethan—who apparently was known by his middle name of Allen—wrote, “We struck the vein without difficulty. … We have followed two shoots down the hill, have a third traced positively, and feel pretty sure that there is a fourth.” They enclosed a diagram later described in The Story of the Mine as “certainly resembl[ing] the south-end Comstock ledges.” They began processing ore and came up with an assay of $3,500 an ounce—a figure they had difficulty believing, though they described the ore as nearly pure silver: “Our vein lays very compact, as far as we have examined it—not a leaf of foreign rock in it.”

 

They were starting to interest sources of capital in investing and were locating additional veins when Hosea struck his foot with a pick, contracted “blood poisoning” and died on Sept. 2 in their American Flat cabin. The Groshes had sometimes been accompanied by other friends in the prospecting, but they clearly leaned on each other and were very close brothers, and the grief expressed by Allen after Hosea’s death has touched those who have read the letters.

“In the first burst of my sorrow, I complained bitterly of the dispensation which deprived me of what I held most dear of all the world, and I thought it most hard that he should be called away, just as we had fair hopes of realizing what we had labored for so hard for so many years. But when I reflected how well an upright life had prepared him for the next, and what a debt of gratitude I owed to God in blessing me for so many years with so dear a companion, I became calm, and bowed my head in resignation.”

 

Soon Allen himself was dead, a victim of frostbite in his feet after he and a friend were trapped in the Sierra. He was buried in Last Chance, a mining camp in California. Hosea is buried in Silver City, Nevada, and there have been discussions of moving Allen’s body from the abandoned California camp to be placed alongside his brother in Silver City.

 

Historian Eliot Lord later wrote, referencing Henry Comstock, “The Grosh brothers died on the very threshold of fortune. … Their years of patient and intelligent search were therefore fruitless, and it was left for a lazy, drunken prospector to stumble upon the prize for which the brothers had striven.”