HIDDEN GOLD AND SILVER IN THE VICINITY OF BEE CREEK

Gypsy Heart

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Nov 29, 2005
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Ozarks
A STORY OF HIDDEN GOLD AND SILVER IN THE VICINITY OF BEE CREEK
By S. C. Turnbo

The following account was written to me from Arlington Washington, by Mr. J. D. Row on the llth of August 1907. "When I got in Carroll County, Ark. on my way from Oklahoma territory to Boone County, Ark. in the year 1900, I stopped and visited with my cousin George W. Barnes of Maple Post Office. He told me a story as follows. His brother Jasper Barnes had been over in the north part of Boone County, and in a conversation with Mat Boothe who lived on Bee Creek, he heard of a train of three wagons having been burned by the guerrillas in time of the war. He did not get many particulars about the occasion. Soon after this his step son come home from the Indian territory and he told Jasper a story he got from a Cherokee Indian, while he was in the Indian territory. The Indian said that during the war himself and 3 or 4 other Indians were coming through Missouri with three wagons, and they had a large amount of gold and silver coins that they were conveying from Southeast Missouri to their homes in the territory. They had been observed by some white men to have a lot. of money and they had followed the Indians, presumably to rob them. They had observed the white men stealthily following them for 2 or 3 days. In the vicinity of Bee Creek the men had become more bold and the Indians feared an attack during the night while in camp. They held a consultation and decided to bury their treasure, burn their wagons, and ride their ponies home. Afterwards they would come back and secure their money. When the war was over and times were peacable enough, the Indians were all dead but this one. He had made two trips back to Bee Creek to get the hidden money, but each time failed to find the place. The country had changed, farms had been opened up, houses built and he could not even locate the road they were on when they burned their wagons. This Indian and another one had taken the coins in two camp kettles a little ways from the road, to a sink hole and buried them in the sink hole while the rest of the crowd had run the wagons together and set them on fire, then they all jumped on their ponies and rode away in the darkness of early morning.

Name: Bee Creek
Class: Stream

Latitude: 36.5097877
Longitude: -93.0626769
 

........................South I looked over Bee Creek, over the Old Matt Booth place, which by Sam's marriage to Old Matt's daughter Annie became the Old Sam France place. After Annie died and after Old Sam jumped a long freight headed west and later was found dead beside the track, the ground around their barns and sheds and burned-out house became pockmarked with holes left by someone or some thing with cause enough to believe something was buried there to dig through whole nights with pick and shovel. Beyond the Old Sam France place stood the home of his brother, Pete, and his wife Cynthia, Old Matt's other daughter, and their sons John's and Jim's places and their son's places. Beyond them lay Journegan and Parrish family lands in Boone County, Arkansas.

A half mile east of the house, at the east end of the orchard fields, our plows turned up pieces of broken crockery, bed casters, harness buckles--left from old Hamm White's life after he was knifed to death in Hollister. Beyond, we could see into Ozark County, Missouri and Marion County, Arkansas, where spring branches and creeks named Fox, Cricket, Bear, Beaver, Cedar, Shoal, North Fork, Sugarloaf and Little Sugarloaf, formed the White River watershed flowing into Arkansas. In a hundred million years, it had etched a valley forty miles wide.

That was my world. Rim to hill rim, all tinted in blue haze, it lay so quiet men strained to hear, to see, to feel. It echoed only the near and far hi stories of me, my father, Old Matt and his kin and neighbors and whoever preceded us, nothing more..........
http://thelibrary.springfield.missouri.org/lochist/periodicals/ozarkswatch/ow504d.htm
 

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