Will a picture of the Comstock Mine showing its wooden platforms be sufficient as evidence in an additional 100 years as the missing wooden platforms from Oak Island?
I'm not sure that I understand the question, so I apologize in advance for my response.
In short - no. And here's why...
The Comstock Mine, or any other mine really, is constructed with the knowledge that it will someday play out; this may take ten years or a hundred years, but there will be a finite amount of ore in a given location. Give this knowledge, it doesn't make sense to "build for the ages," so to speak - you build it with its expected lifespan in mind, and if you need to replace or improve it because it lasted longer than you thought it would, then you do so. It's a site that's being actively worked and if something needs to be repaired or modified, you go ahead and do so because you're still there. And yes, a lot of those mines are still around in some form today, but not because they were built to function as monuments.
A buried treasure doesn't necessarily follow these rules. How you built its hiding place is how that hiding place will remain, at least until someone breaks in to recover the loot. If platforms were used to prevent the earth from sinking in and revealing the location, you'd probably want to take steps to make sure that these platforms would last for a while...at least long enough for someone to come back and recover it, anyway. (Although in some versions of the story, it was a depression that originally marked the spot. Do we now throw those stories out, or do we simply acknowledge that they got something wrong and are at least partially unreliable?) If you used wood, you would use the correct wood for the job, and you certainly wouldn't leave obvious evidence of the job after you were done, up to and including a marker stone eighty feet deep, as anyone who had already dug that deeply obviously knew that they were in the right spot and wouldn't need a marker to urge them on another forty feet.
But, we don't have the wood, nor flagstones, nor the marker. We just have an island with a lot of holes in it and nothing to show for it. I suppose that we could speculate that people buried treasure there with the expectation that they'd get right back and recover it in a few years, but now we're jamming a lot of speculation into an legend that's already jammed full of speculation. I'm trying to find the simple answer. I'm trying to approach this logically. It's the matter of logic, or the lack of it, that has me wondering about Oak Island. The existing stories and evidence, when taken together, doesn't present a logical picture. I can cherry pick my evidence and put it together logically, but when I'm picking and choosing the data that I'm basing my theory on while discarding other data, I'm no longer being scientific about it. At that point, I may as well just make something up. I've thrown any kind of logical process right out the window.
BTW, I'm not the one that brought up Comstock. You did that. I merely pointed out that it was a rather bad analogy. I'm glad that we can both agree on at least this point. As I said, apples and oranges.
?
