Matt Mckay...Gold Coins...$50K...Fort Meyers...Lee County

[lawsan]

Matt Mckay...Gold Coins...$50K...Fort Meyers...Lee County

Is there any information on this lost treasure? I never heard the story.

 

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[jeff k]

Cattleman Matt McKay​

Back in the 1930’s, Tom Phillips was bitten by the treasure bug, and he invented an electronic treasure finder. I helped him wind some of the delicate coils for his first models. In time one of the popular science magazines published an article on Tom’s treasure finder, and he was soon swamped with inquiries from all over the world. Seeing the profit possibilities, Tom prepared blueprints showing “how to make your own,” and he sold the diagrams and instructions for something like $2 each. Small ads in a few magazines brought in orders for a long period, and Tom was kept busy mailing out the instruction kits.

One day shortly after Tom had completed a new working model of his treasure finder, he came to me with a proposition. Back about 1900, there had lived an old cattleman, a recluse, in a log cabin on the edge of a cypress stand about five miles from town. The old cattleman, Matt McKay, was known to have sold many a head of his cattle to the Spanish Government in the days before the Spanish-American War, and to have received his pay in gold at the pens at Punta Rassa. What old Matt did with his gold was never known, save that he didn’t trust banks and would have nothing to do with them.

“It used to be rumored that old Matt McKay buried his gold under his cabin,” Tom told me on this particular day, “so I went to where his cabin used to be, and put my new finder to work. Guess what! There’s an indication of metal in a big circle. Help me to dig this afternoon and I’ll cut you in for a share of all we find.”

I was not only willing, but eager to get in on the deal. That same afternoon we followed a sand trail through the flat woods to where Matt’s cabin had been. The logs had burned up in a grass fire years before, but there was still a rough outline of where the old bachelor had spent his last years. Tom unlimbered his treasure finder, moved over to where you could see a slight depression in the ground, and let me listen to the earphones. I could hear the noise level rise and fall as the finder passed around the edges of the depression. There was no indication of metal when the finder moved to the middle of the low place.

“There's something funny going on,” said Tom. “Who ever heard of treasure being buried in a circle? Well, here we are, let's start digging.”

I took first turn with the shovel, and before I'd gone very deep I scraped against a cypress plank. Hot dog! I thought, Maybe this is a part of a chest. I went a little deeper and the shovel hit metal. I was sure we had something. I dug a little more and found I had hit iron, a rusty band it looked like. I thought it might be an iron bound wooden chest at first, but it wasn't.

After a little more digging around on the other side of the low place, we slowly came to realize what we had found. It seemed that old Matt got his water from a dug well, but to keep the well from caving in and filling up he had put down a cypress water tank, with the iron hoops on the inside instead of the outside. So that's all we had for our trouble; the knowledge that the place contained some slowly rotting cypress staves and three or four rusting iron hoops. We went back to town and called it a day. I'd had my high hopes dashed many a time before, so I didn't take it too hard. I always figured that the very next time might be my lucky day.

Note: From “Pirates and Buried Treasure,” by Jack Beater.

Note: Matt McKay’s homestead was located 5 miles from Fort Myers, so a check of the Lee County plat books should pinpoint the location.

 

[godisnum1]

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