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Legend Of The Lost Gold in Elk County


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Union gold legend lives on Treasure hunters say Civil War bullion lies buried in Elk County

April 6, 2008 12:00 AM

 

April 6, 2008 12:00 AM
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By Michael A. Fuoco Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A 145-year-old secret, worth $20 million, lies buried somewhere in the Dents Run area of rugged Elk County.

Or not.

Legends are like that -- you either buy into them or you don't. And as far as the Legend of the Lost Gold of Elk County is concerned, you can count Dennis Parada among the true believers.

Like generations in Elk County, the fortune hunter from Clearfield, Clearfield County, is certain that 26 50-pound gold bars mysteriously disappeared in Elk County in 1863 while being transported by Union soldiers to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia.

And, Mr. Parada claims, his years-long search has paid off -- he's located the gold's burial site near the Cameron County border.

But there's a problem and a big one at that -- the site is in a state forest and the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has prohibited Mr. Parada from doing any type of exploration there unless he puts up a bond, which he considers financially prohibitive.

Mr. Parada, 55, who admits to being obsessed with the lost gold -- "I think about it every day" -- said he won't ever give up his search, come roadblocking bureaucrats or naysaying historians who discount the veracity of the legend.

"I told DCNR I'm not going to quit until it's dug up. And if I die, my kid's going to be around and make sure it's dug up.

"There's something in there and I'm not giving up."

To understand why at least some people in Elk County don't consider Mr. Parada totally delusional -- even after his treasure hunting company, Finders Keepers, has invested $20,000 in the search thus far -- one must understand the lure of the legend.

It is replete with historical significance, mystery, deceit, treachery and, of course, a fortune in gold.

So the story goes ...

The Elk County legend begins 145 years ago and 175 miles to the southwest.

As highlighted in a 1983 issue of Lost Treasure magazine, the legend holds that a Union lieutenant by the name of Castleton was given orders in spring 1863 to proceed from Wheeling, W.Va., to Harrisburg with two wagons equipped with false bottoms and holding the gold bars that today would be worth $20 million.

Lt. Castleton was ordered to travel northeast to avoid encountering Gen. Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army, which was massing in Pennsylvania for what would become in July the battle of Gettysburg. When he believed the situation to be safe, Lt. Castleton was to turn the wagon train southeast toward Union headquarters in Harrisburg, and the load would be shipped to the Philadelphia mint from there.

With eight cavalrymen and a civilian guide by the name of Connors, none of whom knew of the gold, Lt. Castleton's expedition headed out. Soon, there was an omen of troubles ahead -- Lt. Castleton was taken ill with a debilitating fever and Mr. Connors assumed command.

It is believed the expedition stopped in Butler and then Clarion, where a still-ill Lt. Castleton reassumed his command. He determined they were far enough north to avoid contact with rebels, so he charted a course that would take the wagon train to Ridgway, Elk County, and then eastward to the Sinnemahoning River near Driftwood, Cameron County, where they'd construct a raft and float down to the Susquehanna River and then on to Harrisburg.

The expedition made Ridgway without problems and, after resting, headed off for St. Marys,11 miles to the east. During the trip, Lt. Castleton fell quite ill again and while delirious disclosed the presence of the gold in the wagons.

Mr. Connors reassumed command. The expedition made it to St. Marys and, after a night of rest, set out to cross the mountains toward Driftwood, 20 miles farther.

Lt. Castleton and the eight soldiers would never be seen again.

One version of the legend has the expedition separating due to Lt. Castleton's condition, with Mr. Connors and two other men proceeding on foot to the village of Sinnemahoning, Cameron County, to get help. Lt. Castleton and the rest of the men transferred the gold to pack saddles and headed south.

Mr. Connors and a rescue party from an Army post arrived 10 days later and found only abandoned wagons.

Another version has a hysterical Mr. Connors staggering into Lock Haven, Clinton County, about 40 miles east of Driftwood. Every member of the expedition, save him, had been killed by bushwhackers who stole the gold, he claimed.

The Army didn't buy it and relentlessly interrogated Mr. Connors. Oftentimes, he would claim he couldn't remember what happened. He was permanently inducted into the Army and subsequently died in a Western outpost.

In both versions, the Army sent Pinkerton detectives to find the gold. Posing as prospectors and lumbermen, they searched but never found the gold bars.

A legend was born.

The search for treasure

Fast-forward to 1975.

Mr. Parada and his co-workers at a Phillipsburg, Centre County, furniture store would wile away their lunch hours and their weekends as amateur fortune hunters using metal detectors. One day, a stranger, Mike Malley, of Somerset, walked into the store, spotted the metal detectors and told the tale of the lost gold.

Mr. Parada adds to the mystery by declining to discuss why Mr. Malley was in the area, why he would draw him a map of where to find the gold and how he knew where it was.

"I'm saving the good parts for the movie," he said.

The next weekend, Mr. Parada and his friends discovered some of the landmarks Mr. Malley had indicated on his map. But they just could not locate the key landmark: the fire pit where the Union soldiers made their campfire.

Years passed and in 2004 Mr. Parada was urged by his friend and fortune-hunting partner, Scott Farrell, to pick up the search again. They tracked down Mr. Malley and he, along with Mr. Parada's son, Kem, formed their company and sought the Elk County missing gold.

In November 2004, the group claims, they found the fire pit at a site where, according to the Lost Treasure magazine story, county surveyors found human skeletons in 1876.

Knowing that the land was a state forest, Mr. Parada called DCNR to report his "find" but was told to stop any exploration. The group returned in the spring and through surface digging, which is permitted, found artifacts such as a whiskey bottle, knives, animal traps, tin cans and a bullet. Thinking this would bolster his case for excavation, Mr. Parada turned over the artifacts to DCNR which sent them to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

The commission's analysis, reported in a June 8, 2005, letter from Ted Borawski, of the Bureau of Forestry, to DCNR, was that the artifacts were newer than Civil War era, probably were debris from a campsite and had no cultural or historical significance.

Mr. Borawski wrote there was "no credible evidence ... to support any conclusions that a lost Federal gold bullion shipment from the Civil War was ever located on state forest lands in the vicinity of Dents Run, Pa., or the location Mr. Parada insists is the resting place of the lost gold cache."

Undeterred, Mr. Parada said use of an $8,000 metal detector indicated there is gold 8 feet below the surface.

"There's no doubt in my mind it's down there," Mr. Parada said. He speculates that Mr. Connors killed the soldiers, possibly with poison in their coffee, and hid the gold in hopes of coming back to get it later.

Mr. Parada contends the state is blocking his exploration because it wants to unearth the gold itself. But DCNR press secretary Chris Novak denies that allegation, noting that DCNR officials don't even believe the legend.

"While it's certainly the stuff of local legend, we've been unable to pry any proof of lost gold in Elk County, let alone where Mr. Parada said it is located," she said.

Likewise, Allen C. Guelzo, a professor in the Civil War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College, said he had never heard of such a gold shipment and doubts it ever occurred.

"There's no documentation, description, letter, official report, no paper trail," the historian noted. Indeed, he said, Union Army records have no listing for a Lt. Castleton.

But Mr. Guelzo isn't surprised that such a tall tale would take hold. "Everybody wants a piece of the Civil War," he said. "Legends tend to be formulated around wishful thinking. You don't want to be a citizen of an area where nothing ever happened."

But Helen Hughes, of the Elk County Historical Society, said she believes the legend of lost gold. Still, she noted that country residents scoff when someone claims, as folks periodically do, that he knows the location of the treasure.

"What happened to the gold is a mystery," she said. "People in the county are not out with shovels looking for it. Nobody's ever going to find it."

Michael A. Fuoco can be reached at mfuoco@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1968.

 

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/frontpage/2008/04/06/Union-gold-legend-lives-on/stories/200804060265#ixzz3CriReZvP

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  • 6 years later...

Affidavit: FBI feared Pennsylvania would seize fabled Elk County gold

by: MICHAEL RUBINKAM Associated Press

Posted:  / Updated: 
 

An FBI agent applied for a federal warrant in 2018 to seize a cache of gold that he said had been “stolen during the Civil War” while en route to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, and was “now concealed in an underground cave” in northwestern Pennsylvania, according to court documents unsealed Thursday.

The newly unsealed affidavit confirms previous reporting by The Associated Press that the federal government had been looking for a legendary cache of gold at the site, which the agency had long refused to confirm. In any case, the agency said, the dig came up empty.

The AP and The Philadelphia Inquirer petitioned a federal judge to unseal the case. Federal prosecutors did not oppose the request, and the judge agreed, paving the way for Thursday’s release of documents.

“I have probable cause to believe that a significant cache of gold is secreted in the underground cave” in Dent’s Run, holding “one or more tons” belonging to the U.S. government, wrote Jacob Archer of the FBI’s art crime team in Philadelphia.

Archer told the judge he needed a seizure warrant because he feared that if the federal government sought permission from the Pennsylvania Department of Natural Resources to excavate the site, the state would claim the gold for itself.

“I am concerned that, even if DCNR gave initial consent for the FBI to excavate the cache of gold secreted at the Dent’s Run Site, that consent could be revoked before the FBI recovered the United States property, with the result of DCNR unlawfully claiming that that cache of gold is abandoned property and, thus, belongs to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” the affidavit said.

Additionally, Archer said, a legislative staffer who said he was acting on behalf of others in state government had met with the treasure hunters who identified the likely site and “corruptly” offered to get them a permit to dig “in return for three bars of gold or ten percent” of whatever the treasure hunters recovered.

No one has been charged in connection with the case, and federal prosecutors say they consider the matter closed.

The FBI had long refused to explain exactly why it went digging on state-owned land in Elk County in March 2018, saying only in written statements over the years that agents were there for a court-authorized excavation of “what evidence suggested may have been a cultural heritage site.”

According to the affidavit, the FBI based its request for a seizure warrant partly on work done by a father-son pair of treasure hunters who had made hundreds of trips to the area. The duo told authorities they believed they had found the location of the fabled Union gold, which, according to legend, was either lost or stolen on its way to the U.S. Mint in 1863.

After meeting with the treasure hunters in early 2018, the FBI brought in a contractor with more sophisticated instruments. The contractor detected an underground mass that weighed up to nine tons and had the density of gold, the affidavit said.

That amount of gold would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Archer wrote that he also spoke with a journalist who had done extensive research on a Civil War-era group called the Knights of the Golden Circle. The KGC, Archer wrote, was a secret society of Confederate sympathizers that had purportedly “buried secret caches of weapons, coins, and gold and silver bullion, much of which was stolen from robberies of banks, trains carrying payroll of the Union Army during the Civil War and from northern army military posts, in southern, western and northern states.”

Archer said that a turtle carving found on a rock near the proposed dig site was “very likely … a KGC marker for that site.”

Archer wasn’t able to confirm the U.S. Mint had actually missed any expected shipments of gold because the Mint did not have records for the Civil War period, the affidavit said.

Dennis and Kem Parada, co-owners of the treasure-hunting outfit Finders Keepers, have said they believe the FBI found gold at the site and have pursued legal action to get more information.

The FBI assertion of an empty hole is “insulting all the credible people who did this kind of work,” Dennis Parada previously told the AP. “It was a slap in the face, really, to think all these people could make that kind of mistake.”                 SEE VIDEO REPORT     ;    https://www.wearecentralpa.com/news/local-news/affidavit-fbi-feared-pennsylvania-would-seize-fabled-elk-county-gold/

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  • 6 months later...

Treasure hunters sue for records on FBI’s Civil War gold dig in Elk County

by: The Associated Press

Posted:  / Updated: 
 

Treasure hunters who believe they found a huge cache of fabled Civil War-era gold in Pennsylvania are now on the prowl for something as elusive as the buried booty itself: government records of the FBI’s excavation.

Finders Keepers filed a federal lawsuit against the Justice Department over its failure to produce documents on the FBI’s search for the legendary gold, which took place nearly four years ago at a remote woodland site in Elk County.

The FBI has since dragged its feet on the treasure hunters’ Freedom of Information Act request for records, their lawyer said Wednesday.

“There’s been a pattern of behavior by the FBI that’s been very troubling,” said Anne Weismann, who represents Finders Keepers. She questioned whether the agency is “acting in good faith.”

A message was sent to the Justice Department seeking comment on the suit, which asks a judge to order the FBI to immediately turn over the records.

Finders Keepers’ owners, the father-son duo of Dennis and Kem Parada, had spent years looking for what, according to legend, was an 1863 shipment of Union gold that was lost or stolen on its way to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. The duo focused on a spot where they say their instruments detected a large metallic mass.

After meeting with the treasure hunters in early 2018, the FBI brought in a contractor with more sophisticated instruments. The contractor detected an underground mass that weighed up to nine tons and had the density of gold, according to an FBI affidavit unsealed last year at the request of news organizations, including The Associated Press.

The Paradas accompanied the FBI to the site in Dent’s Run, about 135 miles (220 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh, but say they were confined to their car while the FBI excavated.

The FBI has long insisted the March 2018 dig came up empty, but the agency has consistently stymied the Paradas’ efforts to obtain information.

The FBI initially claimed it had no files about the investigation. Then, after the Justice Department ordered a more thorough review, the FBI said its records were exempt from public disclosure. Finally, in the wake of the treasure hunters’ appeal, the FBI said it had located 2,400 pages of records and 17 video files that it could potentially turn over — but that it would take years to do so.

Finders Keepers asked the Justice Department for expedited processing, which can be granted in cases where there is widespread media interest involving questions about the government’s integrity. The Justice Department denied the request — and, as of last month, had yet to assign the FOIA request to a staffer for processing, according to the lawsuit.

“From the outset, it seems as if the FBI is doing everything it can to avoid answering the question of whether they actually found gold,” Weismann said.                                                                                                                                    https://www.wearecentralpa.com/news/local-news/treasure-hunters-sue-for-records-on-fbis-civil-war-gold-dig-in-elk-county/

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