Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist (16 page)

There is a long history of magical treasure hunting in America. It was widely believed that the country was peppered with pirates' gold, misers' hoards, and lost mines, that Indian graves were filled with valuables, and gnomes collected enormous stockpiles of gold and gems in subterranean caves. The notebook of one eighteenth-century money-digger lists the locations of dozens of treasures (“Mrs. Downing of Wair Informs that there is a mine of silver at ye flat rock on Coy's hill in Brookfield”), and places like Bristol Notch, Vermont, were “honeycombed with holes a few feet in depth, where generations of money-diggers have worked their superstitious energies”
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searching for gold stolen from a Spanish galleon.

On July 20, 1822, the
Lycoming Gazette
(Williamsport, Pennsylvania) reported, “We could name if we pleased five hundred respectable men who do, in the simplicity and sincerity of their hearts, verily believe that immense treasures lie concealed in the Green Mountains; many of whom have been, for a number of years, most industriously and perseveringly engaged in digging it up.” Moreover, the article encouraged readers to take up “the mineral [divining] rod and discover a fortune,” which leads to the
other
popular belief underpinning magical treasure hunting: that occult methods for finding it worked.

They involved spell casting, nocturnal ceremonies, and communicating with spirits, but despite its resemblance to witchcraft (and even grave robbing), magical treasure hunting was not beyond the pale. It may not have been discussed in polite company, but treasure hunting experienced several waves of popularity during which unknown numbers of citizens were slipping out after dark carrying shovels, swords, and spell books.

The actual money-digging process could be simple or elaborate, but the first step consisted of figuring out where to dig. It might be revealed in dreams, or by a ghost (“‘Raise this rock,' said a voice . . . the young man worked most of the night [and] [u]nder it, in old coins, he found money enough to last him the rest of his life”).
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Legends like the story about Spanish gold at Bristol Notch provide a general idea where to look, but some form of magic, such as dowsing, was needed to find to find the precise location.

Dowsing was a popular form of divination that employed rods, pendulums, or other devices colloquially known as “doodlebugs” that signaled the presence of hidden treasure. An Indiana farmer named Wait, for example, used a pendulum weighted with a “mineral ball” that revolved when it was over precious metals, but there were more exotic methods, such as the “peep stones” or “seer stones” employed by the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith Jr. As a young man he used them to see underground treasures just as he later used the holy seer stones, Urim and Thummim, to translate the
Golden Plates into the
Book of Mormon
. Some money-diggers hired diviners like Smith or practiced magic themselves.

Necromancy, the conjuring and questioning of spirits, was the most effective way to discover and secure treasure. “Spells and incantations” with power over spirits is doubly necessary, “first to call up a spirit who shall disclose the right spot and second, to control the demon who keeps the hoard.”
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The “demon” is the spirit that stands guard and must be restrained from attacking the men or moving the treasure out of reach.

When the right location was found, some money-diggers drove an iron spear into the ground to “pin” it in place, while others practiced elaborate rituals. In “A method to Tak [
sic
] up hid Treasure,” Silas Hamilton, the enthusiastic hunter whose notebook listed the local buried treasures, described a way of laying out a magic circle that kept the gold in place:

Tak Nine Steel Rods about ten or twelve Inches in Length Sharp or Piked to Perce in to the Erth, and let them be Besmeared with fresh blood from a hen mixed with hogdung. Then mak two Surkels Round the hid Treasure one of Sd Surkels a Little Larger in Surcumference than the hid Treasure lays in the Erth the other Surkel Sum Larger still, and as the hid treasure is wont to move to North or South East or west Place your Rods as is Discribed on the other sid of this leaf. [The other side of the page shows the rods laid out in a wheel-shaped pattern.]
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Many treasure hunters used a ritual sword or dagger to scratch a magic circle into the ground around the area to be excavated, then cast a spell. It might include hymns, Bible readings, or animal sacrifices, but “[s]hould someone carelessly mutter or curse,” the enchantment would be broken, and “the treasure guardians could penetrate the circle or carry the treasure through the earth.”
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Digging was done in perfect silence and as the men worked, spirits attempted to confuse and frighten them with phantom storms, fires, ghosts, demons, and monsters.

It must have been unnerving work, scooping dirt out of a dark hole in the middle of the night while a shrieking corpse or giant black pig stalked the outer perimeter of the magic circle, and someone invariably spoke or, more likely, swore whereupon the unprotected diggers ran for their lives, arriving home empty-handed and, in some cases, with their hair turned white from terror. What frightened them?

Most treasure guardians were spirits of the dead. The ghost of the treasure's former owner might stand guard, or, in the case of piratical booty, a member of the burying party or other unfortunate was killed for the purpose (these ghosts seem to have been especially angry). There were phantom animals as well, including fiery-eyed dogs and cats, wild horses, and diabolical livestock. A talking toad threatened to murder treasure hunters at Niagara County, New York, while reptiles, particularly snakes, recall the ancient role of dragons as guardians of the Golden Fleece and other treasures. Snakes
also represent Satan, and riches acquired through sin and bloodshed, then hidden within the earth, tended to attract infernal attention.

Five hundred little devils watched over a hoard of silver buried in Safe Harbor, Pennsylvania, and a treasure hunter digging near Dighton Rock, a boulder covered with mysterious carvings at Berkley, Massachusetts, saw “the devil, equipped with all his paraphernalia of tail and horns and cloven hoof, mocking and laughing at him.”
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There were also beings intimately connected to the Earth, including dwarfish elemental gnomes and gigantic children of the goddess Gaia, which, “[b]ecause of their size and strength . . . made formidable guardians.”
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Joseph Smith Jr. reportedly saw a group of money-diggers routed by a giant standing eight or nine feet tall, and Mr. Wait had an even more alarming encounter. While excavating a hole, he looked up and “beheld a huge millstone suspended above him by a thread, and a giant negro standing by with scissors ready to cut the thread and cause the stone to fall upon him.”
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Wait survived the millstone (as well as a phantom flood and spectral wild horses), and when he died around 1900, an attempt was made to overturn his will based “largely on the fact that the testator . . . had . . . been imbued with the belief that he possessed the power to locate hidden treasure.”
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The court did not consider magical treasure hunting a sufficient reason to overturn the will, but the case of
Wait v. Westfall
demonstrates how the rational, more or less scientific, worldview
that came to dominate public life during the nineteenth century had turned a once-popular pastime into evidence of incompetence or insanity.

While powwow doctors might have been curing hexed cattle in Pennsylvania, root magic flourished in the South, and a vampire was killed at Rhode Island in 1892, such activities were increasingly regarded as the eccentric behavior of superstitious provincials.

Stories about pirate's gold and lost mines are still told, of course, and there is no shortage of hopeful fortune hunters searching for them, but at some point the use of rituals and spells vanished in the United States. What might its adepts, men like Silas Hamilton, Joseph Smith Jr., and Mr. Wait, have made of
I Fought the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens
? Would they recognize the events of 1924 as something akin to their experiences?

At first reading, Beck's account seems remote from the world of grimoires and buried doubloons. He does not mention any legends about lost mines or hidden gold at Mt. St. Helens, not even a rumor of the sort mentioned by Albert Ostman (discussed shortly). On July 16, 1924, however, the
Seattle Daily Times
reported that “[i]n the vicinity” of the Vander White mine was “a fable of a wonderfully wealthy gold deposit . . .
worked by Yakima Indians.” These “pioneer reminiscences” described “Indians bringing great quantities of gold from these mountains and then the supply ceasing when several Indians were killed mysteriously.”

Beck's account contains little in the way of folklore or superstition, and there is nothing to suggest that he was familiar with ritual magic, yet Spiritualism was not as removed from sorcery as its adherents claimed. Skeptics thought fraud and credulity explained the phenomena, but others accepted the manifestations as real, if not new. For them it was a revival of necromancy, literally “corpse divining,” the ancient form of sorcery used by the Witch of Endor to raise the spirit of Samuel for King Saul (1 Samuel 28).

How the witch went about it is unknown, but the Greek enchantress Circe had a method that involved prayers to the dead and a freshly dug trench filled with honey, milk, wine, and the blood of a ram and ewe, a mixture that gave spirits the strength to speak. Later techniques were more gruesome.

Necromancy was practiced in graveyards at night by the light of lamps that burned human fat and had a piece of shroud for a wick. Practitioners drew magical circles on the ground, made sacrifices, and dug up fresh corpses for rituals whose resemblance to magical treasure hunting is not coincidental, for necromancy was often used to find gold. The advent of Spiritualism, however, rendered such grotesque practices obsolete.

Séances made “communicating with the dead at once
easy, practical, and comfortable. This was the method truly suited to our habits and the refinement of our civilization, and there is no need whatever to go into cemeteries . . . in short, the necromantic craft of the witch has been advantageously replaced by spiritualism.”
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One important difference between the miners' method of searching for gold and traditional magic was the latter's use of magical spells to shield participants from hostile spirits and protection that was lost if someone spoke. Beck never says that the men thought they were shielded by Spiritualism, or, if they did, that it depended on keeping silent; yet consider events leading up to the discovery of the mine.

The Great Spirit presumably shot the phantom arrow into the sky that led the men on a four-day trek over difficult terrain. Beck does not record anything being said during that time, not until Marion Smith cursed the Great Spirit, whereupon they were told, “[Y]ou will be shown where there is gold, but it is not given you.” Smith had broken the spell, allowing guardian spirits to move the “buried treasure” out of the hunters' reach, and lost the miners' equivalent of “magical protection.”

For six years all had been peaceful . . .
and an aura of good or spiritual power surrounded us
 . . . But one of us had lost his temper and denounced the spirit leading us a liar, from that time on a quiet apprehensiveness settled over us. We continued working our claim, but down deep we felt it would avail to no good end.
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[my italics]

Someone remarked, “We just as well pack up and go home,” and old-fashioned treasure hunters like Hamilton or Wait would have agreed.

While most traditional treasure hunts seem to have taken place in the course of a single night, events at Ape Canyon unfolded at a leisurely pace. The miners worked for two fruitless years before giants drove them from the mountains, which raises the question of why they were attacked at all. There was no headlong flight from the mountains, but two years of fruitless work before giants drove them away, which raises the question of why they were attacked at all.

Fred Beck believed it was revenge for shooting the ape-man, but what if the “good assay” was accurate and the miners were, as they believed, on the verge of discovering gold? That is when the spirits manifested and drove away the Spiritualists with the same fury visited on their spell-casting predecessors, and leaving them just as empty-handed. Beck wrote, “the fact is that we never took any [gold] out. A few nuggets was the only gold I ever obtained, and they were found in different locations.”
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The idea that Ape Canyon is a magical treasure-hunting story, and Bigfoot are guarding hidden gold, may seem improbable, but, like traditional earth spirits, Sasquatch are enormous and primitive, throw stones like giants, and are associated with the underground knocking noises characteristic of gnomes (and responsible for the regional name “tommyknockers”); in some certain alternative-reality circles
ape-men are also believed to mine gold for aliens, another gnomish trait. Then there is the other classic Bigfoot incident that occurred during the summer of 1924.

Albert Ostman was camping in the wilderness of coastal British Columbia's Toba Inlet when he was carried off and held captive by a family of Sasquatch for six days. Ostman escaped and kept the incident to himself until 1957, when he told the story in an official affidavit and swore an oath to its truth.

Experts studied the account, evaluating the description of the creatures' anatomy, rudimentary language, and technology, and even the amount of time they spent gathering edible plants and whether its nutritional value was adequate to sustain primates of their alleged size. Ivan Sanderson's interview with Albert Ostman concentrated on “certain zoological or anthropological details” and the questions were loaded “with snares and abstruse technical catches . . . ,” yet for all this careful investigation, one point is passed over without comment: Ostman's reason for being at the Toba Inlet.
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“There was allegedly a lost gold mine thereabouts and he decided to take a crack at finding it.”
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Like the miners at Ape Canyon, he might have succeeded had a group of Bigfoot not intervened.