The UnXplained: Hunting Lost Civil War Gold (Season 4) | History

According to the legend, in early 1863, a shipment of 26 gold bars, property of the U.S. government, was loaded onto a Union Army caravan in Wheeling, West Virginia. The caravan was under order to take the gold to the United States Mint in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where it would be used to pay for the war effort. Gold shipments were incredibly important for the Union and its success under Lincoln. He was reliant on that gold to pay soldiers and to pay off some debts to foreign lenders. And so these operations of transferring gold were secret, and they were protected by troops to watch it and guard it. That was the only way it could be shipped. Eleven Union soldiers in three wagons began the 350-mile journey to Philadelphia. But just 60 miles into their trek, an unexpected turn of events forced the caravan to change their plans. The wagons were dead-headed for Philadelphia, but then Southern soldiers were getting close to Pennsylvania, and they were afraid it would get robbed. So that's when they detoured. So they went up the Allegheny River, and when they got to Dent's Run, the story says one of the wagons broke down up on the mountainside. Unable to continue his plan, three of the Union soldiers escorting the caravan reportedly left to get help. But when they returned days later, they found empty wagons. The other soldiers and the gold had vanished without a trace. Now, according to the gold story, the Union soldiers robbed the gold. They took part of the gold that they could carry, and they buried the rest someplace around Dent's Run. That's what brings the enthusiasm to the story. Could there be stolen Civil War gold buried somewhere in the Allegheny? It's certainly an intriguing thought, but there's just one problem. No official government records of the lost gold have ever been found. People would assume that it would be in the record of the U.S. government and the National Archives, but it's not. And the reason it's not is because it would have been a huge embarrassment to the Union, to Lincoln, and it might have caused an economic panic to have this amount of gold go missing. It wasn't until 1974 that an article in Treasure magazine brought the mystery of the Dent's Run treasure into the public spotlight. The story reported that in 1865, government detectives recovered 2 1⁄2 bars of gold buried under a pine stump near where the empty wagons were found. In the years since the article was published, a steady stream of treasure hunters have done their own prospecting in the hopes of finding gold at Dent's Run. We're talking about 26 bars of gold. We've had several people come to us, one claiming that they found one bar of gold, another claiming that they found a bar and a half of gold, and you don't know if any of them is true. They're up there looking for it, but I don't think they found it. Are there more gold bars still buried in the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania? Gold that has been hidden for over 150 years, as treasure hunters believe? Well, while exploring a dry riverbed in 2005 deep in the backwoods of Dent's Run, treasure hunters Dennis Parada and his son Ken discovered some intriguing artifacts and a possible hideout that may hold the answer. Right at this location here, we discovered a bonfire pit, and we dug down about 6 inches. We found a lot of bottles, broken glass, an animal trap, and bullets all over the place up there. All the bullets, the glassware, everything here was dated around the Civil War period. And then I looked off to the left, and there was a hole in the mountain. As soon as I came down here and I saw the cave, I was just drawn right, and I had to go in immediately to see what was in there. After descending into the cave to search for more Civil War artifacts, Dennis and his son found signs that they weren't the first people to enter the secluded hollow. My son's looking, and he says, Dad, there's a hole carved into the ceiling for a torch up towards the back of the cave. He put a flashlight in there, and 32 feet back from the entrance, there was a vertical shaft. Dennis and his son were unable to fully explore the narrow cave, but they spent years drilling exploratory holes into the ground above it to search for traces of gold. And then in 2014, their efforts finally paid off. We drill down 8 feet, hook up the equipment, gold. Off the scale, our machine's blown gold. It's sand, large gold item, 10 inches. So I says, 100%, the treasure was here, the Civil War treasure. And I'm like screaming, we found it, we found it! Dennis Parada had been working with the state getting permission from government into doing it the right way, being correctly permitted, but they would not allow him to dig it up. And so I called Denny, and I suggested to him that we work together. I can help him with it. I said, the only way you're likely to see it come out of the ground is to bring the FBI, the feds, into retrieving. What happened next is subject to some debate, but according to Dennis Parada, the FBI took control of the dig site in late January of 2018. They conducted a series of scans of the area using a device known as a gravimeter. The gravimeter measures density, and the density of gold is 19.5, and the density of sandstone, which it was hidden in in a cave underground, is 2.5. The differential would show up hugely in a heat map of that site. They did those measurements over a full day, and they came back with the results that showed a very high reading of gold. That's when things got crazy. The FBI kicked us off, and they said, go home. And then they returned at 8 p.m. that night and dug till the next morning. When the FBI dug, I came up here, and I could see what was going on. There was 20-some to 30-some agents up here at all times standing around. Tobacco was digging constantly. When the FBI left, I came back up to the site the next day to retrieve my hidden cameras, and then I ran some tests on the site area. And the readings we had before, metal underneath, gold and silver, were all gone. Everything was gone.