On the night of April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis boarded a train out of Richmond as word reached the Confederate capital that Robert E. Lee could no longer hold the lines. Behind him rode what remained of the Confederate treasury, gold, silver, and bullion that Captain William H. Parker, who commanded the convoy, put at roughly five hundred thousand dollars, plus nearly half a million more in Richmond bank gold riding along for safekeeping.
By early May the convoy had reached Washington, Georgia, and the money started disappearing in pieces. A hundred and eight thousand dollars went to the soldiers still escorting it, as final pay. Two naval officers were handed eighty six thousand dollars to smuggle to Britain, and it simply vanished, one researcher later calling it money that was basically just stolen. Federal soldiers recovered part of the bank gold after a camp raid at Danburg Crossroads. Davis himself was captured near Irwinville on May 10 with only a few dollars left in his pocket.
One piece was never accounted for at all. Thirty nine kegs of Mexican silver dollars, more than nine thousand pounds of coin, had been hauled as far as Danville, Virginia before the wagons had to move faster than that weight allowed. Researchers believe it was buried there rather than carried on, and ground surveys have detected what looks like buried caches in the search area ever since, in ground nobody has been permitted to dig.
Makes you wonder what a government on the run does with a fortune it can no longer afford to carry.
Buried under a Virginia graveyard, or gone for good?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
What do you think about this? The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a man calling himself R.C. Christian, and no one ever learned his real name before the monument was bombed on July 6, 2022. Message, or a monument that did not deserve to stand?
What do you think about this? Pacifica’s Devil’s Slide has swallowed sections of Highway 1 since 1937, and a WWII watch bunker still perched on its cliff edge has sat abandoned there since 1949. Geology, or a stretch of coast that keeps trying to shrug people off?
What do you think about this? On November 24, 1971, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper parachuted from a Boeing 727 with 200,000 dollars and vanished. In 1980, a boy found 5,800 dollars of that exact cash along the Columbia River. Survived, or never told a soul?
What do you think about this? On September 12, 2023, researcher Jaime Maussan presented two small, elongated bodies to Mexico’s Congress, calling them non-human. Scientists who studied similar specimens found them manufactured. Hoax, or evidence a government put on the record?
What do you think about this? At age two, James Leininger began describing a WWII plane crash in detail, and researchers later matched his account to pilot James Huston Jr, killed near Iwo Jima in 1945. Coincidence, or memory that should not exist?
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