A Hole in the Ground
by Bruce Baker
If you take all the stories at face value, there’s as much gold buried in the United States as was ever mined there. We would all do well to consider Mark Twain’s take on gold mines: “A mine is a hole with a liar standing next to it.”
Along the Eastern seaboard, it’s tales of buried pirate gold; in the Southwest, it’s either a lost prospector’s mine or the buried hoard of a band of outlaws captured by a posse before they could return for it. Throughout the South are tales of buried Confederate gold. There were of course three very real “gold rush” events in US history—the Georgia Gold Rush in 1829, the California Gold Rush in 1849, and the Alaska Gold Rush in 1896—so not every story is fictional. Throughout the southern US and in parts of the Midwest, there are also tales of native peoples who found gold, collected it, then hid it from European incursions into their territory. One such tale here involves the resettlement of the Creek and Cherokee peoples into Oklahoma, commonly known as the Trail of Tears. The discovery of gold in North Georgia was a significant driver in the decision to force them west, and that is where the legend of the Georgia Treasure Tunnel originates.
In 1835, after the signing of the Treaty of New Echota, Rising Fawn called a meeting of his lesser chiefs. Knowing their expulsion from the land was inevitable, the lesser chiefs agreed to his proposal to construct a secret tunnel to hide all the treasure the various Indian families had accumulated. Jacob Scudder, a white man who had supported the Cherokee people’s attempts to keep their land, was asked to be caretaker of the tunnel after the Indian removal. Reportedly the tunnel was 200 feet long, straight, and ran through solid rock into a steep hillside. The natives wanted to be sure the spot chosen would never be cultivated or have homes constructed on it, and in so doing be accidentally discovered. Into the walls of the tunnel were small, square niches where each family could store its personal store of gold; the entrance was carefully sealed and covered to avoid detection. The work on the tunnel was done at night and it took a full two years to complete.
Image: New Echota Treaty, 1835. Courtesy of the National Archives Catalog.
The Native Americans hid their gold in the tunnel shortly before their removal, transporting it via wagon overland, or via boat down the Etowah River. The plan was to return to the area after settling out West, having left their gold in the care of a white man whose compassion for their plight was such that he’d return it to them when they came back.
There was one exception, and that was the chief of the Red Bank Cherokees, which consisted of around 30 families at the confluence of Bruton and Red Bank Creeks. Rather than hide their gold in the tunnel, the Red Bank Cherokee families in possession of gold instead opted to bury their gold separately in 25 different sites on their land. The Red Bank chief and his tribe had opposed the treaty of New Echota and did not trust Jacob Scudder. A large granite stone covered with symbols was carved by the Red Bank tribe, which served as a marker and map by which the individual caches could be located. Forest Wade’s book “Cry of the Eagle” identifies each of the 25 deposits, including how far they were from the stone and how much gold was buried at each location. While the Red Bank tribe opted not to use the tunnel to hide their gold, most other tribes, including the Long Swamp and Big Savannah, did so.
There are at least two stories of returning Cherokees approaching Jacob Scudder, who returned their gold to them as promised, but they aren’t well documented and could be creative fiction on someone’s part. It’s easy to dismiss all of this as folklore from the imagination of gold-hungry settlers. The Cherokee Treasure Tunnel has never been found, despite a great many efforts over the years to locate it. It may never have existed. Except…
Nearly 100 years later, in October of 1932, three boys approached a farmer seeking permission to dig on some land in his possession. Roy Tippens, Bob Struman, and Jack Struman had come across a large granite stone covered with markings near the border of Cherokee and Forsyth Counties and were convinced themselves that it must be the legendary treasure map from the Red Bank tribe. The landowner, Mr. Groover, refused, but the boys would not be dissuaded. They returned a few days later, following the coded instructions on the stone which they believed they’d deciphered, and unearthed a clay pot, of Cherokee origin, that contained 37 pounds of gold (roughly $1.5 million at current market value). The boys had in fact found exactly what they were seeking: the largest of the 25 burial sites around the stone which served as the center point. It’s worth noting that while it was the largest, the combined amount in the other 24 sites, which have never been located, is over ten times as much as the boys found.
Image: "Ancient Indian Petroglyph Boulder" courtesy of UGA Campus – Athens, GA Image Gallery.
Mr. Groover took the boys to court, claiming it as his own as it was found on his land; the courts ruled in favor of the boys, saying Groover had no legal claim to it. The court proceedings are a matter of record in the Georgia Court of Appeals; this is no fable. The center point stone has since been moved, and now resides on the campus at the University of Georgia, which would complicate any attempt to find the remaining caches.
If the Red Bank Cherokee gold is real, who’s to say whether the treasure tunnel isn’t also? An excerpt from Jacob Scudder’s own writing very late in his life has fueled speculation. The Scudder Cemetery is at a place known as “Diana’s Chapel,” which was named for his wife. In writing of their final resting place, he wrote: “Resting beneath these columns of polished marble which stand on a hilltop at Diana’s Chapel, rising like a sentinel to guard the treasure tunnel and looking over the river toward Lewis Blackburn, with a granite marker at my feet with a testimonial of my own.”
Sadly, in the 1970s someone convinced themselves that the Scudders had buried some gold with them, and under cover of darkness used a backhoe and desecrated their graves, seriously damaging the markers. They found nothing. There is no tunnel on the hillside where the cemetery stands, but what about the many hills it overlooks?