True, but we are skilled at doing so. The average person only sees rocks.
I'm enjoying the whole concept of how to bury something such that no one should find it without having directions that are simple to follow. Adding in decades of time delay adds to the fun.
I'm thinking that the story line could even work in some time-dependent issues to help with the solution. Not as detailed as Stonehenge, but something similar to walking towards the setting sun from a specific point on a certain day of the year starting at a certain time in the afternoon. This adds the challenge of determining what time it really was in 1862 as that pre-dates the establishment of what we now know as standard time. Every community had their own interpretation of noon, for example, until the railroad system was widely expanded and required a more precise method of time determination.
The path to the treasure could be a traverse in a phony deed written and recorded to a non-existing Son, sitting in the courthouse for all to see but nobody realizes what it is until the descendants research the deed records a century later. At first they think there was a great uncle that nobody knew about but clues in the description and the fact that the boundary doesn't close lead them to the truth.
James
Hey, this is terrific! From the responses, I'd conclude there must be a little of the fiction writer in every surveyor-- maybe as a reaction to the enforced precision of their professional lives.
Re precise accuracy: I really only have two over-arching considerations here. One is not to commit any obvious howlers--as, it seems, relying on purely celestial reckoning might have been. The other is that someday, in the distant future, somebody's got to dig this loot up. In other words, their data doesn't have to pinpoint the spot with gps accuracy, but it does have to tell them where to plow and start looking for shards of broken glass a la Dan's suggestion. Maybe, come to think of it, +/- 100 ft is accurate enough, some somebody who think's there a fortune somewhere in this 600 sq ft patch.
I'm liking the graveyard idea and the manure pile too. And the idea of local time, per H. Cow: noon you can get from a sundial, but 1:27 is when the L&N train goes by.) Just to let you in on a little more of the plot (I don't know it all myself), the slave T who's helping Beauregard, realizes he's a goner as soon as he loads the bullion onto the mule. Cap'n B thinks T's too dumb to lie, but T falsifies the data in some crucial way and as a result B's map is seriously inaccurate. On the other hand, he makes up a code or ditty (maybe about Bell and Lamar and other occupants of the graveyard) and this (somehow) is passed through the generations too. Can't wait to see how it turns out.
> Hey, this is terrific! From the responses, I'd conclude there must be a little of the fiction writer in every surveyor
Well, if we were to put ourselves in the position of the fellow wanting to stash the valuables, what would we do? Number one, if we wanted to bury it in the graveyard, we wouldn't let anyone other than people we implicitly trusted know what we were doing. That definitely would exclude any white overseers on the plantation who weren't family. So, that probably leaves Mr. Captain and perhaps some blood relation to do the deed. He might have a grave prepared, a coffin made, and then show up with a coffin holding about 150-200 lbs. of something that happens to be gold coins.
Maybe he'd explain that the deceased was some sort of a bad person who had to be buried outside the regular family plot. Some of the old plantation cemeteries in Texas had the graves of slaves, together with the odd outlaw or passerby, just outside the fence, the family inside the fence. That would explain the survey ties to the larger, more prominent stones in the cemetery if it was outside the fence. He'd tell some sort of story about the deceased to scare off any of the plantation "staff", enslaved or free, who might wonder, and to explain whyit was outside the cemetery proper and without a marker, as if the deceased were an outlaw of some sort.
But having buried this fortune in gold coins, how would he keep a record of it? He wouldn't make a map showing "fortune in gold coins buried here" with an "X" marking the spot. He'd make himself a note that only he would readily understand that would lead him to the spot after the surface indications of the burial are long gone and he'd do it in a way that nobody coming across the note would realize what it was.
> The path to the treasure could be a traverse in a phony deed written and recorded to a non-existing Son, sitting in the courthouse for all to see but nobody realizes what it is until the descendants research the deed records a century later.
Except quite a few courthouses got burned, I believe. You'd want to encode the location in a way that no one else could reasonably be expected to make sense of and to preserve it in several different places. Maybe you'd have a cemetery stone made up with the directions cut into it in some inobvious form.
I guess if one is wanting to be historically accurate, the retired naval officer has plenty of time to bury his gold. Georgia was relatively battle free (except naval skirmishes on the coast) in the early years of the war. I don't believe Sherman invaded Georgia until 1864.
I'm with Kent and the cemetery scenario. Someone could 'conveniently' pass away and have the gold interred with, or instead of them.
Or maybe there should be an island in the river with a nice "Huck Finn" cave. Of course the entrance to the cave can only be located by the first rays of sunrise on the summer solstice when standing in the proper spot.
Wherever he decides to bury the treasure he needs to be careful. Remember what Ben Franklin told us, "Three people can keep a secret only if two of them are dead".:snarky:
> I guess if one is wanting to be historically accurate, the retired naval officer has plenty of time to bury his gold. Georgia was relatively battle free (except naval skirmishes on the coast) in the early years of the war. I don't believe Sherman invaded Georgia until 1864.
>
> I'm with Kent and the cemetery scenario. Someone could 'conveniently' pass away and have the gold interred with, or instead of them.
And now 150 years later when someone finally puts the mystery together, it turns out that the land outside the cemetery has been paved to make a parking lot for an Uncle Bubba's restaurant. The folks who want to recover the goods have to pretend to be some municipal workers searching for a gas leak in order to dig up Uncle Bubba's pavement. The Uncle Bubba character is of course based on Paula Deen's brother whose limit on sounding like a normal person is about three words in succession. There are a couple of filings in civil suits now pending that flesh out how Bubba speaks his mind about things.
That's pretty humorous..
I'm thinking Brad Pitt and George Clooney. Bubba would be played by John Goodman, of course.;-)
That's pretty humorous..
> I'm thinking Brad Pitt and George Clooney. Bubba would be played by John Goodman, of course.;-)
So how do you get someone to let you dig up the parking lot of his restaurant to search for a shipload of gold coins that he's going to want to snag for himself if he catches on? Quick answer: you talk your way into the back office where he has a desk and a couch that looks just the right size for diddling the wait staff and you take a shot. "Mr. Bubba," you say, this is one helluva restaurant you've got here, but I can't see how a gas explosion wouldn't be bad for business."
"Course," you say, "I'm here to keep that hound from the door. I figger we can git that leak fixed after you close up on Saturday and have the pavement patched and everything before church lets out if you say it's okay".
"Naturally," you say, "We'll fix everything better than new. It's one helluva lot cheaper than if all the gas was to to blow like a lightning storm in a fart factory. I've seen it happen and it ain't pretty."
That's pretty humorous..
Oh, boy. An excuse for John Goodman to reprise his role in "O Brother Where Art Thou".
That's pretty humorous..
One (of many) of John's finest film performances:
PS - Kent should write movie scripts. Maybe Tommy Lee Jones will use him as technical advisor on his next Taco Western. 😉
> Hey, this is terrific! From the responses, I'd conclude there must be a little of the fiction writer in every surveyor--
Hmmm...well, I have retraced some surveys that I think the original surveyor was definitely a fiction writer.....;-)
> Broken glass....
> A one foot diameter cylinder of broken glass buried above the gold...left one foot below the surface... In 40 years (or a hundred years)...just get close and do a little normal farm plowing...
>
> There she be, mate...
>
> DDSM
I like that. And note the reason for the broken glass. It is a material that is not indigenous to the area; it, theoretically, will outlast an iron or wood marker; it is not surprising to see, so that the average person wouldn't be alerted to it marking something as opposed to be some garbage thrown away; and, like Dan says, it can be found by some shallow plowing.
I would couple that with Kent's idea of taking some angle shots with the sextant, and maybe some star readings to first get the searcher in the general area, then closer still with finding some of the landmarks and taking angles, then finally plowing around for the broken glass....bingo, you know where to dig.