looking for local stories (s.e. oklahoma)

When the Civil War ended, Warren Mun had lost almost everything he owned. Shermans March from Charleston to Goldsboro, North Carolina, had destroyed the farm that Mun had worked for years to build. Salvaging a wagon, team of mules, a few household goods and his life savings, a quantity of $20.00 gold pieces, Mun loaded up his wife and small daughter and headed west.

Several weeks later he entered what was then the Indian Territory at Ft. Smith. He then crossed the Texas Road north of Perryville and camped at the edge of a small canyon, just north of the South Canadian River. It was while he was camped here that a party of friendly Indians visited the camp.

After they left (Mun was not familiar with Indians and thought they were all killers), the family decided, since they could not outrun the Indians if they came back, that they would bury the gold until they were ready to move on. Years later, the daughter described the hiding place of the coins in these words, My father buried the gold in a cavern beside a dripping spring. I dont know how much gold there was, but when my father took the strongbox from the wagon I could not lift it.

Later that night, after burying the coins, Mun was joined by a group of strangers. Still fearing an Indian attack, Mun decided to travel west with this party, but because of the strangers he was afraid to dig up his gold the next morning. Mun figured to go on to California and return for his gold after he was settled. But because of time, raising his daughter and building a farm, Mun never returned to Oklahoma.

Many years later, after Mun and his wife died, his daughter returned to Oklahoma to search for the gold. There had been so many changes that the daughter, after telling her story to local residents and not finding the coins, returned to California. So somewhere near a dripping spring in a small canyon, a few miles southwest of Holdenville in Hughes County, Oklahoma, near the Canadian River, is a cache of gold coinswaiting.

The hills of southeastern Oklahoma have spawned many treasure searches. Some of these date back to the days when Spaniards and Frenchmen roamed the Kiamichi Mountains.

The French were aware of silver mines in their country, as old reports verify. U. S. Indian agent Dr. John Sibley left one such account of what he had heard concerning the mines on the Kiamichi River.

The French called the river Kiomitchie, he said in 1805, but the French knew it as La Riviere La Mine, or Mine River. They reported that it contained clear water and was boatable about sixty miles to the silver mine, which is on the bank of the river. The ore appears in large quantities.

Sibley further stated that above the mine, the current of the river is too strong for boats to ascend it, the country being hilly. His story seems to place the silver mine near the present town of Clayton in Puchmataha County.

That these mines were sought by the Spanish is strongly believed. Almost one hundred years before Sibleys report, the French explorer Bernard De la Harpe recorded during his travels through this country in 1718, that old chiefs had told him about other white men who had traded for metals with the Padouca Indians, fifteen days journey to the northwest, where the mountains furnish rock salt.

While in the mountains north of the Kiamichi River, La Harpe recorded in his journal that he had broken open black rocks that showed streaks of yellow like gold. Some flint rocks had streaks that seemed to be silver, and La Harpe was convinced that mines of precious metals existed on both sides of the Kiamichi River.

La Harpes conjecture of those mines was not farfetched. Just 55 years after his travels, a French trader named J. Gaignard journeyed up Red River from Louisiana. In his diary of October 1773, he told of two silver mines known to the Caddo Indians.

Gaignard remained with the Indians for 84 days, and while in a Caddo camp on the Red River some 55 leagues north of present Shreveport, he heard about the silver mines. One, the Indians told him lay only 12 leagues to the northeast in Arkansas. The other was located on the Kiamichi River, 50 leagues northwest, probably not far from present-day Clayton.

The ruins of many of these ancient diggings have been discovered in recent years, but the mines have not been relocated.

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