The Owl Creek treasure is a Knox County tall tale

GAMBIER — While a lot of my research for this column proceeds based on the idea that there is usually a grain of truth that lies buried in folklore, there is one kind of passed-down story that idea doesn’t apply to, and that is what might be called “tall tales.”

Some strange stories that persist in local memory may be true, but there are other sorts that just don’t hold water when examined closely.

The case in point today is a story recorded in 1996 by James Robert Hopkins in his book “Knox Folklore and Fact.”

Hopkins himself expresses doubt about the tale, though he at least did attempt to verify it. What he even passed down is pretty sketchy.

The gist of the story is that there was supposedly once an iron kettle of silver coins buried by American Indians who were leaving the region to go to a reservation in Minnesota.

Many areas have vague “buried treasure” stories, and this one seems to fall under that general rubric. The supporting evidence is slim.

As Hopkins relays it, the Indians were members of the Delaware tribe who lived in Tuscarawas County in 1843. The U.S. government is said to have bought the tribe’s land and sent them west.

As the refugees were passing through Knox County, near Gambier, they were allegedly set upon by a group of rowdy drunks from Mount Vernon.

The story has it that the natives allegedly buried the iron pot full of coins at the base of a large sycamore tree, invoking the spirit of the owl to protect it.

That invocation was spoken because this sycamore tree was just off the old Gambier Road (today Lower Gambier Road), which runs along the Kokosing River.

“Kokosing” is the original native word for “Owl Creek.” The Indians planned to return to fetch the hoard, but were never able to return.

There are problems with this story.

By 1843, all natives who openly identified as such had been removed from Ohio. The Wyandot tribe had the last reservation, located along the river just east of Upper Sandusky, and a corner of that reservation had previously been reserved for Delawares.

But the majority of Delawares had already left Ohio, and no known village was still living in Tuscarawas County, as far as I can tell.

That’s not to say that there weren’t still a handful of natives around, as some chose to remain and assimilate, as we’ve discussed here previously. But no groups remained.

The date in this story at least suggests a knowledge of real historical events. The Wyandot reservation was shut down and the Indians sent west in 1843. I know of no further U.S. government official dealings with Indians after that point. 

While a natural enough departure from the Tuscarawas area could believably follow what is today U.S. 36, which would indeed bring a group of refugees into Knox County, there’s no historical record of any such migration happening that late.

Furthermore, the sheer logistics of the story are suspect.

If a group is coming along a road, and they see (or hear) a group of rowdies approaching from down the road, how could they possibly have enough time to dig and convincingly hide an iron put full of silver coins?

 

And how did the rowdies know the Indians were there?

I guess it is possible that a passing rider spotted the Indians and raced ahead to Mount Vernon to tell people. But that supposes the Indians went to the trouble of burying the pot before they knew there would even be trouble.

I guess we’ll just move on past the question of whether or not there could be a group of drunk rowdies in Mount Vernon.

If all this weren’t sketchy enough, the supposed mechanism for conveying the story is even more dubious. According to Hopkins, he was told about this legend by “the McFarland Brothers.”

He doesn’t identify them further, so it appears that the assumption in 1996 was that everyone local would know them. 

Thirty years later, that’s not necessarily the case, though perhaps some readers can fill us in. He identifies the brothers as living on the ridge that runs into Gambier, long known as “The Bishop’s Backbone.” Today this is Ohio 308.

The McFarland Brothers allegedly told Hopkins the tale was passed along to them by their father, who allegedly heard it in his youth on a business trip to Minnesota — where he supposedly heard it from an elderly Delaware Indian. 

If the McFarlands were elderly in the 1990s, that could put their childhood encounter with the story before World War II.

If there’s truth to the story, that could mean that their father encountered the story some 30 to 50 years before that, from an Indian who remembered it from his own childhood some 50 to 70 years earlier. 

That time line at least works out as possible. 

The problem is, why would some elderly Indian turn over this information to a White man?

Indeed, it is possible that an Indian would not have been able to travel back to Ohio in the 1800s. But at some point the racist laws were relaxed, because it was discovered that American Indians tend to have a more developed sense of balance than your average White man.

Thus they were recruited to build skyscrapers in the cities, starting in the late 1800s.

Let’s suppose that this Indian is telling his story just before that happens.

Even so, why wouldn’t he hold the story back in hopes that some younger tribal members on the reservation could travel in the future to recover the treasure?

“Buried under a sycamore near Old Gambier Road along Owl Creek near Gambier” isn’t a lot to go on, but it’s not nothing.

Instead, we’re asked to believe that this old man would turn over this potential fortune to some random businessman from that original area where rowdies attacked the old man’s people.

Hmph.

Hopkins tells us the McFarland boys, excited with the tale, proceeded to start searching down by the river, digging various holes under various sycamore trees.

According to the story they told Hopkins, they were spooked one day when an owl — in broad daylight — hooted at them from just above. 

They took off running, convinced that the Spirit of the Owl was indeed protecting the treasure, and they never searched for it again.

In the name of historical verification, Hopkins went out to Lower Gambier Road and searched at the foot of some of the many sycamore trees out that way with a metal detector. 

He found nothing.

He closes his account by reckoning that if the treasure ever even existed, it could be deeply buried beneath the embankments later created for the Cleveland, Akron & Columbus Railroad line that came along the river.

Today this stretch exists as the Kokosing Gap Trail.

Far more likely is that it never existed. One could imagine a sly old native making up the story on the spot, just to mess with the businessman from Gambier.

But I think the most likely scenario of all is that the McFarland Brothers’ father made it up as a game to keep the boys busy and otherwise out of trouble during the slow weeks of summer.

It worked that way until an owl spooked them. Imagine that: encountering an owl along Owl Creek. 

What are the odds?

In the end, it’s the kind of folklore better known as a folk tale, a tall tale, or even just a funny story.

I’d say the odds are exceedingly low of anything ever being found out that way, though I would like to go on the record saying that if you read this column and go out there and DO find a pot of silver coins, I hereby claim a 10 percent consultant’s fee.