Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - The Vanishing Fortune: Lost Confederate Gold

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

On April 2, 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis fled Richmond with the entire Confederate treasury, a fortune in gold ingots, silver bricks, and coins guarded by teenage Navy midshipmen on a train heading south into a collapsing nation. Five weeks later, when Union soldiers finally captured Davis, almost all of it was gone. The War Department told the public the missing treasure was worth $13 million, a number historians say was invented to turn every former Confederate into a hunted man. The truth was far more complicated, with records showing most of the money was paid to soldiers and spent along the way. But the legend never died. Wagons were raided in Georgia, deathbed confessions pointed to buried caches no one ever found, and treasure hunters are still searching 160 years later. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson follows the trail of the lost Confederate gold, the myth the government built around it, and the question that still drives people into the woods with shovels: where did it all go?For more, follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes wherever you listen to podcasts: https://pod.link/1828469754If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

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On a spring night in 1865, in a city that was already starting to burn, the last gold and silver of a collapsing nation was loaded onto a train in the dark, and the people guarding it were teenage boys. Within weeks, the United States government would tell the world that those fleeing rebels were carrying as much as $13 million in gold and silver.

In today's money, more than a quarter of a billion dollars. So you can imagine what the Union cavalry expected to find when they finally surrounded the president of the Confederacy in a South Georgia pine forest. They tore his camp apart looking for it. They found a few dollars. Somewhere between a burning capital and that Georgia field, the treasure of the Confederate states of America had simply vanished, and people have been digging for it ever since. So where did it go? From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors. These aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction.

I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is conspiracy theories, cults and crimes, a crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. These cases are wild, and I want to hear what you think. At the end of each episode, leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review, and follow so we can continue building this community together. And remember, these Monday episodes will also be on YouTube with full video. You can find them every Saturday. Just search for Crimehouse Studios, and be sure to like and subscribe.

And if you want even more, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus, and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crimehouse lineup, ad-free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of the Conspiracy Theory's Cults and Crimes Show page. Today I'm digging into one of the most enduring treasure legends in American history, the lost Confederate gold. For 160 years, people have been certain that a fortune of Confederate gold and silver disappeared in the spring of 1865 and that it's still out there somewhere waiting to be found.

Treasure hunters have searched fields in Georgia, plantations in Florida, and the bottom of Lake Michigan trying to find it. It's the story of how a country lost a treasure, and what happens when you finally start to wonder whether the treasure was ever really there? All that and more coming up. I don't want to start in 1865, but rather in the cold gray water of Lake Michigan, about a decade ago. Two men from Muskegon, Michigan, a retired firefighter named Kevin Dykstra, and a diver named Frederick Monroe,

were out on the lake in a small boat, staring at a sonar screen. For years, they'd been chasing the same dream. They believed that somewhere on the bottom of that lake sat a railroad box car, and inside it, a fortune in Confederate gold. The story that put them out on that water was almost too good to be true,

and it traced back to a deathbed confession, In 1921, a man named George Alexander Abbott was dying in Muskegon. He'd been a respected local banker. The story goes that in his final hours, Abbott confessed a secret to his family. Years earlier, he'd stolen Confederate gold and hidden it in a box car that was being shipped across Lake Michigan. One stormy night, that boxcar went to the bottom of the lake, and the gold went with it. That confession got passed down person to person for decades until it reached Frederick Monroe back in the 1970s. A friend told him there were supposedly $2 million in gold bullion sitting in a box car at the bottom of the lake.

Monroe never let it go. Now, Dykstra and Monroe are just the most recent searchers, but they're part of a tradition that stretches back a century and a half, because ever since the Civil War ended, people have believed that a vast Confederate fortresses, and disappeared, and that it's still hidden somewhere, in the ground or under the water, waiting. Treasure hunters have dug up Georgia farmland. They've searched old plantation sites in Florida. There are families across the south who quietly believe their ancestors stumbled onto a piece of it. It's inspired by novels, movies, and reality TV shows. It's one of the longest running treasure legends this country has ever produced, and every bit of it rests on one night in April

1865, when a fortune really did leave the city of Richmond, Virginia on a train guarded by teenagers. So, let's go back there. Sunday, April 2nd, 1865 was a beautiful spring morning in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. The president of the Confederate States, Jefferson Davis, was sitting in his usual pew at St. Paul's Episcopal Church. But the calm was an illusion. About 25 miles to the south, the Confederate lines defending the city were crumbling under General Ulysses S. Grant's Union Army. In the middle of the church service, a messenger walked in and handed Davis a telegram. It was from General Robert E. Lee, and the message was blunt. The lines had broken. Richmond could not be held. The government had to get out right away. Davis quietly stood up,

walked out of the church, and went to his office. He sent for his cabinet. men like his secretary of the treasury, George Trenum, his secretary of war, John C. Breckenridge, and his secretary of the Navy, Stephen Mallory. He told them the capital was to be abandoned that very night, but the fight wasn't over. Davis's plan was to keep the Confederate government alive and on the move. He wanted to flee south, link up with the armies he thought were still in the field,

and keep fighting. Maybe they'd regroup in the Carolinas. Maybe they'd cross the Mississippi River to join the Confederate forces still holding out in Texas. And if all of that failed, he could slip out of the country entirely, to Cuba or Europe, and keep the cause alive from abroad. But none of that was possible without money. A government on the run still had to pay its soldiers and buy supplies. And that's what the Treasury was, the Confederate government's reserve of hard money, gold, silver, and coin. It was the lifeblood of the whole operation, and Davis couldn't let it fall into union hands.

So the gold and silver were going with them. So here's where the mystery actually begins, because the decision to abandon Richmond came so fast, the treasure was packed up and loaded in a frantic rush. There were gold coins, gold ingots, silver bricks, and Mexican silver dollars. It was quickly stuffed into sacks and boxes and kegs. And in all that chaos, no one made a careful count

of exactly how much was there. That single fact that nobody nailed down the number, at the start is the crack that the entire legend would eventually pour through. In the years to come, estimates of what was on that train would run absolutely wild. Some said a few hundred thousand dollars, others would insist it was as much as $13 million. That gap between the low guess and the high one is the whole mystery in a nutshell. Whatever the actual amount, the treasure needed protection. And the man in charge of Richmond's defenses had almost no one to spare. So, the job fell to a group of teenagers.

As soon as the cabinet meeting broke up, Navy Secretary Mallory sent a message to a man named Captain William H. Parker. Parker was the superintendent of the Confederate Naval Academy, and Mallory's order was simple. Have your core of midshipmen at the train depot by 6 o'clock that evening. These were the cadets of the Confederate Naval Academy, about 60 boys ranging in age from just 14 to 18 years old. They'd been training aboard a school ship called the Patrick Henry, anchored in the James River, and in the last desperate year of the war, they'd done more actual fighting than studying. And on that particular Sunday, they were the best option left. The regular army was either out at the front lines with

Lee or falling apart, with soldiers deserting by the day. There was no spare unit of trained soldiers just sitting around the capital, but the midshipmen were right there, and they were disciplined. But that discipline was about to be put to the test. The scene at the Richmond Train Depot that night was pure chaos, and we know exactly what it looked like because Captain Parker wrote about it in his memoirs years later. As the government prepared to evacuate, the city was coming apart. Confederate officials were destroying their own supplies so the union couldn't use them, and that included the liquor stores. Parker described whiskey literally running in the gutters and crowds of people suddenly appearing out of nowhere to loot the

city and get drunk on it. This is how Parker described it. He wrote, quote, the screams and yells of the drunken demons in the streets, and the fires which were now breaking out in every direction made it seem as though hell itself had broken loose, end quote. And in the middle of all that were these 60 teenage boys guarding a train full of gold. When the mob started turning its attention toward the treasure, Parker had the midshipmen fixed bayonets and clear the area around the train. train. The boys held the line. The crowd backed off, and around 8 p.m., the overloaded train finally pulled out of the station. It was the last train to leave Richmond before the city fell, and so began one of the strangest journeys in American history. For the next month, Captain Parker

and his teenage guard hauled this treasure across the collapsing Confederacy, by train when they could, by wagon when they couldn't. They went from Richmond to Danville, Virginia. then down to North Carolina, to Greensboro and Charlotte, then into South Carolina. For part of the journey, they were also escorting Jefferson Davis's wife, Verena Davis, and her young children. At one point, the roads were so bad that Mrs. Davis had to climb out of a stuck wagon and walk five miles through mud with her baby in her arms. And there's another important detail to keep in mind. The treasure was being spent along the way. At various stops, money was paid out, some to soldiers, some for supplies. So whatever the train started with,

it was getting lighter with every single mile. Through all of it, Captain Parker refused to let go of whatever was left. Even after he heard the news that General Lee had surrendered at Appomattox, even after people told him the war was over and he should just divide the money up before the union got it, Parker said, no. He'd been entrusted with this treasure, and he was going to deliver it to President Davis personally, or die, guarding it. He finally caught up with Davis's fleeing party in Abbeyville, South Carolina at the end of April. There, he handed the treasure over to a Confederate official named McHajah Clark and a cavalry general named Basil Duke. His mission was complete, and on Mallory's orders, the Corps of Midshipmen was disbanded. After a month of

guarding a fortune across a dying nation, the boys simply scattered and went home. The treasure and the president continued south, and that's where the trail really starts to get murky. By early May, Jefferson Davis was a man on the run, riding south through Georgia with a shrinking band of followers. At a town called Washington, Georgia, he split off from the slower wagons and pushed ahead with a small escort, heading for the Florida border, and he hoped eventual escape. He made it as far as a tiny place called Irwinville, Georgia. Just before dawn on May 10, 1865, Union cavalry from the 4th, Michigan, surrounded his camp and closed in. The president of the Confederacy was captured.

And when those Union soldiers tore through the camp, searching the man who was supposed to be carrying the wealth of an entire nation, here's what they found on him. A few dollars. The fortune was gone, but the hunt for it was only just beginning. Let's pick up where we left off. On May 10, 1865, Jefferson Davis was captured in the Georgia Pine Woods more than a month after fleeing Richmond with the Confederate Treasury. And he had almost nothing on him.

In fact, the entire group he was traveling with had only about $8,000 in hard money between them. The entire fortune of the Confederate States of America had come down to the contents of a few saddlebags. There's a famous footnote to that capture. the Northern press gleefully reported that Davis had tried to escape, disguised in women's clothing. Davis and Verena always disputed it, insisting he'd grabbed her shawl against the cold and the rain. Historians have argued about it ever since, but one thing was clear. Almost overnight, the story of Davis's capture had grown into something bigger and

stranger than anyone could have imagined. And to understand how he ended up surrounded in that Georgia field in the first place, we have to back up a few weeks because Davis was being chased for two very different reasons, for what he'd supposedly done and for what he was supposedly carrying. Less than a month earlier on April 14th, President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated, and the North was out for blood. Suspicion immediately fell on the Confederate leadership, and the new president, Andrew Johnson, issued a proclamation accusing Jefferson Davis

of being part of the plot to kill Lincoln. Johnson put a bounty on Davis's head. $100,000. In today's money, that's around $2 million. There was just one problem. The accusation wasn't true. Davis had nothing to do with Lincoln's assassination, and the charge was never proven.

When Davis was later shown the reward poster accusing him, he reportedly said of the man who issued it, quote, the miserable scoundrel who issued that proclamation knew better than these men that it was false. The second manhunt was about the gold, and this is the heart of our story. As Davis fled south, the U.S. War Department sent out urgent wires to union commanders across the south, telling them to intercept the fleeing rebel leaders and their, quote, plunder.

According to those messages, the rebel chiefs were carrying somewhere between six and fifteen million dollars in gold and silver. But one figure stuck, the one that would echo throughout history, $13 million. In today's money, that would be over $260 million, more than a quarter of a billion dollars, supposedly being hauled around the back roads of Georgia in a few wagons. So now there were two staggering incentives layered right on top of each other, a six-figure bounty for the most wanted man in America, and a rumor of a treasure worth hundreds of millions in today's money, just sitting out there for the taking. The effect was exactly what you'd expect. It turned the entire collapsing South into a treasure hunt. You had union troops scouring the

countryside. You had Confederate soldiers who'd just surrendered and been sent home, who figured that gold was owed to them as much as anyone, and you had straight up bandits and deserters, drawn like moths to the rumor of easy riches. And while everyone was scrambling after the gold, the hunt for Davis himself had already turned into something out of a spy novel. In the weeks before his capture, as Davis fled south, the union had quietly slipped its own men into his escort. According to historians who've traced this, around 20 union cavalrymen detached from an Ohio regiment, disguised themselves as Confederate soldiers, and rode along with Davis' own group. They tracked his movements and fed reports back to their commanders. So for much of his flight

south, the most wanted man in America had the enemy riding beside him and never knew it. And here's the irony that tells you just how deep undercover they were. Those union spies got handed Confederate pay right along with everyone else, drawing wages from the very treasury they were helping to hunt. After Davis was captured, some of them turned around and collected a share of the reward, too. But Davis was only ever half the prize. The other half was the gold. And in at least one case, the hunters found a big piece of it.

Well, sort of. When the Treasury was taken from Richmond, it wasn't traveling alone. On the same train was a separate stash, the gold and silver reserves of several private Richmond banks, worth around $450,000. That's roughly $9 million today. This money was never the Confederate governments. It belonged to the banks, but it was traveling under the same guard, and it ended up stored in a vault in Washington, Georgia. After the Confederacy collapsed, Union forces took control of that bank gold. and started moving it north under armed guard.

And on the night of May 24, 1865, near a place called Chenalt Plantation in Lincoln County, Georgia, the wagon train carrying it was ambushed. It was a robbery straight out of a western, a gang of roughly two dozen horsemen swept into the camp in the dead of night, scattered the guards, and broke open the kegs of coins. According to accounts of the raid,

the robbers were so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of gold and silver, that they were stuffing coins into everything they had, including their pant legs, before riding off into the dark. They got away with around $251,000. That's more than $5 million in today's money, and that is the seed of countless buried treasure legends. To this day, their stories around Lincoln County of riders so loaded down with stolen coins that they hid caches under fence posts and in creek beds, planning to come back for them later. The scramble to get that money back turned into its own kind of chaos. A former Confederate general named Edward Porter Alexander, one of Robert E. Lee's most respected officers, pulled together a posse of ex-soldiers and local

citizens to track down the robbers and recover the bank money. And at first, it worked. They followed the trail and started making arrests. Then the posse hit a wall because the local men in the search party started recognizing the robbers. They were their own neighbors, and in some cases, probably their own relatives. Both sides drew their guns, and the whole thing nearly turned into a shootout right there in the Georgia countryside. Alexander had no choice but to back down. He let the thieves go on nothing more than their word that they'd return the money the next day. Some of it would eventually be recovered, but roughly $140,000 of Richmond bank gold was never officially accounted for. In today's dollars, that's about $2.9 million that simply vanished into the Georgia

countryside and became one more thread in the legend. But there's a part of the story that the treasure hunting legends tend to skip, because the hunt for that money got really ugly. A few months after the robbery, a union general named Edward Wilde came to Washington, Georgia. working for the Freedmen's Bureau, the federal agency set up to help people freed from slavery. But Wilde became convinced that the Chennaults, the family who owned the plantation where the wagons had been ambushed, had been involved in the raid, or at least knew where the money had gone. To get them to talk, Wilde had members of the Chenalt family strung up by their thumbs. The women of the household were searched.

It was brutal, humiliating, and produced absolutely nothing. Wilde never found the gold. In fact, his tactics were so over the line that the U.S. Army itself arrested him and let the Chennaults go. It was becoming a pattern. The dream of Confederate gold made people do desperate, even cruel things. And it kept coming up empty. That was the Richmond Bank gold. But the Confederate treasury itself, the government's own money, had one more piece that genuinely disappeared. and this one really was stolen. In the final days, as the government dissolved before Davis was ever captured, his officials made one last desperate gamble. They took $86,000 in gold, about $1.75 million in today's money,

and handed it to a Navy paymaster named James Semple. His mission smuggle the gold out of the country all the way to England to fund a possible revival of the Confederacy. It never got there. According to the historians, Wesley Millett and Gerald White, who tracked this money down, Semple and his accomplices just flat out stole it and split it up. And Semple's share funded a life that sounds like a soap opera. He reportedly spent part of it on a love affair with Julia Gardner Tyler, the widow of former U.S. President John Tyler. Another portion went towards a harebrained scheme to try to provoke a war between the United States and Britain.

So that's $86,000 in Confederate gold gone, not buried in a field, just pocketed. And from there, the trail kept breaking into smaller and smaller pieces scattered across the south. Part of Davis's baggage and remaining valuables, traveling south with a separate party, made it all the way down to Florida. There, after the news of his capture caught up with them, the bags were buried in the dead of night at a plantation owned by a Davis ally. Years later, the man who'd buried them as a young boy described the job. He and one companion hid the chests at midnight in the cow stable, and within a few hours the two of them had erased every trace of the digging. But even that didn't stay buried.

One of the men from the wagon train tipped off union officers about the hidden trunks. A union captain rode out to the plantation, got a polite run around from the family, and eventually tracked the trunks down and hauled them away. To this day, the accounts disagree about what was actually inside, whether there was real gold in them, or whether it had already been moved somewhere else. But a small handful of men knew exactly what had happened to that treasure, where nearly every coin had gone. They'd carried it, counted it, and spent it themselves. And they knew the truth was nothing like the legend.

Here's the story the country believed by the end of 18. That April, a fortunate in gold and silver was loaded onto a train and hauled out of Richmond. A month later, Jefferson Davis was run down in a Georgia pine forest with almost nothing on him. And the treasure itself seemed to have scattered across the south, robbed at the Chenalt plantation, pocketed by the Navy Paymaster James Semple, buried in the fields of Florida. For the next 160 years, that story sent treasure hunters digging across half the country. and every one of them started from the same assumption that there was a fortune out there to find.

But I'm going to do something none of them did, something the legend never does. Instead of digging for the treasure, I'm going to follow the money. The man Jefferson Davis appointed as his acting treasurer in those final days, McCaja Clark, kept records of where the money went. And in the decades that followed, historians, most importantly a Georgia scholar named Otis Ashmore, trace the Treasury's path coin by coin. And the moment you do, the great mystery, starts to fall apart in your hands. Based on those records, let's start with the most important number of all, how much was actually on that train. Remember, the legend says up to $13 million, that's $260 million in today's money,

but the real figure, according to the people who handled it, was somewhere around $327,000 in gold and silver when it left Richmond. In today's money, that's about $6.5 million. Now, that is a lot of money, but it's not $260 million. The mythical fortune was nearly 40 times bigger than the real one. The treasure was inflated by the legend before the train even got out of Virginia, and it gets even more revealing. That count came near the start of the journey, and from there, the number only got smaller because the money was being spent, and every dollar of it was written down. A big payroll went to one of the Confederate armies that hadn't yet surrendered.

Money went to buy food and supplies for the fleeing party, and in one telling episode, the unpaid Confederate cavalry guarding the treasurer demanded their back wages, so the soldiers were paid out of the treasury, about $26 each. $26, that's around $530 in today's money. These were the men supposedly guarding a quarter billion, dollar fortune, and they walked away with the modern equivalent of a few hundred bucks a piece. That alone tells you how little was actually there. Add it all up, the payrolls, the supplies, the soldiers pay, the bank gold that was never the governments in the first place, the chunk

that Semple stole, and the treasury very nearly balances out. Almost all of it was spent or paid out in ways you can actually trace right out in the open, which brings us to the real conspiracy at the center of this story, not a hidden treasure, but a hidden lie. And that points to the one question the legend never asks, where that $13 million even came from. It didn't come from the treasury because the treasury never held anything close to that. The best evidence is that the U.S. War Department simply inflated the number. Historians think the government pumped up the size of the missing fortune on purpose to light a fire under its own troops. As one accountant, puts it, that bloated figure was meant to spur the Union soldiers on as they chased the fleeing

Confederates. And it was brutally effective. If you tell every soldier and every civilian in the South that there are millions in gold out there for the taking, you've just turned the entire region into your search party. The bounty on Davis got people hunting the man. The phantom fortune got people hunting his money. And the bigger the number, the harder everyone looked. The government didn't lose a As far as we can tell, it invented one to catch a man. And the people who'd actually carried the treasure knew it was nonsense from the very beginning. McHagia Clark, the acting treasurer, watched the legend balloon in real time. He later wrote about coming back through the South after the collapse and hearing the wild rumors

everywhere he went. People just could not accept that, in his words, $5 to $15 million could not vanish in the air in a day. But that's exactly the point. It didn't vanish. There was never that much to begin with. Clark knew the real figure. He'd helped count it and pay it out. He knew the soldiers jingling silver dollars on the roads

were carrying the actual remains of the Confederate treasury, not a hidden fortune. But the last scraps of a broke government. Nobody wanted to hear it. The legend was just so much better than the truth. And I think that's the real reason this myth has survived for 160 years, and there are three things, keeping it alive. The first is that the government's own inflated number gave it official weight. When the War Department itself says millions are

missing, that's not a campfire story. That's the United States government telling you a fortune is out there. The second is simpler. It's gold. Buried treasure is one of the most powerful fantasies humans have. The idea that a fortune is sitting out there, and that you might be the one to find it, is almost impossible to let go of. And the third reason is the hardest one. For a defeated South, a story about lost treasure was a far more romantic thing to pass down than the truth. The truth was that the Confederate government ended its life flat, broke, that its grand cause came down to a few hundred thousand dollars in coins spent paying off unpaid soldiers and buying groceries on the run. There's no glory in that.

Consider what happened in those final days in the town square of Washington, Georgia. Confederate officials built a bonfire and burned somewhere between $600 and $700 million in Confederate paper money. That sounds staggering until you remember that with the Confederacy dead, its paper money was worth nothing. The only real wealth had ever been the gold and silver, and there had never been much of it. So burning the paper wasn't destroying a fortune. it was admitting there wasn't one. And a buried treasure guarded by brave boys and hidden from the enemy made a far better story than a bankrupt government collapsing under the weight of a war

it had fought to preserve slavery. And here's a detail that shows the suspicion ran in every direction. As early as 1881, the famous Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston gave an interview suggesting that the treasure had been stolen, that Confederate officials, maybe even Davis himself, had pocketed it. So you had northerners convinced the rebels buried millions, and Southerners convinced their own leaders stole it. Everybody believed in the fortune.

Nobody could accept that it had simply been small and spent. Now, to be fair, it's not all accounted for. There are a few genuine loose ends, and I want to give them their due as well. There's a story that a batch of Mexican silver worth making, $156,000 at the time, that's around $3 million today, was left behind and possibly buried near Danville, Virginia, and never recovered. Treasure hunters claim their equipment has detected metal underground there, though the city has never allowed them to dig. Then there's the roughly $140,000 in Richmond Bank Gold from the Chenalt raid that was never officially recovered.

And here's a detail that captures this whole story in miniature. The portion of that bank gold that was clawed back got tied up in federal court for 28 years. When it was finally settled in 1893, the banks got back less than $17,000 of it. Nobody got rich. It just ground through the courts for decades. There's also a chest of jewelry donated to the Confederate cause that disappeared while in union custody, not Confederate. And there are those buried trunks down in Florida. So yes, some real money went missing. I'm not going to tell you every dollar is perfectly tied up with a bow, but look at the scale of it. The genuine loose ends add up to maybe a few hundred thousand dollars, scattered across multiple states. Even being generous, you're talking about a fraction of the legend. Something was buried out there. It was just never the fortune the country was promised. And that brings us all the way back to two men in a boat on Lake Michigan. Kevin Dykstra and Frederick Monroe spent years chasing that boxcar of Confederate gold. Remember, the whole theory traced back to one man, George Alexander Abbott, the Muskegon banker

who'd confessed on his deathbed that he'd stolen a fortune in Confederate gold and sent it to the bottom of the lake. And there was one detail that gave that story real staying power. The union officer whose men captured Jefferson Davis in Georgia, a colonel named Robert Minty, turned out to be Abbott's brother-in-law. After the war, Minty was court-martialed and went to work on the railroads. On paper, he was the perfect person to spirit a boxcar of Confederate gold all the way up to Michigan. And Dykstra and Monroe did find things down in that lake, including a sunken box car, but it turned out to be full of coal. Another time they found what they believed was a treasure ship's safe, which experts identified as a galley cook stove. Their search got turned into a history channel series, but the gold itself has never surfaced. After 160 years of searching, the great Confederate fortune has never been found, for the simplest reason imaginable. The fortune that the legend describes was never there to find. So here's my question for you. Do you think there's still real Confederate gold

buried out there somewhere waiting for the right person to dig it up? Or do you think the whole fortune was just a number the government made up to catch a fleeing president. Let me know in the comments wherever you're listening. I'd love to hear your thoughts. For me, here's where this story lands. It's just so tempting to make this a treasure story, to make it about box cars and buried caches and X marks the spot. But I don't think the treasure was really ever the story. The government didn't lose a fortune. It invented one. And then a defeated nation found it easier to believe in buried gold than to believe it had simply gone broke. The people who actually knew the truth

were telling it the whole time. Captain Parker and his teenage midshipmen, who guarded the real treasure with their lives, McKaja Clark, who counted it and wrote down where every coin went. They knew there was no hidden hoard. They knew the Confederacy died with its last silver dollars jingling in the pockets of unpaid soldiers

walking home from a lost war. We spent a century and a half searching the ground for a fortune. The real answer was never in the ground. It was in the ledger the whole time. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theory's Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies, and criminal acts. Conspiracy theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crimehouse original, powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you

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Conspiracy Theory's Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a Crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theory's Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pritzowski, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Roman DiAngelo, and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening. I'm Lindsay Cormack, host of Government That Doesn't Suck with Greg Jackson from History That Doesn't Suck, a narrative history podcast about the American institutions that you'll never

look at the same way again. Listen to and follow Government That Doesn't Suck, available now wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, The First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.