A Mad Hunt for Civil War Treasure

Did the FBI steal the gold of dents run?

- By Chris Heath

The FBI was excited. That much seemed evident from the affidavit the agency lodged on March 9, 2018, asking a court for permission to dig up a Pennsylvania hillside in search of Civil War gold.

The affidavit related a story from a document titled The Lost Gold Ingot Treasure, which had been found in the archives at the Military History Institute, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The tale, in its barest bones, was this: In June 1863, a caravan of Union soldiers transporting a shipment of gold through the mountains became lost. Three men were sent to get help and eventually one returned with a rescue party, which located the group's abandoned wagons but no men, no gold. Teams from the Pinkerton detective agency scoured the hills. In 1865, two and a half-buried ingots were found, and, lat the bones of three to five human skeletons. The rest of the gold remains missing.

The affidavit also laid out how this story had come to the FBI's attention. A treasure hunter named Dennis Parada had heard folklore alluding to the lost gold since he was a child, and had spent over forty years searching for it. Now he and a team including his son, Kem, believed they had finally located it, in the inaccessible recesses of a turtle-shaped cave near the community of Dents Run. FBI agents had visited the site twice and ordered geophysical surveys that had detected something underground-something with a density of 19.5g/cm³ (the density of gold) and consistent with a mass having a weight of approximately 8% to 9 tons.

In other words, the FBI believed it knew where an enormous hoard of gold was, and as soon as they could get their hands on a warrant, federal agents were coming to get it.