Walking on Water

Galilee, Saskatchewan

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Somewhere in southern Saskatchewan there is a buried treasure worth as much as $500,000.  If we find it, we will split the proceeds.

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I encountered the story of a lost fortune in my late father’s notes.  Dad collected historical records and photographs from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries in southern Saskatchewan.  Among his unfinished research is a tale about a strongbox of silver, gold and US currency brought to Saskatchewan by Sitting Bull after the Battle of the Little Big Horn, in 1876.   

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Sitting Bull was chief of the Lakota-Sioux people in what is now South Dakota and Montana during the Great Sioux Wars of the late 19^th century.  In 1876, Sitting Bull and his warriors defeated the American army, at The Battle of the Little Big Horn. 

At the time of the battle, Custer’s 7th Cavalry was carrying an army payroll, consisting of silver, gold and banknotes, which fell into the hands of Sitting Bull.

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The band travelled north through the Black Hills, crossed the Missouri River and entered Canada near Wood Mountain.  The band was welcomed by Canadian authorities and resettled near Old Wives Lake.

Sitting Bull and his people stayed in Canada for four years.  When they went back to the US in 1881 to face trial, the treasure didn’t go with them.

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Battle of the Little Bighorn – Charles Marion Russell

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The Wood Mountain area has very little wood and no mountains.

It is so named because there was once an isolated bluff of poplar trees on the otherwise desolate prairie. Métis people living there cut and piled the poplar for building material and firewood.  The Métis named the location Montaigne de Bois, mountain of wood.

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Dad heard the story of Sitting Bull’s treasure from a man named Fred Gomersall, a pioneer rancher from the Wood Mountain area.  During an interview with Dad, Fred relayed his story about the lost treasure.

“There was once a circle of boulders, about 100’ across, south of Galilee.  The boulders must have been hauled from some distance, as there were no others like them in the immediate vicinity.”

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Fred had seen the boulder circle as a young man. He and others assumed it was a teepee ring or some other Native American edifice. 

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The circle of boulders, and many other Native American artefacts, disappeared in the 1950s and 1960s to make way for farming enterprises. The exact location of the boulder circle Fred had seen faded to oblivion.

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When the story of Sitting Bull’s treasure emerged, Fred speculated that perhaps the unique boulders were placed by Indians to mark the location where the treasure was buried. 

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When Dad interviewed him in the 1980s, Fred was an elderly man.  He remained convinced that the circle of stones was a marker of significance.  Fred relayed everything he could remember about the location of the boulder circle to Dad.

“There was a trail from the water tank east of Galilee that went south across the hills. The circle of rocks was on that trail.”   

Over the years, Fred and others searched the area where they roughly remembered the stone circle being.  They found a few arrowheads, but no treasure.

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The Sea of Galilee in Israel (left) and Old Wives Lake in Saskatchewan (right) bear remarkable similarities.

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There is a whole lot of Saskatchewan out there.  Even though Fred narrowed it down some, the location of the boulder circle and the potential treasure could be anywhere in a fifty-mile radius of the now extinct town of Galilee.

But what do you say, should we give it a try? The chances of us finding Sitting Bull’s treasure are remote but the rewards could be great. 

Let’s do some digging. It will be fun to try, even if our odds are about the same as our chances of …

… Walking on Water.

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Conference among Sitting Bull and his People, and Jean Louis Legaré (Indian Agent), near Wood Mountain in 1881, just before he retuned to the US.

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