This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
How do you think squirrels remember where they buried all those acorns? They don't, as Thomas Kelly of East Dubuque could tell you. At least if they're no smarter than humans.
Kelly was an early arrival in East Dubuque, 1832. He had come down from Canada after hearing of the fortune to be made mining the region's lead.
The rich lead ore around Dubuque and nearby Galena lay near the surface in small veins. Each miner mined his own claim and kept his finds to himself. Every so often, Kelly, like the others, would load his ore on a barge and float it down to St. Louis, then sell both the ore and the barge and return to start over.
There were rumors around Galena that Thomas Kelly had struck a particularly rich vein, but he kept to himself. He refused to deposit his money in a bank—everyone would know. Instead, he turned his profit into gold coins which he wore in a belt around his waist.
That, in turn, made him suspect that people were following him to beat him up and take his money, a reasonable suspicion since he went everywhere dressed like a miner wearing a gold belt. Eventually he shot a man he was certain had been pursuing him. He was arrested and confined to an asylum.
In 1854 Kelly escaped and headed back to Dubuque. Here, he became more secretive than ever, living on the bluff that now bears his name. He died on his bluff on May 15th, 1867, leaving only a note which read "If you want my gold—you can look for it."
No one put much stock in the note until 1900, when two boys playing on the bluff found an iron chest in a shallow hole. They took it to Elizabeth Kelly, the miner's sister. When the lock was broken, the chest was found to contain ten thousand dollars in gold coins.
Then, another boy found $1,200 in a tin can on the bluff, and a man discovered $1,800 in second can. At that point, someone remembered that Kelly before his death had had a blacksmith construct a much larger chest than the one the boys found. It's still out there with the bulk of Kelly's fortune in it. If you can put yourself in the mind of a paranoid, misanthropic Irish lead miner, it's there on the bluff for the finding.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
