Crivitz residents live in the shadow of an offensively-named hill and a legendary buried treasure

CRIVITZ - Randy Polzin is sitting on a treasure trove.

Either that or one of his neighbors is.

Or, possibly none of them are and the whole thing is just one big farce. That’s the problem with legends. You just never really know.

This is a legend of lost treasure, and whether it’s true or not, it’s as much a part of the history and culture of this tiny Marinette County village as its lumbermill heritage and its funny frog-croak of a name.

Four powder kegs full of gold and silver are buried somewhere in Randy Polzin’s neighborhood, so the story goes, just waiting for some developer to come along and start to put in a septic system in just the right spot.

“Mostly everybody in Crivitz seems to have heard of the story,” said Polzin, who has owned his land since 1983 and been living on it since 2006. “Whether it’s from word of mouth, their great-grandparents, whatever, I’m not sure.”

Polzin and his son, Bradley, have been over the property with a metal detector dozens of times, but it's hard to thoroughly search 10 acres, he said.

"This gold could be buried 5 or 6 feet deep, and these detectors are not going to pick that up anyway,” he said.

Or it could be higher up the hill. Or on one of the other 30 acres of hilltop property owned by five or six other families. Or it could have been found years ago. Or it could never existed in the first place.

It’s the famous Lost Treasure of — uh-oh. And here’s where we get into trouble. See, the story centers around a hill just south of the village that was named centuries ago, centuries before certain words were even considered offensive.

The name of the hill is a racial epithet that shows up on early maps, a hill that was offensively named at least 100 years before Crivitz even became Crivitz back in the 1880s.

Most Crivitz folks nowadays, when talking to a stranger about the lost treasure and the hill, kind of look down at the ground uncomfortably and poke at the snow with the toe of one boot and come up with various inoffensive euphemisms for the name of the hill.

John Deschane, curator of the Crivitz Museum, boldly calls it “the hill that seriously needs renaming.”

More from Paul Srubas:You can pan for gold in Wisconsin. Can you strike it rich?

More from Paul Srubas:Neil LaFave was murdered 48 years ago. His family wants the Suamico Boat Landing renamed for him

The hill's name matters somewhat, because the name might be a clue as to which version of the legend is true.

One written version says a large black man, name lost to history, was killed in an American Indian raid on his trading post on the hill along the Peshtigo River. There is no mention of treasure.

Another version floating around says it was an enormous red-haired, red-bearded trapper, known today only as “Red Beard,” who lost his treasure and his life on the hill that day.

Still another says the trading post was owned by Canadian Frenchmen, whom the Indian raiders buried along with their money because the Indians were afraid the money was haunted by its owners’ spirits.

The name of the hill, which shows up in all three versions, is practically the only reliably-recorded fact of the legend. The Crivitz Museum has a map from the 1830s with the place name identified.

But the written accounts of the legend itself are not so old. All are second- or third-hand tales, tantalizingly devoid of sources, and presenting only the roughest timeline of when any of this was supposed to have happened.

The saga of Red Beard

The Red Beard version seems the best known, possibly because it is the most recent: It appeared in a 1917 newspaper, the Wausaukee Independent, and spells out the greatest details.

But it presents them in a wildly dramatic, highly unbelievable fashion.

“Barrels of Gold and Silver Lost For Over One Hundred Years Await the Fortunate Searcher Near Crivitz,” the newspaper headline screams. “The Thrilling Narrative of ‘Red-Beard,’ the Gaint Fur Trader…”

Yes. The headline says “Gaint.” Spell-check in 1917 still had some bugs.

Anyway, this gaint fur trader “was a man of huge stature, who presented a striking appearance because of his mat of long red hair and immense, sweeping red beard,” whose “fame still lingers in the folk lore of the north and whose deeds of prowess the few surviving pioneers love to recount.”

No word on any of his other deeds of prowess. But according to the Independent, back in “the infancy of the great republic,” Red Beard and an unnamed black  assistant opened a trading post at the top of the hill overlooking the Peshtigo River. He and his companion would make seasonal trips to Green Bay where they would sell the furs they had collected and pick up fresh supplies of food, ammunition and trading stock, then head back into the northern wilderness.

The business thrived, allowing Red Beard to squirrel away “a precious hoard” — 3½ powder kegs of silver and nearly a keg of gold. That’s a remarkably precise accounting by a newspaper 130 years after the fact, for a treasure that has never been found. The newspaper doesn’t say where it came up with those numbers.

In any case, Red Beard’s Green Bay competitors grew jealous of him, persuaded his American Indian fur-suppliers that he had been cheating them, and convinced them to take revenge. But that crafty Red Beard was warned, and he managed to bury his treasure before the attack.

Red Beard and his assistant both were killed, and the trading post and stockade were burned to the ground.

“Many attempts were made by the early settlers to locate this lost wealth,” the newspaper says. In 1875, “a party of well-known men from Menominee and Marinette” set off to search. They discovered the remains of the trading post, and they found Red Beard’s skeleton, “the remains of the immense beard and matted red hair still clinging to the mouldering skull,” but they never found the treasure.

“No trace of it has ever been discovered,” the article intones dramatically.

A tamer tale

A much older account — told in prose decidedly less purple — appeared in a book about the history of Menominee County, Michigan. Published in 1876 as part of the celebration of the United States’ 100th birthday, the book written by the Honorable E.S. Ingalls casts a wide geographic net and includes history of Marinette and Oconto counties, and so it touches upon the story of Red Beard and the lost treasure.

Except that it makes no mention of Red Beard nor of the lost treasure. It does tell the story of a black trader, “accompanied by a Canadian voyageur in his employment,” both of whom were killed by a party of Indians from Sturgeon Bay.

The American Indians came across the bay to trade with him, but he had given them credit in previous visits, and he insisted on being paid what he was owed, according to Ingalls. Paying off the debt used up all of their resources, and the trader refused to extend them further credit, Ingalls says. Somehow, the American Indians construed this as dishonest, and they attacked and killed the trader and his voyageur friend and took the supplies they wanted, Ingalls reports.

He attributes all this to “traditionary lore.” The existence of the offensively-named hill is “the only proof we have to support it,” he says.

If there was a treasure, the "traditionary lore" failed to inform Ingalls of it, or he didn’t think it worth mentioning.

A third version of the tale shows up in the diary of Louisa Bartels. As a diarist and as the wife of the founder of Crivitz, she may seem to have extraordinary credibility, but the tale wasn’t really a day-in-the-life kind of diary entry. She wrote it a good 100 years after the event supposedly happened. Nor does she provide a source for her information. She also places the hill on the wrong side of Crivitz. The hill was named because of the dark complexions of the Canadian Frenchmen who built the trading post there, she says.

In her version, those traders were killed by American Indians, but she offers no explanation why. The Indians buried them along with their money, which they were afraid to take because they feared it was haunted by the traders’ spirits, she says.

So, three versions of a story, all taking place on the same hill, all involving death by American Indian raid. Two versions involve a black man and one involves dark Frenchmen. And two versions involve buried treasure – or, at least, buried money.

And yes, the story still enjoys life and vitality by way of “traditionary lore,” but spoken versions today seem suspiciously derivative of the written accounts.

“All I know is, a lot of people up here know the story,” Polzin said.

More than just “up here.” A website called TreasureNet, “The Original Treasure Hunting Website,” with more than 135,000 members worldwide, had a lively discussion 10 years ago about the legend in little ol' Crivitz. The person initiating the discussion included a link to the Wisconsin Historical Society’s reprint of the Wausaukee Independent's article.

“This story seems too ‘storyfied,’” one poster wrote. “Most of the legends sort of smell the same, if you know what I mean.”

Modern treasure hunters

Many members of the Wisconsin-Michigan Prospectors club are familiar with the legend, said club president Ron Smith, who owns a prospecting and treasure-hunting supply store in Wausaukee.

“There’s got to be something to the story,” Smith said. “Sometimes it’s just kind of a legend, and you don’t really know for sure, but it’s like a family story: You study into it and find out that sometimes, after years of telling the story, the story changes.”

Some aspects of the legend just seem too legendary, he said.

“Even in Europe, the legends always seem to have a big red-headed, bearded guy,” Smith said. “He just works his way into the story.

“Still, you never really know. You’ve got to look at all the versions. Stories like this perpetuate. But some of them are true.”

Smith said he’d love to have a crack at the properties on the hill himself, and other members of his club have talked about trying to get permission to search. The trick would be to at least find where the trading post and stockade were, because then the search for treasure could move outward from there.

But on the other hand, the entire hill has probably been pretty picked over, he said. Somebody by now surely would have come across the square nails or some other sign of the trading post’s location, he said.

Deschane spoke of a 93-year-old woman he knew who died just a few years ago who grew up on a section of the hill.

“She said she dug holes all over her property when she was a girl,” Deschane said.

Polzin said he and his son used a metal detector to pretty thoroughly pick over the part of his property along the river and the old American Indian trail that runs through his land. All they ever found were copper knives and arrowheads, along with the usual assortment of metal garbage: bottle caps and pennies and things.

Polzin has a running gag with his cousin, who also owns land on the hill.

“He always jokes that I secretly found it, and I always joke that he did,” Polzin said.

About two years ago, a pair of metal-detector hobbyists from the Marinette-Menominee area came down asking for permission to snoop around. Polzin and some neighbors gave them permission. All they ever came up with of interest was a metal medallion, about the size of a quarter, stamped “Basilique de Ste. Anne de Beaupre” – a commemorative medal for the St. Anne basilica in Quebec.

Polzin, who is on the Crivitz museum board, talked the two treasure hunters into donating the medallion, which now is in the museum collection.

“I researched it, and it’s probably a lot later than what we’re looking at with Red Beard. The medallion is like, maybe 1900.”

If there ever was treasure, Polzin figures it’s long gone.

Deschane's doubts extend much further. If a black man were merely an assistant to a gigantic man with a gigantic red beard, Deschane reasoned, why would an entire hill be named for the black man? More likely, the black man owned the trading post, and there never was any red-haired man associated with the real story, he said.

And many other details of the story could be false.

That there was a black fur trader who died on the hill — that much Deschane accepts.

But the treasure? Likely just nonsense, the stuff of legend, he suggests.

“Fur trading just wasn’t that profitable of a business,” Deschane said. “The American Fur and the Hudson Bay Company made money, but for the guys that were out there actually doing it, it just wasn’t profitable enough to generate barrels of gold and silver.

“And why would someone continue living up here and doing that when they already had barrels of gold and silver?” he asked.

Contact Paul Srubas at 920-265-3087 or psrubas@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @PGpaulsrubas.

More:There's gold in them thar hills, but you're better off playing the lottery, prospector says