Incredible Metal Detecting Discoveries: True Stories of Amazing Treasures Found by Everyday People by Mark D Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

with my scoop.

    The next signal my metal
detector gave me put a huge smile on my face. It was a solid low
tone. On the particular machine I was using at the time, this solid
low tone was usually a piece of gold.

    I moved a few fish
carcasses aside and put the point of my scoop into the beach sand. I
stood on the back of my scoop and watched it sink. I removed a giant
scoop of sand and scanned the hole with my metal detector. The target
was still in the hole.

    A foul odor filled the
air. It was difficult to describe, but it made me feel uneasy. The
foul odor was coming from the hole I had just made. This didn't make
me feel any better. I contemplated covering the hole and moving on,
but the thought of a gold ring (my precious) kept me digging.

    I pushed my scoop down
into the hole and retrieved yet another pile of beach sand. I scanned
the hole again. There was no signal from the hole. I had my target in
my scoop.

    I dumped the sand and
lightly kicked it across the beach. I ran my detector over the sand
and pinpointed the signal. It was still buried under a few inches of
sand. I lightly spread the sand across the beach with my foot. In the
middle of the sand was a small black disc about the size of an
American quarter.

    This was no gold. It did
not look familiar at all. I reached down and picked it up. It was
still covered in sand. With a quick puff, I blew the sand away. It
was at that precise moment that I realized exactly what I held in my
hand. It was a crematory tag. A chill went down my spine. These are
the tags that are used to identify human ashes when a person is
cremated. It had been tossed into the ocean along with a person's
ashes.

    Here I was standing on the
beach surrounded by thousands of dead fish holding a crematory tag in
my hand. I reached back and threw the crematory tag as far as I could
into the ocean. It skipped across the ocean like a rock until it
finally sank back to the bottom. At this point, I decided to call it
quits and head back home.

    On the way back to my car,
I came across this weird dead fish. It is a Mora Mora or a sunfish.
What a perfect ending for such an odd day of detecting on the beach.

The Dark Treasure of Little Bighorn
    On June 25 th and 26 th close to the Little Bighorn River in Montana, a
brutal battle took place. This battle would be known as “Custer's
Last Stand,” and it went down in the history books as the
single most devastating conflict of the Great Sioux War of 1876.

    George Armstrong Custer
would lead over 700 men into a battlefield that was massively
underestimated. Over 260 of his men were killed and Custer himself
would succumb to this horrible error in judgment.

    An artists
rendition of the horrific battlefield

    A lot has been written
about this conflict, and a lot of people believe the truth has been
covered up by the American government. Since there were so many high
ranking casualties, much of the battle remains a mystery.

    After the battle ended,
army officials tried to examine the battle site. What they found
baffled them. There were no dead Indians to be found anywhere, but
there were plenty of American soldier bodies to be found.

    Dead horses were piled
high in makeshift walls. This was a last ditch effort to offer
protection from the Indian tribes. Many of the American soldier's
bodies could not be identified. Their bodies were stripped of all
their clothing and ritually mutilated. The army scouts were forced to
bury the bodies where they were found.

    Custer's body was
recovered with two gunshot wounds. One shot wound was in his left
chest and the other was in his left temple. Some sources say he died
as a direct result of the chest wound, while others say he shot
himself to prevent capture.

    The entire battle was said
to only last 30 minutes to an hour. Native Indian accounts of the
battle state that the Cheyenne and Sioux warriors simply overwhelmed
the troops in one huge charge.

    Today, the entire site of
the battlefield is a National