The Buried Gold of Dungeness and the Woman Ansel White Left Behind
Neighbors near Dungeness take up divining rods and dig out stumps hunting a dead man's fortune — and turn up instead the fifty-year-old story of the woman he ruined.
Port Townsend, May 25. — Special. Some of the old people near Dungeness are becoming so interested in locating the hiding place of Ansel White's money, said to be about there, that they have resorted to using the magic divining wand. Others are taking a more sensible course and are digging up stumps in hopes of finding the treasure.
In his youth Ansel White, who at his death was reputed heir to a large estate, was of a romantic turn of mind. He and another young man eloped from Sitka with two women. The one who accompanied White was a married woman, and the other was a girl of good family. The couples went out to Illinois and separated. White and the woman went on to Missouri, to escape the pursuit of a wronged husband. There White tired of his toy and abandoned her. That occurred over fifty years ago.
The woman eventually returned to Sitka, but the reconciliation with her husband never came about. She lives near Sitka now, an old woman, gradually receding down the shady side of seventy years, whose life in early womanhood was blasted by listening to the honeyed words of the gay deceiver Ansel White, whose present earthly resting place is in a pretty flower-decked cemetery near Dungeness.
“She lives near Sitka now, an old woman, gradually receding down the shady side of seventy years, whose life in early womanhood was blasted by listening to the honeyed words of the gay deceiver.”
Every small town on the peninsula still has a version of this: a rumored cache, a map drawn on a napkin, a neighbor with a metal detector. What the treasure hunt actually disinterred was the ruin of a woman's life in the 1840s, reported here with more sympathy than her seducer ever earned — a reminder that the frontier's romantic legends are usually somebody else's damage.
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