After moving Wayne Township sand dunes in search of buried treasure, Bill Westrate has no way of knowing whether the king's ransom of Ransom Dopp ever existed.
But the four-acre hole his "Gold Diggers" created looking for it since the fall of 2000 proved enriching in other educational and entertaining ways for a man science fascinates.
Westrate recapped the saga so far Tuesday evening for the Cass County Historical Society, including twists and turns the tantalizing tale has taken since his first presentation in February 2001.
Dopp came to this area in the 1840s, starting out as a young man as a stagecoach driver on the line between Niles and Kalamazoo.
Within a short time, Dopp became one of the largest farmers in southwest Michigan. Though the extent of his holdings is in dispute, Westrate said it's estimated that at its peak, he owned and farmed 3,000 acres. "With horses, that's a lot of ground. He had about 1,500 acres listed in his estate when he died in 1890. He was considered to be quite a character, an astute businessman and a wealthy farmer."
Ransom did not believe in banks or paper money, neither of which was uncommon in his era.
People kept their money in silver and gold coins.
Yet when he died, no account contained more than $300, according to probate records, fueling suspicions he buried a fortune somewhere.
The Kirk Proshwitz family lives there today. Westrate's brothers own farmland there south of Gage Street.
He took Westrate to a spot the size of a pirate's treasure chest marked off in orange paint where he detected gold, silver and iron around the outside.
With an idea of "knocking off" the hilltop, Westrate happened upon Henry's Dozer Service leaving a job near the townhall. The bulldozer gnawed further into the sandy shoulder. A crowd began to gather.
Janssen confirmed Westrate's assessment. When he arrived in 1928 the area "looked like the Gobi Desert. There was a geological event sometime in the early 1900s that drastically altered this area. I suspect that once the forest was cleared after settlement and the land began to be farmed with (primitive) farming practices that led to the Dust Bowl in other parts of the Midwest, and the soil was sandy anyway, with a lot of wheat raising. Then the wind starts to blow and this dune landscape built up. When I was a kid in the '50s, a lot of it looked like the dunes along Lake Michigan. Not as high, but pure sand, no pebbles. It probably stopped in the 1930s. Ocassionally, thin topsoil layers blew in from the plains."
By the 2000 dig, however, another transformation had taken place.
Janssen's backhoe gave way to the bulldozer, which gave way Sunday afternoon to an excavator at 22 feet. "Bedrock, you can go straight down. Sand, you've got to dig a big, wide hole." Generators lit the pit when darkness fell. They ultimately dug to 45 feet in one six-foot-square area.
At 28 feet the original coarser ground surface studied with rocks, gravel and other "glacial material" that was there before the sand shift was encountered. The first dig petered out after two days, rain turned to snow Monday and winter set in.
Westrate spent the winter of 2000-2001 pondering and deciding whether there was a plausible basis for the rumor.
His brothers and son got on the Internet and researched names of consultants they phoned. "The best advice we got was to test his equipment and find out whether it detects metal."
A month after his first talk, in March 2001, Westrate created his test for the treasure hunter, who set up a transmitter and "pods" which also sent out the signal. "It theoretically sets up a path of this re-emitted frequency between the transmitter and the target which you can detect," he explained. "It also sets up the same signal between two pieces of the same material. They read the return signal with battery-powered metal dowsing rods. They essentially use your body as the antenna for receiving the signal."
Faced with a "probable" story and proven detection equipment, Westrate was determined "not to sit there and wonder the rest of my life."
Over Memorial Day 2001 they scheduled a second dig. "I also wanted to confirm the geological history of the area," and brought in a soil scientist. The topsoil layer forms at the rate of an inch a century. The dune's was about three-fourths of an inch thick, "which would put the start of its formation in the '30s, just when I thought it had happened," Westrate said. A "layer of black stuff that was very curious" indicated carbon residue from before sand dunes.
As Westrate continues to "wonder about all this," the science grows more complicated.
Then I got to wondering about the sensitivity of the person doing the checking."
He contacted an expert treasure hunter from Kentucky with even more sophisticated equipment. Westrate figured if the transmitted signal could be refined, so could the return signal. can make all the difference.
This was the home of Mr. Ransom Dopp where he trained horses for the nearby Stage Coach Line. Ransom lived near the corner of Glenwood Road and Gage Street, which was Pickett's Corners. There was a tavern and post office there built by Mr Selah Humphrey.
Also the Humphrey Stage Coach Line stopped there from 1844 to 1862. Mr. Dopp raised and trained horses for the stage line at his home just to the north of Pickett's Corner. A later owner of the property used the training ring for go karts.
This Marker is at the corner of Glenwood Road and Gage Street, on the right when traveling North on Glenwood Rd. It marks the spot of a Tavern and Postoffice built by Selah Pickett in 1844 and the Humphrey Stagecoach Line Stop that ran from 1844-1868