The LEGEND talks about how it is valued at over $ 350,000 or probably more given the recent increase in the price of gold and mentions how Native Americans learned about the “Cross on the Rock” story as passed down by their elders. Also known as Borie’s Lost Treasure, it is conjectured to be one of the little-known caches of hidden riches still to be found in America in the center of a wooded paradise known as God’s Country, Potter County, USA. USA
Could this treasure still exist?
Intrigued by the legend, I embarked on a voyage of discovery in search of the source of the tale; determined that if it existed it would be mine.
When this treasure was hidden, America was still a vast wilderness in the 17th century. Few, other than the hardiest of explorers and fur hunters, had ventured further inland than the coastal colonies. However, when Louis Frontenac arrived in 1672, Canada was no longer the children’s colony it had been when Richelieu founded the Company of Hundred Associates. Through the efforts of Louis XIV and Colbert it had assumed the form of an organized province and Frontenac as the new governor sought to create regulated parishes and business opportunities from Montreal to New Orleans in “New France.” Through armed conflict, Frontenac drove out English settlers and subdued Native Americans who claimed vast territory for France which was later marked by lead plates buried in the ground identified by Celoron de Beinville and mapped by Father Pierre Bonnecamps, a “Jesuit mathematician. The fur trade in particular flourished creating the wealth Frontenac sought and the expansion of” New France “progressed rapidly.
My research found that in the mid-1680s, nearly a century before white settlers began to permanently occupy what is now Potter County, a small group of French Canadians from the fur trading establishment that belonged to Louis Frontenac and Robert Cavelier left New Orleans by boat. , for the return trip to Montreal. I quickly discovered errors in the legend recorded by others. I had been misled in the details of the trip; more deliberately by someone eager to keep the secret of this hidden treasure to himself.
The original tale says [The planned route was up the Mississippi to the junction of the Ohio and then up the Beautiful River, as the Indians call it, to the Allegheny and then northward to the mouth of the Conewango near present day Warren. From that point, a short run would bring the expedition to Chautauqua Lake near the present day Jamestown, New York. From this point, the party could practically roll down hill by the way of Prendergrast Creek and then home free by the way of Lake Erie into Lake Ontario and Northward to Montreal. Nearly the entire trip would be made by water, without the danger of long overland, backbreaking portages.]
I soon learned that a trip up the Mississippi was a one-way ticket in the late 17th century. Crazy to think that one could paddle rafts or canoes upstream for over 3000 miles back to Montreal quickly through a hostile and unstable desert! The return trips were always made by sailboats from the port of New Orleans to the port of Baltimore and then up the Susquehanna River by canoe to the West Branch and Sinnemahonning rivers and then to Jamestown NY, up the Great Lakes to Montreal . . The rivers were the roads of the 1600-1700s and the only trails were those of the Native Americans; no roads had yet been created in any of the inland colonies.
[And so the coureur de bois left New Orleans on rafts loaded with provisions and a number of small kegs, each of which were loaded with gold coins covered with a thin film of gunpowder, and anchored securely to the crude log transports by means of ropes and iron nails. The gold was to be delivered to His Most Gracious Majesty’s Royal Governor in Montreal, (Gov. Frontenac) and the party was instructed to guard the valuable cargo with their lives. Under no circumstances was it to fall into the hands of the English, the Americans nor the hated Senecas, who were always at war with the French. ]
The group made the uneventful journey around the tip of Florida and up the east coast of America to the Chesapeake Bay and began the second and most arduous part of their journey. The Susquehanna River, a relatively shallow body of water, winds languidly through Pennsylvania interspersed with whitewater and rapids that are known to wreak havoc on northbound travel depending on the season. The dangers of rising rapids, small waterfalls that carry and elude hostile Indians through the Wyoming area of Pennsylvania were well documented. As the rivers narrowed, avoiding the Indians became increasingly impossible. Much outnumbered and hunted across the desert, the French grew increasingly wary as they realized they had become the prey in much more than a game of cat and mouse along the West Branch River.
With the position fixed and mapped by the Jesuits, the exasperated French buried their treasure to keep it safe near the confluence of two rivers and decided it was safer to temporarily hide it and return with a larger expeditionary force than to risk losing their lives and the treasure. Seneca’s war party. The Jesuits marked the exact location of the treasure by carving a large cross into the rock under which it was.
The Jesuits led by Étienne da Carheil, well-educated as a mathematician, religious scholar, and cartographer, and Father Ernest Laborde, decided to stay to lure and convert the savages to Christianity as the travelers advanced under cover of darkness up the Sinnemahoning River and into New York. eluding his enemies and escaping to Montreal.
Louis Frontenac was called to France shortly after his group of fur traders arrived in Montreal; unable to get his money, and Cavelier died in 1687 in one of the trading posts he had helped establish.
Frontenac returned to Quebec in the fall of 1689, just after the Iroquois massacred the people of Lachine and just before they descended on those of La Chesnaye. The universal mood was one of terror and despair. Suppressing the Red warriors and securing their outposts from the English squatters led Frontenac on a military campaign that lasted several years. Upon his victory, he immediately sent soldiers into the wilds of Pennsylvania to obtain his gold. With his health in decline, Louis Frontenac could not accompany his men and on November 28, 1698 Frontenac died at the Château St Louis. His fortune now destined to remain on the ground.
Frontenac’s enemies liked to say that he used his position for illicit profit from the fur trade. He was certainly trading to some degree, but it would be hard to charge him with venality or embezzlement on the basis of the evidence that exists. There is a high probability that the king appointed him with the expectation that he would increase his income from sources other than his salary. As a member of the King’s Court, it was hoped that in order to carry out such a bleak rendezvous in the New World it would not be said that any wealth that might be gained would be one to keep. Public opinion varies from age to age regarding the freedom that a public servant may be allowed in such matters. Under a democratic regime, the standard is very different from what has existed, for the most part, under autocracies in ages past. Frontenac was a distinguished man who accepted an important position for a small salary. We can infer that the king was willing to allow him some of the perks. If so, your profit from the fur trade becomes a matter of degree. As long as it remained within the limits of reason and decency, the government raised no objections. Frontenac was certainly not a governor who plundered the colony to feather his own nest. If he took profits, no one considered them excessive, except Duchesneau, who was Frontenac’s rival at the king’s court and who had been rejected for the post of governor. The king had called Frontenac not because he was venal, but because he was quarrelsome, and he returned him upon realizing that he was precisely the right man for the job.
Native Americans knew about the rock and conjectures about its meaning created their legend to explain its existence.
Near Keating, until the railroad was built in 1901, you could see the “Cross on the Rock”, a great natural wonder, a perfect cross of heroic proportions carved out of a rock along the river. Fortunately, there is an excellent photograph of the remarkable natural curiosity, as it has since been shed.