Necessary Evil Read Free Page B

to husband the
farm he’d so carefully built up.
    There was some consolation in the idea
that the financial trouble had started before Uncle Michael’s accident. Ever
since the debut of the Lost American Treasures episode featuring the
mythical (in my opinion) Alexander Chase treasure, our respectable family farm
had been inundated with treasure hunters and curious tourists who frightened
off our clientele and, worse still, left the marks of their search behind them,
with devastating effects.
    The Chase Treasure story itself is a
fairly typical buried treasure myth: Alexander Chase, the black sheep of the
respectable Mayflower family, stole money and goods from his employer, merchant
Jasper McInnis of Charleston. It was just before the Battle of Fort Sumter, and
it included a box of prized silver Kirk spoons, intended as the wedding dowry
of McInnis’ daughter, Mary Anna. Local lore has it that he buried booty
somewhere on the Chase property when he came home for a brief visit in April of
1861, just before he joined the 3 rd New Hampshire Voluntary
Infantry. The location of the treasure was lost when Chase died after the
Battle of Sucessionville in 1862. “Treasurists” - a term invented by my Uncle
Michael - believe that the McInnis treasure is still on the property somewhere,
proof that Chase family counted thieves among their members.
    Family members and some historians
disagreed.
    Anti-Treasurists bring up the fact that
Alexander Chase’s reputation was fairly clean, aside from occasional bouts of
drinking and gambling, and insist that he was as ardent an abolitionist as was his
father. They maintain that the thievery charges brought against him by the
McInnis family after the war’s end were just another case of so-called ‘lost
causers’ trying to recoup their wartime losses.
    A third theory, one that I subscribed to,
is that Alexander Chase did steal from the McInnis money, and then lost it
gambling in one of the seaports that he frequented. These people believe that
he was a thief and probably indifferent to slavery, a position that my Uncle
Michael found repugnant in the extreme. A mild-mannered man, he was known to
actually argue with people about Alexander, holding until his dying day that
the private died a slandered but essentially good man.
    Those who believe in the treasure have two
pieces of evidence to support their theory. One is that Avery Chase,
Alexander’s half-brother, spent his entire lifetime searching for the treasure,
even while refuting the McInnis’ claims. The second piece of evidence comes
from one of Alexander’s own letters, which was discovered by my uncle in an old
box in the barn several years ago. Written to his mother just weeks before his
death, Alexander commended his “earthly” treasures to her care, and reminded
her of his favorite hymn, ‘no. 29’. Chase’s step-father, Obadiah, was a deacon,
and Alexander and Avery were practically raised in the pew. On page twenty-nine
of Psalms and Hymns , an 1853 hymnal that Alexander would have been very
familiar with, are two songs: Come, Ye Thankful People, Come , and Gather the Golden Grains . Treasurists are adamant that this rather
benign sentiment is actually a clue to the treasure’s location.
    As Mark Dulles, the handsome Ivy League
host of Lost American Treasures , pointed out, both are songs of
thanksgiving that speak of the fields. Come, Ye Thankful People, Come ,
even specifically mentions corn and wheat fields. Since Obadiah Chase was a
conscientious log-book keeper, who recorded every ear of corn that ever grew on
his farm, this clue led generations of hapless treasure seekers to search
particular fields on our land, some of which we still use for haying now.
    While filming, Mark Dulles and his crew
worked in the fields, demonstrating with the latest equipment that there was
nothing buried there. They were forced, reluctantly, to conclude that there was
nothing to find, something that should have ended all further