By Marc J. Elzenbeck
There are good reasons to bury treasure. Fear of discovery and theft is well-founded, transport risk is real, and it is wise to avoid temptable natures. Love isn’t known to top the list, but it might be the oldest reason and the best. A love story is why Vashon has been subject to treasure hunts for gold since the late 1800s.
Juicy particulars aren’t recorded, but there are clues. For the first two decades after November 13th, 1851, when Dave Denny told his brother Arthur’s party of two dozen – just ashore on Alki Beach – “I wish you hadn’t come,” Tacoma and Seattle were little more than muddy lumber mills with big plans. Each consumed most of the nearby labor and timbers, sending off coveted Doug Fir for bridge spans, beams, ship masts, and spars, and cedar lumber and shingles.
When the Northern Pacific railroad cut its way to Tacoma in 1873, a young Norwegian logger named Lars-Jan Hansen likely arrived with it. He would have had the saved wages, time, and inclination to scout the area. Like many fellow Scandinavians in his construction crew, he had a natural fondness for fjords, plus some awareness of the 1864 Homestead Act.
Soon after the railroads, Vashon Island started to serve as a whistle stop between the ambitious competitors to its north and south, with floating docks, steamer villages, and post offices springing up all along its coastlines. Vashon’s old-growth trees were still untouched, many reaching over 300 feet high, standing on trunks 12 feet across.
But for a few primeval streams as pathways to a dark interior, crossing Vashon by foot or horse was practically impossible. Whereas rowing, sailing, or steaming around it was easy, with a wide outer harbor opening due south, connected to a hidden, glacier-carved inner sanctuary. The interior lagoons and the relatively low banks of what we call Burton made for natural landings for canoes, dinghys, and skiffs.
When Lars Hansen saw Vashon, he resolved to visit. When he did, he probably touched in at Judd Creek’s outlet, visiting with natives who lived there. If there were better places for a skilled logger, they were half a world away. Lars could turn north and south and see ports with lumber mills; he could look behind and see over a billion board-feet of thick timber perfectly placed between, with connected water transport.
He must have laughed with joy and awe at the scale of the opportunity, considered the required tools, what to build first, and who to hire on as crew.
We don’t know exactly when or where Lars Hansen met a native Indian girl named Katherine M., nor by what authority they married. We do know that he loved her, was logging on the Burton peninsula by 1877, and entrusted Katherine with $800 in gold. There was no bank to hold it. He told her to bury it in a secret spot where only she would know.
In those days, $20 Liberty coins were a normal means of saving, not used for daily items, but sometimes traded for land or business purchases. This would have been a symmetrical four stacks of ten coins, making a nice three-pound square of 40. Depending on condition, today each coin would reach up to $10,000 at auction.
As a logger, Lars had surely witnessed gruesome deaths among his peers and knew that every day might be his last. An extraordinarily perilous profession, mortality was 20 to 30 times higher than the average man’s. It could come from a snapped cable or chain; bleeding out from a splinter to the neck; a deep, infected axe wound; being crushed by a roller, trapped by a toppler, blasted by dynamite; or knocked unawares on the head by a falling widow-maker while working a two-man Swedish Fiddle cross-cut saw.
Lars was planning ahead and wanted his wife and forthcoming children to be provided for. Yet it was young Katherine who died early and suddenly from an illness. It is said, passed down first-hand through settler families, that she never revealed the treasure’s location, not even to Lars.
Due to the time the Hansens spent together on Judd Creek, locals have long suspected the cache is buried somewhere along it. While its value is only about the total of a modest house, generations of boys have walked along, searching from Paradise Valley on down, digging and prodding without reported success. A few are known by this author.
Modern techniques might prove effective in finding this treasure, but it’s a big area and a small target. Besides, there is a much bigger treasure, in both size and value. We’ll get to that in a future issue.
Lars Hansen went on to prosper and to eventually own much of Burton. While it may seem implausible that he really didn’t learn the location, some familiarity with sickness and grief make it less so. The couple may well have hoped or assumed she would recover, only for Katherine to fall into a fevered coma and pass away. Lars may have been absent while she was still coherent. Or, facing greater matters, they may have simply chosen to treasure their last moments together.
