XII. Digging adventures 6

As in any other endeavor, perseverance is the key to success. When you’re young, the digging of a hundred holes in one afternoon is no great challenge. However, as you grow older, twenty holes a day can wear your tail out. I have lately reached the latter state. Still, one cannot give up.
One Sunday afternoon back when I was a hundred-hole-a-day squirt, perseverance paid off with one of my most memorable digs. A friend and I had been hunting for hours in the heat, and we were worn out because the hot Mississippi sun had turned our usually moist Mississippi soil to concrete. Near dusk, fatigued, wet with sweat, looking forward to a cold shower and a beer, and not twenty feet from our vehicle, I happened on a signal – solid, symmetrical, smooth-ended – that simply shouted “big round iron!” I didn’t have the strength to dig through two feet of concrete, so I asked my friend if he wanted to give it a go. “No,” was the answer I got, “I’m tired. I’m going home.”
The curiosity that afflicts all treasure hunters, of course, got the better of me. After resting a while, I spent a good forty-five minutes chopping, digging, using the point of the shovel more as pick ax than blade, and finally reached my objective. It turned out that there were not one, but three complete stands of Confederate twelve-pounder grape in that hole, a cannon round so rare that I’ve never heard of anyone else digging even one. These were left behind by the Confederates in the artillery position they manned during the siege – the Ameristar Casino office (formerly an MP&L office building) stands squarely atop the site now.


I dislike hunting an area where there is evidence that other relic hunters have done a thorough job of cleaning it out. However, one must… persevere.
A couple of years ago I was faced with just this dilemma. I set out to hunt a site in south Vicksburg that had the potential to yield some Confederate relics; when I got into the woods, I was immediately disheartened at the sight of unfilled hole after unfilled hole gaping from the hillsides. An outlaw digger who had no respect for the land or landowner, the kind who may eventually irritate the public to the point that the hobby could be banned in the future, had hunted the site not days before. I detest this kind of abuse, so I spent a good part of that afternoon covering his holes as I scanned the area with my metal detector.
In one particularly large hole I got a strong signal; the digger had apparently missed the target, or had pulled a relic from the hole and failed to recheck it for more. I dug deeper and was enraptured by the discovery of not one but two very rare 4.2” Confederate Mullane (Tennessee Sabot) bolts – along with a rare Confederate percussion fuse. Years before, I had dug a pair of these rare rounds near the artillery position of the First Missouri Light Artillery (US), where they had been fired by the Confederate artillery.
A similar experience occurred several years ago when I scanned a hole left by a relic hunter and was amazed to find, in the loose dirt left beside the hole by the digger, a 3” Burton shell from the War.
Of course, sadly, there have been times when I quit too soon. On one of the expeditions involving my hunting buddies and myself, I got a faint signal in a creek beneath a tree that had fallen across the creek. I scratched mud and debris from all around the signal, but it being under water and under the tree, I just could not locate it. So I gave up. My hunting buddy had observed my unsuccessful attempt, and when I gave up, he took over. Within a few minutes he had retrieved a small pottery container filled with percussion caps, one of the neatest relics I’ve ever seen.
Darn!