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For the past three days they’d been plodding through the swaht prove they weren’t on a wild-goose chase Neither of the it caoose in the end

In this case, the goose in question was based on an obscure legend While the nearby Chesapeake and Delaware bays were said to be home of nearly four thousand shipwrecks, the prize Sam and Remi were after was land based A month earlier Ted Frobisher, a fellow treasure hunter who’d retired not long ago to concentrate on his antique shop in Princess Anne, had sent the provenance

The pear-shaped gold and jade brooch was said to have belonged to a local woman named Henrietta Bronson, one of the first victims of the notorious outlaw Martha “Patty” (aka Lucretia) Cannon

According to legend Martha Cannon was a tough, ruthless woman who in the 1820s not only stalked the wilds of the Delaware-Maryland border with her gang, robbing andthe wealthy and poor alike, but who also ran a hostel in as then called Johnson’s Corners, today Reliance

Cannon would lure travelers into her establishment and feed, entertain, and tuck theht She would drag the bodies into the base of value, then stack theh to warrant a wagon trip to a nearby forest, where she would bury them en masse Horrific as that was, Cannon would later commit what many considered her most heinous crimes

Cannon established what round railroad,” kidnapping freed southern slaves and keeping theed in the inn’s eon before sneaking theht to Cannon’s Ferry, where they would be sold and loaded onto ships headed down the Nanticoke River bound for Georgia’s slave markets

In 1829, while plowing a field on one of Cannon’s farms, a worker uncovered several partially decomposed bodies Cannon was speedily indicted on four counts of uilty, and sentenced to prison Four years later she died in her cell by what reed was suicide by arsenic

In subsequent years both Cannon’s cri from the clai and robbing far into her nineties, to tales that have her ghost still roa hikers What few people disputed was that Cannon’s loot—of which she’d reportedly spent only a fraction—had never been recovered Estimates put the treasure’s present-day value somewhere between 100,000 and 400,000

Saend of Patty Cannon’s treasure, but lacking solid leads they’d consigned it to the “soence of Henrietta

Bronson’s brooch and an exact datuin their search, they’d decided to tackle the mystery

After a detailed study of the Pocoed hideouts in comparison to where the brooch had been found, they’d narrowed their search grid to a two-square-mile area, most of which lay deep within the swamp, a labyrinth ofto their research this area, which in the 1820s had been dry ground, had been home to one of Cannon’s hideouts, a tumble-down shack

Their interest in Cannon’s treasure had nothing to do with thethe story, Sah to find the treasure, the bulk of the proceeds would go to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, an irony they felt sure would outrage Cannon if she were still alive Or, if they were lucky, it would outrage her ghost

“Remi, as that poemthe one about Cannon?” Saraphic memory for details, both obscure and pertinent

She thought for a moment, then recited:

“Hush your mouth