Of History and Fantasy

Charles

Here's the kind of thing drives a Historian batty.

Open this link  and scroll WAAAAAAAAAAAY down to down to the paragraph just above the SS Senator image to the paragraph that begins, "The American businessmen and creditors who foreclosed on Vejar's land..."

Read the next few paragraphs, through "To this day, the $125,000 in gold has yet to be found and is somewhere at the bottom of the Los Angeles Harbor." This tale is a myth created by treasure hunters.

The Historical Society has done a fine job of giving a detailed account of the community's origins. The story they tell is compelling, but the section about the Ada Hancock and Wells Fargo people aboard her is not from genuine historical records. The whole thing is a fantasy.

The historical record finds the Ada Hancock explosion  was an accident. But when you read treasure hunter accounts of the incident, with the addition of a mystery-laden 125 G's, the sources they refer to are works by treasure hunters about treasure hunting.

There is little merit to the speculation, if any, that I can find in authentic sources. Merit requires real, substantive historical work — original documents cited, archives accessed and archaeological finds consulted. Learning how to do these things requires training and practice, and having other Historians looking over your work to challenge just about everything. History as vocation has definite standards to ensure the most accurate account possible.

With treasure hunting yarns , one guy writes it and inspires dreams of gleaming riches discovered in an afternoon of scuba diving. Dreams make the speculation "fact" because we all want it to be. Fabulous tales become the actual story.

Well, it ain't actual. It's fabulous, sure, but it's still a tale.

The long Ada Hancock section is about a guy named Schlesinger and his 1863 adventures with the foreclosure of Rancho San José  in Southern California. There's an ambush and murder, and a subsequent gun battle with Wells Fargo employee William Ritchie.

Schlesinger is wrongly identified — he was not a Wells Fargo Agent. There were no offices in that area before the 1870s anyway, save Los Angeles proper. (Wells Fargo's Agent there was H.N. Alexander.) William Ritchie was, in fact, a well-respected Wells Fargo Messenger, whose task was to protect treasure. And Wells Fargo did have a money shipment on board, as steamers were the principal means of transportation before the transcontinental railroad.

But remember, the ship exploded, blowing the cash to smithereens. Only 7 of the 53 on board were unharmed — our man William Ritchie was killed.

That's the main thing treasure hunters should weigh, before they start weighing the treasure chest of their daydreams.