2 Will Go Fishing in Lake Bed for Legendary Cache of Silver

The State Lands Commission Tuesday granted a permit to a pair of Nevada men in search of an elusive cache of silver bars said to be buried deep in the treacherous mud flats of a dead lake in Inyo County.

Trouble is, according to a California historian, they probably won’t find their century-old buried treasure.

The commission granted Malcolm Stewart and his son, David, both of Reno, permission to probe and excavate the state-owned Owens Lake bed for a year.

Also interested in the site is Al Enderle of Tustin, Calif., who says he has investigated the area for 10 years and hopes the commission will give him a similar permit in January.

The modern-day treasure hunters plan to dig through the mud of the lake that disappeared in the 1920s, after being depleted by irrigation, evaporation and the 226-mile aqueduct built in 1913 to provide water for the thirsty, growing town of Los Angeles.

Today, the only digging underway goes on at a salt mine, but the treasure seekers will hunt for silver bullion that reportedly fell overboard or sank on a barge that crossed the lake in the 1870s.

Dr. Richard Lingenfelter, a California historian who has written a dozen books, says both parties may be chasing nothing more than a big myth.

“I was never able to find any evidence that anything was ever lost,” said Lingenfelter, who investigated the lake’s history in the early 1960s.

Lingenfelter--who also is a research physicist at University of California, San Diego--said he did extensive research with original documents of the times, including newspapers of the period which carefully chronicled the silver trade.

Silver was mined in the Inyo Mountains east of Owens Lake from the 1860s to 1910, according to Bill Michaels of the Eastern County Museum in Independence.

“The mines of Cerro Gordo built Los Angeles,” Michaels said. In less than 50 years, more than $20 million in silver was pulled from the hills surrounding the lake.

Shipping the silver from the mines to Los Angeles was a problem solved by obtaining two barges in the 1870s--the Bessie Brady and the Mollie Stevens.

The boats hauled the silver, which was combined with lead and made into bullion bars, from the east to the west side of the lake. There, it was loaded onto railroad cars and shipped to Los Angeles.

Legends still circulate about some silver falling overboard or sinking to the lake’s bottom when one of the boats burned.

“We’ve heard that one of the barges sank somewhere between 1870 and 1890,” said Ed Freudenberg of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

But according to Lingenfelter, in the spring of 1882, the Mollie Stevens was dismantled and its engines were installed in the overhauled Bessie Brady. Work was nearly completed on the Brady when it caught fire and burned on land. There was no silver aboard.

Another story says that a wagon load of bullion aboard one of the boats slipped into the lake.

Al Enderle said he has investigated the area thoroughly and believes there is still silver in the Owens Lake bed. He will not say why.

If granted the permit in January, Enderle said he will start exploratory drilling in February.

The muddy lake bed will likely pose problems for the explorers, said Duane Buchholz, a water and power company engineer.

“It’s very treacherous--there are lots of soft areas and stories of people losing vehicles out there,” Buchholz said.