Arsenic and Old Wallpaper - Walls of Death

I know, the title sounds like it would be appropriate for a Halloween blog, doesn't it? 

I realize I do mention and even harp on keeping safe when picking far more than most picking related blogs. 

I do it because, frankly, it can be dangerous profession, and the better armed you are with the facts the better you can protect yourself from harm, and live to go picking another day.  I have been lucky, and have learned the hard way to take certain precautions.

One of those precautions is wearing a respirator, not just one of those flimsy white dust masks.  I will admit, I don't wear one of my respirators all the time when picking, but, frankly, I should.

I already have a type of asthma that is triggered by fine dusts, and fibreglass insulation in particular. That is a direct result of my chosen profession, not an inherited malady.

Dusts, seen and unseen can be a problem. You already likely know to be careful of lead paint, but the source of what I am about to reveal may surprise you.

Arsenic dust borne from wallpaper.

If you take a read of this article, you will see this is not just a paranoid thought. 

The fact is that "near the end of the 19th century the American Medical Association estimated that as much as 65% of all wallpaper in the United States contained arsenic."

That leaves pretty high odds for that peeling wallpaper in that old Victorian farmhouse you are picking to be a very dangerous material....and the airborne particles you are breathing in won't be just from mouse/rat droppings, bird droppings, black mould spores and fine topsoil...you can add a lethal poison to the mix. 

Go buy a respirator.

Pick safe! 

A Little Luck Goes A Long Way

For some, treasure hunting comes naturally....or, I should say "by fluke".

Those of you who have been following my blog for years, may recall reading about the Marc Chagall painting, a copy of The Declaration of Independence, and the unpublished works by Beethoven I did a post about back in May 2010.

Then there are the recent discoveries made by accident....

Like the tins of gold coins found by a Californian couple while out walking their dog....

And the 19 amphoras full of Roman coins found in Spain by construction workers digging a trench....

As well as a lost Jackson Pollock painting languishing in a guy's garage....

Plus a 1970s find of a Ferrari that kids found buried in someone's back yard...

And a search for a lost hammer revealed a multi-million dollar Roman hoard...

And an accidental capsizing a kayak made for a discovery of a gold hoard lost since the Boer war.... 

And I could go on and on.

So many treasures are found by people entirely by accident, people not even looking for treasure.

Such finds probably frustrate real treasure hunters, I'd bet. They frustrate me, I know that!

But, you still go on, and chase the treasures you know about. 

What else can you do?

Got to keep the dream alive, working to get ever closer to that treasure!

Modern Buried Treasure Worth Billions

There is a whole new realm of lost treasure out there.

With crypto currencies making waves in the financial realm, there is digital currency access saved on hard drives across the world.

So, what happens if you forget you have your bitcoin access saved to a hard drive in a computer you decide to get rid of?

Well, this is what happens.

This gentleman tossed a laptop in the trash....unfortunately for him, there was access to 7500 bitcoin....which, at the publication of this blog is worth $136,847,625.00.

He has plans to try and find said laptop, but he has the financial ability to do so, with his own net worth being $80 million. 

Most of us would not be so lucky to have the finances to pursue such an endeavour. 

If he was smart, he might as well purchase that section of the landfill, and literally mine it for other materials while looking for his laptop; he'll at least recoup some of his investment that way.

There are over 4 million bitcoins out of circulation right now....

that translates to $74.76 BILLION dollars.

Here is the breakdown for anyone interested.

This digital age could well be opening up a whole new wild west of treasure hunting.

Treasure Leads - The Cons

There should be a common thread you have noticed with all the treasure leads I have presented to you.

You hadn't already heard of them....

Or at least most of them. 

If you had heard of them, it could have been from myself, or you got a vague mention of the stories that accompany them. 

None of them are well known, unlike 1000s of other leads out there, which can be found in various books, magazines, YouTube, etc. 

I could easily present some of those more obscure ones to you as my own, and you would likely be none the wiser, unless you decide to spend an hour on Google digging into them. I prefer to be straight, on the up and up about the leads I have, and that they are unique and relatively unknown. It does add to the mystique of them, as well, no?

Plus, mine are all basically here in Manitoba, my home province. Manitoba really is under rated for treasure hunting, and has some fascinating history that is largely ignored.

One incident that falls into the category of lost treasure waiting to be found is about $380,000 worth of gold on the Dawson Trail in 1868, here in Manitoba. At the time the shipment was worth $10,000, and was the payroll for soldiers at Fort Garry.

It is not very well known, and there has been no well publicized searches for it, to my knowledge.  But, it is something that appears often enough in the public eye, and information on it is available to the general public. 

You can chase it, if it has not already been quietly found and has made someone moderately wealthy.

I believe that given time and money, most of these treasures I have listed can be found.

However, money is not always in ready supply.   

Some of the leads require heavy equipment, special permissions, significant travel, specialized skill sets, among other factors.

Some will require luck, and much time.

Others require combinations of the above. 

None of them are cheap ventures. If it is not money being spent, it is time....and, as the old adage says time is money.

I have worked on a few of these leads more than the others.  The most work has been done on the Mad Trapper case, with the Norse leads coming in a close second.

I'd love to get the railway china, which could be profitable. However, I do not scuba dive.  But, a miniature sub might work. Anyone have one handy?   If I had some sort of TV backing, I know of a company who might actually provide the use of one, in exchange for the publicity.

Digging up the locomotive would be cool, just for shits and giggles and to say I had done it.....but really,  the market for a rusty locomotive is pretty limited. I do have a couple homes for it in mind, but they are both museums, and their pockets are not going to be deep. A donation is more a museum's thing. Would be worth a pretty penny just in weight for scrap, but it is unlikely even that will outweigh the costs of going after it.  Corporate sponsorship by one particular company might be the way to go, but to get it, I'd want to have the site 100% determined, and evidence of the same to present to them.

The dugout canoe would be a significant archaeological find, but going after it could require some heavy equipment, and getting that equipment to the site would be quite the feat all on its own itself.

The James brother's artifacts would be a cool Canadian/American history crossover, but the trail is quite cold.

The airplane engines are not a 100% for sure, though I am sure other artifacts would be found that would make the dig worthwhile. There is a wild card in this lead, which is something I have not mentioned. You see, some of the materials put into the landfill site could be of a dangerous nature (IE: hazardous chemicals, potential for explosive ordnance).  I know there would be support for this venture from at least one source, but it would be support by way of knowledge and connections, not financial.


The lead most realistically to get worked on (or finished) this year, considering my current financial and time situation is the Mad Trapper case.

This one requires time, though there are a few things I'd like to do that would require travel time and cash.  There is a site he may have been, at which there will be spent ammunition, and I would like to obtain that spent ammunition. If they are 45 casings, I would also locate the one of the spent 45 shells he left behind in his battle with the RCMP and posse at his cabin. I could them compare the two to see if the Manitoba site is one he definitely was at.  Could be a neat metal detecting outing for sure! 


So, what leads shall I follow up in the New Year?   

Any wealthy benefactors or Television production companies out there that want to back a treasure hunt or 3?

What Treasures Shall the New Year Bring?

Ok, so I have presented you with 8 of my treasure leads so far.

Just to review they were:

(1) Oak Island Treasure - Steam Locomotive

(2) Treasure With The Blackflies - Ancient Dugout Canoe

(3) Treasure Intangible - Mad Trapper's movements and identity

(4) Treasure On A Platter - Hoard of Railway China

(5) Hagar The Horrible Would Be Proud - Norse helmet and sword/dagger

(6) The Manitoba Runestone - Viking Runestone

(7) Fly, Fly Away - WW2 airplane engines in crates

(8) Wild West Outlaw Treasure - Jesse James' horse bridal and Frank James' colt revolver

Now I have two questions for you.

Which one would you dedicate your time to pursuing, if you had the money, time and ability to pursue? 

Realistically, which are worth pursuing, given a lack of time, money and limited abilities?


I look forward to your answers in the comments!

Treasure With the Blackflies - Treasure Lead #2

Those of you familiar with Canada's northern portions and the huge biting insect population it contains will have an inkling where my next treasure lead is.

That being it is in Northern Canada, and in this case, Northern Manitoba.

Yes, those wonderful blackflies are one of the hazards I may have to contend with should I pursue this lead.

You see, the item I am after has reportedly sunk back deep in the muskeg from whence it came many years ago.  How it emerged is quite an interesting story in itself, but revealing that will narrow down the location, which I do not wish to reveal yet.

What I am after is a dugout canoe, reportedly with a primitive axe embedded in one end.

It would be a wonderful archaeological find all on its own, but the location makes it more astounding....

There are no trees remotely near that area that are of the size required to create a dugout log canoe!  

So, there is treasure lead number 2!

Egged On

Seeing as it IS Easter and all, I thought an EGG-cellent story was in order. Yeah there was a little bit of CORN thrown in for good measure there...(get it? Chickens lay eggs and CORN = chicken feed?)

Ok, I admit, that last one really was a heck of a stretch....

Even though I have no funny, unusual, gross, (etc) picking stories that involve eggs (that I can recall) t hat makes it more difficult to do a post about eggs....but I am still managing to do a posting talking about eggs...and Easter.

You still with me?

Anyway, an Easter egg hunt is sort of like picking, right?

So, let's just go looking for some VALUABLE eggs, and other Easter related things of value we can add to our scope of knowledge...adding more to that long list of weird things we can pick, and maybe create a nest egg after the items are sold......!

Odds are most of us will never come across a REAL, antique Fabergé Easter egg....But, you never know, and if you at least know what to look for, maybe you WILL be one of the few who discover one of these beauties. Just remember I set ya on that when you do find one....Maybe drop a few hundred thousand of that profit into my "Tip Jar" on the blog here when you do find and sell one, ok?

I could also do a post about egg, rabbit, chick (etc) shaped paper mache candy containers, but I suspect there are already a million blog postings out there that have already done postings on those, especially at this time of year!

Let's stick the the unique, rare and extremely valuable, shall we?

There are all sorts of "collectible" Easter related items out there, from candy containers in all sorts of forms, from paper mache, to glass, to plastic, to cardboard, and on and on.

Yes, there are some rare ones that may command some extreme dollar figures. Pre WW1 German made, Paper Mache, highly detailed, finely made, antique, and mint condition pieces tend to be the ones that generally command high hundreds, even thousands, of dollars in collector circles.  But, take note that like with most other items in the collecting community, damage, missing pieces, discoloration, repairs, etc, etc all have negative effects on values....some more negative than others.

I try to be realistic in this blog, in that I don't spout how every "X" is worth big money.

Rarely is any "X" worth big money.

Only certain "Xs" are worth big money...and then only if you can get them to the right market, during the right time.

However, thinking back to being a kid, I know that finding "lesser" eggs during Easter morning was still a thrill.

The thrill is in the hunt, after all....just like picking.

Treasure Hunters All - (Teremity Magazine Article)

This is a copy of an article I did for Teremity Magazine - published Feb - 2012

__ Treasure Hunters All__

Yes, I am a real picker.

I have been in the antiques biz, as my primary (and usually only) source of income, for half my life…20 years. Add to that the fact I have been “into” "treasure hunting" of one sort of another for as I can remember!

I briefly owned a metal detector, but it was pretty much the cheapest one on the market....I could see metal objects it had passed over, barely settled in the grass, which the unit could not seem to locate no matter how many times I carefully moved the head over the spot! 

Why did I buy such a crappy detector? Dreams of a kid, and one I wanted to fulfill as soon as was possible. My parents worked hard for every dollar, and had little to spare, aside from the 25 to 50 cents allowance I acquired every Saturday. Thus I worked hard for pretty much every cent I ever had, also.

That crappy metal detector was paid for with hard earned nickels and dimes. The dollars were painstakingly accumulated, 5 and 10 cents at a time. I searched for soda and beer bottles high and low on weekends, holidays, and after school. I dug them out of clumps of winter killed weeds on boulevards and rescued them from their precarious perches amongst thorn spiked hedge branches. On family camping trips I scavenged them from cigarette butt strewn campsites. I popped them up out of the sun baked mud of roadside ditches, snagged them from their hiding spots in waist high grass, all the while shivering, soaked to the skin, the result of early morning dew wicking off the switch grass into the denim of my jeans and shirt sleeves. I even tolerated the stench of the clumps of rotting cigarette butts, insects and mouse corpses, some of which stubbornly stuck to the insides of their glass walled coffins. I am all too familiar with the stench these mini-greenhouses can create out of the mish-mash of debris that may end up in them. The goo sometimes lost its battle with centrifugal force, mid-swing. I can vaguely recall moments when a piece of chunky slime would shoot out of the bottle neck, then, to my horror, took an unintended, but oddly graceful acrobatic arc, seemingly in slow motion! Sometimes I dodged the wad of rot, the ground being its final destination. Other times my shoes, jeans or shirt became the landing sites.

On my return home from such an outing, there may have been the disposal of a pair of favorite-one-sole worn-through-running-shoes. They were given a proper burial in the outside trash can. Sometimes a pair of knee patched jeans or shirt followed them.

If it was clothing I was fond of, or I knew I'd catch heck for throwing out, the article would become part of an existing laundry pile, usually in my bedroom closet. Sometimes they shared their odorous prize with the rest of the clothing until washday, on the occasions that I forgot to make mention of them to my mother.
(Sorry, Mom!)

I had found & cashed in literally hundreds of “deposit” bottles to pay for that detector.

I guess the word “found” is not actually correct. The term really should be "picked."

Hmmm, come to think of it,  I have been honing my "picker's eyes"  for a LONG time....since I was 6 years old!

That is the thing with picking, you rely on your eyes quite a bit.  However, a really good picker uses all his/her other senses, also. Yes, every sense we have, we use.

While walking on trash/debris strewn wooden floors of old buildings, I have learned to be highly aware of what is underfoot, not just being aware of things in my line of sight.  You never know, you could be
far closer to a real treasure than your eyes can see, or even your arms can reach. But, of course, safety is very important, too. I want to be able to go out picking for a long, long time.

I can be walking along, stepping gingerly, feeling the floor's boards give slightly, listening for the structure underneath the planks creak just a little more than in an average old building. I strain for that initial sharp splinter of wood fibers, groups of them simultaneously letting go of their 100+ year grip they had on their neighbors...sort of a timber's own  nearly-too-late-warning-scream of  "OH CRAP!"

Or, it could be the barely audible squish of waterlogged, sponge-like, rotten wood fiber, ready to imitate that trap door on a stage, and in a blink of an eye, recreating that classic magical illusion of "now you see him, now you don't!"

So, all the while I am walking, I listen carefully, feeling each step, making sure I am not about to fall through a floor to my demise, or in impale my foot on yet another rusty nail.  With the next step, the feel and sound of that footfall is noticeably different than the previous. The general "feel", combined with the tone, echo (etc) of the sound differed dramatically from my previous footfalls. It is likely not something anyone else who has tread on the same spot has taken any notice of in the room's 75 years of human traffic.

I realize there is metal beneath that foot's resting spot! No electronic metal detector required. Moving aside, still aware, but with some anticipation clouding my usual careful steps, I brush the debris aside.  What is revealed is a sheet of metal. Brushing away all the debris past the surface's edges reveals a streaked mix of smooth, streaked glassy, but grunge smeared surface. With a slight shift of my eyes, they follow the flashlight beam tracing the outer edge of the whitish smeared chunk of steel. Visible upon careful inspection, almost obscured by an oily floor wax/dirt residue, are holes at the corners and middle edges. Most people would not have even not noticed them, but the smears of green, indicative of verdigris growing on the brass grommets the holes sport, are obvious to me. 

The odds very high that it is an old enamel sign covering some hole! Maybe even a very VALUABLE sign!

Experienced 'digger's are familiar with these sorts of feelings, I am sure. The detector sounds, you bend or crouch down to the spot, and get out your equipment. With the first push of "whatever preferred excavation tool you use" into the ground, you hear/feel the pebbles, rocks, rotten wood, tree roots, and anything else it rubs against, or hits, including the target your detector sounded when it skimmed over the ground's surface.

Odds are you even have a pretty good idea of what it is, or at least it's composition. You may even know the object's shape and size, just from the feel of that little vibration.

These skills are the things we develop. We fine tune of our senses; hone them for, and by the pursuit of, our specific treasure hunting interests.  We really think little about them, until they are pointed out to us.  I am referring to observations by that friend/relative who tagged along with you. They come along with you on a hunt, maybe invited, sometimes out of curiosity, or maybe from pure avoidance of chores they needed to get done around the house.

Besides, it is a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Over the afternoon's hunt, you have calmly ignored their rolling eyes and their bored  yawns. It is mid-afternoon, and over the past 2 hours you have politely answered their moronic or/and annoying questions, which are getting close to being  akin to a five year old's whining queries of "why?"

As you bend down, and excavate the target your detector sounded on, you audibly mutter that you think the item is only a 1950s quarter.



After you excavate the prize, and show your companion for the afternoon, their eyes widen and with an amazed and almost incredulous tone say:

"How did you know it was going to be a quarter and not another bottle cap? And how the heck did you know it was from the 1950s????"

Yes, it is like that for me, as a long time picker, also.  I don't know how many times people have said things like:

"I can not believe I walked by that thing pretty much every day, for 40 years, and had no idea it was there!!!"

Diggers.

Pickers.

We are all part of a worldwide treasure hunting fraternity. The treasuring hunting experience is something that unites us in more ways than we realize.

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Link To Article On Temerity Magazine (online) - SEE PAGE 70.