Fresh documents from a Justice Department lawsuit—and compelling witness accounts—revive doubts about what really happened when the FBI swooped into a site thought to hide $500 million in treasure.
By David Howard
Late afternoon light was starting to fade on the Western Pennsylvania hillside where Eric McCarthy was tracking a bull elk when a masked man stepped out from behind a tree and pointed a semiautomatic firearm at him. “You need to get off this mountain,” the man said.
McCarthy, a hunting guide, stood still for a beat. It was March 14, 2018, and he’d spent the day following the elk on a wooded slope above Dents Run, a tiny unincorporated town about 135 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. The man was dressed entirely in dark clothes, including over his head and face. “All I could see,” McCarthy remembers, “was his eyeballs.”
McCarthy wasn’t used to running into strangers on these forested hills, much less masked, armed ones. He was 40 at the time; he’d been hiking the region’s knobby peaks and mine-scarred crevices since he was 16, first as a hunter and then as a guide, and now as owner and operator of Big Bull Outfitters. Dents Run is partly renowned for its elk viewing area, where in autumn, visitors come to hear the animals bugle and watch them spar for dominance. Near the end of winter, elk and white-tailed deer drop their antlers, which are coveted by collectors and taxidermists. McCarthy leads shed hunts—tracking animals for the purpose of claiming freshly dropped antlers—to keep money flowing in during the offseason, when he would otherwise work construction.
Read the full article on Popular Mechanics:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoors/a71165066/dents-run-fbi-civil-war-gold/
