[Granville-Hough] 22-23 June 2009 - Golden Days at Bunker Hill

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

GOLDEN DAYS AT BUNKER HILL, by Harold Hopkins (used by permission) (Part 1)

It is probably unjust that there are so few shortcuts to quick wealth. 
Too many people spend to much time searching for easy outs - hoping for 
the right card to fall when they would do better sticking to more 
useful, less exciting pursuits. In the 1930’s my Dad and some of his 
friends believed that finding gold might be, for them, the big payoff. 
In the summer and fall during those lean years they would, now and then, 
traipse off for a night of gold hunting. Night, because the gold they 
sought was not gold dust or nuggets, as found in nature, but gold pieces 
already mined and minted, and artfully concealed. And they wern’t 
looking for just a couple of gold pieces to clink together, but an iron 
pot, a fruit jar, a length of lead pipe, or even an old sock full of 
golden eagles.
This nocturnal fever grew out of a wishful and wistful thinking and the 
willingness to swallow pure rumor; fool’s gold, if you like. The tales 
about hidden gold were superficially different, but all had a kind of 
alikeness: Death had come to a certain stingy, crafty, unsociable old 
farmer or merchant, always a bachelor or widower, who distrusted banks 
and kept all his assets in gold pieces. The stories pointedly noted that 
no container full of gold coins had turned up among his personal 
effects. Rumor upon rumor was embroidered so endlessly that red-blooded 
goldbugs could hardly stand the suspense of gold unfound. The teller 
speculated freely about the amount of gold, and where it might now lie. 
It was whispered hoarsely that the late departed had spent much time 
taking solitary walks, and had been seen behind the barn or smokehouse 
or in the corner of an old field. Some listeners became convinced that 
all this gold lay awaiting the turn of a spade by the lucky finder. If 
the miser had no close kin and the house was unoccupied, that was the 
signal for a gold rush on some dark night.
When one is young almost everything is new, and the incredible is 
accepted as the ordinary. At my tender age I had added little or no 
scepticism to my bag of lore, and I admit to believing some of these 
far-fetched tales were true. Later, knowing more of human foibles, I 
came to believe that gold hunting may have been just an alibi Dad used 
to get out of the house for a night of poker – an equally uncertain, and 
slower, way to wealth.
But one day while exploring around the house, as kids do, I came across 
a gadget I had heard my Dad mention as his “mineral rod.” In those 
pre-electronic days, this formidable looking instrument consisted of 
several pieces of machined brass, all kind of screwed together end to 
end. One section had a loosely coiled spring, with a “pointer” at one 
end. You walked along with it in your hand and when it detected gold, 
the spring would bend as the senser pointed in the direction where one 
should go to dig. There’s no evidence I know of that such a contraption 
ever led anybody to a cache of gold. But one’s head can be filled with 
such nonsense.

(GWH: It was after WW II when mine detectors became commercially 
available that there was a resurgence in hunting for gold or silver by 
both Sullivan descendants and outsiders. Of course, lots of old cans 
were dug up this way, as well as plows and other metallic debris from 
farming operations. When you were exploring around old house sites, you 
could step into pot holes left by careless diggers who did not bother to 
cover them. On the Hough farm, the old Frank Ware homesite was checked 
out thoroughly by his descendants using detectors.)

GOLDEN DAYS AT BUNKER HILL, by Harold Hopkins, used by permission, Part 
2, Fishing.

It was about this time when my Dad and I and my cousin Lloyd Butler and 
his dad, Walter Butler, and my uncle Grover Yelverton all went on an 
overnight fishing trip down on Cohay Creek at a place called Bunker 
Hill. Bunker Hill was near the Illinois Central railroad line between 
Mize and Taylorsville. We went in Uncle Walter’s 1932 Chevrolet sedan, 
with our bedrolls or quilts piled in or on the car along with the 
fishing equipment. We turned off the main road and drove slowly along an 
old logging road to get the car as close as possible to Cohay Creek. 
Suddenly, the right front wheel sank into a deep hole in the road, and 
the car stopped. We tried to pry it out, but it was nearly dark, so 
after a few attempts we decided to make camp right there, and use the 
remaining daylight to set out our hooks.
Setting out hooks overnight was what fishermen did in those days to 
catch catfish and eels. One tied a line several feet long that included 
a baited hook, line, and sinker to the end of a slender green pole cut 
and trimmed from a branch or sapling and its butt end sharpened. The 
hook was baited with worms, a minnow, or a crawfish, and tossed into the 
creek, and the butt end of the pole was pushed into the soft creek bank 
deep enough that nothing short of a 60-pound catfish could yank it out. 
You set out two to five dozen more hooks the same way along the creek in 
spots where you thought the big ones might be hiding. Next morning you 
were up by daylight to make the rounds of your set-outs. At each one you 
hoped there’d be a big catfish or eel tugging so hard that the tip of 
the pole would be bobbing up and down. When that did happen, as it did 
sometimes, it could sit your adrenalin racing.
I’ve strayed from the point which was that when Uncle Walter’s Chevvy 
sedan’s front wheel sank into the hole, one of the adults among us – the 
driver, of course - pronounced an ugly word or two and allowed that the 
car had hit a pot hole. In my simplicity, I thought that a pot hole was 
one done by someone looking for gold, not a section of rut blown out by 
rainwater runoff. Today I know that pots are not found in pot holes, 
though some may have several hubcaps lying in or about them. My 
suspicions that we had foundered in a gold hole were strengthened when 
one of the adults commented that many years before, a house had stood in 
the very spot where we had now come to grief. Indeed, the evidence that 
a house once stood were there – a few bricks making up a part of a 
chimney, old pieces of lumber, and one other damning bit of evidence 
that I will soon disclose. And now (as a certain radio commentator used 
to say) for the rest of the story, one with what you might call an 
iron-ic twist:
We set out our hooks, returned to camp and had dinner. Dinner or 
breakfast in the woods, whether it’s mothers from home or Dad’s from the 
campfire, is infinitely finer than food from any restaurant anywhere. If 
you want to enjoy a heavenly taste, just camp overnight when you are 
about 10 or 11. After dinner the adults among us played non-gambling 
games with cards, pitch (setback) or five-up, by the firelight. 
Eventually Lloyd and I, grew bored and unrolled our quilts for bed. The 
ground underneath the quilts was hard, as ground almost always is, and I 
remember that I remarked to my cousin that, Wouldn’t it be nice if we 
had bedsprings under our quilts to soften the ground a little?
The campfire died and the adults came to bed but I lay wide awake. The 
stars were out, and in the stillness you could hear things happening out 
in the woods. Something was poking me in the back through the quilt, and 
I couldn’t get up and remove it because Lloyd was asleep on the other 
side of the quilt, and it would wake him. I don’t know how long it took 
for me to get heavy-lidded, but it seemed no time at all before I was 
awakened by the mumbling of adult voices, saw the fire all lit up, 
smelled breakfast cooking, and got ready to gobble it down so we could 
go and see how many big catfish were squirming on our hooks. But I hung 
back a bit for Lloyd to get up too, because I wanted to find what it was 
that had been poking me all night. Finally, he was up, and I grabbed the 
edge of the quilt and swept it back, and there it was! – an old piece of 
bedspring. Unfortunately, wishes can come true.


(GWH: My first fishing trips were remarkably similar to Harold’s. I 
caught my first fish in a slough or bar-pit on Hachitapalou Creek, then 
we went on by mules and wagon to Cohay Creek to spend the night, not far 
from the Ace Johnson bridge.. My second fishing trip was a long walk 
down the railroad to Okatomy Creek in Simpson County, where it rained 
all night after we set out hooks. It was hard and cold to sleep in the 
rain even though I was hunkered into a partly hollow trunk of a big 
tree. We had to wade out of the swamp to the railroad and walk, all wet, 
back home. I was in the second grade.)

P. S. The exchange between Winston Churchill and Lady Astor comes under 
the category of "When Insults had Class." She said, "If you were my 
husband, I'd give you poison," and he said, "If you were my wife, I'd 
drink it."

P. S. Another little episode from "When Insults Had Class," occurred 
when a member of Parliament said to Prime Minister Disraeli, "Sir, you 
will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease." "That 
depends, Sir," replied Disraeli, "on whether I embrace your policies or 
your mistress."