Announcer: Idaho Experience is made possible with funding from the James and Barbara Cimino Foundation, devoted to preserving the spirit of Idaho.

From Anne Voillequé and Louise Nelson.

From Judy and Steve Meyer.

The Friends of Idaho Public Television, the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

[Music] NARRATOR: When gold and silver were found in the territory that would become Idaho, people swooped in hoping to strike it rich.

Prospectors searched high and low for gold and silver.

but some came looking for an easy score.

JUSTIN SMITH: It was a crazy place in the 1860s to be in southern and eastern Idaho.

JEFF WADE: You could get killed at any time, just riding in a stagecoach that there happens to be a bunch of gold on.

NARRATOR: Getting the gold out of Idaho was no easy task.

There are stories of sunken silver ore in Lake Coeur d'Alene.

GREG TRUE: They had about 150 tons of silver ore on it.

NARRATOR: A crooked sheriff's daring robbery of a stagecoach in Bannock County.

JEFF WADE: Yeah robbing the stagecoach like it was a big risk.

I mean, you get shot or hung.

Think about $75,000 back then.

About $4 million today.

NARRATOR: The legend of Butch Cassidy's heist in Montpelier.

BILL BETENSON: They don't even look at him as an outlaw.

He's just a folk hero.

NARRATOR: And the mysterious Chief Bigfoot.

JEFF WADE: They would find these large footprints up to 17 and a half inches long footprints by about seven inches wide.

NARRATOR: If the legends are true, what happened to the gold and money?

Could there be treasure still waiting to be found?

JEFF WADE: If there's just a little bit of a chance they can get rich from just, you know, taking a shovel, a metal detector out, I think they're going to do it.

I think they're going to want that to be true.

NARRATOR: Searching for lost treasures next on Idaho Experience.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: It's a true story that's taken on legendary proportions.

With whispers of missing treasure thrown in.

NARRATOR: On August 13th 1896 at 3:13 p.m. Butch Cassidy, Bub Meeks, and Elzy Lay robbed the bank in Montpelier, Idaho.

NARRATOR: This robbery wasn't about making a score or returning to Cassidy's outlaw roots - it served another purpose.

RON EGAN, BANK OF MONTPELIER MUSEUM: The reason he got the money here is his old friend Matt Warner was in trouble with the law.

BILL BETENSON, AUTHOR "BUTCH CASSIDY, MY UNCLE": It's a great illustration of the loyalty that Butch had for his friends.

He is out of prison.

He could start his life over, but his friend is in need.

NARRATOR: Matt Warner, one of Butch Cassidy's pals was arrested for murder and needed a lawyer.

Douglas Preston said he'd take the case but Cassidy would have to pay his lawyer fees.

BETENSON: So what do they do?

They looked for a big juicy bank to make a withdrawal.

BETENSON: They said just before they decided to do it, they went to the local saloon for a little liquid courage.

NARRATOR: After a drink, the group took the short stroll across the street to the bank.

EGAN: It was just before closing time, when they rolled up, Butch and Elzy Lay just walked in.

BETENSON: Bub Meeks held his gun on the cashier.

Butch jumped over the cage and got the gold and silver.

EGAN: After they got the gold and silver, he asked for currency and they said there wasn't any.

He said, Don't lie to me.

And that's when he hit him over the head.

BETENSON: He miraculously remembered there was some currency.

NARRATOR: Cassidy and crew took more than $7,000 in cash, along with gold and silver coins.

Enough to pay for the lawyer, with extra to spare.

NARRATOR: Outside a young boy on a bicycle witnessed the heist.

CORDELL GREEN, BANK OF MONTPELIER MUSEUM: The deputy grabbed the bike, tried to chase him.

That bike is hard enough to ride by itself, let alone on a dirt road.

BETENSON: The key to his success in getting away was he would stash relays of fresh horses every ten miles or so, so he could out distance the posse because their posse horses would become spent after time.

And so they were able to make their way towards Wyoming and escape.

GREEN: He thought ahead.

He's thinking about stuff.

What's the best way to do this without anybody getting hurt?

NARRATOR: No one knows what happened to the gold and silver coins taken from the Montpelier Bank.

Rumors have the loot stashed in the City of Rocks or as far away as Wallace.

NARRATOR: Cassidy would never serve prison time in Idaho.

NARRATOR: Of all the places Butch Cassidy robbed in his criminal career, that bank in Montpelier is the only building that still stands today.

RADEK KONARIK, BANK OF MONTPELIER MUSEUM: When I drove through this town, I see this building empty and I decide to with my wife to purchase this building.

GREEN: This building is and was the Bank of Montpelier.

It's the only one left.

So you got 120 plus year old floors, the actual floor, counter, and the vault door.

BETENSON: He's done a wonderful job with this.

And it's nice to have something recognized too, and not torn down.

We need to preserve our history..so we learn from our history.

EGAN: That's what's so special about the museum.

People can come through here in this little town in Idaho and see the part of history.

And people are hungry for history.

GREEN: A lot of people come in that know about the museum, even though they come from Germany, Spain, France, all the countries In Europe, people from Ireland, Australia.

EGAN: One of my biggest rewards is when when kids come into this museum and many of them are more interested than their parents are.

A young boy come in and looked around.

He looked at every picture here.

He listened to every story.

He was 11 years old and he loved to read.

And he actually wanted to know more than what we actually told.

So he purchased the book from the museum here.

KONARIK: We trying to collect all the data, everything what happened in here and preserve this treasure of the West for future generations.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: The Owyhee Desert is rugged terrain far from civilization.

Perhaps that's what makes it an ideal place for a legend like Chief Bigfoot.

And tales of lost riches just waiting to be found.

JUSTIN SMITH, HISTORIAN: He's an urban legend.

It's very difficult to find anything that indicates that that person actually existed.

His dimensions are always interesting, 300 pounds, six foot eight, huge person.

JEFF WADE, HISTORIAN: They would find these large footprints up to 17 and a half inches long footprints by about seven inches wide.

And they found these footprints in the whole area.

NARRATOR: Settlers and immigrants were quick to blame him for every wagon train robbery from Idaho to Northern California.

WADE: Supposedly his name is Star Wilkinson, and he was part Cherokee, part white and part black.

And he had come out with the wagon train where he'd fallen in love with a young maiden on the wagon train.

WADE: But she doesn't reciprocate the love.

And so he becomes angry and ends up killing her other suitor.

And so this begins kind of a life of crime for Chief Bigfoot.

NARRATOR: From the early to late 1860s, robberies and other unexplained criminal activities were blamed on Chief Bigfoot, who proved to be as elusive as his wild-creature namesake.

WADE: They're both very elusive, and like you can't see him until he wants you to see him type thing, because the only evidence he left behind was the big footprints.

Kind of like the Sasquatch version of the story.

So there's definitely some interesting ties between them.

NARRATOR: Real or not there were advantages to the folklore for Native Americans.

SMITH: There were accounts in other places of the Native Americans with large moccasins that they would use for footprints, because that was a good way to distract from who it really was.

So any time something happened, it was Chief Bigfoot.

SMITH: Anytime the white settlers got the worst end of it.

Must have been Chief Bigfoot.

NARRATOR: Eventually a highwayman named John Wheeler caught up with Chief Bigfoot along the stage route to Silver City.

NARRATOR: The story was told years later in the Idaho Statesman.

Whatever the real story was, historians agree, the account that emerged was likely embellished by the author.

SMITH: So it ran in the Idaho Statesman third hand.

The story was interesting, if nothing else.

The idea was that Chief Bigfoot was off robbing another group of people.

He was caught in the middle and he was shot 15 or 16 times.

SMITH: And as he was laying, dying on the ground with 16 bullet holes in him, supposedly he spent 2 hours giving his life story to the man who was standing over the top of him, who pumped a 17th bullet hole into him.

WADE: After he tells his story, he dies.

Wheeler and Anderson bury him pretty much on the spot there at the Reynolds Creek Canyon.

Bigfoot also made mention that a lot of the robberies that he did, he also left behind a lot of the loot, a lot of the clothing and the gold and guns.

Basically supplies, anything like that he took from his wagon trains.

So somewhere out there, there could be a large stash of valuable items from the 1860s.

So that's known as Bigfoot's treasure.

[METAL DETECTOR SOUNDS] NARRATOR: Jason Smith is a local treasure hunter, one of a number of people who have searched for Chief Bigfoot's treasure over the years.

He uses a metal detector, a hobby that he picked up from his dad.

JASON SMITH, METAL DETECTING ENTHUSIAST: Once you get familiar with your metal detector, you can tell what the sound means anywhere from iron kind has a kind of a grunt, kind of a low growl kind of grunt to it.

SMITH: Silver has a really high-pitched tone to it.

And then the gold and gold rings is just kind of a mid-tone, basically.

SMITH: There's definitely a lot in Idaho, different coins and they've been stolen and what not back in the 1800s.

And then lost.

And whether someone's found or not, a lot of times you just don't know cause a lot of people just don't come forward with it.

There's a lot of lot of treasure out there.

NARRATOR: The search came up empty except for a few bullet casings and clay pigeons.

Suppose you were to find that treasure, could you legally keep it?

Experts say if you find something historic do not remove it, or you could wind up in court and face a penalty.

The law is a bit murky so it's a good idea to have permission even if searching for non- historic items.

[MUSIC, GUN SHOTS] NARRATOR: David Updyke like many young men in the mid 1800s moved west with the gold rush.

A classic tale of someone trying to strike it rich the legal way.

At least until the lure of easy treasure became too tempting.

JEFF WADE, HISTORIAN: So this story, it's really one of those typical Western type of stories.

WADE: In Idaho City, he mined gold on Ophir creek or in the Idaho City, Placerville, Boise Basin area.

He was able save up enough money to buy a livery stable here in the city of Boise.

WADE: At the time, you had a lot of what they called road agents or, you know, highwayman, outlaw at the time.

They were doing a lot of robberies.

WADE: So it seems like he kind of fell in with this crowd.

JUSTIN SMITH, HISTORIAN: Updkye was involved in a number of criminal enterprises including money laundering and just thievery.

NARRATOR: Despite riding on the wrong side of the law, Updyke ran for sheriff of Ada County.

WADE: So it was quite a surprise when he was elected sheriff on March 3rd, 1865.

SMITH: You know he was the first Ada County Sheriff and was well known for being a shady character.

SMITH: There's quite a few rumors about that that he had some help from his gang and that there was a little bit of strong arming that went on.

NARRATOR: Soon Updyke would follow the gold road in Eastern Idaho.

SMITH: East Idaho and southern Idaho were truly the old Wild West.

There was very little law through the region, particularly in the 1860s.

However, there was a lot of money moving around.

WADE: The Portneuf stage robbery occurred in July of 1865, and what this was is there was a stage that was coming down from Western Montana, from the mines up there and headed toward Salt Lake City on what was called the Montana Trail or otherwise known as Idaho's Gold Road, because there were so many millions of dollars gold shipped over this road.

WADE: What happened was there was a special stage set up to carry at least $75,000 worth of gold from Montana all the way down to Salt Lake City.

WADE: $75,000 of gold value today would be about $4 million somewhere in there.

SMITH: They were looking to get that money off of the stagecoach.

And in one haul, you could change your life.

[MUSIC] WADE: There had been several robberies on this road before.

So the passengers on the stage, they were all armed and they were all ready for this this fight.

WADE: When the stagecoach passed a certain bend in the road in Portneuf Canyon, several men stepped out of the brush.

WADE: Their faces were painted black and they all had their weapons ready to go.

The driver supposedly said it's a robbery, fire at them.

And some of the passengers did shoot at the bandits, but none of the bad guys were hit.

The robbers returned fire, hit the stagecoach.

They counted 77 bullet holes in the stagecoach.

SMITH: Once the shooting had stopped, they went down, opened up the door.

They saw five bodies.

One person was wounded, but he was playing dead.

The four had died on the spot.

And so Updyke and his men pulled the stage off of the road a little ways, took the gold boxes and headed for the hills.

[MUSIC] SMITH: They got away with about 15 gold bars and well over two pounds of gold dust.

SMITH: There's also speculation that they took it over the City of Rocks.

We have no idea where the gold went after that.

NARRATOR: What is known is that Updyke ultimately paid the price for his crimes.

WADE: So the county commissioners figured out what was going with Updyke.

I think they had always had an idea that he was not a good dude.

WADE: They were able to prove that he was pocketing a good amount of the taxes he was collecting.

And on that, they brought him up on charges.

He supposedly paid back all of the money that he owed to the county, and then he was allowed to resign from his position.

NARRATOR: But Updyke wasn't allowed to walk away.

The Payette Vigilance committee was ready to dole out the justice it thought he deserved.

SMITH: The Payette Vigilance Committee put the word out they were looking for him.

He fled to Boise.

The people in Boise didn't like him too much either.

NARRATOR: Updyke wound up north of Mountain Home in the Syrup Creek area.

SMITH: The Vigilance Committee finally did capture him.

And as they captured him, of course, the question came up, where's the gold?

And the story is Updyke looked at him and said, Go to hell.

And then they hung him.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: In the 1880s more steamboats likely plied the waters of lake Coeur d'Alene than any other body of water west of the Mississippi River.

But it's what lies beneath the surface of that great lake that draws the interests of under-water explorers, Greg and Brian True.

GREG TRUE, UNDER WATER EXPLORER: The steamboats were huge on this lake.

They had to get the ore out of Kellogg and Wallace.

Some of the boats built were able to carry a thousand people or at least 100 tons of ore.

The Georgie Oakes is one of the ones.

NARRATOR: Eventually narrow-gauge railway diminished the need for steamboats to haul lumber and other goods.

But in late 1889, the Kootenai, a boat designed to break ice in the cold months was hauling two barges of silver ore. GREG TRUE: They were bringing two barges down from the mission landing.

They had about 150 tons of silver ore on it.

The ore is in canvas sacks held about 125 pounds of ore stacked about four feet high.

This barge had three rows of it.

And they got down MacDonald Point around midnight.

Then they noticed the barge was leaning to the port side.

So the captain kind of made a run for the bank.

GREG TRUE: They got about 300 feet from the bank and then the barge flipped and dumped part of the ore in one way.

And then it dropped the weight then it flipped the other way and dumped the other part of the ore in.

So most of the silver ore went into the lake.

NARRATOR: Northern Pacific sent a diver, and determined it wasn't worth the cost of trying to recover the lost ore. Two of the crew members of the Kootenai returned the next spring to bring up the ore with hooks, with little luck.

More than 100 years later, a modern salvage came up empty.

NARRATOR: That hasn't deterred the Trues, who have found everything from sunken steamships to boat motors, and even a truck.

GREG TRUE: It's a totally foreign world.

GREG TRUE: You know, you never know when you go out what you're going to run across.

NARRATOR: Brian and Greg use sonar to visualize what's under the water, and a remote operated vehicle, or ROV, with a camera to investigate.

BRIAN TRUE, UNDERWATER EXPLORER: There's two sonars on it.

One's an echo sounder like altimeter, which tells me how far it is above the bottom.

And the second one's an imaging sonar that gives me a rough image like what's around it.

BRIAN TRUE: Radio waves don't work in the water, so it has to have a tether.

It's also nice if it loses power or if it floods, I can pull it up by the tether to save it.

GREG TRUE: When you're diving it's really weird, all of a sudden you see this big black thing in front of you.

It's kind of unnerving.

You don't know what it is.

But usually with the ROV, you'll come into view and you see what it is and you start going down the side just trying to figure out the size of it, how it's sitting.

And then you can do a more finer search and kind of go inside of it.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: Brian and Greg spent part of the year exploring McDonald point where the silver ore is believed to have fallen off the barge in 1889.

GREG TRUE: So most of the silver ore went into the lake.

The original story says quarter mile above.

We believe that was north.

Since nautical maps above does mean north, I kind of wonder if it didn't mean the other side of the point too.

We've checked both sides of it.

GREG TRUE: The mud doesn't seem to be too deep.

What we've found is it adds about eighth inch a year of mud.

So if it were in canvas sacks, we probably wouldn't get a good reflection back on the sonar and it may be covered too with mud.

We've chased some mud mounds, turned out to be rocks with the mud, went over the top of it.

GREG TRUE: I believe it's still there.

It's probably under the mud.

You might luck out and stumble across it.

GREG TRUE: It's a great mystery.

That's what keeps life interesting, all these mysteries.

NARRATOR: So far - no silver.

but silver isn't the only treasure these two are looking for.

GREG TRUE: I think the steamboats are a lot bigger treasure.

That was a piece of history.

This area, without them, this area never would have grown like it did.

GREG TRUE: Some of these boats were 145 feet long and they're steam powered, all made out of wood.

And they had a thin metal side on the outside of them.

It's pretty incredible to me that you can build something out of wood like that that could carry a hundred tons or a thousand people.

GREG TRUE: I'd love to bring a boat up and rebuild it, but let's face it, I don't have $1,000,000, plus the wife would never go for it.

GREG TRUE: It's just mostly just trying to preserve history cause it won't be around much longer.

JUSTIN SMITH, HISTORIAN: History is about a story.

It's about these narratives that are romantic or these narratives that are exciting to hear.

And that's what draws the kids in, and that's what draws a lot of these adults in and gets them started.

NARRATOR: What is truth?

What is legend?

And what is folklore?

NARRATOR: Bank robbers, stagecoaches full of gold, and missing money make for good stories that become weaved into our history.

SMITH: I think it's valuable to tell these stories, including the myths.

Those myths have value because even though they may not be true as they're told, it's information that the students can learn.

SMITH: They can begin to pull apart the sources and start to understand why those myths took root and why they grew.

So stories like this are incredibly important for people to enjoy Idaho and learn about Idaho and the region, and something that I encourage teachers and students to look into.

It's a lot of fun to read about these guys.

[MUSIC] Announcer: Idaho Experience is made possible with funding from the James and Barbara Cimino Foundation, devoted to preserving the spirit of Idaho.

From Anne Voillequé and Louise Nelson.

From Judy and Steve Meyer.

The Friends of Idaho Public Television, the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.