By Dale Welch
What would cause a young slave boy to go off wondering in the night when he could be at home, in his cabin? What would it all cost him?
In the 1840’s, Ben Cowan was a yong boy and a slave of the Cowan family and worked on the farm, located in the Indian Creek area of what is now Putnam County. Young Ben worked clearing land and planting and harvesting fields of corn and tobacco, along with at least two generations of his family to help his master. It was hard backbreaking work that demanded effort to get the job done.
But Ben began to wander out at night. Roaming the woods and hills and hollows became a nightly routine. It started effecting his daily work. No matter how bad he was scolded and whipped by his master, he still slipped out and continued his nightly roaming. What was he so obsessed about? Neither questions nor whips would make him give an answer. His master finally had enough. Ripping him away from his parents and siblings, Ben was sold to a faraway Southern planter.
Ben Cowan spent 30 years picking cotton for his new master. While in the fields, he was still obsessed about the reason for his nighttime ramblings back at home. As the Civil War came and went, Ben found himself a free man and could go where he pleased. Now with a family, he headed back to his Indian Creek home and soon began his rambling through the countryside again.
Searching when he could, Ben never could find what he was looking for. Finally, Ben divulged his lifetime secret to his son and another man. Back when he was a child, Ben revealed that his grandmother was dying and told him of a treasure that she had heard which had been hidden years before. She told him that a French trapper had dug a cave into a mountain near an old oak tree and had buried eight barrels of silver coins. Ben had many questions to ask her, but she died after revealing that bit of information. Believing his story, they helped him search.
Ben was going to find that silver. He’d thought about what his grandmother had told him in her dying breath. It was the reason he was sold off to another master. It was going to be his He said he wanted to live like the white man. By November 1872, he and his son found the dugout cave and began working it.
The cave was found back into a mountain just inside Putnam County, on a farm owned in 1874 by Matt Cowan. The last time Ben and his son dug in the cave, disaster struck and struck hard. As they dug, a rock fell upon his son and killed him. Had Ben’s obsession for wealth beyond measure caused all this? His son was more precious than all the silver and gold in the world. Now all of a sudden, it didn’t mean anything to him. He was done.
Bering done didn’t mean he was done talking about it. He would show people the “curious looking coin” that he had found while digging in the clay. He said the silver wasn’t packed in barrels, but apparently in the clay. Ben also said the cave was haunted. The last time he was there, something came out of the cave and pushed his face, which made him run. He would tell people that if they find the cave, they will find an old grub hoe sticking in the clay.
Talk about the cave and the silver became strong in the African American community. During the first part of May 1874, around 30 African American men from Putnam, DeKalb, Smith and Wilson Counties, all armed with muskets, shovels and picks, formed a line and marched to the cave. The men camped both inside and outside at a fenced-in log house about one-half mile from the cave. Sam Baird and Mark Magness were organizing the work. Everything went well the first day.
Around sunrise the next day, all the men were getting their breast and planning for their workday, when a white man on a white horse came riding down the mountain up to the fence. He looked at them and wheeled his horse and rode away. The men were talking about how strange that was when three men on foot came walking up. They asked a man named Clay if the African Americans had “come to fight.” Before their intentions could be told, three African Americans came walking toward the home. They were returning with water. The three strange visitors saw them and hollered “Here they come” and started advancing and firing on them. At that command, a group of men on horseback came riding hard down the mountain, with guns a’ blazing.
The unsuspecting silver miners scattered. Several men got to their guns and began returning fire on the attackers. For about 20 minutes, the battle was heated, but there were too many of them. The African Americans were trying to escape. Ben Turner had been held up in the house tried to escape out the back door, and was shot in right hip, which passed though him, exiting above the left hip.
No one knows what the white men done afterwards, or who they were. Sam Baird came back at night and retrieved the wounded. However, it was said that a Cowan man that lived nearby called for a doctor, and the doctor pulled out a bullet from his chest. There was also a fine mare killed that had belonged to to Bailey Johnson, of Alexandria.
What was the reason for the attack? It was during the Reconstruction period, less than 10 years after the war ended. Many at the time mistakenly thought the band of African Americans had been formed to attack the neighborhoods around the area. There was still a lot of animosity between all the different peoples. What had become an obsessive dream to a young slave boy had endede in only a nightmare as he became a free man.
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