Kelly's Bluff - Lost Gold and Mystery Graves in Dubuque County, Iowa

Mark Turner 

Mysterious World 

4/25/14

Dubuque County in Iowa has its share of legends but the story of Kelly's Gold has intrigued gold hunters for the last 150 years. Buried coins valued at around $100,000 are said to have been buried by an eccentric lead miner named Thomas Kelly. No one has found the gold, but people still keep up the legend.

From WQAD 8: A tall monument remains on display at Dubuque’s Linwood Cemetery, standing in dedication to a mystery that left Tom Kelly with the last laugh.

Rider Waite tarot card
depicting Judgement Day
as the angel Gabriel
stirs the dead
from their graves

Also, on the same bluff, other mysteries of a grimmer and more substantial physical nature exist. 900 graves were suddenly 'discovered' in at the Third Street Cemetery on Kelly's bluff in 2007 when a dog unearthed a bone. The bodies were buried in haste from a cholera epidemic that swept the region and the burials were never documented. They have since been reburied. Some of the burials were aligned on the ancient Irish tradition of pointing the head to the west and the feet to the east so that the dead could rise from their graves when Gabriel sounded his trumpet on Judgement Day. But as the disease mounted and people died en-mass, bodies were buried quickly, no longer in east to west fashion and sometimes with one body on top of another. 

I wondered after finding these two seemingly unrelated stories, that maybe the tall tale of Thomas Kelly was born from the plague as an indirect way, a sign-post for future generations to know that something had happened here, and a gold story would be more interesting than a plague of disease killing nearly a thousand people. 

Gold and plague, reminding us all that no matter how much you have, you can't take it with you.

Story sources: WQAD 8 Moline, Illinois, Archaeology News Network

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