Original subtitles

WILLIAM SHATNER: Mysterious ancient earthworks

that lead to the land of the dead.

Strange lights that haunt a town for hundreds of years.

-(animalistic screeching) -And horrifying tales

of monsters said to roam the American frontier.

In 1803,

the United States completed the Louisiana Purchase,

acquiring 828,000 square miles

of untamed wilderness from France for $15 million.

Quite the deal.

And almost immediately, scores of explorers

and settlers began pushing westward

to discover much more than just an uncharted frontier.

Pioneers spoke of bizarre, man-made structures,

strange mummies and weird, ghostly lights.

Were these merely tall tales spun around the campfire?

Or was the American frontier far stranger

than we ever imagined?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

♪ ♪

(horse neighing)

SHATNER: From the 1700s to the early 1900s,

the era of the American frontier marked a period

of rapid westward expansion.

-(horse neighing) -It was a time where explorers,

pioneers and adventurers moved into unknown lands

to create a new life and build a new country.

(indistinct chatter)

KEN LAYNE: America really starts with the frontier.

The father of the country, George Washington,

makes his name by fighting in the French and Indian Wars

on the American frontier,

beyond the mountains of those first coastal settlements

that made up the American colonies.

As more people arrived,

a lot of those people went straight to the frontier.

And for the next 100 years,

the story of America is really moving across that frontier.

And as it did,

all of the different cultures and landscapes

and the troubles that it took to get through those places

all added up to the myth and legends of America.

So on the frontier, the American West--

it really became the land of promise.

The idea was that there was unlimited resources,

and all you had to do to get it for yourself was go there.

Be willing to brave danger

or strife or difficulty,

and all of the resources, the land--

that could all be yours.

This was a really different idea for people.

That there was somewhere where anyone,

not of a good family or a particular lineage,

but anyone could achieve their dreams.

SHATNER: In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson

purchased the Louisiana Territory from France,

doubling the size of the United States.

And for the next 40 years,

around seven million people took part

in the treacherous westward migration.

But in 1848, gold was discovered in California,

igniting a feverish frenzy of treasure seekers

who ventured even farther west

to claim their fortune.

IAN NELIGH: When gold was first discovered

in California,

that brought a staggering 90,000 people into the frontier

and across the Rockies to try to find gold.

And of course, along the way,

they were prospecting the streams,

and they were looking for gold, and they found a lot of wealth.

And some people became quite rich overnight.

The gold rush happened again ten years later in Colorado in 1859,

when another 100,000 people decided to brave the frontier

and try to find gold.

The frontier could provide an untold opportunity

for those who knew how to look for it.

There was enough people that they needed

to bring in cattle to feed them all.

And with cattle, you need cowboys.

And now you have the West.

SHATNER: By 1862,

President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act,

granting Americans 160 acres of public land for free

if they were willing to farm and develop their claim.

(horse neighing)

Around four million people took on the challenge

to be part of a westward expansion.

MAN: Yah!

SHATNER: And what they found was a world

unlike any other.

LANCE GEIGER: The stuff

that they found in the West was truly amazing.

The Yellowstone country,

the Grand Canyon.

Native American ruins, where they were building walled cities

that we never knew that that was going on.

They even found bones

of ancient elephants and sabertooth tigers.

And newspapers at the time were happy to print stories of,

you know, finding giants in the West.

You could believe that

because so much was found in the West.

But is it just legend, or is it truth?

There was a lot of truth

stranger than fiction in the West.

TOK THOMPSON: You're moving to the area that was not mapped.

A land that had been inhabited by cultures

for thousands upon thousands of years.

Most of the North American continent was Native American.

And these cultures have their own stories,

a lot of strange stories.

Many, many million beliefs, native legendary creatures

that had become a part of Western folklore.

Even the most classic American supernatural other, Bigfoot--

you know, Sasquatch--

this comes directly from Native American lore.

SHATNER: While pioneers experienced

Native American mysticism for the first time,

the new settlers were also creating stories and beliefs

that were all their own.

This included a strange form of entertainment

found in traveling shows that toured the frontier.

They passed off questionable relics as genuine--

like McGinty, the petrified man,

the alleged mummy of Abraham Lincoln's assassin,

John Wilkes Booth,

and other oddities that further blurred the line

between fact and fiction.

LAYNE: Frontier settlements were

completely isolated from civilized America.

So, carnivals and related traveling shows

brought a certain kind of novelty to these small towns.

And one of the favorite attractions

of such places was the freak show.

And these freak shows would have all sorts of strange animals.

You might have a two-headed bull.

And there was also human curiosities.

Like, very big humans.

People who were eight, nine feet tall.

They would have people

who had hair growing over their entire body.

And for the performers, this was often a way

to get out of a doomed life

where they couldn't really have a regular life.

Instead, they got to travel,

entertain people and achieve a certain kind of fame.

SHATNER: While so-called human curiosities

garnered great attention,

there was also one strange object

that attracted so much notoriety in the West,

people claimed it cursed the entire city of San Francisco.

LAYNE: One of the most grotesque,

weird curiosities was the head

of the notorious gold rush bandit

and outlaw Joaquín Murrieta.

And this was a human head

in a jar of whiskey, the legend goes.

It toured around the state of California

and its last permanent exhibit was

at Dr. Jordan's Anatomical Museum

of Weird Curiosities in San Francisco.

And it was in that museum in 1906

when the great earthquake of San Francisco struck.

(people screaming)

LAYNE: The whole place was leveled.

And the legend grew that perhaps Joaquín Murrieta

cursed San Francisco for displaying his head

and caused the actual earthquake.

SHATNER: While it's safe to say

that a head in a jar was not responsible

for leveling San Francisco,

could some of the countless strange tales and legends

that are still told

from the American frontier really be true?

McNEILL: We have the historical reality of the frontier

and westward expansion,

and then this real mythical, legendary world

of the Wild West becomes this backdrop.

Like a landscape against which anything can happen.

If we're looking for a place

where unknowns are going to be encountered,

where strange and bizarre things can happen,

the American frontier is a magnet for stories like that.

SHATNER: This remote frontier town is famous

for a rather strange phenomenon

that has been witnessed since the 1880s.

The spectacle is so well known,

the town constructed a viewing station

for the thousands of onlookers who, every year,

hope to catch sight of... the Marfa lights.

WOMAN: Oh, my gosh, it's totally moving.

(crickets chirping)

MICHAEL HALL: I've been coming out here for a long time,

going to the Marfa lights viewing station

and seeing what I thought were the Marfa lights.

People have been seeing these lights for hundreds of years.

They mostly appear at night

and mostly in an area called the Mitchell Flat,

which is between Alpine and Marfa.

The more I reported, the more I realized

that there was no real consistency to the reports.

Everybody had an individualized experience with the lights.

WOMAN: It's, like, flickering and changing colors.

HALL: I talked to people that said

they have different colors, they hover.

Sometimes they shot off, sometimes they came back.

They were different velocities.

A lot of people say how playful they are.

It's like they're having a spiritual experience

with these mystery lights.

SHATNER: While some eyewitnesses claim

to feel a transcendent experience

witnessing the Marfa lights,

others have found them to be rather unsettling.

Belle Peña-Lancaster was just 13 years old

when she and a bus full of her classmates

got an up-close look at the mysterious anomaly.

I remember sitting in the bus,

and that's when we saw them for the first time.

They were out there in the field.

And they came closer and closer and closer to the bus.

Just kind of playing with each other.

The whole bus lit up with the lights.

It was, like, blue, green, like, a soft yellow light.

But we could see they weren't spherical.

They were two-dimensional.

They were about the size of a big platter.

So, they're flat.

And they went back quickly to the end of the field.

Some of the girls were really upset and crying.

And that's when our coach was just...

told the bus driver, "We got to go. We got to go."

MAN: We got two heading this way.

THORNSBURG: I grew up here.

We all had our own idea what the lights were.

They are very intelligent.

I'll tell you how we communicated with them.

So whenever those lights appeared, we would take a laser

and hit that light with green, blue, whatever.

And they answered back.

But whatever color you hit it with,

it turned that color, and it grew every single time.

Now that is light that did that.

Those lights... not supposed to talk.

They're not supposed to communicate, but they did.

SHATNER: Can the Marfa lights communicate with us in some way?

Well, it's an intriguing claim.

And one that's made even more compelling

when you consider what happened to military personnel

who were stationed here during World War II.

THORNSBURG: The Marfa Army Airfield was

the largest training bomber base in World War II.

During the training progress,

whenever those bombers took off,

the lights would come out of the ground

and either fly with the plane or fly in the plane.

And they got to a point

where they would interfere

with the communication that base had with pilots.

The military decided to shut it down

because the lights were getting out of control.

The officer in charge of flight ops, his name was Fritz Kahl.

He became the mayor of Marfa later on.

He was very much afraid of the Marfa lights.

He said, "Stay away from 'em.

They're not of this world."

SHATNER: Just what are the Marfa lights?

While no one can say for sure,

to this day, there is endless speculation

about what this mysterious phenomenon could be.

HALL: Since the first time

anyone ever saw the Marfa lights,

they've come up with theories to explain them.

There is gas rising up

from the volcanic floor of the Mitchell Flat.

That might have something to do with it.

There's this theory called "Fata Morgana,"

which is what happens

when you see a ship out on the horizon,

and it seems to be floating in the air.

So maybe the lights are just a mirage.

A lot of folks out here think

that the Marfa lights are connected to UFOs and aliens.

But the biggest theory is

headlights on the highway from Presidio, Texas.

Of course, there were no car headlights

back in the 19th century, but that is the number-one theory.

(cattle lowing)

The first recorded sighting of these lights is 1883

by a 16-year-old cowboy named Robert Ellison.

He was driving cattle with some other cowboys,

and he told his family

about seeing these weird lights in the sky.

There is no documentation to these early accounts.

What there are, are oral stories, oral history.

But that doesn't mean that they're not true.

SHATNER: With no other explanation

for the strange, dancing lights on the horizon,

it is said that Robert Ellison believed

they may have been fires set by a local Apache tribe.

But what's so intriguing is

that the Apache had their own explanations

for these ghostly illuminations.

They believed they were connected

to the death of a mighty Apache chief named...

Alsate.

The Apache had a chief named Alsate,

who was killed in the wars with the Mexicans

back in the 19th century.

And what the Apaches and the Mexicans thought was

that any mysterious light seen down there

was Alsate's ghost.

Are the mystery lights the ghost of an Apache chief

wandering through the wilderness?

I don't know. Maybe so.

DOVER: There are native tribes

that speculate that the ghost lights are the spirit

of a chief, and that the spirits

of the warriors are still searching for him.

There are native stories in that area

that these are called "ghost lights."

We don't know for sure,

but native stories always have some basis in truth.

I've talked to people that had seen them,

that said that they've actually communicated with them

and would ask them, "Move to the left,

"move to the right, move higher,"

and these lights would, in turn, follow those instructions.

SHATNER: Stories of the Marfa lights are

as old as Texas itself, and continue to this day.

And while there's no definitive answer

for what these anomalies really are,

this phenomenon has become an accepted member

of this remote, frontier community.

HALL: The Marfa Public Library, which is this really cool,

little small-town library, right off the town square--

there's a room full of local history.

And one of the highlights of the room is this binder.

It's about four inches thick,

and it's full of Marfa lights stories.

And there's hundreds of stories.

It's like any great mystery.

The great mysteries are unsolved,

no matter how deeply you look into them,

and that makes them live on forever.

and that makes them live on forever.

Even though the strange Marfa lights remain a mystery,

the fact that they're still visible today allows us

to continue to study them.

Which is also the case with a massive, earthen mound

in southern Ohio,

that some experts believe was built to serve as a gateway

to another world.

While mapping the West,

legendary explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark

discover several strange mounds made of earth

that appear to be hundreds, if not thousands, of years old.

What they had discovered are some

of North America's greatest ancient wonders.

THOMPSON: One of the

interesting things that Lewis and Clark came across

in their expedition were mounds.

And these mounds are sacred places for Native Americans.

Most average Americans, around the 1800s,

they would have had no idea what to make of this.

What they were stumbling on is a tremendous story.

One of the ones that they describe--

the so-called spirit mounds-- is a natural mound,

not a man-made phenomenon.

This lines up with Native American ideas

of sacred landscapes,

that, you know, the land itself has spirit.

But we also have what's called "effigy mounds."

ROMAIN: Effigy mounds are large earthen structures,

usually between two to four feet in height,

and they're shaped in the shape of an animal of some sort.

Many of them are bears.

Many of them are birds.

A few of them may have barrels within them.

Most of them don't. And, frankly,

the reason for effigy mounds is not clearly understood.

SHATNER: It's estimated that thousands

of mysterious earthen mounds were constructed

all across North America by ancient Native cultures.

But there is one structure in central Ohio

that is more confounding than the rest.

It's called the "Great Serpent Mound."

The Great Serpent Mound is an effigy earthwork,

in the shape of a snake

about to grasp, or bite into,

a circular, or an oval-shaped object.

Often described as an egg, but probably not.

It's about 1,300 feet in length,

which makes it longer than a football field.

It's, quite frankly, a masterpiece

of ancient earthwork construction

that has yet to be rivaled

anywhere, frankly, in the world.

SHATNER: The Serpent Mound is mostly made of clay and ash,

with a layer of rocks and soil that help it retain its shape.

It was one of the first archaeological sites

in U.S. history to be preserved as a state park.

But even after centuries of study,

experts are still working to uncover its many secrets.

ROMAIN: In 2010, we took solid cores--

like biopsies, basically-- from 18 different locations

within the body of the serpent

to obtain radiocarbon datable materials

from the base of the mound.

The object, of course, being

to try to ascertain the best we could

who-who built the effigy.

So, the ground at the Serpent Mound was dated

to about 320 BC.

I suspect that the initial construction was built

by Adena people.

It may or may not have looked like what we see today,

but it was continually renewed, rebuilt

and restored by Native Americans

for well over 1,500 years.

SHATNER: What would compel ancient Native people

to maintain this enormous site for thousands of years?

Perhaps clues can be found in the tales

of frontier-era discoveries that can only be described

as gigantic.

In the mid-1800s, people begin to find

what appear to be really abnormally large bones

that seem to speak to incredibly tall people.

Some reports say, nine, ten, 11 feet tall.

This is a really interesting suggestion,

that there were ancient people living here

who were literal giants.

And then here we have, in the landscape,

this impossibly large piece of art representing a serpent.

It's not a stretch to think, giant people make giant art.

DOVER: There was one skeleton that was found

in direct connection with the Serpent Mound.

They said that the skull was large, the jawbone was huge,

and this skeleton became known as the "Adena Giant,"

and it was put in a museum,

like so many others were,

and has been lost to antiquity.

And there still is an accounting

as to where a lot of these remains went.

So, there's a lot of people that believe

that the giants that existed then

had a lot to do with the construction.

SHATNER: Was the Great Serpent Mound built

by an ancient race of giants?

It's an intriguing theory that certainly adds one more layer

to the mystery

of what the extraordinary Serpent Mound could be.

ROMAIN: What else is a burial mound

except a portal to another world?

And that's what I believe Serpent Mound represents.

It's a portal to the land of the dead.

This was a sacred burial ground,

with the serpent at its center,

as a guardian to that land of the dead,

and as a protector of the people who are buried there.

But ultimately, no one really quite knows

precisely what Serpent Mound is.

Whatever the purpose

of the Great Serpent Mound might have been,

it's a reminder that the legends of the frontier

stretch back thousands of years.

But there are other mysteries that have yet to be solved,

like the case of a terrifying giant creature who ran wild

in Arizona, called the Red Ghost.

SHATNER: This land of searing desert,

treacherous canyons and ancient saguaro cactus

is a dangerous wilderness reserved

for only the most resilient frontiersmen.

But after the arrival of the railroad in 1877,

the population explodes.

Settlers are hellbent on exploiting this rugged land

for cattle ranches, agriculture,

and, of course, gold.

And around the same time,

word spreads of a strange, new danger in the region--

a monstrous creature roaming the desert.

In 1883,

there was two prospectors

who were camping at night,

and some terrible creature ran through their camp

and destroyed their tents and scared the heck out of them.

(eerie screeching)

And the next day, when people went to investigate the area,

they found hoof marks that did not look like anything

that anybody had ever seen.

JOHN: This monster-- it was huge.

It was aggressive.

It made this weird screaming noise

that nobody had ever heard anything like before.

Frontier people had dealt with wild animals.

You know, bears and mountain lions and whatnot,

and even crazy horses.

But this huge monster was frightening.

People were scared of this thing.

It left long red hairs on the bushes as it went through.

And so, it acquired the name "the Red Ghost."

SHATNER: As the story goes, over the following weeks,

more locals reported encountering a giant red monster

in Arizona.

Some accounts claimed it was over 30 feet tall.

Others said it could knock over heavy freight wagons with ease.

What possibly

could these frightened frontiersman have witnessed?

LAYNE: Wherever Americans fanned out across the frontier West,

people reported seeing strange animals

that could not be found in any zoology book.

There were stories about creatures

like the Wendigo and the Skinwalker.

These were sort of werewolf-style humanoids.

There were legends of great thunderbirds

that looked like pterodactyls,

-that would darken the sky... -(screeching)

...as they went overhead.

A lot of people, at the time period,

would have readily believed in strange monsters

that might have been lurking about.

This was unexplored territory.

There were animals not yet known to science.

And so, nobody really knew

what the Red Ghost was or what was going on.

It was a time of monsters.

SHATNER: In addition to its frightening description,

there was another reason that the Red Ghost was so feared

in the Arizona Territory.

Because according to eyewitnesses,

this giant red monster...

also had a demonic rider.

The story takes sort of a darker turn

when two prospectors saw it crossing a mesa

and described it as being this giant,

red creature being ridden by the devil.

They couldn't quite make it out.

So, they decided to fire at the creature.

(gunshot)

And it got away,

but something fell off.

So, they went up there to look at it.

And they found the remains of a human head.

So that kind of further added to the legend

and sort of the creep factor of this Red Ghost

that was sort of terrorizing the Arizona Territory at the time.

SHATNER: The legend of the Red Ghost and its rider spread

throughout the Arizona Territory during the late 1800s.

So, what exactly was this strange beast

said to be ridden by the devil himself?

It wasn't until about 15 years later

that, one morning, a rancher got up,

and he looked out his window,

and he saw the Red Ghost in his front yard.

And so, he carefully took his rifle and fired...

-(gunshot) -(screeching)

...killing the Red Ghost once and for all.

It's always an interesting moment

when somebody shoots a legend, because at that point,

it's no longer really a legend.

Now, it's a dead creature.

When people got to examine the dead creature

that the fellow shot on his lawn,

it turned out to be a camel.

Camels are not native to this area.

So, for the people there, this would have been unusual.

SHATNER: The discovery that the Red Ghost

was not a monstrous beast,

but, instead, an exotic camel, left locals questioning

how on earth this creature found its way to Arizona?

Well, many believe it was a long-lost member

of a frontier expeditionary force

known as "The Army Camel Corps."

DOVER: In 1855,

up to 1887, there was a proposal that was

brought out by the War Department.

The head of the War Department was Jefferson Davis.

And he recommended that with the American Southwest opening up,

that we probably needed camels.

So, they recruited camels from the Mediterranean

and brought them over, about 75 of them.

-(camels grunting) -And they were actually pretty successful.

They could go for a week without water.

They could go for a month without food.

But the soldiers were having difficulties

because the camels had an ill temper

and would spit at them and bite them.

The program was finally dissolved

because the railroad started coming through,

and they no longer had a need for camels.

Was the Red Ghost just the last of a regiment

of camel-riding soldiers?

It's certainly possible.

But even if that were true,

the identity of its skeletal rider is another mystery.

DAVID ALBAUGH: After this farmer killed the camel,

they found that a human body was strapped on its back.

They did not know the origin of the person that was on the back.

They thought maybe it was somebody

that was dying of thirst, and maybe

he would strap himself to the back of the camel,

hoping the camel would lead him to water.

But then they found that the way

that the body was actually attached is not something

he could have tied himself.

So, the question is, who put him on the back of the camel

and tied him there and just let him go?

JOHN: It is extremely mysterious

how someone tied someone else to the back of an animal

that was that unwelcoming of human contact.

How did that happen?

Who was that person and what happened to them?

There is a lot of unexplained stuff here.

Could the Red Ghost have been a lost Army camel

with a dead rider on its back wandering the Arizona desert?

We may never know the truth.

Which might also be the case with a bizarre discovery

found in Wyoming,

where prospectors uncovered a humanoid mummy

that was only six and a half inches tall.

SHATNER: This region in Central Wyoming has long attracted

fortune seekers in the search for frontier gold.

But it's also the site

of a strange discovery in 1934,

when gold prospectors Cecil Mayne and Frank Carr

unearth a man-made cavern hidden inside the mountain.

Cecil Mayne and Frank Carr--

they were looking for gold one day,

and they just happened to find a little bit

on the edge of the mountain.

So, they blew up the side of the mountain,

hoping they'd find more ore.

(explosion)

But what they found was this room,

and it was a room that was obviously

constructed by somebody.

It was four-by-four foot wide and 15 feet deep.

It looked like a tomb.

And standing on a little shelf

that was two and a half feet off the ground was

this little figure, a little mummy.

DOVER: When they looked at it, it was

almost sitting cross-legged, as if it had been posed there.

It was a total of six inches high.

The head was flattened on the top and large.

It weighed about a pound,

and they said that if you stretched it out,

that it would be possibly 18 inches high.

SHATNER: This tiny mummy was nicknamed "Pedro"

in honor of the San Pedro Mountains where it was found.

But just who or what is Pedro?

Well, according to the earliest known newspaper reports,

soon after the mummy was discovered, it was sold

to a man named Homer F. Sherrill.

And for seven years, he had scientists examine it.

And many of them believed this small mummy

was actual proof of a tiny race of pygmies,

or little people.

ALBAUGH: Scientists had access to Pedro,

and they X-rayed it.

What they found, according to them,

was a full skeleton inside

with fully-formed arms and fully-formed legs,

and including a full set of teeth.

Pedro also had very sharp canine teeth,

much like a vampire would,

and they also found what they called meat in its stomach.

According to them,

this was actually the body of a 65-year-old person, and

an actual fetus would not have a full set of teeth.

It would have teeth that were in the gums,

not developed yet.

If this finding was true,

that meant that it couldn't be a fetus.

So, could this be actual proof

of a race of small, pygmy-like people

who lived in that area of Wyoming?

People were very fascinated by this mummy,

which seems to have been a real mummy,

and fascinated by the idea that perhaps there were pygmies,

or little people, an undiscovered, perhaps,

branch of Native Americans.

DOVER: Native American tribes, in the early days,

all of them had stories

of little people that inhabited this world.

The Pedro mummy could very well be some indication

that little people did exist.

THOMPSON: Now, Pedro does seem to have been Native American.

And Pedro came from the area

the Shoshone people were living in.

They had longstanding traditions of little people,

which they called "the Nimerigar."

These were a very vicious and even cannibalistic race.

Their stories talk about them even fighting

and eating each other.

Now, presumably, if a Shoshone individual were

to come across Pedro the mummy,

Pedro would fit perfectly into their ideas,

and in their folklore and support

their beliefs in the pygmy race.

SHATNER: Is Pedro, the mountain mummy, proof

that a lost race of tiny cannibals once roamed the west?

Well, it's certainly exciting to consider.

But after changing hands among various collectors,

in 1950, Pedro reached

the American Museum of Natural History in New York City,

and underwent a thorough examination by Dr. Harry Shapiro

to try and determine who and what Pedro was.

Dr. Shapiro, as he continued his examination,

found that Pedro was actually either an unborn fetus

or a child that was born and died soon after,

suffering from a condition called anencephaly,

where a good part of the brain is not developed,

and oftentimes, a part of the skull,

which would explain why Pedro's head was flattened.

So, his findings did completely conflict

with earlier findings as to Pedro being a small person.

SHATNER: Is Pedro the mummy the result of a rare birth defect?

Well, it's certainly possible.

But the debate rages on,

because the tiny mummy went missing in 1980,

after its last known owner died.

And unless Pedro is rediscovered,

the mystery endures.

What is interesting to me, as an anthropologist,

about Pedro is that it was loved by a community,

and its burial was very special.

This was not buried in the usual way.

But, of course, we no longer have Pedro.

If we did, we could probably run very different tests now,

genetic tests and the like,

to know a great deal more about this individual.

And since we cannot reexamine Pedro,

Pedro is going to remain a bit of a mystery.

SHATNER: Prospectors James Cluggage and John R. Poole

discover gold in Southern Oregon,

triggering a gold rush

that yields upwards of $60 million mined

from the region.

But there is one famous frontier legend

that speaks of a massive amount of gold...

being lost.

And to this day, it's said there still exists

a lost cabin in the wilds of Oregon

with gold hiding just beneath the floorboards.

NELIGH: The lost cabin of gold in Oregon is

one of those stories that make

our fascination with the Wild West live on.

It starts with two prospectors

who had found a massive amount of gold,

and they had brought it back to their cabin

to hide it under the floorboards,

which seemed like a pretty good idea

until they ran afoul of the local Indigenous tribe.

-(screaming) -JOHN: One of them was killed.

And then, the other one just barely made it

and was taken to San Francisco for medical treatment.

It didn't work. He died.

But on his deathbed, he wrote a note

to his cousin back in Chicago,

saying, "I've got a cabin with gold in it,

and I need you to go and find it."

SHATNER: Armed with the alleged location

of this cabin of gold, the prospector's cousin

from Chicago teams up

with a frontier poet named Sam Simpson

to try and find the lost fortune.

And according to Simpson,

these two found more than they bargained for.

-(neighing) -JOHN: Sam Simpson

has a story that he wrote in 1899

in which he claims

to have found the cabin.

They went into the cabin,

there was a skeleton there,

and at that very moment,

-the cousin from Chicago... -(gunshot)

...accidentally shot himself.

And then Sam went out of his gourd

and was found a gibbering idiot

on the stage road two weeks later,

and was never able to find his way back to it.

But Sam Simpson,

by the time he wrote this story,

was deep in the bottle.

He struggled with alcoholism all his life.

So, it's just really hard to say.

You know, maybe it's still out there.

SHATNER: Could there really be a fortune of gold

still buried under the floorboards

of a lost cabin in the Oregon wilderness?

Perhaps.

But as with so many other strange tales

of the American frontier, the truth remains elusive.

McNEILL: One of the sort of inescapable symbols

of the American frontier is this sense of vastness,

this openness.

And any time we have that kind of openness,

it's just waiting to be filled with stories.

And even if the story is not

specifically correct or accurate,

there's usually a kernel of truth there.

And that's what fuels the legend and keeps it going.

JOHN: What fascinates me the most

about the American Frontier is

that nothing like it has ever existed, or ever will again.

MAN: Yah!

JOHN: You've got that expansionist culture

moving across the whole continent,

and there's so much storytelling there

that the truth is not gonna be really easy to pick out.

It's been layered and layered and layered,

with more and more stories and more and more stories,

leaving you to wonder, what's the part that's real?

(neighing)

It's intriguing to think that there may be a lost cabin

filled with gold somewhere in the backwoods of Oregon.

And, as with so many other frontier legends,

the truth, like the cabin itself,

is elusive.

But when stories like the mystery of the Red Ghost,

or phenomena like the Marfa lights,

continue to raise questions almost a century later,

it makes you wonder,

what other strange tales

from the American frontier might emerge?

Stories of great adventures

that, for now, remain...

unexplained.

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