Michigan Cavalry Camp By Don Westbrook

  I have dedicated allot of time to researching Civil War period maps. The best maps you can obtain are those that have been hand drawn by the soldiers or officers that served in the Civil War. Every so often you get lucky and come across the maps by doing an online search and digging deep into the results. Although my favorite and arguably the best way to come across these hand drawn treasure maps is to discover them hidden in a soldier’s journal. Once I acquire a map I upload it to google earth and began the overlay process. Utilizing main roads and nearby water sources as reference points, by doing so I am able to triangulate an area of interest to begin my search. This is where I typically start when locating new spots.

  Once I had permission to search the area I set out with the XP Deus in hand. I adjusted my settings to my general search mode. I like to start out with my general search mode and make adjustments as I gain a better understanding of the current ground conditions. As I worked my way up the side of a gentle hill within the first five minutes I heard a very faint but clean repeatable signal. Roughly ten inches below the surface was a dropped Spencer Carbine bullet. Instantly I was amped and knew that I was on the correct path to the camp I had been searching for. Dropped Civil War bullets are an excellent sign, along with melted bullets or (camp lead) as we relic hunters like to call it. These items are typically your first find when searching for a camp.

  Continuing my search along the hillside I came to a nice level area that was easily accessible from the nearby period road bed. That’s when it happened, the awesome sound of iron in the ground. Listening for iron pockets is one trick that relics hunters will use, concentrated areas of iron signify previous civilization. Understanding the ground conditions have changed from relatively clean to heavily iron infested. Making adjustments to my settings was crucial to squeezing the most performance out of the XP Deus. I dropped my TX power down to 2, Reactivity was raised to 4, and Sensitivity adjusted to 85, I confirmed that my ground balance was accurate. This camp was loaded with Spencer, Merrill, and Smith carbine bullets. I even recovered a pistol bullet that still had a piece of the paper cartridge attached to it! Along with a few other goodies that I recovered at a later date, but that’s being saved for another story. There were so many targets in the ground, this lead me to believe the camp had not been discovered by past relic hunters. Thanks to the versatility of the XP Deus I was able to capitalize on the changing ground conditions and the results were truly impressive.