For both hobbyists and professionals, the metal detector has for decades been a valuable tool in searching for hidden evidence of our history.

[Music] To dig into the topic of metal detecting, we traveled to a location near historic Fort Harker to meet a history teacher who avidly searches for hard evidence from the past.

I'm Garrett Seuser.

I'm a middle and high school teacher at Wakefield, which is on the north end of Milford Lake in Kansas.

I got into metal detecting about 12 years ago now and I was still in high school.

You know, I've always been fascinated with history.

My grandpa, he was a Vietnam veteran and he would tell me stories and he had a plethora of history books at his library.

He always told me to engage and so that's what I did with history was to engage with it.

Once I discovered what metal detecting and stuff was that you can go find history.

There's still stuff out there.

There's stuff everywhere.

The signal was coming in clean multiple ways around and it's not very deep and we're right on it.

The pin pointer also helps so that way you can locate it in the ground and not damage whatever it could be.

And it's an old find.

It's just not a time period find.

We find these all the time.

This is a UMC company number 10 shotgun shell, old paper shotgun shell head stamp.

Probably 1880s.

So that's an old design.

Can't always be civil relevance, but it's still over 100 years old.

So UMC company stands for Union Metallic Cartridge Company.

I think gradually I started getting into the research aspect of it and got onto the westward trails and for the last six years my focus has been on the Oregon Trail, Santa Fe Trail, Smoky And it's gotten me invited to speak about some of the sites I've discovered.

Me and my partners have been all across the country looking for sites.

We follow the Oregon Trail from here almost to Oregon looking for sites.

So this is one of my display cases from a very special site on the Oregon Trail right on the Kansas-Nebraska border.

Round balls were your standard ammunition for ever, for hundreds of years until the conical bullet came out.

You have two half dimes there which were made before nickels came out.

The tiniest coin the US ever made, the $1 gold coin was found there.

And then there's all kinds of buttons, a broken hat eagle.

This was my wife's favorite thing.

This is actually a bugle mouthpiece for a calvary man.

But this bugle mouthpiece, you could put it on a modern day trumpet and still play.

And that's just one side on the Oregon Trail and this is just one shadow box of the best finds there.

I mean this is a sword hanger for a Dragoon officer.

This is a lead pewter spoon.

They were using utensils eating out of lead pewter, poisoning themselves also while eating.

The prairie was so kind, you know, like this is an iron key that barely rusted.

So that loamy soil is good to these artifacts.

Currently we're in Ellsworth County and kind of on where the military reservation of Fort Harker was along the Smoky Hill Trail.

Along the Smoky Hill Trail there was, I believe there was five forts.

You have Fort Leavenworth at the start by action.

Then you have Fort Riley come down here to Fort Harker, Fort Hays and then Fort Wallace.

And it was important because, you know, where we're standing now, if it was the 1860s, this is Cheyenne Country, you know, this is Native American country.

And as Americans were pushing westward after the Civil War, Kansas became the new battleground.

We're standing where General Sheridan, Custer was out here.

Buffalo soldiers were through here, you know.

We're standing on ground that so many famous names in American history were here.

There's so many things that have been found out here.

Being where we're at, it's worth digging because it could be anything.

So this is the pin pointer.

Helps you locate stuff in the ground so you're not, you know, digging excessively.

All right.

We're right on top of whatever it is.

Now, whether it's time period or not is yet to be determined.

All right.

It's in this little clump of dirt.

So this could be either something relevant or not.

It's not in that clump.

Ah, square iron nail.

Stuff that you can date that's relevant.

So like coins have dates on them.

But also like it's good to find a coin with a date on it because also the wear pattern, you know, a few feet from where I'm standing was an 1865 Indian head scent that was in phenomenal condition.

It was only lost a year or two after mintage.

But I also found a 1777 German coin out here that's worn almost completely, you know, wafer thin with a hole punched through it.

That was probably someone's good luck charm.

And that had been circulated for almost 100 years until it was lost in here.

This is actually a Saxon finnig because Germany wasn't Germany yet.

The first metal detectors basically just beeped at you and you dug everything and you didn't.

There was no way to distinguish whether it was, you know, a Civil War bullet, a silver coin or a pop tab, you know, or an aluminum foil.

There was no way to distinguish.

So people were digging everything.

And it's evolved over the years to where like nowadays this machine, you know, people ask me all the time, "How deep can it go?"

You know, I'd say regular settings, a dime at a foot is about not pushing it.

It'll find it.

It may be even a little deeper, but like that's about some of the limitations.

But it gives you different sounds for the, you know, electric conductivity of whatever metal objects in the ground.

So like the more conductive it is, like silver and copper rings a higher number and it's loud pitched.

Lower tones are, you know, less conductive metals like gold, aluminum, and then iron basically just grunts at you electrically.

I'll dig one of these big loud signals I keep talking about just to show you.

You never know what you're going to get.

So let's dig.

Oh man, I think it's already iron because I'm already Oh, there it is.

It's a railroad spike.

Being that we're yards away from the Kansas Pacific, there's a railroad spike likely from it.

When I say big loud signals, that's what I'm talking about.

Stuff like this.

And it can be a good signal, especially when you're somewhere like this.

You could get a bayonet, a sword, but there's just subtle differences that after thousands of hours on your machine, you can learn those subtle differences.

At lots of the museum sites on the towns that were along the Smoky Hill Trail, most of those museums have artifacts from the 1960s even of people that had found, you know, stuff when metal detectors first came out and been available to the public.

They had a lot of research and for someone who didn't know much about the Smoky Hill Trail, you know, not even maybe 10 years ago, how many people already knew about it and had found these sites and, you know, that I thought maybe were lost to history, but they weren't, you know.

And so that was, you know, it's exciting to see what people have found in the past and what you can find now on the trail and kind of match those artifacts.

And, you know, you can almost piece together certain groups, expeditions by finding similar things.

So, you know, it's just building upon a legacy.

We're talking to Sherri Swartz, who happens to be the daughter of Florsweiser.

Floris Weiser was an incredible amateur archaeologist or avocational archaeologist in western Kansas.

I knew him more professionally when I was with the State Historical Society.

The stuff he could tell me and the stuff I learned from him only in the brief times I'd visit with him was absolutely incredible.

So I have a lot of respect for him because he not only did a lot of metal detecting throughout the area, which we'll talk about, but he recorded everything better than most archaeologists would.

His collection is absolutely incredible.

It's now at the Fort Wallace Museum in Wallace County, Kansas and western Kansas, and everybody should come and see it.

When did he start doing this?

He got his first metal detector in 1973.

Oh, really?

He started out with just the intention of getting a metal detector for some leisure, get a little exercise, maybe find a few old coins.

And he bought a book about treasures in Kansas, and he happened to read about the Smoky Hill Trail, realized that it was really close.

And the first time that he went, he didn't really find anything, what he was looking for.

But then he went out again, and then he found his first rifle shell, didn't really know what it was, as far as what type it was and everything.

And then that kind of got him hooked, and that started on his quest for history.

He was a legend before I met him, and I was at Fort Hays doing some archaeology work at the Fort during some festival there, and we were finding empty shell cartridges.

Well, I was a prehistoric archaeologist, and it's historic stuff, and he was there.

And so I went in asking myself, "What caliber is this shell casing?"

Well, that broke the ice.

That's all it took.

Because I didn't know.

So we appreciated his artifacts, and then when he pulled out the maps of where he'd found stuff, blew us away.

Yeah, yeah.

Very meticulous in that he could tell you where almost every item was that he found.

And he did so much research, and not only did he find the stuff in books, but he interpreted a lot of stuff.

Although the military records were mostly in triplicate, so everybody had them, they still didn't tell the whole story.

And he was able to put a lot of stuff together to tell the story on why they were there, and on and all the way along the Smoky Hill Trail and other places.

And that was before you had Google and the internet.

So if he found something that he didn't know what it was, he wrote to people.

He mailed letters.

He found names of people that he thought would help him and be able to tell him.

So it was a long process.

It wasn't just you looked it up on the internet.

No, it wasn't.

Because one time he was talking about the 10th Cavalry, which were the Buffalo Soldiers camping in an area near the fort.

And I said, "Well, how'd you find out it was there?"

He said, "Well, I found the artifacts."

And I said, "Okay."

But I said, "How did you prove it?"

He said, "Well, I wrote to National Archives."

So it was incredible.

He did so much research, and he didn't stop until he... He couldn't do it anymore.

Yeah, yeah.

And if he wanted to find out an answer, he kept at it until he found somebody that could give him that knowledge.

So there's very few things in here that he didn't figure out what they were.

I'm amazed at some of the Native American stuff he found at some of these things too.

And all of the steel arrowhead points he had found.

I know he could tell whether they were trade items, which some of those were, but if they were made by the Native Americans.

All the leather punches that he's found in the all needles.

Very small.

He was very meticulous in finding those items.

It always amazed me that his process... He worried a lot about taking care of the land that he was on.

And he narrowed down where it was, and he would take a screwdriver and poke down around the edges and lift it out carefully also, because you don't want to damage or break something that might be there.

And a little all needle is very small, and it takes a lot.

It's something there, and just be so persistent.

He would pull out just a chunk and check that, and if he didn't get the reading, he would check again.

And if he did, he just took it apart by hand, and then he filled it all back in.

You couldn't tell he was there.

And I think he was influential in talking to the archaeologists that work for the state about doing metal e-techning.

So he had a big influence on a whole lot of people.

Very proud of everything that he did, and he just loved it.

And like you said, people would say, "Well, this has to be valuable.

Are you going to sell this?"

And he's like, "No."

That wasn't his interest.

He wanted to preserve it and have people be able to enjoy it and learn the history."

And so, yeah, there's a lot of military stuff in here because it sat for Wallace.

But then here behind us is a cattle rusters camp about 1881, which is typical.

I mean, that's what they would have had, obviously, at a cattle rusters camp.

And I think one of the most interesting things that he found that took him the longest to actually bring home is he found an intact cannonball that hadn't exploded, still had the powder in it.

So it made him a little nervous even though, you know, it's been around that long.

But so he actually left it in the ground for about six months while he wrote people and said, you know, "What are the chances of this?

How do I take the powder out of this?"

Made its way to one of the cases.

An intact cannonball from the 1860s or 70s is pretty incredible.

So we have his metal detector up here.

Is this the last one or this is the only one?

No, he had several.

He did have several.

That's probably the main one.

He tried to upgrade or find one that works a little bit better.

And then, yeah, he took a lot of us family.

He would take grandkid adventures and not take them quite out as far, but they always got excited because grandma packed him a great sack lunch and they got to go out and he let them each take turns using it.

What was your father's collection donated to the Fort Wallace Association?

He wanted to keep it local.

He, Fort Wallace, is where the majority of these artifacts originated.

This is the fort that the Calvary camps and everything were associated with.

And so then he approached the Fort Wallace Museum and they decided then that they would build a wing that would house just these artifacts.

And then it took about a year and a half to get it up and going and get everything built.

He had a groundbreaking ceremony.

He made a lot of trips out here and checked on the progress and then included the paintings that Jerry Thomas did with it just to kind of tell the whole story.

Jerry actually got my dad's name because he was researching a painting that he was doing on General Kester out in this area.

And so that's how he met my dad as he came and asked him what he knew about that because he always wanted to make his paintings as historically accurate as he could.

And so they actually did a lot of relic hunting together and so that is why his paintings are also interspersed in here with that.

And then the actual grand opening was September 2nd, 2007.

And one of his favorite things to do was to go to the schools.

And so a lot of the grandkids got to have their grandpa come to their school, to their classroom and he would bring a few of the cases that the kids took the most interest in.

And so then once the collection was out here, a lot of field trips with school kids came out here and they would always let my dad know in case he was available.

And so he made a lot of trips out here and met the school kids and walked them through and told them the stories.

Yeah, so this is not only preservation, but it's also education.

It is.

And probably more emphasis on education.

Yes.

What is out there?

This is why we know it was there.

We're really proud of it and glad that it was able to be.

Yeah, and you should be.

Kind of ranging around this magnificent collection out here at Fort Wallace, I'm going, "I learned that from the forest, more supplies."

All right, we have a good little mid-tone here.

I've incorporated metal detecting in the classroom before and I would show them how a metal detector worked.

I'd show them what different signals sounded like and then we went and looked for signals in the ground.

And we found some Mercury Dimes, 1920s, found some Indian head pennies from Teddy Roosevelt's presidency in the early 1900s.

And I let the kids find it and let them be the first ones to touch it.

And then I go, "You're the first human to touch that in over 100 years.

That's been sitting there and you grew up in this town.

Your parents grew up in this town and that's been there since before."

All of that.

And so it just kind of, it's that light bulb moment.

And I incorporate the fines into my classroom.

I dub it the Sousa'sium because, you know, when they feel how heavy a bullet is from the Civil War, they're like, "Goodness gracious, I didn't realize how heavy this was."

And I said, you know, like to put it into perspective, that hurt if somebody threw it at you.

Now imagine it coming at you 800 feet per second, you know.

And I think it really makes them understand and make history come alive for them.

You know, I preach ethics to my students.

You know, you got to practice what you preach to.

I stress always getting landowner permission.

Respect the land, respect the property.

Nine times out of ten people are nice enough to say yes if you approach it the correct way.

Got a higher end mid-tone here.

Here we are.

A time period find.

This is a 50-70 bullet.

But as you'll notice, it's still wrapped in brass.

So this was a full cartridge, but black powder so corrosive that when it's under the ground for 150 years, it degrades and basically makes the rest of the cartridge go away.

Now I found them complete before in this site too, but the bullet with part of the casing still wrapped around it.

It gave me such an odd signal.

I wonder if the rest of the cartridge is in there.

Nope.

Oh.

Yep.

There's the base of it.

So there's the head stamp of it.

Seagull and black powder corroded all of it away in between that and the bullet.

It would have been about that long.

Got the top and the bottom of it.

You find a three-ring miniball from the Civil War.

You know, that obviously went to an infantryman, but it doesn't tell you exactly which regiment or which company.

You just know, okay, infantry.

But if you find something identifiable, like kind of basically right behind where I'm standing now, I found a company letter D, kind of like the one on my hat.

This is company I. That's one of those missing pieces to the puzzle.

You can say definitively who was that, not just this area, but where you're standing exactly.

You can pinpoint it to within a centimeter.

There was a campsite that my friend and I discovered based off of a newspaper article.

We find spread 535 yards across the prairie from, you know, one end to the other for marking the artifacts.

Exactly what the newspaper described, the exact regiments that were supposed to be there.

I found a very large, gold-guilted officers button.

It had a big eagle on it with a D that stood for the U.S.

dragoons who are the precursor to the cavalry.

But based on the research of who was here, we know who was in charge of the dragoons that were in the specific regiment or in this group that went west.

And his name was Lieutenant Thomas J. Berry.

99% sure it's got to be his.

He was a West Point graduate.

And his first assignment was taking dragoons west to Utah during the Utah War in 1858.

When the Civil War started, he left the Army and joined the Confederacy, became the Colonel of the 60th Georgia Infantry, was wounded eight or nine times during the Civil War, including at Gettysburg.

And then he dies in October of 1865 at the end of the war.

But he lost his button in Kansas before the Civil War even started.

Relevance is important.

Life and history is a big puzzle and there's a lot of pieces missing.

But that's what finding this stuff is.

It's putting little pieces back together.

Aha.

There we go.

A Spencer cartridge.

And it is marked.

Very nice.

This one has a head stamp marked S.A.W., which stands for Sage Ammunition Works.

And they were in business from 1864 to 1866.

And the head stamps of them are marked S.A.W.

Research is important, too, and reading old diaries, reading newspapers, everything that was going on in a small town or a county or anywhere was put in the newspaper.

So that's how you can find where old picnic groves were, where old parks that may no longer be there.

The newspapers say, like, you know, on Mr.

Smith's property over here, you can find trail routes from the Orang Trail.

Map work is very important.

How to read old maps.

There's overlays of how the fort sits on the town.

And they said there was no buildings built on this side of the tracks and do research and just discovering stuff.

You know, just behind me here, there was a potential structure.

You can see it on Lidar.

There's brick.

And so we think there was a structure here.

And we found probably 100 plus time period artifacts that date no newer than 1870.

This is one of those surface low tones, but it's the type of signal that the numbers tell me it could be something good.

It could be something not so good.

We don't know till we dig it up.

It's always the excitement and anticipation.

One of these scraps of a ration tin or something.

These never hold up well in the ground, but here's what's left of a soldier's tin tray of something.

It's just disintegrating in my hands.

So we'll just throw that in here.

You know, we're all stewards of history, whether we know it or not.

You know, somebody gets a hand me down from Grandma's collection.

You know, you're a steward of that history.

Finding a shell casing from the 7th Calvary from 1867, you know, like you're a steward of history for that, too.

Just continuing to be stewards of history and just respectful stewards of the land and respectful to the property and the history itself.

All right.

Oh, there it is.

There's the button right there.

That's what I was hoping to find to show you.

There we go.

Nice general service eagle button.

Very nice.

My favorite things to find are buttons.

We got the head, the wings, the arrows, all the branches.

So this is a general service uniform button for soldiers from the 1860s.

This will complete anybody's day right here.

This is awesome.

Still got the shank on the back.

So, you know, when finding something as personal as a button, you know, this was like the buttons on my shirt, you know, it's right there.

It's the same size, even, you know, this is something a soldier manipulated.

They touch this with their hands.

You know, they this was on their uniform.

If this could be a camera or if this could talk, this is the kind of stuff that, you know, it's just it makes the mind wander and it boggles the mind.

And it's just another.

I mean, we found hundreds of buttons around here, but, you know, every little one just completes that puzzle piece that much more.

History is all around you.

It's under your feet everywhere you walk.

You know, we've been here 30 plus times and walked over it and now it decides to come out.

So every little piece continues to tell the story of what was here and who what was going on, who was here, what they were doing.

You know, every little piece just from a fired cartridge casing to, you know, broken up bits to a soldier's tin, you know, everything tells a story.

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