Every river bluff in Wisconsin, it seems, has some legend attached to it: a maiden leaped off it, a spirit lived under it or a refugee sheltered in it.

Few bluffs carry so many legends, though, as Bogus Bluff on the Wisconsin River.

Towering 220 feet above Highway 60, west of Gotham and opposite Avoca about 50 miles west of Madison, this bluff was reportedly home to an entire series of treasures. As early as 1850, stories circulated that a fortune in fur trade gold, a chest of Spanish doubloons and specie payments for soldiers at Fort Crawford had all been hidden in its caves.

Julius Neefe recalled that prospectors were already digging for treasure there when he arrived about 1850. Another early resident, Adolph Seifert, reported that the prospectors shot at onlookers and burned the cabins of nosy settlers.

Seifert explored the bluff for decades, refusing to share certain details until, on his death bed, he told his family to search "under the big flat stone on the west side."

This was the very spot indicated on a map obtained "at a spiritualist meeting in Wonewoc" in 1921. The three miners who found that map honeycombed the bluff. But if they unearthed any gold, they didn't tell anyone and disappeared quietly.

The closest thing to an actual fortune known to really exist at Bogus Bluff was minted by counterfeiters operating from its caves after the Civil War.

And it was either their phony currency - or the repeated failures to discover any real treasure - that are presumed to be the source of its name.

- Wisconsin Historical Society
www.wisconsinhistory.org

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