About ten years ago, I was kayaking the Youghiogheny River with family and friends when I spotted a man climbing the bank with a metal detector.
Several of us paddled over. When my neighbor asked, "What are you looking for?" He looked up and said simply: "Looking for Braddock's gold."
He explained his theory that the payroll was buried somewhere along that river. He wasn't the first person to search there. He won't be the last.
One of our kayak trips on the Youghiogheny River. Great for spotting hawks, herons, bald eagles, and the occasional treasure hunter working the bank.
That moment crystallized something I'd been carrying for years. I grew up 7.5 miles from the exact spot where General Braddock was shot off his horse on July 9th, 1755. I spent childhood weekends in western Maryland, near the stretch of wilderness soldiers called the Shades of Death. The forest there was so dense that it turned midday into twilight. It took Braddock's army days to clear a single mile of road through it.
The legend of his buried payroll was never just a legend to me. It was local history. It was the landscape I grew up inside.
But there's something else I've never shared publicly about why I actually wrote the book.
My mom was a teacher. She loved reading and always helped with my writing. When I started my fourth business book, she was already six years into fighting cancer. She went into hospice while she was still proofreading that book for me.
Before she passed, she made me promise to write the Braddock story. So I did. I owed her that.
Echoes of Fortune: The Search for Braddock's Lost Gold is dedicated to her memory. It won the 2025 PenCraft Best Thriller of the Year. I think she would have been proud.
Knights of the Golden Circle Update
Book 3 is in final revisions. August 2026. More details coming soon.
Did You Know?
July 9th, 1755. George Washington had four bullet holes in his coat after the Battle of the Monongahela. Not a scratch on him. He later wrote that he believed he had been preserved by Providence for some greater purpose. He was 23 years old.
Thanks for being on this list. More dispatches coming next month.
David R Leng
Echoes of Fortune. The Past Never Ends. It Echoes into the Present.
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