The French Military Chest

This is the legend 'Where the Gold is Buried' is based on:
‘In the year 1789…there came as a Settler from the United States a man with a large family professing to be Quakers. .. Immediately on his arrival at the fort he waited upon the Commandant and informed him, that after the reduction of the French Garrison [in 1759]…a sick soldier, being unable to proceed, was received in his father’s house, where he was hospitably Entertained until his death. Shortly before that Event, the Frenchman gave them to understand that he was not ungrateful for the kindness he had experienced, but that he had no means to mark his sense of it except a small folded paper in a little pocket book, which might possibly turn out a prize to some of the children: in which hope he requested Jeremiah Sinclair to accept the pocket book.
It contained a folded paper on which was some writing in the French language understood by none of the family. After the death and burial of the Prisoner occasion was sought to ascertain the purport of the paper writing and it was found to be a memorandum of the burial of the French Military Chest, previous to the surrender of the Fort of Niagara. It stated that early in the day a fatigue party was ordered of which he, the Frenchman, was one – that it proceeded to the Flagstaff and opened the ground close to it as deep as they could, with their spades, threw the earth clear of the pit or well: that the Fort Adjutant with the Paymaster and Commandant attended with a large iron chest, which was carefully deposited on the bottom of the pit, before it was quite daylight. That as soon as it was left, the party began to cover it with the earth and had perhaps filled up about three feet, when a Battery opened upon the Fort and one of the first shots killed one of the laborers and precipitated the body into the pit, about seven feet below the surface; that the officer would not wait to get the body, but urged the filling in and making the surface of the ground even: that the capitulation taking place that day, the writer supposed that the chest remained, and that at the peace it might be a prize which would be well paid for.’
Ontario Historical Society papers. ‘The French Military Chest’.