"money digger"

[George Thompson]

[I sent this a few hours ago, but it has not shown up in my mail from ADS-L,
and I am supposing that it did not go through.  My file copy looks ok, but
this is a new system, and I am still figuring it out.  My apologies is
somehow it went through to everyone but me.]
*

The recently revised M section of the OED has the following for "money
digger":
**

money-digger n. U.S. a treasure hunter, esp. one who believes buried
treasure can be located by divination or other mystical means.

1820    B. Silliman Remarks Tour Hartford &
Quebec<http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:31797/view/Entry/121171?rskey=IHIVgY&result=1&isAdvanced=true>
121
Even to this hour‥new pits are excavated by the insatiable money diggers.

1870    J. De Mille Boys of Grand Pré
School<http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:31797/view/Entry/121171?rskey=IHIVgY&result=1&isAdvanced=true>
x.
148   We haven't any mineral rod, nor any magic ceremonies. We're merely a
plain, hard-working crowd; not of money-diggers, but of archæologists.

1998    New Republic<http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:31797/view/Entry/121171?rskey=IHIVgY&result=1&isAdvanced=true>
(Electronic
ed.) 23 Feb.,   Smith and many of his contemporaries became avid
money-diggers.




Here are more:


     ON Monday Night the 20th Instant, made his Escape, or was taken off
from one of the Islands called the Two Brothers, near Hell Gate, a Negro Man
named JACOB, belonging to Henry Brasier, and formerly known in this City, by
the Name of the Fu-Fu Negro, or Money-Digger.  He is between 40 and 50 Years
of Age. . . .  He speaks both English and Dutch, and was born and brought up
in the Jersies. . . .  ***
     N-Y Gazette, February 27, 1769, p. 3, col. 3


     [a long account of an attempt to dig up Cap't. Kid's treasure, in a
cellar, Gold near Beekman:] a bible lying open, with something like a sword
across it, and some long bright iron rods with other apparatus of wizards
and moneydiggers. . .



Commercial Advertiser (N. Y.), April 23, 1822, p. 2, cols. 2‑3


**

     The Money Digger at Fault. [in Tuckyhoe; "a forlorn looking personage"
who has learned from a dream that gold was buried on a gentleman's property;
he uses a forked hazel twig, "well known and much believed in . . . among
the old negroes in Kentucky"; finds nothing]
     Evening Star (N. Y.), May 2, 1837, p. 2, col. 4.  (It does not seem
that this forlorn

personage was black, though.)
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GAT
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-- 
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ.
Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.

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