Bigger and Better

Published Oct 19, 2023, 9:00 AM

Treasure is always curious. Sometimes it's hidden and needs discovered, and sometimes it's right in your desk drawer.

Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. They say that everything is bigger in Texas, belt buckles, stakes, even state pride. But the lone Star state can officially lay claim to one thing that it does bigger than any other states in the Union, that has the most buried treasure. And it was all thanks to one man and his family. Off the coast of Texas in the Gulf of Mexico is an island. It's called Padre Island, the longest barrier island in the world world, stretching one hundred and thirteen miles from end to end. It had once belonged to several Native American tribes, including the Karankawa. Much of their culture has been lost to time and colonization. Today only five hundred words of their language are known, But what we do know is that they were very nomadic and very tall. It's believed that the Karankawa were over six feet tall, with some even pushing seven feet. They also communicated using smoke signals. Around fifteen fifty four, a fleet of Spanish ships invaded the island. Three vessels crashed along the island's sandy shores and left behind at least one hundred and fifty casualties. The survivors spread rumors about the Karankawa being cannibalistic, although it's more likely that they invented that excuse when it became clear that they would not convert to Catholicism. The last vestiges of the tribe were wiped out in the eighteen nineties by Mexican and Texan colonists. Now Padre Island earned its name in the seventeen hundreds thanks to Jose Nicholas Bali. Bali was a secular Catholic priest or Padre who owned the island during that time. Many years later, in eighteen forty seven, a man named John Singer and his wife Johanna came to Texas to settle down. They started a shipping business, hauling cargo on their new three masted schooner, which they dubbed the Alice Saddle. During their first year, as entrepreneurs. Their vessel met a similar fate as those Spanish ships from hundreds of years before. A nasty storm shipwrecked the Singers on Padre Island. When the reins cleared, they got to work grabbing what they could from the vessel. Suddenly, though, it dawned on them they would need shelter, so John built a small home on the island for the family to live in, constructing furniture out of driftwood and pieces from the ship. Pretty soon they knew their arrangements would no longer be temporary. They stayed put even when help finally arrived to take them home. They loved Padre Island and found it to be the perfect place for rebuilding their lives. To go back and forth between Pidre Island and the mainland. Though John constructed a smaller boat, he also bought cattle and planted a garden selling vegetables to make ends meet. Granted, Johanna's family had plenty of money already, so they never really wanted for anything anyway. After about four years of this, the Singers gained possession of Padre Bally's ranch, which they purchased from his estate. John also became a wreck master, meaning that he was allowed to keep anything salvaged from any of the ships that crashed ashore, and over the course of their lives, quite a bit of treasure washed onto the island. In fact, one storm in eighteen fifty four brought them untold amounts of gold, jewelry, and other items. Sadly, their slice of paradise would not be their forever home. At the start of the Civil War, the Confederates in Texas pushed Singer, his wife, and his seven children off of Padre Island. But before they left, they made sure to hide their hull somewhere in a sand dune they called Money Hill. The Singers buried roughly eighty thousand dollars in cash, Spanish, bablloons, and jewelry. Today that fortune would be worth about three million dollars. At the end of the war, the family returned to the island to reclaim what they had left behind. Very little of their homestead remained. Their house had been dismantled for firewood, and their cows had been killed for food by the Confederate soldiers. What's more, the island itself was now a shadow of what it had been. The terrain was all different changed by war and weather. Money Hill was gone and with it their treasure. John tried on multiple occasions to find the missing money with his son Alexander, but to no avail. He died in eighteen seventy seven, and with him any chance of finding it. Others have tried to look for the treasure today, but none have been able to locate it. The theories vary, with some claiming that it's at the southmostern tip, while others believe it stashed in between a pair of oak trees. Legend has it that the treasure is still out there waiting to be found. Just grab a shovel and keep an eye on the weather. How much is a paper clip worth? It's actually a more complex question than you might think. Value is relative, after all, and an item's worth is determined by a number of factors. If you go on Amazon right now, you can order one thousand paper clips for about ten bucks. Based on that, you could say that a paper clip is worth a penny. But what if your paper clip was made out of sterling silver and emblazon with the word Prada. In twenty seventeen, paper clips like that were actually sold, and a single one would have cost you about one hundred and eighty five US dollars, which sounds like highway robbery until you learn about a very curious story from two thousand and five. It all began with a single red paper clip, which belonged to a twenty six year old Canadian man named Kyle MacDonald. While Kyle was little, he used to play this game called Bigger and Better, which was basically where you had an item and you try to trade it for something that was well bigger and better. So that's it exactly what he set out to do with his red paper clip. In June of two thousand and five, he listed the little Office supply on Craigslist and he said that he was open to trade offers. Two women from Vancouver saw the post and thought it was funny. They searched around the house for something to swap and soon responded to Kyle with a proposition. How would he like to trade his paper clip for a pen shaped like a fish? And Kyle said sure, why not? Next thing he knew, he was the proud owner of a quill with gills. From there, he made a deal with a potter who lived in Seattle. Kyle sent the fish pen to the US and received a handmade doorknob in return. The trades kept piling up a doorknob for a camping stove, the camping stove for a one hundred watt generator, a generator for an empty beer keg and a light up Budweiser sign. And then the most lucrative swap yet, Kyle got in touch with a Montreal radio host who apparently really wanted that Keg and Neon sign. In exchange, he offered Kyle a snowmobile. In just six trades, Kyle had managed to turn a paper clip into a fully operational vehicle, and that would be impressive enough, but he didn't stop there. His curious crusade was starting to earn him some media attention, and a small town Canadian magazine wanted to make a trade. They told Kyle that for the snowmobile, they would give him an all expense pay trip to the snowy town of Yak, British Columbia, which is just across the US Canadian border. Kyle couldn't believe his luck. Obviously, he said yes, and then he turned around and bartered that trip for a literal moving truck. Now this is where Kyle really went off the rails. Instead of trading the truck for another item, he swapped it for a service, a recording contract with a professional music producer. This included recording and post production of a full album and a promise that the finished product would be pitched to executives at Sony and XM Radio. This was huge, and it kept getting bigger. An aspiring singer wanted that contract desperately, and she agreed to give Kyle a year of free rent in her apartment in Phoenix, Arizona. But Kyle did it. I want to live in Phoenix. So he swapped that year long vacation for an afternoon with rock legend Alice Cooper, and then he traded that once in a lifetime opportunity for a snow globe. Okay, now would be a good time to remind you of how we began this story. That all value is relative, and this wasn't just any snow globe that he had just traded for. It was a special collectible snow globe inspired by the rock band Kiss. And while most of us probably wouldn't care about a branded glass sphere, there was someone who did. He was a collector named Corbin Burnson. And in exchange for the snow globe, he gave Kyle a credited speaking role in a film being produced by a major studio. And look, Kyle knew that this was it one more trade and he would have exactly what he was looking for. The Mayor and Town Council of Kipling, Saskatchewans soon reached out to him with an offer. They would like to swap him the movie role for a house on Main Street. And this is what Kyle had wanted all along. From the outset. He had dreamed of bartering that little red paper clip until he got himself a place to live. He moved in on July twelfth of two thousand and six, about a year after his first trade. So again, what is a paperclip worth a penny or a house? And the answer to that question is a curious one indeed. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

From the creator of the hit podcast Lore comes a new, bite-sized storytelling experience. Each twice 
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