Eyes locked on treasure buried for 2,000 years, Ben McGhee couldn’t speak or move. Just beyond his reach, a trio of bi-face blades peeked out of magical dirt, a mere fraction of one of the greatest Native American finds of recent history.
Shaking off the shock, standing on isolated farmland in northeast Missouri, the implications rolled over McGhee. A motherlode under the soil? Heart exploding and skin tingling, he dropped to his knees, poked a pocketknife into the tilled loam, and hit an absolute grail. He dug out 51 chert blades untouched for millennia—the find of a lifetime. Otherworldly.
Born with an artifact hunter’s sixth sense and obsession, McGhee felt the grail before he saw it. “I knew it was somewhere under that field. I knew it. Some people may think that’s crazy, but you see with your mind first. Then, when you walk farmland or a creek, you look not only with your eyes, but with a feeling.”
McGhee’s wonderful madness turned into a phenomenal discovery.
“My adrenaline still jumps talking about it,” he exclaims. “It took five months to locate that cache of blades, but the signs were all there from the start, almost like that field was talking to me. I just had to listen.”
Patience of Methusaleh
Ben McGhee hunts ghosts, in the form of arrowheads, fossils, old bottles, coins, petrified wood, and much more. Spot him in the back of beyond and see a nomad garbed in tan cargo pants and t-shirt, neck gaiter and ball cap, shoulder strapped with a canvas satchel, all propelled by a pair of hiking boots.
“I’m out there with deep appreciation for what’s hidden,” he says. “It’s kind of like a need inside to find something everyone else is missing. I think I was born to hunt. The feeling of the unknown, mixed with smelling cool air over a farm field as the sun is going down, and walking out with an arrowhead in your pocket is priceless.”
Raised on gravel in heavy farm country northeast of St. Louis in Lincoln and Warren counties, McGhee caught the artifact infection as a 5-year-old, enchanted by a stone tool found by his father. “I picked the brain of all my elders, trying to learn about what was under farmland. We were surrounded by farms, and the old-timers allowed me onto their fields and they took the time to teach me how to look, where to look, and why. When I got in my teens, I worked on farms and kept building a network on private land, learning the whole time.”
He hunts with the patience of Methusaleh. “There’s so much more to a hunt than walking around hoping to stumble across a rock. The clues are all there, but you’ll miss them if you get in a hurry.”
Dalton, Snyder, Clovis, or myriad other point types, McGhee amassed a stunning lifetime collection of Native American artifacts pulled from farmland, creeks, and riverbanks, but he’d never located a giant cache. Until 2025.
Ovoid Beauty
Mercury rising above freezing, McGhee walked a long-time arrowhead haunt in mid-February 2025. The 100-acre rolling field, laced with ridges and sloped toward a shallow river, had been disked weeks earlier, leaving a new top layer of dirt exposed to the cleansing of subsequent rains.
With no predictions beyond a couple of pocket pieces, McGhee kept his neck craned downward and initially was rewarded by a handful of broken points and common specimens. Despite finding no smokers, he noted telltale color scattered in heavy patches: percussion flakes. “That was a big hint in this geography that I might be on a Woodland period camp site. The flakes showed someone here had producing a big quantity of stone tools. If my suspicions were right, and this was Woodland, then some nice points could be close.”
By day’s end, having burned through a sandwich and several bananas, McGhee was dragging feet, slowly moving toward the field’s bottom to end the hunt. In mid-pace, time stopped.
Muscles tense and mouth to cotton, McGhee noted white on brown, roughly 10’ dead ahead. Sitting atop the dirt was an ovoid-shaped, Burlington chert beauty, approximately 4.5” long by 3” wide. “There it was, likely several thousand years old—a North blade,” he recalls. Right when I saw it, I understood what it meant. I wasn’t looking at a cache, but I was looking at a cache blade. Therefore, somewhere nearby, buried in this field, I believed a cache of North blades was hiding.”
Bingo. Extraordinarily, McGhee’s suspicions were directly under his feet. He was literally standing on the cache.
Breadcrumbs and Treasure
North blades, McGhee explains, were made to trade. “Basically, they’re raw and unfinished, predominantly heat-treated and made from chert. They come out of the Woodland period and the Hopewell culture, and those people worked them into other kinds of smaller arrowheads.”
Find one; hope for many. “Just a minimal amount of research shows the presence of North blades indicates a possible cache,” he continues. “Nothing is guaranteed, but they’re commonly found in caches because the Indians stockpiled them for trade.”
As the months rolled by, McGhee kept his powder dry, giving the field ample time for clods to diminish and dirt particles to erode in spring rains. By June 12, with the field on the cusp of late soybean planting, McGhee was bucking and jumping, anxious to see if the breadcrumbs led to treasure.
In the weeks before June opportunity, his ear was already on the ground. “It’s the law of attraction and you gotta believe it,” McGhee insists. “I always visualize what I’m going to find. Think of the time period and type, and where those pieces should be—and get ready. Sometimes a piece will be sticking out of a row or bank, just how I saw it. I don’t know how the brain does it, but all I can say is that it works.”
X-ray vision.
The Blood Cache
On June 12, McGhee walked back in the 100-acre field on an overcast day, covering the higher elevation first, intentionally leaving the sloped area for his last passes, hoping he’d picked the right window of time. “I knew a cache was out there, but there’s no controlling when the elements are right for surface exposure. But I was ready in my mind all the same.”
Several hours later, McGhee made his move toward the location of the initial North blade find, and to his astonishment, in the precise spot where he stood in February, another North blade peeked out of the dirt. He knelt for a closer look, but didn’t dare touch the tool. Soaking in the moment, his eyes suddenly caught the contrast of another blade, feet away to the right. And then another. Three. All in plain sight.
Indisputably, a North blade cache. He eased the three worked stones from the soil, possibly their first human touch since a Native American knapped the blades roughly 2,000 years in the past—parallel to the time of Christ.
Mind reeling, McGhee was on the cusp of major discovery. He pulled his only extraction tool on hand, a Kershaw pocketknife, and began scraping and digging. Roughly 4” later, he struck history as a massive North blade horde spilled from Missouri dirt. “My senses went crazy. The more I dug, the more I found.”
One after the other, the leaf-shaped blades emerged from the earth, both intact and broken due to disk contact. McGhee’s ungloved fingers caught the edges, dripping blood onto the cache. The wounds were welcome.
Head over heels, McGhee fell into a time warp. “It was like an out of body experience. I was seriously afraid I’d pass out. When I realized there were more blades than I could count in that moment, my adrenaline started pumping wild. My skin started to tingle and my face went numb. My speech slurred and it was hard to breathe. I’ve never, never felt anything close to that sensation in my life.”
“It felt like my body was racing at 200 miles per hour and everything was a blur,” he adds. “I’d dreamed of finding a big cache many times, but when it happened it was a million miles past my expectations.”
McGhee dug for over an hour, pulling out 40-plus blades. He returned several times over the next week and found more, bringing the cache total to 51 North blades.
Based on the location, and the lack of percussion flakes or hammer stones within immediate proximity, McGhee believes the cache was transported to its present location, close to the water’s edge, for trade access.
“It’s just opinion, but considering the shallow dirt, I think the river came up and silted the stockpile. Basically, a flood or high water took the cache. Maybe the Indians then left the area and the cache was lost for the next few thousand years. It was a high-value cache to whoever lost it.”
No doubt in McGhee’s mind: The field holds more secrets. “There’s another cache out here. Doesn’t mean I can find it, but it’s here. I feel it.”
Secrets Yet to Uncover
In his younger years, McGhee’s sleep patterns consistently were laced with arrowheads. Walking a river, kneeling in a row, finding an exquisite tool—always repeated in nightly dreams. “I still have a reoccurring one where I find an 18” spearpoint,” he says, “but I don’t dream about arrowheads as much now because my dreams have become reality.”
Running his hands across the contours and flake marks of the awesome North blade cache, McGhee is filled with boyhood fascination. He’s ready to hunt again. “The cache is precious. I’m just grateful to have had the opportunity to find and preserve it. It proves to people these artifacts are still out there on farmland. They can still be found.”
Read more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106).
