Strongboxes have a colorful history in the Old West. They were
used to thwart would-be thieves, most of the time they only
succeeded in keeping honest people honest. Strongboxes were
common on stage coaches, which were the main means of long
distance travel in the early days before the railroad. There
are many accounts of robberies and tales of how axes were used
to breach the box, many of which were sturdy and wooden. Iron
was also used. That made it harder to break into the boxes,
but if bandits were able to haul them off they were usually
lost. The lava beds west of here were the favored spot to
conduct the heists. Numerous small lava caves may still be the
hiding places of some of the many strongboxes that were never
recovered. This cache, as its name suggests, is indeed a
strongbox repilica, made of iron. It is located near what used
to be the main road through these parts.
Here is the story as it was passed down to me by my Great Uncle
Kubwa (means "large" in Swahili): As a young boy Kubwa was
intrigued by tales of strongboxes and their treasures hidden in the
lavas. Correspondingly, he spent many a night in the local saloons
attempting to glean information from drunken hooligans. One night a
fight broke out, and one especially gnarly fellow, who had
regularly spoken of knowing the location of a strongbox, lay in a
pool of blood. This Mr. Gnarly summoned Kubwa and told the boy of
the location of the strongbox. Kubwa spent most of his life
searching for the box. Then one day when he was an old man he was
reported to have found it! Kubwa was killed in a horrific car crash
on his return trip. The crash left his auto half buried along the
upstream side of the old highway bridge. His body was never found
and the auto was too far buried to worry about salvaging it. In the
mid 1950s a new brige was built and is still used today. Rumor has
it that the remnants of Kubwa's auto can still be found beside the
crumbling abutments of the old bridge. I can vaguely remember a
riddle that Mr. Gnarly told Kubwa with his dying breath. Kubwa
would always mutter the riddle as he set off towards the lavas on
one of his treasure hunting sprees. The riddle goes like this:
"What is the four-digit number (no zeros) in which the third digit
is the number of "winds," the first digit is one-half of the third,
the second digit is double the third and the last digit is one-half
the sum of the first three?" Happy Caching Bwana Kidogo