Sweetman also found another pair of guns that he thought interesting:

Sweetman then exits stage left while Dr. H. N. Graves enters stage right.

On their way home after the end of the war, Dr. Graves and his buddies step off the train at Harrisburg six miles south of Houston on August 15, 1865. In Graves’s own words:

He goes on to say:

I have a problem with this statement. Number one, what woodwork? An entire gun carriage was built of wood. Number two, a fire would have caused suspicion. Union soldiers were camped within a mile and often walked to Harrisburg for food and drink. Number three, what was left of the carriages to throw in the river if they were burned? And number four, why roll the cannon 400 yards into the woods when you could have rolled them on carriages? Besides, you can’t roll cannon because of the trunnions, the pins opposite each other on a gun so it can be pivoted up and down. This scenario doesn’t make sense. Also, it was a hot, sultry night. These guys were toughened by war, but they weren’t at their physical peak, and one of them had measles. So I don’t believe they hauled the guns as far as Graves claimed, certainly not through a forest at night. They must have used a road or path most of the way before turning into the woods.

Graves went on:

This is the only detailed account Graves gave. If only he had said which direction he and his buddies took when they stole the cannon and pushed them off into the night. Regrettably, he left more questions than answers.

Before leaving, the men all took a solemn oath that none of them would ever reveal the secret of their hiding place until all possibility of their cannons’ capture and confiscation by enemy hands was removed.

In 1905, forty years later, Dr. Graves, Sol Thomas, and John Barnett returned to Harrisburg and attempted to relocate the site where they buried the guns. They drew maps separately, according to their memories of the landmarks, and compared sketches. The maps all coincided; however, the men were not successful in finding the exact spot, since the terrain had undergone marked changes — a situation I find all too often on NUMA searches.

The three men actually found three of the original marked trees and two of the stones they had placed in the general area. This would indicate that they must have been within a dozen feet of the Twin Sisters.

Another fifteen years passed, and then, in 1920, a reporter with the Houston Chronicle by the name of Mamie Cox persuaded Dr. Graves to come back to Harrisburg for another try at finding the Twin Sisters. In her story, Graves was driven around Harrisburg before stopping in the general location of the guns’ burial. Unfortunately, no record was left as to where the car stopped for the search or to whom the property belonged. Supposedly, Graves found two of the landmarks he left in 1865.

So ends an intriguing tale of a mystery filled with bafflement.

Texans have been drawn to search for their heritage over the decades. Many individuals and groups have probed the landscape around Harrisburg looking for the guns. They’re probably the only tourists who go there. Despite their efforts in analyzing clues and pursuing tantalizing leads that never pan out, they still search. And so does NUMA.

We first beat the bushes in the fall of 1987. Wayne Gronquist, Austin attorney and then president of NUMA, assembled a group of ten or so Texans who owned metal detectors and were fired up for the hunt. The first probe concentrated on the area west of the railroad tracks that run north across Bray’s Bayou into Houston. We spread out in a line and worked inland from Bray’s Bayou.

It was like trying to pick up confetti with a nail on a stick during a windstorm. Over the years, industrial manufacturers had used this location to dump everything from scrap metal to steel fifty-five-gallon drums to old refrigerators. There was so much iron that the metal detectors and magnetometers almost burned up.

I made the only discovery of the day. When sweeping through a field of high grass, I was startled down to my socks when two illegal immigrants leaped up and took off across the field. They must have been either hiding or sleeping when I almost walked on top of them. I shouted after them, “It’s okay, enjoy your day!” But they never turned or looked back before vanishing in the woods.

In 1988, Gronquist met up with another group of Texans looking for the cannon, led by Richard Harper and Randy Wiseman, who agreed to join forces with NUMA. Our people consisted of Bob Esbenson, Dana Larson, Tony Bell, and the Ross family. We all gathered in Harrisburg in March to begin the sweep. While we searched along the bayou, Harper and Wiseman hired a huge backhoe to dig a hundred-foot trench twenty feet wide and fifteen feet deep, but found nothing of interest.

The next day, using the Schonstedt gradiometer, I found an iron rim that came off an old wagon wheel and dug it up along with several old bottles. I felt the rim was too narrow for a cannon carriage, more in keeping with the size of a buggy wheel. But Harper and Wiseman became enthused, and they felt sure the rim came from the Twin Sisters gun carriage. They later dated the bottles to sometime in the 1860s.

The next day, there was a conflict between the two groups. Harper and Wiseman became angry because one of the people who had volunteered to bring his metal detector was a known treasure hunter. Why this bothered them, I’ll never know. If found, there was no way the guns were going anywhere but to the state capital in Austin, and from there to the conservation labs at Texas A&M. They were also disappointed that we had not rented a bigger backhoe, even though we had excavated along the railroad tracks where they requested. Then there was a problem of proprietary rights. I got the idea that they thought the Twin Sisters belonged to them and that we were interlopers cutting into their territory.