Stonewall's Gold

The first novel from former congressman turned author Robert J. Mrazek, Stonewall's Gold (1999), is a young adult historical fiction set during the US Civil War. Borrowing from Robert Louis Stevenson adventure classics such as Treasure Island and Kidnapped, Mrazek’s work follows a teenage boy and girl’s attempts to beat several other interested parties – thieves, Confederate holdouts, idealistic believers – to a stolen pile of gold. Mixing a coming of age story with nonstop action, Mrazek fills his book with deeply researched descriptions of life during the 1860s in the hardscrabble landscape of the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia.

Several years before the start of the novel, the small Shenandoah Valley town of Port Republic was the site of a Civil War battle early in the war. To win the Battle of Port Republic, the Union General Sheridan ordered his troops to destroy the countryside. What few people know, however, is that before this battle, Confederate General Stonewall Jackson stole and buried a lot of Union gold after intercepting the train it had been on after the Battle of Bull Run. The soldier who made a map of the location this treasure was buried later died during the Battle of Port Republic and was buried with this invaluable map.

Now, is it 1864, and fifteen-year-old Jamie Lockhart is forced to try to keep himself and his mother alive and fed in the devastated Port Republic. His father, a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate army, is gone, and the family farm is failing. In order to make ends meet, Jamie’s mother decides to take in a boarder. Soon, the town is shocked to see that the graves of soldiers are being desecrated – and after some sleuthing, Jamie realizes that their boarder is responsible. However, when Jamie goes to confront the man, he discovers him in the middle of a vicious attack – trying to rape Jamie’s mother. In the process of defending her, Jamie kills the boarder. He then finds the cryptic map to Stonewall’s gold in “the Mouth of the Devil” that stranger had been digging up graves to find.



Jamie knows what he must do: recover the gold and deliver it personally to the head of the Confederate army, Robert E. Lee. Along the journey, he runs into a variety of dangers and is saved from one of them by Major Alain de Monfort, a one-armed, knife-throwing man from Louisiana. De Monfort advises Jamie to give up the quest – but if he is determined to sneak behind Union lines, to memorize the map and then destroy it. Jamie does that, making it harder for the bad guys to kill him since he is the only one who knows what the map said.

However, Jamie is not the only person ready to go out in search of hidden treasure. The boarder had been digging up the graves of soldiers on the orders of Captain McQuade, the last survivor of the original train robbery and the last of the group who knows where the gold is buried. McQuade has rounded up a group of brutal, horse-mounted killers. As soon as they realize Jamie has the map, they pursue him with abandon, eventually catching and taking him hostage.

The horsemen stop at the house of the Dandridge family, demanding food and shelter. After they are turned away, the youngest of the family, eighteen-year-old Katherine Dandridge, watches in horror as her father and their butler are slaughtered. The aristocratic Katherine steels herself for revenge, deciding to pursue the gang to free Jamie and kill McQuade and his people.



She executes the first part of her plan, and she and Jamie join forces. Spending time with the passionate and headstrong woman, Jamie can’t help but fall in love. On the run from McQuade and his cutthroats, they, eventually, reunite with Alain de Monfort. He reveals that he is actually François Guillaume Mouton La Frenière and that he, too, is in pursuit of the gold – but his goal is to use the money to help formerly enslaved people.

In the end, with Alain’s help, Jamie and Katherine find the gold. However, just as they do, the gang that has been following them all this time catches up. Alain is shot and killed – and with him, his dream of helping newly freed black people. But in a surprising reversal, Jamie and Katherine are saved from the rampage by Captain McQuade. Jamie and Katherine make it out of the adventure alive, if not entirely unharmed by everything they have seen and experienced.

The novel, presented as a “found” manuscript, ends with an author’s postscript detailing the future lives of the Dandridge and Lockhart families. Although couched to look like realistic biographic research, this addition is also fictional.