Rebel Gold

by Warren Getler

  Furthermore, the base of operations of the front men provided value. Their proselytizing in such cities as Cincinnati and St. Louis made it appear that the KGC was fundamentally a Northern, Western or Northwestern movement. While the Union made all-out efforts to penetrate the so-called Northwestern Conspiracy (and in the process made it seem that bringing this clandestine group to heel meant an end to the KGC nationwide), the KGC’s Southern bastions of power—Charleston, New Orleans, Montgomery, Richmond and finally Nashville and Canton (Texas)—stayed out of range of Lincoln administration agents during the war.18

  This is not to say that the efforts of Bickley and Vallandigham were deliberate red herrings. The KGC’s core leadership knew that the efforts of a Northern-based branch (supported by communiqués transmitted by covert agents and by coded messages placed in Northern newspapers) could enlist new recruits, weaken Northern public resolve for total victory and possibly lead to a coordinated movement (between uniformed Rebel forces from the South and nonuniformed fifth column KGC recruits from the North) to open up a Northern front. As it turned out, Vallandigham campaigned openly and aggressively in public speeches for an abrupt, negotiated end to the war that would leave the South’s independent slave-holding republic intact. At the least, the Northern branch could stir up enough internal dissent in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa—all suffering from weak economies—to thwart Lincoln’s chances of reelection in 1864. And, even if Lincoln were to be reelected, a stepped up KGC campaign of terrorism and subversion might convince a weary Union that the war might not be worth the cost in lives and matériel.

  Stirring up a sense of panic and chaos in the North clearly was the unspoken reason for the brutal antidraft riot in New York City in July 1863, which, after three days, left hundreds, mostly blacks, dead in the streets.19 Some believe the KGC was behind this bloody event. According to Benson Lossing’s social history from the late 1800s, the carefully organized “riot” had begun with the destruction of telegraph wires extending out of the city. After uttering cries against the draft, the mostly Irish mob, fueled by the KGC’s plotting and invectives, yelled:

  “Down with the Abolitionists, down with the nigger, Hurrah for Jeff Davis.” … This riot seems to have been only an irregular manifestation of an organized outbreak in New York City simultaneously with a similar insurrection projected in some western cities. But the draft went on in spite of all opposition; and the Knights of the Golden Circle and the Peace Faction were discomfited.20

  Ultimately, even if all else failed with political agitation and paramilitary operations in the North and West, a key component of the KGC’s North/South strategy would remain intact: the move underground, via widely dispersed cells in the South, to prepare for a second Civil War.

  Timing was critical. The KGC’s leadership had seen the writing on the wall during that eventful month of July 1863. In those critical few weeks, first Gettysburg and then Vicksburg—the Confederacy’s vital stronghold on the Mississippi—fell. KGC leaders immediately recognized that the South, after suffering such devastating battlefield defeats, could no longer expect British or French intervention on their side. Such intervention, they knew, had always been dependent on convincing London and Paris that the South ultimately would prevail in its bid for independence.21

  The KGC elite realized that the South had insufficient capital, matériel and troops to prosecute the war alone without European assistance, particularly after giving up key logistical advantages along the Mississippi. Better, they reasoned, to take firm steps to build the resources and command structure below ground for a renewed fight on more equal footing, at a time of their choosing and with an emphasis on guerrilla warfare. Focusing government agents, newspaper columnists and academic historians on such cranks as Bickley gave the KGC convenient cover while it plotted to go below surface on its home turf. This enormous enterprise was undertaken late in the war, and all but escaped scrutiny.

  4

  Coming Home: A Gold-Filled Legacy

  THE phrase “Knights of the Golden Circle” meant nothing to Bob Brewer in 1977, the year that he moved his young family to Hatfield after a nineteen-year career in the Navy. It would take another sixteen years before “KGC” entered his vocabulary. Once he had resettled in the Arkansas hill country, a powerful desire to solve the mystery of Grandpa’s deep-woods excursions—and their links to possible treasure—was never far from his mind. In fact, in that small Polk County mountain town, where everyone seemed to know each other, the topic of hidden treasure was all but unavoidable.

  Bob spent the first year at home unwinding, adjusting to the pace of civilian life. He put his modest savings toward fixing up a small ranch that he and Linda had purchased a few miles from town. It felt good having stretches of free time, the first since his youth.

  But, notwithstanding the buffer of a military pension, he also recognized that with three young boys to feed and a daughter going off to college, he had to enter the civilian workforce. To troll for job leads and catch up with old acquaintances, he would drive to McLain’s, the coffee shop on the edge of town, where burly men from the timber and trucking industries would gather for breakfast. Much of the conversation centered on the hunting season, the mills and local politics. Almost invariably, amid the din, someone would slip in a line or two about hunting treasure, “Spanish gold,” to be specific.

  It struck Bob as odd just how much treasure talk there was. Some of the conversationalists—locals such as Art Akins and George Icke—were self-avowed, full-time “treasure hunters.” Others claimed to do their “coin shooting” for sport in their free time. No one claimed outright to have found hidden caches. Yet many spoke of having uncovered mysterious “Spanish treasure” signs in the surrounding mountains.

  Bob could only grin. Among the many vague descriptions of such signs from these well-meaning men—all of whom claimed to know more than they actually did—he would occasionally hear a precise account of one of the carved symbols that he had seen with Grandpa and Ode. When told about carvings that were unfamiliar, he carefully would sketch them on loose pieces of paper. If a location was given (and there was an implicit level of trust among these mountain men), he would head to the woods to investigate. On several occasions, he concluded, the tree- or rock-face engravings fit a pattern: the same knowing hand or hands had created them. That knowledge he quietly kept to himself. In his study at home, he began incorporating each field report into a master, color-coded topographical layout of the Brushy Creek area near Smoke Rock Mountain.

  He recognized a certain irony in all this seemingly haphazard talk about “lost Spanish treasure” in landlocked Arkansas. He had just arrived from the Florida Keys, his last Navy posting, where an effort had been under way to find the sunken Spanish galleon, Nuestra Señora de Atocha, and its reputed millions. During his “twilight tour” at Naval Air Station Boca Chica, Bob occasionally had bumped into high-profile treasure hunter Mel Fisher at local establishments in nearby Key West. He learned that Fisher’s treasure-hunting team was focused, well-equipped and maintained a systematic approach to finding its target. At some point, Bob speculated, Fisher was going to find the mother lode in the shallow waters off the Keys. (Fisher did just that with the Atocha, in 1985, for a total recovery estimated at more than $400 million in gold coin, ingots, jewels and gems. In the process, Fisher lost a son, a daughter-in-law and another diver to a freak salvage-boat accident.)

  In their last encounter in Key West in 1976, Bob had told the veteran offshore treasure hunter that as a boy growing up in the Ouachitas he had been shown treasure markings. When Fisher asked about the origin of the rumored land treasure, Bob said that he didn’t know but that it might be Spanish. (At the time, Bob had no way of knowing that Fisher would wind up on the same trail, fifteen years later, near Smoke Rock, on property owned by a daughter of Grandpa Ashcraft. A gold “mining” company, called Equity AU and financed in part by Fisher, would leave a hole ten feet long, five feet wide and eight feet deep a quarter-m
ile east of where Will Ashcraft had pointed out the beech tree with the “treasure signs” to Bob. The area, in fact, was thick with treasure markings and near the spot where Grandpa had staked some of his mining claims. After Fisher died of cancer in 1998, the short-lived Equity AU mining operations in the Ouachitas ceased.)

  Grandpa and Uncle Ode never spoke about Spanish gold. So when Hatfield locals at McLain’s gabbed loosely about sixteenth-century Spaniards having to hide their loot in the hills from marauding Indians, Bob chalked it up to plausible chatter. But, he figured, it could just as easily amount to mere myth. Whatever the stories’ merits, he recalled how Grandpa had referred to a “Mexican” getting killed for “snooping around” not far from the Ashcraft cabin, in an area with numerous treasure markings. Was this “Mexican” actually a Spaniard, and did he ever exist?

  The questions nagged Bob. So he set out to talk with the one person in town who, he thought, could shed some light: William Hicks, a former neighbor, retired preacher and friend of Will Ashcraft. When asked about the Mexican’s murder, the octogenarian chuckled: “My grandfather loaned Tandy Hatfield the gun that he used.” Hicks also said that young Tandy—one of several sons of John Hatfield, an early homesteader with Confederate roots—had been arrested for the fatal shooting, jailed and then, mysteriously, vanished. There was plenty of speculation, Hicks added, that a local conspiracy had freed Tandy and that he had lived quietly on a mountainside above Brushy Creek, some twelve miles from Hatfield, for years.

  Bob thanked the old man and set out to confirm his account in the county court records in nearby Mena and then in newspaper archives in Little Rock, three hours away. The court records revealed an 1884 indictment for first-degree murder against T. A. Hatfield, but there were no follow-up documents as to the outcome of the indictment.1 Moreover, Bob could find no trial record, no punishment record or even a death certificate for the murder suspect. In Little Rock, he came across a July 18, 1884, article in the Fort Smith Elevator.2 It described how, in early 1884, an “old Mexican or Spaniard” had arrived in Brushy Valley via Texarkana with an old map of the area. The map reportedly delineated local “mines.” The man, going by the name “Vannetta,” used the information provided by the map to find a vertical shaft said to have hidden gold bullion inside. Vannetta reportedly recovered buried tools in the shaft, but, the article said, “nothing was done at the time toward developing” the search for the bullion. Vannetta then reportedly returned to the area in early July, seeking other trails for other mines, where he met his fate. The Fort Smith newspaper said: “Some week or two ago, this old Spaniard was delving on one of his claims, and it proved to have been homesteaded, and he was shot and killed.” The young fugitive, Tandy Hatfield, was later arrested and jailed in Dallas, Arkansas, the old county seat of Polk County, it noted.

  Bob found the century-old article fascinating. Parts of the story seemed to fit with what Grandpa had told him, on that first logging trip into the mountains. But what was the real motive behind the killing? What, if anything, was Tandy Hatfield trying to protect from Vannetta? Was Vannetta truly Spanish, he wondered. The name did not sound Spanish, and Linda, his wife of Mexican heritage, agreed.

  Then, what about these “mining claims,” in that area of Brushy Creek, near the Hatfields and the Ashcrafts? He scoured mining records stored at the Polk County courthouse and found that Grandpa, indeed, held extensive claims in precisely the same sector, running into the mid-1950s.3 Some of the claims appeared to be related to the same dank, abandoned tunnels and shafts that veined Smoke Rock mountain—unsafe excavations that he had been warned to stay away from as a boy.

  Most perplexing was that, despite persistent talk and effort expended on “Spanish” gold mines (and there were lots of abandoned “diggings” in the area), there never seemed to have been any authenticated amount of gold discovered. A state geologist contacted by Bob reported that there had never been any substantial quantity of gold mined in Arkansas.4 Manganese, for hardening steel, had been quarried extensively in the 1930s and 1940s in Polk County, but not precious metals.

  It was all very confusing: the local papers from the mid-1880s through early 1900s had reported sporadic gold strikes by newcomers.5 Bob began to suspect these stories were apocryphal. He guessed that a “staged” gold rush in Polk County might have been promoted before 1900—perhaps as a smokescreen for some other purpose, one related to treasure.

  A conversation he later had with Hatfield’s postmaster, Jim Harris, bolstered his hypothesis. The postman’s father, Tutt, owned the local general-supply store in Hatfield in the early part of the century. During the 1930s and 1940s, Tutt Harris regularly sold groceries and mining supplies to a perennial, albeit mysterious, visitor to town, William Chambers Dobson. Born in nearby Cove, Arkansas, in 1866, Bill Dobson was a close friend and associate of Will and Odis Ashcraft. He would arrive each year, beginning in April or May, from his home in Coolidge, Arizona.6

  After picking up rations of salt pork, pinto beans, loaves of bread and sticks of dynamite at Tutt Harris & Son, Dobson would gather up a paid crew of five young locals and work his and Grandpa’s mining claims along the trails and creeks near Smoke Rock. (Joe Dobson, Bill’s son and an all-star pitcher for the Boston Red Sox during the 1940s, visited his father in his Hatfield “mining” operation, causing quite a stir in the local barbershop and other parts of town.)

  Dobson stayed in a miner’s shack that had been built by Bill Wiley in the late 1800s or early 1900s. But Dobson’s main interest was not exactly mining, in the traditional sense; it was something to do with buried treasure. Tutt Harris and others, for instance, had observed Dobson carrying around a “waybill,” or what to them looked like a coded treasure map. On the one occasion that young Jim Harris visited the site, he noticed the overweight Dobson taking readings with a compass. He observed the old man wandering up the creek bed unaccompanied, while the rest of the crew dug into the side of the mountain. Jim recalled Dobson telling him that they were looking for a “vein of gold that runs all the way to Arizona.” Moreover, this mysterious transient figure who hired local teenagers to dig holes deep into mountainsides had another puzzling habit: after the young men had dug to a certain depth, he invariably would pull them off the shaft and move them somewhere else. No one ever knew for sure what they were looking for. It was almost as if Dobson knew how deep something was buried and abruptly stopped the digging—presumably to finish it later, alone, after the heavy lifting had been completed.

  Dobson died suddenly, in June 1946, of a heart attack. He was found collapsed in a creek bed just a few hundred yards from the spot where Vannetta was said to have been killed. On his death certificate, his profession was listed as “mining, prospecting.”7

  Such leads—nineteenth-century newspaper clippings, court documents, mining claims and oral histories about mysterious men like Vannetta, Hatfield and Dobson—were intriguing. But they did not yield a coherent picture, a clear historical context, from which Bob could devise a plan to solve Grandpa’s riddle. To crack the code, he knew that he would have to pursue two tracks: archival and “grass-roots” field research, the latter involving hands-on exploration of clues on the surface and in the shallow underground.

  Although he had done some weekend metal detecting, most recently with his teenage boys in the Florida Keys, he now was gearing up for something wholly different. This was to be a systematic hunt combining technology, instinct and a rough sense of direction provided by the abstract carvings in the forest.

  Bob relished the idea. Yet, after a year with no formal job and with his nest egg from his time in the Navy gradually being depleted, he knew he had to put family first. Luckily, he landed a moderately well-paid job as a state apiary inspector in early 1978: it would take him along every backwoods trail in the region and provide an opportunity to search for further clues.

  As a boy, Bob had learned a few tricks from Uncle Ode about harvesting honey from wild bees. In setting up the ranch in Hatfield, he decided
to try his hand at running some commercial hives. A state apiary inspector who came by to examine the bees for disease and parasites mentioned that he was planning to resign in a few weeks and suggested that Bob look into applying. Upon hearing that the position offered flexible hours during nine months of season-based work each year, Bob shot over to Little Rock and soon was locating, registering and inspecting hives for two adjoining counties, Polk and Scott. But backwoods folk from distant areas were not greeting him with open arms when he came to inspect their bees.

  In certain assigned inspection areas, parts of which happened to be monitored by the local police as marijuana-growing terrain, “beehive” owners were downright unwelcoming. The occasional hostile reaction, he thought, may have stemmed from his volunteering as a reserve police officer for the Mena Police Department. As it turned out, a nasty confrontation with an armed local near Nella, Arkansas, persuaded him to resign the following year. But he did so with mixed feelings, for the job had provided a little cash and some valuable visual leads from the field.

  What most intrigued him was the discovery, along these distant western-Arkansas trails, of treasure markings similar to the ones surrounding Hatfield. If the Spanish had been depositing gold and silver caches in what is now Arkansas, they had spread their hoards over large distances.

  To help resolve the markings’ origins, he bought a few self-published books about so-called Spanish treasure and treasure signs, nearly all of which he found to be somewhat dubious in their assertions. Nevertheless, he saw a certain overlap between several symbols illustrated in the books and those that he had observed in the woods.

  Bob—a committed do-it-yourselfer—wanted to decipher the signs that he had observed and meticulously recorded. By now, his inventory of carved hieroglyphics ran the gamut from countless letters and numbers with odd flourishes, to crosses and crescent moons, to bizarre stick-figure depictions of animals: snakes, birds, turtles (including one laying eggs), horses, mules and deer. These were almost always laid out in groupings, seldom singularly. Most were at eye level of a person standing or riding horseback.