From these etched tableaus, he knew there were messages to be discerned. He inferred that the key indicators were for distance and direction. Others, he surmised, indicated numerical compass headings and perhaps even the outline of topographical features in the immediate area. What appeared to be, say, the carved letter Y could actually be the confluence of two streams.
Bob wandered wherever his intuition would take him. There were innumerable false leads and cold trails, but for every ten of those, there was a payoff of sorts. He would carry along a U.S. Geological Survey topographic map and mark the location of every treasure sign—tree carvings, rock carvings, rock piles—that he discovered. Back in his study, he would sketch the various encrypted signposts, along with their relative positions and orientations, on yellow legal pads.
Rather quickly, he realized that the mysterious symbols extended along distinct tangents, sometimes for miles on end. He speculated that they were directional markers for some kind of linear, geometric grid. The grid appeared to be anchored in physical features of the Brushy Creek countryside, as there were clusters of carvings in the area. Distinct lines, it seemed, radiated from Smoke Rock Mountain, the rugged expanse where Grandpa had spent much of his time away from home.
But where did it all lead? Through simple trial and error, Bob tried to determine the gauges for surveying distances that he believed the clues indicated. Turning to his small library of Spanish treasure books, he resolved to experiment with historic Spanish distance measurements. These ranged from varas (30–35 inches) to statute leagues (21/8 miles). Armed with his compass and topo maps, he would pace off along directionals that he assumed the tree carvings indicated. But the only results—over months of slogging through poison oak–infested forest along these transit lines—were blisters, tick bites and added confusion. The symbols did not correspond to the Spanish metrics. Chagrined, he began to question whether he was, in fact, dealing with Spanish treasure—or treasure of any kind.
It was a stressful period. Bob no longer had the freedom to immerse himself in the hunt. Over the past six months, he had spent so much time on the treasure trail that obligations around the ranch had gone wanting. Linda expressed growing concern that his focus on uncovering Grandpa’s mystery was becoming a financial liability. Their daughter, Brenda, was at college, and Bob still had not replaced his bee inspector job. And there was a flicker of heat from the outside. Some relatives in town and friends of Linda’s at church let it be known that they thought Bob was wasting good time and may even have gone “a bit crazy” with his meanderings in the mountains. “Why do you let him do that, running off to the woods?” was a constant question thrown at Linda, and it pained Bob.
Things turned his way in February 1979, when the job of utilities superintendent was tossed in his lap. The town’s utilities supervisor had left abruptly, leaving Hatfield without anyone to oversee water supply operations during a fierce winter storm that had frozen the well controls. An elderly woman who had known Bob as a teenager and recognized his mechanical skills urged the mayor to call him. Within a few hours, the town got its water supply back, and Bob had a full-time job. The money was decent and the hours flexible. He enjoyed the work and soon became involved with the design, construction and operation of an environmentally friendly wastewater-treatment plant.
Hatfield’s state-of-the-art facility received state and regional media recognition, sparking a visit by then-Governor Bill Clinton (who, due to politicking in town, never kept his appointment to tour the plant with Bob). Bob soon received numerous out-of-town job offers, including assistant to the director of the Arkansas Department of Pollution Control and Ecology. But, to pursue his life passion, he elected to stay in Hatfield. With the exception of a brief stint as director of public works in a small, southern Texas town in the mid-1980s (where he quickly grew tired of local government politics interfering with the job), he remained in Hatfield with its mysterious surrounding forests. With his children now well into their adult lives, his military pension—combined with income from occasional cattle and timber sales and from intermittent contract jobs—would be enough to keep Linda and himself comfortable while he explored the treasure trail.
In the late 1980s, Bob’s investigation took a new turn. He began to realize that the clues around Brushy Creek and Smoke Rock Mountain were not limited to carvings on trees but in some cases included the shape of certain trees.
Walking along indicated directional lines, he began to notice that select trees—almost exclusively red and white oaks—had a pattern of grafted limbs or oddly shaped trunks which, he thought, could not be naturally occurring. Some had grown into the shape of football uprights; others looked like half-finished scaffolding, with perfectly vertical limbs sprouting off perfectly horizontal branches. Some took the shape of Ts or crosses. It appeared as if nineteenth-century pioneers had snapped the trunks of saplings and tied them into right-angled contortions, using twine that would disintegrate. By now these were no mere landmarks but giant sculptured signposts, or, in some cases, neat rifle sights—showing a traveler that his compass bearing was correct as it sliced through the center of the marker tree. Other contorted oaks had large bent-knee knobs knitted into their trunks—providing a waist-high “this way” indicator.
He wondered if his imagination were running wild. But the pattern was uncanny. If only Uncle Ode were around to explain, he thought, recalling how his mentor had grafted fruit trees.
By far the most fascinating “treasure” tree in Brushy Valley was the “map tree,” the big beech singled out by Grandpa and Ode back in 1950, near where the Mexican had been killed. Bob had rediscovered the inscribed tree in the early 1980s by following a line indicated by one of the odd bent oaks in the area. Upon his return from Texas, he had spent months trying to decipher the beech’s weird cluster of signs and symbols.
Anchored at the base of Smoke Rock, it was pocked with sixty-five inscriptions—a cross, a bell, a heart, a legless horse or mule, a legless bird, a priest-like figure and a host of letters, symbols and numbers. The challenge was in seeing in this naïve indigenous “art” a sophisticated coded message.
The beech, to Bob, was the starting point. Certainly, there were other marked trees nearby, but this one, because of its complexity, drew him in. Some of its signs were fully visible; others were covered with moss and lichen, which had to be delicately removed with a wire brush. Several engravings had been stretched or otherwise distorted by the tree’s growth. Nonetheless, over many years, the carvings remained legible, particularly if outlined lightly in chalk.
(The bark of the North American beech, Fagus grandifolia, is unusual among temperate-climate trees. Its original tissue replenishes itself externally, producing the telltale smooth outer surface of the species; in contrast to the fissured bark of, say, oaks, which produce new bark tissue deeper inside the tree.8 Hence, the relative abundance of old inscriptions on beech bark.)
The name Odis Ashcraft—juxtaposed with the date “1924”—was carved into the beech, as Bob discovered one morning while brushing away the moss. From that startling moment, he knew that this tree “tablet” probably held important keys for unlocking the puzzle that had preoccupied him for so long. The bark engravings, inscribed as they were on a long-lived beech, were no idle graffiti. They conveyed something esoteric, arcane, perhaps spiritual. At the top of the inscription, more than four feet above the ground, was the lettering 1st Thess 2:3. Slightly below and on the opposite side of the trunk were the inscribed initials J.A.S., surrounded by three dots arranged in a triangle.
Bob at first did not know what to make of these, but he came around to thinking that they might be Biblical references, in keeping with the priest-like figure centrally carved into the bark. Turning to his King James Bible at home, he tried First Thessalonians, chapter two, verse three. The passage speaks of exhortations being true. As for J.A.S. and the three dots, he guessed at “James, chapter three, verse three”—which speaks of turning a horse around by its bit.
The tree “tablet” seemed to suggest focusing on the prominent legless-horse figure, while the biblical references appeared to allude to the animal’s direction. The trick, he guessed, was to turn the horse around and to know that this new direction of the turned animal was true. The horse’s image was unusual because it had no legs and had one ear pointing down. If the image were reversed, the drooping ear would point east to a spot on the ground. The telltale ear of the “stationary” horse provided a directional line. Twenty yards from the tree, in an easterly direction as indicated by the ear of the reversed horse, lay a large depression in the forest floor, covered with brush.
Bob would never know whether the person who dug the pit had recovered a large cache or had merely excavated a large hole. But whatever initial disappointment he felt on discovering the dry pit was surpassed by a buoyant confidence that his interpretations of key aspects of the Map Tree had been on track. He renamed the beech the Bible Tree.
The trick now was to deduce additional directional lines leading from the tree, to sift out distinct compass headings from its explosion of symbolism. He scrutinized each carving for any suggestion of geographic headings. Several seemed to indicate a northeast direction: a fancy number 7, with a scythe-like tail, seemed to point that way. And, amid the scrambled letters, he noticed that NE seemed to have been carved as a distinct pair in an area not far from the upturned tail of the 7.
With compass in hand, Bob headed into almost impenetrable vegetation along a line to the northeast, as indicated by the 7’s fish-tail. At just under half a mile, he made a series of discoveries. A large number 7, about the length of a man’s arm, had been chipped into a rockface with a pick or chisel! The full length of the 7 was visible as a shadow figure under the bright sun. Not far from the 7 was a vault-like chamber, about eight feet on a side. Above the vault and to the right was a large carved symbol in the shape of a three-toed turkey track, whose middle toe pointed directly to the vault. The track had been partly defaced by someone, apparently years ago. Climbing into the vault, Bob could see that the man-made chamber connected to a waterlogged tunnel going off to one side and that a narrow entrance tunnel, coming up from the creek below, had collapsed.
Exiting from the vault, he felt confident that the Bible Tree had directed him to the spot. He realized that it was the same creek bed that Grandpa had said was the final resting place of the mischievous Mexican. He wondered how much of a coincidence it had been for Grandpa to have pointed out both the Bible Tree and the site of the Mexican’s undoing during that first outing, nearly forty years ago.
Back at his study, Bob charted his discovery on his topo map. Using dividers to obtain pinpoint accuracy in calculating distance, he could see that he had walked exactly three-eighths of a mile to the 7 rock-face carving from the 7 engraving on the Bible Tree. On several prior occasions, he had noted that he seemed to have traveled a certain distance between signs measured in precise one-eighth-mile units. The trip from the Bible Tree to the seemingly important vault made him wonder: Could the measurements be indicated in furlongs, a standard legal gauge for American surveying calculated in eighths of a mile, or 660 feet? The “Spanish hypothesis” seemed to be fading fast.
Returning to other trees with distance indicators, he satisfied himself that the American surveyor system of measurement was being used. He found that he could predict the distance at which a clue was likely to be found along an indicated line. By early 1990, he began to find markers systematically. Typically, the clues were carved in tree bark or chiseled in stone outcroppings. But the symbolic signposts could also take the form of strategically placed rocks or groupings of rocks. The stone markers were often shaped like an elongated diamond or trowel; some resembled large arrowheads, and some even looked like a boot.
Moreover, Bob began to realize that the rusted “junk” metal that he occasionally discovered with his metal detector while walking lines could hold some significance for the overall geometric grid. Until this point, he had discounted all such seemingly random findings: horseshoes, muleshoes, plowpoints, pick and axe heads, wagon and stove parts. He had assumed that the “stuff” had been lost or deliberately tossed by miners or woodsmen working in the area long ago. But was it really junk? No, the pattern was too consistent, too linear, in fact, to be a coincidence.
He eventually concluded that constellations of abandoned spare parts had been placed at calculated distances and then buried four to six inches underground. That depth of burial, he realized, was just enough for concealment but within range of a magnetic-compass needle to mark the ferrous target below the surface.
(Those individuals who created an underground money grid—perhaps a century or more ago—obviously owned no metal detectors or other electronic devices for remote sensing. All they had in their employ was the basic needle compass or a similarly functioning instrument, known as a Spanish dip needle. The horizontally rotating magnetic needle of the compass or the vertically seesawing Spanish dip needle would orient itself to the induced magnetic field produced by the buried iron object—the container for the gold and silver coins, bullion, jewels and the like—in the shallow underground.
The science behind the venerable compass, the less-well-known Spanish dip needle and today’s prosaic but reliable electronic magnetometers and metal detectors is fairly straightforward. Yet it takes a little explaining to relate this science to the task of finding treasure.
All magnets have two poles, commonly referred to as north and south. With any two magnets, like poles repel and opposite poles attract. Thus, a north pole of one magnet is attracted to the south pole of a second.
A powerful magnet exists within Earth’s core, created by flows of molten iron. The presence of this giant subsurface magnet is detected by a compass.
A compass, in its brilliant simplicity, is nothing more than a bar magnet balanced on a pivot, such that the magnet is free to rotate. Since like poles of magnets repel and opposite poles attract, the south pole of the compass is attracted to the north pole of the Earth’s core magnet.
The Earth’s magnet occupies a relatively small volume in the planet’s core. Consequently its magnetic poles do not extend to what are called Earth’s true geographic north and south poles. The result is that Earth’s magnetic north pole deviates from its geographic north pole, over time and from different locations. Nevertheless, under most circumstances, the magnet of a compass points true north, and this elementary tool can be used for land, sea and air navigation by those who know how to adjust for the deviation.
Because of the powerful magnet lying inside the Earth’s core, all ferromagnetic objects—those containing iron, nickel or cobalt—lying on the Earth’s surface will become “induced” magnets and thus detectable to some degree by a compass. Recall how a paper clip in the proximity of an actual magnet starts to behave like a magnet itself. The object becomes “magnetized” when near a magnet, or technically speaking, it transforms into an “induced” magnet whose magnetic strength is proportional to the distance from the actual magnet.
Moving from a paper clip to a buried iron washpot full of coins or an iron safe stuffed with jewels, the principle is the same. These buried iron containers have absorbed some of the magnetism of the Earth’s core magnet. When a hand-held compass passes over these substantial “induced” magnets, the compass needle will react by pivoting sharply to this sudden, proximate magnetic force attracting or repelling it.
Hence, in the pre–metal-detector years of outlawry, those burying substantial caches risked never recovering their gold or silver [nonferrous metals] unless the caches were marked by signs or code on the surface or were buried in ferrous containers [iron washpots, safes, strongboxes, milk cans]. They would also need to be buried near the surface, for small stashes such as a glass jar full of coins capped by a ferrous lid would provide only a weak signal. The rusted lid could completely oxidize, leaving an even weaker signal. That is why heavy iron parts—from old stoves, wagons, field tools—were dep
loyed just under the surface as unseen markers for actual treasure or crucial clues buried deeper. Their magnetic field, undetectable to the eye, would send the compass awhirl. Moreover, the buried rusted relics might have a distinct pointed part that, in turn, would provide a topographical heading to follow.
But it was not that easy to find treasure with compass in hand. The treasure hunter would need to stand on top of the target and then crouch down low with the compass and hope that the object was not buried too deeply. With each doubling of the distance between the compass as a sensor and the ferrous target, the detectable magnetic force decreases by a factor of eight.
Today’s treasure hunter has better and affordable tools at his or her disposal. A magnetometer, like a compass, is an instrument that measures magnetic force. But, electrically powered and programmed, it is far more sensitive and powerful than the rudimentary, centuries-old compass. With a magnetometer, a treasure hunter can detect much smaller magnetic objects, and items lodged at greater depths. Still, like a compass, it can only find ferrous objects.
A metal detector, also electrically powered, detects all metals, not just ferrous objects. It does so by broadcasting a weak radio wave [far weaker than those emitted by a radio station] that is then reflected by buried metal objects. The metal detector monitors rebounding signals, which appear as a movement of a dial or as an audible alarm, indicating the presence of nearby metal. The larger, or the shallower, the metal object, the greater the interference to be monitored. Yet, since radio waves do not penetrate very deeply into the ground, metal detectors are limited to sensing and locating only shallow objects. There are other challenges as well. Soil conditions can wreak havoc: iron-rich soil or sediment covered by iron-laden rocks can create an impossible blur when looking for specific targets.)
Rebel Gold Page 5
