The heat was off, as far as external political-military operations were concerned. Pike, as well as Forrest and others at the helm of the postwar KGC, could now pursue the secret order’s main postwar priority: the expansion of a nationwide underground network of hidden treasure and arms. Still, the purely political effort of forestalling congressionally mandated political equality for newly freed blacks would continue unabated by duly elected Deep South politicians during Reconstruction and beyond. As Columbia University historian Eric Foner astutely observes in his recently published Who Owns History?: “In the 1870s, as the Northern commitment to Reconstruction and the ideal of racial equality waned, Democrats regained control of one Southern state after another. By 1877, Reconstruction had come to an end, and white supremacy had been restored throughout the old Confederacy.”97
The KGC’s Gold
Pike’s mastery of secret Masonic code, its symbolism and sacred geometry (a mathematical paradigm or metaphor based on Pythagorean and Euclidian formulas and ratios) was but one factor that positioned him perfectly to take control of the design—the architectural and topographical blueprints—of the hidden Confederacy’s postwar Fort Knox: a geometrically based grid of monumental ingenuity that involved hundreds of secretly coded, underground financial depositories scattered across the South and Southwest. Pike’s familiarity with the rugged terrain of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico—and his familiarity with the various native cultures there—gave him the personal access that a master mapmaker and financial gatekeeper would require.
The exact sources of the KGC’s gold, silver and arms are not known. As noted, some Confederate reserves had been sent by Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin (a former English subject raised in the British West Indies) to England for safekeeping during the war. In addition, an unknown amount of precious-metal reserves (coins and bullion) may have been shipped abroad from the Confederacy’s near-depleted treasury at war’s end, to be secretly repatriated to KGC operatives after the war. Several hundred thousand dollars worth of gold coins and bullion, and some lesser amount of silver coins and bars, reportedly was hauled south by train out of Richmond shortly before the fighting stopped, as historian William C. Davis has noted.98 Some part of this treasure is believed to have been used to pay straggling Confederate troops. The rest may have arrived in safe harbor in London, to be later secured and returned to the KGC by the likes of Benjamin, Breckinridge or others who fled to England after the war. As it happened, one of Benjamin’s first stops in London, after a long arduous escape at sea, was an August 1865 visit to the home of Sir Frederick Pollock, lord chief baron of the exchequer (treasury).99
Breckinridge, who fled to Cuba via Miami in May 1865, arrived in London around the same time as Benjamin. It is not clear what his motives were, in a subsequent visit, in seeking out Confederate officials—including men, the likes of Benjamin and Sanders, who had some accounting of Confederate funds on reserve in London banks.100 Was it, as William Davis alludes, meant to secure remaining assets to pay off outstanding Confederate debts? Or perhaps to clear up rumors of financial scandals involving expatriate Confederates? Or, was it wholly different: securing funds for repatriation into KGC coffers back home?
Another possible source of KGC funds after the war was hidden coin and precious-metal reserves from KGC coffers in Toronto, Montreal and Windsor, Canada. Historian McPherson notes that in a “secret session on February 15, 1864, the Confederate Congress appropriated $5 million” for establishing “Canadian-based sabotage operations against the North.”101 Those operations were well under way by late spring 1864.
By war’s end, exiled Confederate and KGC cadres operating out of Canada under the seasoned leadership of Jacob Thompson, Clement Clay and Thomas Hines had amassed a treasury estimated at more than $2 million in gold and silver coinage.102 These funds had been obtained in part from various wartime raids on financial institutions in New England and other parts of the Union. It stands to reason that they eventually may have been smuggled into KGC depositories inside the United States in the years immediately following the war. Moreover, ex-Confederates who fled to Mexico may have hauled some treasure back into the United States via Texas and New Mexico Territory (the latter including most of what today is Arizona).
Additional precious-metal reserves might have come into the KGC’s possession from gold- and silver-mining operations owned by ex-Confederates and their sympathizers. California, to be sure, had been a hotbed of KGC agitation, particularly in the Gold Rush territories east of Sacramento. Even if the subversive organization did not own mines outright (some KGC luminaries, including Cushing and Breckinridge, held extensive mining interests in such diverse locations as Mexico, Arizona, New Mexico, California and Minnesota), KGC operatives could have resorted to “high-grading,” or pilfering, from mines owned by unfriendly interests.103 Indeed, stealing from the Union—whether from the U.S. Treasury or from Northern financial institutions, as in the raid on the St. Albans, Vermont, bank in October 1864—was central to KGC tactics before and during the war.
But by far the biggest boost to its postwar coffers likely sprang from its activities in the Wild West. Federal stagecoaches, carrying bank transfers and U.S. Army and other federal payrolls in the form of freshly minted gold and silver coins, were easy prey to the new Western “outlaws”—more accurately, to KGC “Knights Gallant” marauding the open plains and mountain ranges. Their modus operandi had been spelled out by the author of the 1861 Exposition, a self-avowed former KGC initiate:
Their mission is wherever they wish to go, and their license to take what they can, and do as they please, except to injure or violate females or little children. By the “Knights Gallant,” provisions are to be secured from Northwestern States, in case of scarcity in the South, for the Southern Army. All the property or money they can obtain in the course of the perambulations is to be considered Southern wealth.104
Among the postwar KGC “Knights Gallant” were war-hardened ex-members of William Quantrill’s guerrilla force, men on horseback who, like Morgan’s raiders in the Northwest, had worn star- and crescent-moon lapels on their pinned-up brim hats as they had ridden into battle in Missouri and Kansas. And there were many others who had engaged in unconventional warfare operations for the Confederacy, much of those in the trans-Mississippi theater. Some ten months after the war, a group of ex-Quantrill men—led by Cole Younger—hit the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri. In that audacious daylight raid, the outlaws took some $70,000 in gold, currency and bonds. In pulling off the heist, they set a marker for their postwar style of operations.
Still, the most famous KGC outlaw of them all was a thirty-third-degree Scottish Rite Mason, Jesse Woodson James. A former Rebel guerrilla conducting hit-and-run raids during the Civil War, Jesse W. James would become the KGC’s master field commander. Consider: the James and Younger brothers never became rich as a gang; they never used the booty they had stolen for personal gain. So what did they do with their plunder? The answer, which is only now emerging, is that they systematically buried it—under a masterful grid likely devised by Pike, Cushing and others. The system employed complex cipher, precision surveyor’s techniques, cryptic Masonic-linked inscriptions on trees and rock faces, and a handful of bewilderingly coded maps.
The hidden caches had to be protected. They had to be guarded by lifelong sentinels watching over them. The plan, in order to succeed, required loyal families dedicating their lives—from generation to generation—to overseeing the treasure. And this at substantial costs and deprivations to the sentinels—sworn to absolute secrecy—and their often unknowing families.
As Lee had failed to bring victory to the South in its quest to maintain itself as an independent slave-holding Republic, the KGC itself had failed in its first mission of the war: to undercut the North’s will to fight on. At all costs, it could not fail in its second mission: to adequately prepare for a second civil war.
Finally, it should be noted that amon
g the last acts of the peripatetic Albert Pike were his many travels across the American South and West in the 1880s. In 1880, according to Pike biographer Walter Lee Brown, the Scottish Rite leader and former Confederate general embarked from the Scottish Rite’s Southern Jurisdiction headquarters in Washington, D.C., on a 7,000-mile journey that took him through Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Missouri.105 The following year, Brown notes, Pike traveled over 12,000 miles through the Midwest, as well as to Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. Then, in 1882, he ventured to other parts of Florida, Georgia and Alabama, before heading off in the spring of 1883 to New Orleans, El Paso, New Mexico, Arizona and the Pacific Coast, from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and then on to Portland and Seattle. Finally, in the summer of 1885, Pike set out on an extensive trip to Nebraska, Missouri, Wyoming, Utah, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa. At the end of all this travel—ostensibly for the purpose of setting up Scottish Rite lodges—he was left “worn out and sick,” according to Brown.106 He died on April 2, 1891. One has to wonder whether Pike, the mysterious dark genius that he was, was making the rounds on the KGC’s underground network of gold: making sure that the inventory was bountiful and manned by responsible sentinels.
6
Retracing History in the Arkansas Woods
WITH his discovery of the jar full of gold and silver coins, Bob Brewer had achieved his first goal: he had proved to himself that there was a rational system, a matrix of coded twists and turns, that linked disparate pieces of a puzzle scattered over many square miles—the solution to which would lead to treasure. But he wondered whether he might just have gotten lucky and stumbled upon an old pioneer’s secret stash. That was a possibility, but he could not explain away that the small treasure had been found in the deep woods, directly in the midst of what he had determined to be directional markers. And these coded signposts lay along defined lines, based on compass headings that had started many miles away. Yet he knew that for his hypothesis to be scientifically valid, he had to be able to repeat the result over and over. He was confident that he could recover other, possibly larger, hoards of secret treasure. What he was unsure of was the motives of those who had buried the nineteenth-century gold and silver coins in the Arkansas mountains.
Bob felt it was time to invest in a more advanced metal detector. A friend from town, who happened to be a consultant to a company that produced sophisticated detectors, suggested that he buy a lightweight programmable system that could detect at greater depth and be used in thick brush. Bob’s existing detector often proved impossible to use in the thickets of the surrounding mountains. Within days of acquiring his Garrett Master Hunter CXIII, he decided to try the new system at a few suspected cache sites, some of which had proven beyond the scope of his old device.
Topping the list was Jess “Goat” Brown’s abandoned property in the wooded hills east of Hatfield. Bob had heard rumors that the eccentric Spanish-American War veteran had buried containers of gold and silver coins. Brown, a recluse and a friend of W. D. Ashcraft, had lived in a small house with an untold number of pet goats along a remote dirt road that led to the Ashcraft cabin. The colorful woodsman, who had been known to loan money to locals and demand repayment in hard currency because it had to be “reburied,” died mysteriously in the 1930s. The fallow Brown homestead was decades overgrown, with no trace left of the house but a gnarled fruit-laden apple tree and an overgrown grapevine from the erstwhile orchard.
Armed with his new detecting equipment, Bob returned to the Brown site for a day of cache hunting. He was able to probe beneath the rotted, vine-entangled remains of a trellis. To his amazement, he received a strong bell tone from the detector. Reaching through vines and the disintegrated lattice with his Army entrenching tool, he recovered a pint-sized fruit jar stuffed with U.S. gold and silver coins. The gold coins, dating from 1871 to 1919, were mostly $5 and $10 pieces.
With this, his second find in eight months, he felt elated. But his delight was tempered. He recognized that this recovery was different; it had relied largely on hearsay and better technology, and seemed to have nothing to do with carved signs and symbols. It had to be placed into the seasoned hobbyists’ category of lucky strike: the recreational metal detector’s recovery of a “posthole bank” containing coins, jewelry or other objects of value at a place of former habitation or work. Still, this second find amounted to more than a few loose coins of recent vintage. The little bit of dizzying self-satisfaction that he allowed himself soon would interfere with his better judgment: he knew that he and Linda should keep the news to themselves, but somehow he could not resist flaunting his success in the face of one of his “competitors.”
Soon after his success at Goat Brown’s, Bob bumped into another Hatfield treasure hunter, Bob Smith, at McLain’s. He had mixed feelings toward Robert L. “Snuffy” Smith. He viewed the older man as the shrewdest of the town’s treasure-sleuthing contingent. A few years earlier, Smith had moved to Hatfield from Gillham, Arkansas, thirty miles to the south. Bob, having been introduced to Smith by his trusted lifelong friend, Bob Tilley, had shown the inquisitive newcomer some of the carvings and sites that he had been investigating. Smith reciprocated by offering to sell Bob a used metal detector for a song. Their budding friendship, however, soon hit a snag. Bob had returned to a few of the sites that he had revealed to Smith and noticed that several of the elaborate tree carvings had been defaced. Bob had known about these particular inscriptions since childhood, and their mutilation enraged him. Bringing matters to a head, he also had found several holes dug near the engraved trees. Bob decided that Smith was trying to beat him at his own game, and brazenly. The worst of it, he later learned, was that Smith had been trying to undermine some of Bob’s long-standing friendships.
That morning at McLain’s—for whatever reason, perhaps to show Smith that he had the upper hand when it came to finding treasure—Bob impulsively pulled some of the Goat Brown coins from his pocket. He walked over to Smith, who was sipping coffee at his usual spot, and rolled a few of the gold pieces onto the table. “Got lucky yesterday,” he said, nonchalantly. Smith’s immediate reaction was surprise, if not shock, and he started nervously rubbing his forefingers together. “Very nice,” Smith responded, while fondling the coins. “Did they come from around here?” Bob said that they did and went on to relate how he had found the glass jar buried near the dirt road to Goat Brown’s. The man’s finger rubbing accelerated, a habit of Smith’s whenever talk of gold surfaced. Smith’s evident envy gave Bob a rush of satisfaction. In a small town where talk of treasure far exceeds treasure being found, and where the poseurs outnumber the pros ten to one, rivalry exists at the top. Yet, as he left the restaurant that crisp morning in December 1991, Bob knew that he had made a foolish, ego-driven mistake and that he should have kept his find to himself.
From the moment he arrived in Hatfield, Smith proved an enigma. He seemed to be a cagey hound dog hot on a scent—the scent of buried money. He had come to town looking for anyone with information about Avants Mountain. He claimed to have heard of a legendary Spanish treasure or gold mine supposedly located there. That query led to Bob Tilley, one of the oldest surviving descendants of the Avants line in town and a close family friend of the Brewers. Tilley, a former logger and retired Polk County employee, is the great-grandson of John Avants, who, at the Civil War’s conclusion, had homesteaded on acreage that came to be known as Avants Mountain, some twenty miles east of Hatfield.
As it turned out, Goat Brown, Will Ashcraft and Isom Avants (John’s grandson) were close friends who lived in the Shady-Brushy Creek area along Brushy’s main east-west dirt road. Grandpa and Odis Ashcraft occupied the middle ground; Brown lived on the western access point into the valley; and the Avantses on the eastern end. The north and south entrance points, along the other access road, were where W. D. Ashcraft’s son, Nooks, and his son-in-law, Dan Lawrence, lived. An
y outsider would have had a hard time driving into Brushy Valley and Smoke Rock Mountain undetected. The Ashcrafts were known to pass emergency signals through the hills by blowing through hollowed-out cattle horns—“coon hunting” horns, in the local vernacular.
Smith initially told Tilley that he was a “flea-market” vendor and wanted to detect around the abandoned Avants homestead to find “junk metal.” Tilley called Smith’s bluff: “You’re a treasure hunter and there ain’t no Spanish mine on Avants Mountain, period.”1 When Tilley explained that others had come fishing for similar information, the two shared a good laugh. They soon struck up a longer conversation that eventually led to a treasure-hunting partnership and to Smith’s buying a small farm near the Tilleys’ house on the outskirts of town.
What specifically had drawn Smith to Hatfield in the late 1980s was an article that he had read by a local Hatfield treasure seeker and history buff, George A. Mitchell. In the December 1969 issue of Frontier Times, a magazine of Western Americana, Mitchell wrote a piece, “Twin Springs Spanish Gold.”2 The article described a site in the Ouachita National Forest, where a series of old beech trees were inscribed with cryptic carvings: a snake, turtle, crescent moon and a horseshoe among the dozen or so symbols. “The carvings on the beech trees could provide a clue to some serious-minded treasure hunter and perhaps eventually lead him to the resting place of the golden horde [sic],” Mitchell wrote.
The Twin Springs legend, according to Mitchell’s article, originated with talk of Spaniards having buried “seven burro loads of precious metal” near the riverbank and near a spring after being attacked by Indians. The legend held that a stranger appeared more than a century later in nearby Shady, Arkansas, at the homestead of John Avants and his seven sons. He was searching for a landmark “twin springs” that would lead him to a “vast amount of treasure.” When the Avants family said that they had no idea about the site’s whereabouts, the stranger left. But, as Mitchell wrote, some of the Avants sons eventually found the “twin springs” with the inscribed beech bark nearby. Two of John Avants’s grandsons—Isom and Ed—eventually showed Mitchell some of the carvings in trees that were still alive. (Mitchell, who had moved to Hatfield in search of treasure himself in the 1960s, died shortly after Bob had arrived with his family from Key West. From the one brief meeting that he had with Mitchell, on a visit in 1975, Bob was impressed with the man’s knowledge of the area and of other treasure sites in Texas and Arizona.)
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