Rebel Gold

by Warren Getler

  Whether the circular depression was the imprint of the missing second washpot containing the rumored $80,000 in gold coins could never be known. Within thirty yards of the hole stood a large beech engraved with several arrows and other carvings. Tilley was convinced that Bob was on to something big.

  Back home, Tilley phoned his sister to ask if she had any old documents, personal records, or memorabilia of Uncle Isom or other Avants forebears. Within a few days, he was in possession of a curious heirloom, whose importance was not immediately clear. It was an encrypted diary, a “Memorandum” book of Isom Avants, dated 1920. Its lined pages contained the names Avants, W. D. Ashcraft, J. P. Smith and James Blalock, all locals of the Shady-Brushy Creek region, at the time. Other pages were filled with various payroll notations. A page in the back contained an odd spiderweb-like drawing, with concentric circles and sporadic dots within, next to which was written “Shady, Arkansas, August 23, 1920.”

  When Tilley showed Bob the fragile diary, Bob was stunned. He had seen a beech tree not far from Smoke Rock and Isom Avants’s home that had the names “J. Avants W. D. Ashcraft J. P. Smith” inscribed on it, along with various dates, “1855,” “Nov. 22 1910,” as well as the outline of a Winchester rifle. The s in Ashcraft, he recalled, had been carved in the shape of a question mark. The correlation between this record book—in which a financial accounting for services rendered was being denoted—and the beech tree with its coded treasure indicators could not be a simple coincidence.

  Bob had begun to unlock a code, one that hinted at a hidden depository system, not just in his immediate environs but in woods thirty miles away. By now he was convinced that the treasure caches could be found with some regularity—by using the patterns of interlocking symbols and signs, by integrating geometry with geography and land navigation with topography, by thinking like “them.” The joy of the hunt—staying on track, avoiding the cold trail, solving the mystery of the trails’ makers—had become perhaps more important than finding the gold itself.

  To ferret out new information and to see whether, indeed, the trail extended beyond the borders of Polk, Scott and Montgomery counties of west-central Arkansas, Bob and Linda produced an hour-long videotape showing the Bible Tree and its elaborate symbolism. (In the tape, Bob made multiple references to “Spanish treasure signs,” even though by then he doubted that they were Spanish. He simply did not know what else to call the inscriptions. He knew, for instance, that the old Spanish colonialists were not likely to write, “1st Thess”!) Initially, he gave the hour-long tapes to a few friends. But they quickly became hot commodities at a handful of treasure-hunting shows attended by the couple in 1993. Within weeks of releasing the Bible Tree video, Bob was inundated with letters and phone calls. His hunch was right. The signs were everywhere. Bob was amazed at how many treasure buffs from out of state wrote or called to say that they had seen similar tree or rock carvings, either on the trail or, in some cases, on their own property. But none of the respondents—all from the South or Southwest—knew anything about the origins of the cryptic inscriptions.

  One of the more interesting letters arrived in July 1993 from Stan Vickery, an insurance salesman and treasure hunter from Alexandria, Louisiana. Vickery was fascinated by Bob’s interpretation of the Bible Tree’s symbols. He had encountered similar beech etchings in Louisiana and East Texas, and he commended Bob for having “done his homework.”

  In a follow-up conversation, Vickery suggested that the two cache hunters get together, and Bob consented. At Bob’s ranch, Vickery showed him photographs of treasure signs that looked uncannily familiar. Bob certainly was impressed, but all that he volunteered was that the abstract images appeared part of the same system; to try to interpret their meaning out of context and without having surveyed the environs would be premature. The two agreed that they should put their talents together, and soon thereafter, Vickery invited Bob to join him on a trip to Ackworth, Georgia, to canvass a site being explored by some treasure-hunting friends.

  Bob, his curiosity piqued by the photos suggesting that the “system” extended into neighboring Texas and Louisiana, quickly agreed. Weeks later, he met Vickery in Shreveport, and they headed east for Georgia in Vickery’s pickup. They traded treasure stories the entire way, partly to kill time and partly to build trust, to gauge the all-important “b.s.” factor that runs rampant in cache-hunter circles. Vickery gave Bob a book from his bag and said he might want to take a look at it. The book was Jesse James Was One of His Names: The Greatest Cover Up in History by the Famous Outlaw Who Lived 73 Incredible Lives.6 In the few minutes he took to leaf through it, Bob was struck by what he read.

  His head spun at the sight of carved stick-figures captured in a set of photos in the book. The first caption read: “Golden Circle treasure sign.” In one photo, he could see the shape of a chiseled turtle figure juxtaposed next to a carved donkey or horse. In another, he could make out an etched bird astride a man’s head. A third showed what looked like a sunrise symbol, with two turkey tracks and the initials JJ (as in “Jesse James”) carved above and the name “Cole Younger” and the date “1874” below. Chapter 12 started on the facing page. Its title was “The Knights of the Golden Circle.” The chapter began:

  One of the deadliest, wealthiest, most secretive and efficient spy and underground organizations in the history of the world was The Knights of the Golden Circle, which operated over the globe for sixty-five years (1851–1916)…. Some of the craftiest, finest brains in the South directed the activities of the Knights of the Golden Circle. The group was heavy on ritual, which was borrowed from the Masonic Lodge. …7

  The clincher, however, came two chapters later, in a startling twenty-page section entitled “The Fabulous Confederate Treasure Troves.” He read there that at the Civil War’s end, with the people of the South starving and the region in chaos, a hidden Confederacy based in Nashville, Tennessee, had buried enormous caches of gold, silver and arms for the South to rise again. The stockpiled caches, ranging from those that could be dug up by shovel to those that required enormous mechanical lifts, were hidden in a complex, cross-border depository system. “The symbols are not always arrows, turkey tracks, snakes and birds, but sometimes they are the old Confederate Army Code. Every venture old Jesse’s [James’s] organization did was in multiples of 3s, 5s and 7s.”8 The gold and silver specie and bars said to be buried in the Confederate troves—stretching from Florida to California—was in the hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of dollars in current values, it said.9

  Bob was silent as a rush of images from his past converged with the published images in the book: the arrows from Mitchell’s “Twin Springs,” the “7” from the Bible Tree leading to the “7” rock carving, the turkey track near the “Spaniard’s” grave site; the many snakes, birds, horses and other animal carvings he had recorded in the Ouachitas. Confederate, indeed. Yet, it was no longer just the possibility of Pike’s involvement but that of … Jesse James! Suddenly Bob had a tingling sense of how big this treasure conspiracy was.

  He wanted to shout, “My God, this is it!” But this time he contained himself and kept quiet. He desperately wanted to stop, read and reread the three-hundred-page book from start to finish; to find out who the authors were and to assess the content’s credibility. But that would have to wait until after the mission at hand. “Interesting ideas … sounds a lot like what I was discovering,” he said casually to Vickery, who nodded. “The photos seem to match,” he added.

  At the forty-acre site in Georgia—heavily forested hill country northwest of Atlanta—it took but a couple of hours of orientation before Bob realized that the landscape abounded in tree carvings. He had heard that the spot might have been a location for buried “Cherokee” treasure. It lay but a few miles from New Echota—the former Cherokee capital, where in December 1835, Stand Watie, his brother Elias Boudinot and his uncle Major Ridge agreed to move the Cherokee nation west into Indian Territory, without the consent of chief John Ross.
Among the symbols depicted in the bark of the local beech were a cavalry boot, a crude figure of a man wearing a crown and a pipe-smoking Indian sporting a feather headdress. Bob also came across a large flat rock that had been inscribed with a turtle figure. Despite encountering such promising signs, the men did not have permission to track lines (indicated by the turtle’s head and other directional markers) into adjoining sections of private property. So, the mission ended without getting close to identifying a potential cache-burial site.

  That mattered little to Bob, for he had found the “evidence” that he was seeking. The “system” extended across state borders. His Georgia observations made him ever more eager to assay—for both its historical and treasure-hunting value—the apparent gold nugget that he had just encountered in Jesse James Was One of His Names. The book contained some outlandish comments and bold assertions about places and times that strained credulity. But, despite his justified skepticism, Bob felt convinced that there was valuable information in its pages. His quest, he knew, had just become exponentially more challenging.

  7

  Jesse James,

  KGC Field Commander

  THE name Jesse James evokes an unambiguous image in the American psyche: a dashing pistol-packing outlaw in a class of his own. Yet, Jesse James’s story is one of the great ambiguities in American chronicles. Hundreds of books—from biography to Western Americana—have been written about the secretive bank-, stagecoach- and train-robbing outlaw and his “gang.” With but a few exceptions, they plow through the storyline that the “Missouri-born” brothers, Frank and Jesse James, wreaked havoc in the postbellum West for their own criminal and, ultimately, selfish ends.1 Jesse and his elusive band of hardened ex-Confederate guerrillas may well have targeted “Unionist” banks and railroads. Likewise, they may have eschewed robbing those who made their living off the Southern, trans-Mississippi and trans-Appalachia lands. The Robin Hood image of a handsome good-natured brigand redistributing wealth to the poor—to Southern veterans, widows and orphans—has been widely attached to the traditional Jesse James saga and legend. But in nearly all these accounts, the notorious, sometimes brutal James-Younger gang was in it for themselves.

  Still, these accounts never adequately answer two central questions. First, if Jesse and Frank James did rob in order to get rich while exacting sweet revenge, what happened to the money? Second, why didn’t any of the gang members show signs of increased personal wealth after their unprecedented string of twenty to twenty-five successful hits, amounting to a then-estimated quarter of a million dollars in stolen loot?

  Virtually nowhere in the popular history does one encounter this jarring possibility: that Jesse James, America’s most famous outlaw, was a masterful political operative, plundering and plotting and spreading misinformation not for himself but for a powerful pro-slavery secret society, the Knights of the Golden Circle. (As this book was being prepared to go to press, author and independent historian T. J. Stiles published a well-researched volume, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, which sets forth the case that Jesse was politically motivated: that he was attempting to keep up the fight for the Confederate cause amid Reconstruction. Stiles focuses his research primarily on the bitterly divided situation in pre– and then post–Civil War Missouri, where James and his cohorts carried out often brutal acts of subversion and revenge: “a cultural and political offensive waged by the defeated rebels to undo the triumph of the Radical Republicans in the Civil War.” Stiles makes brief mention of the Knights of the Golden Circle, who, he writes, were rumored to be “preparing to rise” in Missouri in early 1864.)2

  Such a “revisionist” thesis might go far to explain what could have been the real motive behind the storied armed robberies and murders carried out by Jesse and his clandestine band from as early as 1866 to at least 1881—securing funds for another Civil War. It could explain why all the fabulous wealth reportedly stolen by the everyday criminal enterprise remains almost entirely unaccounted for: it was buried in the coffers of political combatants, in the coded depositories and weapons stockpiles of an underground post-Confederate terrorist network.

  In a rare mention in the mainstream media of a long-lived Jesse James, U.S. News & World Report noted the following in its July 24, 2000, “Mysteries of History” issue: “Jesse James’s Gold: He died in 1882—or maybe he didn’t. Some say he lived into the 1900s, burying gold in New Mexico and Texas (to finance a second Civil War in which the South would rise again).”3

  For 120 years, some have speculated that Jesse James faked his death on April 3, 1882, in St. Joseph, Missouri, and lived for decades under scores of aliases.4 Could Jesse’s “outlaw” career have extended far beyond the sixteen years from 1866 to 1882? Those who believe so say that James was not shot in the back of the head for $10,000 reward money by “turncoat” gang-member Bob Ford. They maintain that James became a field commander and financial overseer of the KGC after he was alleged to have been shot. Having the support of a highly effective underground would certainly have helped in perpetrating the death hoax. It also would have been useful to have a KGC member or sympathizer in the press, both to further the KGC’s overall mission and to perpetuate the myth that James was assassinated.

  Midwest columnist John Newman Edwards seemed to fit the bill. During the war, he had been an assistant to Brig. Gen. Jo Orville Shelby, a major KGC operative in the trans-Mississippi theater. In a book published in 1867, Shelby and his men: or the war in the West, Edwards makes a rare historical reference to the fact that the KGC was operational in the western theater of the Civil War in 1865: “Much reliance, too, was placed, especially by Generals Price and Marmaduke, upon the secret orders of the Knights of the Golden Circle. Periodical installments of these well dressed, sleek looking gentry came among the ragged veterans of four years service, with mysterious books, innumerable signs, grips, signals, passwords….”5 In the postwar era, it was Edwards who almost single-handedly cultivated the knight-gallant “Robin Hood” image of the James gang through his pandering editorials and columns in the Kansas City Times and later in the St. Louis Dispatch.6 In his famous “Chivalry of Crime” column in the Kansas City Times on September 29, 1872, Edwards went so far as to refer to men “with the halo of medieval chivalry upon their garments.” (The romantic reference may suggest a James gang association with the Knights Templar and the Templar-oriented KGC. It is worth considering whether much of Edwards’s prose about the James gang may have been written as a subtext—as cipher—meant to be understood only by the initiated.)

  As a result of disinformation and propaganda, the true identity and whereabouts of Jesse James may never be established. The mystery has only deepened over time, with new installments every few decades. Indeed, many self-proclaimed Jesse Jameses came forward in the late nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth centuries.

  The one who created the biggest stir was J. Frank Dalton in the late 1940s. Dalton reportedly died at well over one hundred years of age, on August 15, 1951, in Granbury, Texas, southwest of Fort Worth. A few years earlier, the mustachioed, wrinkled centenarian with flowing white hair, bushy eyebrows and a thick goatee, had given an interview in Lawton, Oklahoma. In a front-page story published May 19, 1948, in the Lawton Constitution, he claimed that he was the real Jesse Woodson James and that he had a slew of telltale scars, rope burns, tattoos and living friends to prove it. “JESSE JAMES IS ALIVE! IN LAWTON,” blared the banner headline. In an accompanying article by Constitution staff writer Frank O. Hall, Dalton was cited mentioning buried gold “taken from trains and stage coaches,” Jesse James “maps” and “a code that wasn’t easy to break.” The story added:

  Jesse declares that there still are many of those caches untouched by human hands since they were buried years ago, but he is an old man and money no longer means anything to him. Besides, too much blood has been spilled already over the inglorious gold which sets the very blood of mankind racing with greed. Leave it for the individuals who are capable of working
out its puzzles and solving the secrets of nature’s most severe problems, Jesse confides.

  The Lawton “scoop” sparked a wave of interviews in the national media and brought forward an aged, ragtag army of affidavit-signing witnesses. Needless to say, Dalton-James’s genealogical claims and his colorful version of post–Civil War history caused a sensation. And, while most of the commentary at the time was highly skeptical, not all of it was dismissive.

  The J. Frank Dalton story stands at the center of Jesse James Was One of His Names. This controversial book, published in 1975 by Santa Anita Press (Arcadia, Calif.), is filled with tantalizing historical possibilities and a bevy of bold claims. At its core are the propositions that Jesse Woodson James was a post–Civil War leader of the Knights of the Golden Circle and that the KGC’s primary goal, after going fully underground, was to prepare for a second civil war. The book—now out of print and highly sought after by treasure hunters, Jesse James fans and Civil War buffs—goes into considerable detail to explain the secret organization’s methods. It cites numerous changes during the KGC’s postwar evolution. These include owning major businesses—railroads, mining and timber operations, banks, racehorses—as front-company sources of operating revenue.7

  The accuracy of the account provided by J. Frank Dalton–Jesse James (as disclosed by the book’s authors) remains open to investigation. Dalton-James’s life is told in Jesse James Was One of His Names through the voice of someone going by the name Jesse James III. The latter, whose legal name was Orvus Lee Howk, also went by the name Jesse Lee James and claimed to have been a grandson of Jesse Woodson James. “Jesse Lee James, alias Orvus Lee Howk, spent his lifetime as a detective and bodyguard-confidant-executor for his notorious grandfather,” the book states.8

  The book does not elaborate on the fact that Orvus Lee Howk/Jesse Lee James (who is now deceased) also paraded his said grandfather—who was in a severely enfeebled state, suffering from a broken hip—around at vaudeville-type road shows in the late 1940s. (It is of course entirely possible that Orvus Lee Howk/Jesse Lee James may have been unrelated to J. Frank Dalton by blood, yet may have won the trust and confidence of the old man, who relied on him for daily care and mobility in his later years. Howk, for his part, seemed to have taken a keen interest in the location of the KGC’s buried gold, something about which J. Frank Dalton appeared to know a great deal. It is clear from the book that the two men traveled great distances to scores of states.)