Rebel Gold

by Warren Getler

  2. Jesse Woodson James was a thirty-third-degree Mason.38

  This statement by Schrader and Howk suggests a direct Jesse James connection to the Supreme Council of the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite in Charleston: only those selected by the Supreme Council could attain this highest honorary degree within U.S. Freemasonry. Could this then imply a secret link to Albert Pike, the Supreme Council’s Sovereign Grand Commander at the time, who gets no mention in Jesse James Was One of His Names?

  In a related vein, the book oddly notes that a few members of the KGC’s Inner Sanctum were “members of the Rosicrucians,” and that Jesse James was also interested in alchemy.39 Why would a Wild West “outlaw” be interested in something so esoteric, indeed, so Old World?

  Perhaps, once again, there is an Albert Pike connection. As Scottish Rite historian William Fox observed about Pike: “The organizing premise of the Pike rituals of the Scottish Rite and his Morals and Dogma, was according to [Scottish Rite researcher] Rex Hutchins, ‘religious cross-fertilization,’ so that knowledge of the ancients, whether from Jewish mysticism, Christian Platonism, or medieval hermeticism and alchemy (nourished specifically by a seventeenth-century sect of German mystics called Rosicrucians), was funneled into Freemasonry ‘along many diverse paths.’”40

  The Rosicrucians, whose chief symbol is a cross with a red rose at its center, put considerable store in the ways of the Knights Templar and their mystical and cabalistic traditions. They have been associated with European Freemasonry and an underground sociopolitical movement supporting intellectual freedom (one in direct opposition to the Roman Catholic Church). In addition to a philosophical worldview grounded in mathematics and science, the Rosicrucians of the Enlightenment also tended to value insights from alchemy and astrology.41 Centuries later, Albert Pike is reported to have traveled to a world Rosicrucian conference in Paris during the Civil War, attended by France’s Napoleon III and other European luminaries.42

  3. A Habit of Going into the Woods Alone.

  Schrader and Howk briefly mention that “Jesse had a life-long peculiarity of going into the woods or a canyon alone to think things out.”43 Was this perhaps far less “peculiar” than it seemed? Could it suggest that Jesse was deciphering KGC code inscribed in the trees, in caves or on exposed bluffs, or that he was perhaps creating new signposts for buried KGC treasure? The authors ask: “[Did] Jesse go romping about the country in invisible, astral form, keeping his eye on the vast post–Civil War Confederate Underground and his own vast financial empire?”

  4. Signs of KGC Treasure.

  Coauthor Howk writes that he is often asked if there are any Knights of the Golden Circle records in existence. “Only a handful,” he replies. But, he adds, “there are Confederate signs, often confused for Indian markings, on rocks throughout the West, South and Midwest.”44 “JJ,” he says, is the most obvious, for “Jesse James,” while others include images of animals and numeric code.45

  5. Locations of KGC Treasures.

  In the book’s two key chapters, “The Knights of the Golden Circle” and “The Fabulous Confederate Treasure Troves,” J. Frank Dalton’s professed revelations to Howk provide vague locations for the supposed KGC caches of gold, silver and arms. Dalton never says “X” marks the spot for any given area. But he does disclose that most caches are buried near cattle trails, waterways, railroad rights-of-way, livery stables, stagecoach stations, smelters and old mills.46 Most of the troves, Dalton-James says, were buried in Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio and the Northwest.47 A coded list of about one hundred sites from some eight states is provided, with the KGC’s assigned name (including such vivid flourishes as “Fat Man’s Greed Treasure” and “Fat Man’s Misery Treasure”) and, in some cases, the face value of the KGC treasure allegedly buried.48

  Howk notes that some of the caches are relatively small. Some were buried in metal milk cans, as reportedly was the case when several hundred thousand dollars in KGC treasure—including double-eagle gold coins—was found in the 1960s near Troy, Ohio, by a great-grandson of a former KGC associate of Jesse James.49 But the bulk of the KGC money and arms is buried in elaborate, deep underground vaults or chambers, some of which, Dalton-James said, were booby-trapped: “The old Confederate Underground agents employed both engineers and geologists…. The Golden Circle spared no expense in burying its gold. It employed the best engineers and the most modern equipment available.”50 Many of these professionals, including surveyors and those expert in building tunnels, were recruited from Germany, Austria, France and Italy, Howk (a.k.a. Jesse Lee James) explains in an earlier book, Jesse James and the Lost Cause.51 To recover any of these large treasures would require significant manpower, machinery and, in those cases where the money is buried on public land, a “fight … through a maze of federal and state government red tape.”52

  6. Building—and Protecting—the Depositories.

  Dalton-James explains through his intermediary, Howk, that much of the depository excavation (the digging of underground vaults and bunkers to conceal the KGC’s gold, silver and arms) was done under the cover of “mining” companies. Once the large subterranean infrastructures were created, an above-ground protective sentinel system was established.

  Mining companies also employed a network of agents to report “unusual activities” [near the site]. The Confederate Underground was busy sinking shafts for caches, and this could pass for “mining.” Golden Circle agents were merciless, and many a “snooper” was tracked down and killed before he could file a report. “Shoot—and ask questions later,” was Colonel James’ standing order to his secret operatives. Another order was, “Better to kill a man than be sorry.” On rare occasions a Golden Circle agent would violate his blood oath and attempt to slip back and recover some of the buried loot. The man was invariably shot because Jesse kept a concealed guard around a new cache for generally a month. After that it was periodically inspected to see if it had been tampered with.53

  Jesse Woodson James, according to the book, dipped into the caches on three or four occasions during his lifetime. Howk, for his part, says that he personally was tempted to uncover some of the money. He once investigated a cache site in south-central Oklahoma, north of Dallas, with a said $8 million face value in buried loot. The indicated clues on site were “two large boulders, side by side,” which, ultimately, he failed to find. He gave up the thought of going back a second time after being pestered repeatedly by a greedy friend. “I told my friends I was calling off the hunt and returning to Dallas. I thought of all the blood that had been shed by those old Southerners to steal the gold and the sweat they’d expended to cache it away. This greenhorn had killed any desire I had to retrieve the trove.”54

  7. Jesse’s “Key” to the Treasures.

  Perhaps the most intriguing passage in the book is the following:

  On his 100th birthday in 1944, old Jesse told his closest relatives, “There are no free and easy Confederate treasures, any that an amateur or tenderfoot could locate and dig out on a weekend. He’d need a hell of a lot of inside information. There is a ‘key’ to Confederate treasure troves. In 1916 we sealed our Golden Circle records for fifty years. So in 1966—I will be long gone—it won’t belong to anybody. I will leave the ‘key’ to my grandson Lee Howk (Jesse James III). There are no written records of the caches, just signs and symbols, but Lee will have the ‘key’—that I assure you.”55

  Not another word is mentioned about the “key.”

  3. Cross-sectional diagram, from a Howk letter, showing a typical deep-burial KGC depository, in this case in Texas. If large depositories exist—those containing perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold specie and bullion bars—then they are likely to be well-engineered feats of workmanship, involving 30- to 40-foot shafts, ventilation ducts, booby traps and more.

  8. The KGC: A Highly Efficient, Of
ten Brutal, Underground.

  Schrader and Howk’s book, based on the latter’s account of Dalton-James’s rendition of the Knights of the Golden Circle story, indicates that the KGC’s leadership was a well-organized, hidden Confederate cabinet. As mentioned, the secret order’s headquarters were later moved to Texas, and subsequently to Colorado, after Jesse Woodson James—under his new assumed identities—took control around 1883–84. The order employed blood oaths, cryptic passwords and handshakes among its co-conspirators, and used cipher, signs and symbols to communicate.56 It was all-male: women were kept in the dark, for their own protection.57 Clearly, the scenario laid out by Schrader and Howk is a close echo of the Holt Report to U.S. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, in which a functioning underground government of the South was said to be well under way in 1864.

  Among the KGC’s postwar leaders, according to Jesse James Was One of His Names, were not only Jesse James but Nathan Bedford Forrest, J. O. Shelby, Cole Younger, and, in a lesser role, former Confederate President Jefferson Davis.58 They not only operated from Nashville, Canton (Texas) and then Colorado Springs, but had a network of affiliated leaders in Canada, Mexico and England. The KGC leadership placed moles inside telegraph operations, insurance companies and rail companies (some of those owned outright by the KGC)—each providing exquisite inside information for raids against trains, federal stagecoaches, banks and other targets.

  The KGC plan often involved brutal actions. According to the book’s authors, the militant order did numerous “violent and expedient” things in its complex history. On one hand, Dalton-James says that some of his dearest friends and most loyal protectors in his KGC circle were black; yet, at the same time, he acknowledges that the KGC formed the KKK as its militant and sometimes murderous arm to combat “unscrupulous Carpetbaggers” and to terrorize newly freed blacks in the South during Reconstruction.59 The same KGC, he notes ever so candidly, was responsible for the disappearance of a number of black Union troops occupying the KGC hotbed of Van Zandt County, Texas, in the immediate aftermath of the war.60 With such acknowledgments laid bare, there clearly was no attempt to canonize Jesse James in the book.

  Concerning the KKK, Jesse admitted, “It was the secret military police of the Old South, but the Golden Circle really rode herd on their activities. We began folding up the KKK a few years after the Golden Circle sealed its records in 1916. We oldtimers had absolutely nothing to do with the modern KKK, which is a different breed of cat.”61

  The KKK was but one of several lower-level, associated groups operating under the KGC umbrella. Others included the Knights of the White Camellias and the International Anti-Horse Thief Association, according to the Schrader-Howk account.62

  9. John Wilkes Booth: An Associate of the KGC.

  Could John Wilkes Booth have been a member or close associate of the KGC, and did he execute an order from his KGC superiors to kill President Lincoln? Dalton-James, through Howk and Schrader’s telling in a chapter dedicated to the Booth saga, says that Booth was never a formal KGC insider but rather a member of the lower-ranking Knights of the White Camellias.63 But the KGC sprang into action to keep Booth alive and out of government hands, following the assassination. The reason: “he knew too much” about KGC operations.64

  It may never be known, beyond a reasonable doubt, whether J. Frank Dalton was Jesse Woodson James, the notorious “rebel” outlaw and averred head of the Knights of the Golden Circle. Despite being criticized on various levels by detractors, Jesse James Was One of His Names makes a number of intriguing assertions that merit further exploration and analysis.

  No doubt, conflicting reports have been part and parcel of the Jesse James saga. Faulty memories, bad reporting, and indeed, deliberate misinformation play a role in the difficulty of sorting out such a complex, camouflaged story. Seen in that context, Jesse James Was One of His Names may prove a most revealing and vastly misunderstood book. It should be noted that Schrader and Howk were not the only ones drawn to J. Frank Dalton’s story and to conclude that there may have been a darker, conspiratorial side of the Jesse James saga.

  In Jesse James “The Outlaw,” author Henry J. Walker says that his independent research into the life of J. Frank Dalton convinced him that the old man was Jesse Woodson James and that he was a high-ranking member of a secret society for the Southern cause.65 In his self-published 1961 book, Walker, who interviewed Dalton and his aged associates, says that Jesse Woodson James and KGC and Confederate guerrilla leader William Quantrill were “higher-degree Masons” and were members of an unnamed militant secret order “controlled by men in the high Confederate wing of the Democratic Party of that time.”66 Walker quotes J. Frank Dalton: “Quantrill was a thirty-third-degree Mason. We were all Masons, and attended Masonic Lodge meetings in various towns, using assumed names of course.”67 The order had gone around the country burying gold and other treasure for the cause. “Last year late in the fall I made the rounds, and we still have cached away in various places I visited $500,000 in gold money and an equal amount in the value of diamonds and jewels we hid in the 1860s and 70s and 80s,” says one Dalton-James associate interviewed by Walker in 1949.68 Walker’s research led him to conclude—without ever mentioning the name Knights of the Golden Circle—that:

  … the robberies and escapades they took part in were not actually of their own planning, nor the plans of their band of outlaws. The James boys were only a small part of a large movement of members of a “lost cause” in the South. Some of these members were even elected to government positions; some were employees of the express companies, and this secret organization was financed mostly by a foreign government to make regular espionage reports on the United States outpost forts, from 1865 to 1892. Not until this latter date did this spying movement collapse.69

  8

  The Hunt Extends to Oklahoma

  AFTER pondering Jesse James Was One of His Names for a couple of weeks, Bob was convinced that he was searching for Rebel treasure—and on a large scale. He had little doubt that the mysterious signs he had been following in the Arkansas woods would lead to additional hoards—gold and silver coins, perhaps bullion, buried systematically—in other parts of the country. It all boiled down to locating the proper markers, deciphering their hidden messages and plotting their distribution on the topo maps. Someone, or perhaps some clandestine organization like the KGC, must have designed the elaborate, indeed ingenious, method used to mark the treasure-cache layouts. To think that a central player behind the conspiracy may have been the most infamous fugitive of them all, and a die-hard Confederate to boot!

  Before he read the Schrader-Howk title, which he dubbed the “black book” for its black binding, Bob had wondered if there really could be as much hidden loot as the numerous markings and buried clues in the Ouachitas had suggested. Now, here were two twentieth-century co-authors telling him that an intricate subterranean patchwork did indeed extend over many state lines. Still, he needed to verify the scope of such a grand scheme, through his own methodical, step-by-step approach.

  Setting aside the book’s obvious yarns and hyperbole, Bob found that many of J. Frank Dalton’s remarks about the code-makers’ methods rang true. The abstract signs and symbols, the remote locations of the caches, the mining operations as potential cover for cache burials, the shoot-to-kill sentinels, and Jesse’s “going into the woods alone,” all sounded authentic. But parts of the book seemed hard to swallow. It was one thing to assert that the KGC’s underground system was spread over more than a dozen states. But were there really hundreds of millions of dollars—or more—in hidden post-Confederate treasure, still untouched, as the book’s authors assert? And what was all that about “the key” to those fabulous Confederate treasure troves?

  While Bob weighed the latter question in the summer of 1993, a phone call came from a treasure hunter and Jesse James history buff in Oklahoma, a junior high school history teacher named Michael Griffith. Like dozens of other weekend treasure hunters who had obtain
ed a copy of Bob’s “Bible Tree” videotape that year, Griffith was probing for help on a pet project.

  Over the phone, Griffith came across as cocksure about Old West history but deferential when it came to locating buried treasure. It was clear from that first call that Griffith was passionate about Jesse James history and lore, was a collector of James memorabilia and fancied himself an expert on the outlaw. Griffith suggested they meet and swap ideas. It was worth exploring, Bob thought, and he agreed to a visit.

  He found the younger man congenial, if perhaps a trifle too gung-ho. Successful treasure hunting, like any good detective work, requires time and patience. Griffith, from those first face-to-face hours, seemed to be itching for a strike, despite a feigned nonchalance. Bob chalked it up to the amateur historian’s passion for his subject, as much as to any pecuniary motivation. Any of Bob’s initial misgivings were set aside by the fact that Griffith seemed extremely knowledgeable about the history of the Oklahoma–Indian Territory region; the middle-school instructor taught Oklahoma history on a regular basis to ninth graders.

  Even more important, Griffith was well aware of the KGC: he had his own worn copy of Jesse James Was One of His Names and had conducted archival and field research of his own. It turned out that Griffith had been introduced to some of the local history by Bud Hardcastle, a Purcell, Oklahoma–based acquaintance of Bob’s. Hardcastle, who had spent several years quietly investigating the J. Frank Dalton/Jesse James/KGC enigma, had provided Griffith with Bob’s “Bible Tree” video.

  But it was not just that Griffith had read the black book a dozen times. The Oklahoman told Bob he was convinced that rumors of the post–Civil War KGC and its hidden treasures were accurate: the trick was figuring out exactly where the caches were. He admitted that he had not had any luck recovering caches, despite several years of intermittent searching at a couple of suspected Jesse James hideouts in Oklahoma. Was Bob interested in visiting some of these, he asked. Bob was.