Rebel Gold

by Warren Getler

  It was almost as if something told him not to read the article, for he hesitated before starting at the top. The story began innocuously enough, relating Griffith’s large display of collectibles and books associated with the Jesse James saga. It then described the “history teacher” and “amateur historian” as a supporter of the view that Jesse James had faked his death and that J. Frank Dalton’s paper trail lent credence to the theory that Jesse had escaped capture. But, for Bob, everything boiled down to the last brief paragraphs of the article.

  The history buff’s love for all things related to James has brought financial gain, as well. In December 1993, Griffith said he and two others decoded one of Frank and Jesse James’ maps and unearthed a Wells Fargo safe full of gold coins. He won’t say where because other excavations are planned near there.

  “I could talk for days about what I’ve learned and what I plan to do in the future to find out more,” Griffith said. “ I’ve never seen anything so complicated in my life.”

  When Bob let the article fall to the table, he felt numb. That someone could do a “friend” so wrong, and without remorse, was beyond comprehension. He wanted to confront Griffith. Yet his rage was largely directed at himself for having given Griffith the full benefit of the doubt. He did not quite know where to direct his anger and frustration. At a minimum, he decided that he must not let himself slump into deeper despair. As a first step, he resolved to verify that the recovery of the Wolf Map treasure had occurred exactly where he said a cache would be found.

  There were so many unanswered questions. How could the reporter have failed to press Griffith for more details? How could the story suggest that the recovery occurred in 1993, and not 1995? (Griffith had given a copy of the map to Brewer for decoding at the end of 1993.) Where was the follow-up story? Finally, why did the Daily Oklahoman’s editors allow such a tantalizing tidbit—a bold claim of a safe full of Jesse James gold being found, most likely in their state—to be buried at the bottom of a story in the back of the newspaper?

  The unpublicized story-behind-the-story was one man’s life work—the cracking of the KGC’s code and its cash-and-arms burial system. The article made the recovery of the “Wells Fargo safe full of gold” sound almost as if it were an everyday occurrence.

  In the unsettling wake of the Daily Oklahoman article, Bob phoned his friend Bud Hardcastle. He liked Hardcastle because the used-car salesman and Jesse James researcher had been true to his word in all their dealings. Also, Hardcastle had invested much time and energy into tracking down the unconventional possibilities behind the Jesse James saga, as a fellow uncredentialed historian. The occasional pieces of information provided by Hardcastle over the years seemed to hold up in Bob’s own grassroots research. (As Bob later learned, Hardcastle had given the ever-acquisitive Griffith a copy of the Wolf Map, as he had a copy of Bob’s Bible Tree videotape. It must have been Griffith’s calculation all along, Bob realized, that if Brewer could uncork the Bible Tree code, then Brewer could probably unravel the cipher of the Wolf Map. Griffith, sadly, was not only persistent but also unabashedly resourceful, even at the expense of two alleged “friends,” he concluded.)

  During a brief phone call, Bob asked Hardcastle if he would be interested in accompanying him on a trip south to Addington. Explaining what had happened with Griffith, Bob said that he had some on-site investigating to do. Hardcastle said that he understood and would make arrangements.

  When the two men arrived in Addington, they managed—to Bob’s amazement—to hook up with the ranch owner. He turned out to be a pleasant fellow in his late sixties or early seventies. After introducing themselves, Bob and Hardcastle asked if they could have permission to go on to the property, specifically down to the creek area, to do some historical research on the Chisholm Trail. (Bob knew that his statement was not completely truthful, but he felt that it was the best he could do to confirm whether Griffith had gone to the spot.) The ranch owner, whose family had owned the sprawling property for generations, consented with a firm handshake and a nod. In response to a question from Bob, he confirmed the existence of an old Indian camp, near a spring, in the valley below.

  Heading down a ravine toward the target site, Bob spied a hoot owl tree that suggested where to proceed. At a ford crossing along the Chisholm Trail, Bob and Hardcastle headed north and spotted a grouping of three large boulders. The three circles on the Madrugada map, without a doubt! How easy it must have been for Griffith to have tracked everything from this point, he thought. The waybill’s three circles equaled the trio of boulders.

  Bob could feel the veins in his forehead pulse as he walked to the geological formation—a perfect topographical match with the crude schematic representation drawn on the Early Morning Star Map of Gold. A stone’s throw from the three boulders, at a spot next to the creek and just thirty yards east of the Chisholm Trail, Bob glimpsed what he did not want to see: an empty, freshly dug pit, about eighteen inches deep and a couple of feet wide. The hole was exactly where he thought it would be.

  With Hardcastle at his side, Bob knelt down beside the hole and reached in to touch the packed reddish soil. In the handful of dirt, he could see numerous flakes of rusted iron. “Yep! He found it!” Bob exclaimed in a hoarse voice. Hardcastle, seeing the anger in his friend’s expression, said a few comforting words—to the tune of “That bastard screwed you and me both.”

  Before they left, Bob decided to take a GPS reading of the coordinates of the Wolf Map cache hole. He took note of several KGC symbols in the area, including a triangular shaped “map rock” that had been neatly engraved with coded directional markers. With this information, he could better determine just how well his system—and the use of his modified template—worked on a large-scale depository, say one as large as one hundred square miles or more, with dozens of symbols involved.

  What Griffith appeared to have found was a sizable treasure but one that probably ranked as an easily detectable marker cache, he thought. That is, it was not an enormous master cache, which would have been buried very deep, thirty to forty feet down. Thus, there might be other larger treasures in the area. The thought gave him little consolation.

  The only silver lining was that the Wolf Map—and its arcane symbolism, geometry and geography—had worked. He had, on a bigger scale this time, matched wits with the mapmakers and penetrated their veiled, underground secret. And this, in light of all the other tracking he had accomplished to date, provided growing confirmation that a large and efficient post–Civil War organization was behind these seemingly inexplicable burials of hard currency. It also suggested that Jesse James might have been more than just an itinerant bank and train robber.

  Bob was too upset that day to talk with the rancher about what had transpired. But two days after returning to Hatfield, his thoughts collected, he called up the landowner. This time he reached him.

  Bob explained that someone had taken a safe full of gold coins from the property, by the creek, and that a story to that effect had made the papers but had not mentioned the precise location. The man’s reaction was immediate. He simply hung up the phone. No questions asked. Nothing. Bob’s subsequent attempt to correspond—by letter this time—went unanswered: to say the least, he was mystified by the silence. (As it turned out, despite a few additional attempts, Bob never did speak again with the property owner, who died not long after. Could the rancher have known all along that treasure was on the property? The notion had crossed Bob’s mind since he first discovered the locale. But it was unanswerable.)

  His fury untamed, Bob decided that he had to confront Griffith directly and with a witness. He drove to a town not far from where Griffith taught junior-high history. From his motel room, he called Griffith at his weekday residence and, as if nothing unusual had happened, asked that they meet at the motel to discuss a couple of important matters.

  When Griffith showed up, he was surprised to see Bob’s friend Stan Vickery in the room. Bob said that Stan, who had come to Oklahoma for
some dental work that week, was there as an observer.

  Without preliminary conversation, Bob asked whether the “safe full of gold” mentioned in the Daily Oklahoman had been found at the Addington site—the place that he had deciphered from the symbolism on the Wolf Map and that he had taken him to see. Griffith, who seemed surprised that Bob had learned of the article, paused but then categorically denied the proposition. No, it came from the Wapanucka area and was found using the Rebel-code rock map, he declared, in turn claiming the proceeds all his own. Bob told Griffith flatly that he did not believe him. He said that a recovery had taken place at the exact spot that he had described to Griffith, standing atop Monument Hill in Addington. He said that he had just been to the exposed cache hole with Hardcastle, and that he was now owed a third of the recovered money and the rancher the other third. Griffith shook his head in denial.

  How much, in fact, was recovered, Bob demanded, leaving the question of the locale aside. “$2,200,” Griffith replied, noting the face value only. Bob again growled that he did not believe him. “$2,200 in coins does not come near the ‘safe full’ of gold that you claimed to have found in the article,” he said. The Madrugada map, he reminded Griffith, referred to $200,000, or as much as $10 million to $15 million in current numismatic rates.

  He could not help but ask what Griffith had done with the recovered coins in the interim. Griffith said that he had sold some to coin dealers and private collectors, putting income from those discreet sales into certificates of deposit in his family members’ names. With that, the school-teacher got up and left, saying that he looked forward to working with Bob again!

  It was the last time Bob Brewer spoke with Michael Griffith.

  In the months that followed, a psychologically painful stretch toward the end of 1995 when thoughts of physical retribution crossed his mind, Bob mailed a package to the Gillespie sisters of Wapanucka, owners of the property where Jesse James’s gold had been found. He enclosed a copy of a videotape that Griffith had shot of the recovery of the two small caches in the Wapanucka area, including one (in which Bob was absent) on the sisters’ property itself that had numerous glistening Golden Eagles among the coins recovered.1

  Bob knew that he was late in sending the package, but he hoped that the Gillespie sisters, whom he had not contacted until this point, would take up the matter. Delivering the videotape to the sisters was, without question, an act of revenge against Griffith. Yet it was also a sincere attempt to warn the Gillespies that Griffith still had hopes of finding additional treasure on their property, as he had mentioned Wapanucka a number of times in the motel room. In his accompanying letter, Bob explained how he and Griffith had been kicked off their property and how Griffith had then boldly returned with family members soon thereafter; and how on that return trip, according to correspondence and videotape footage that he had received from the schoolteacher, Griffith had found a cache of gold and silver coins in a spittoon. Bob concluded his note with an apology for having been on the property without permission and with regrets that Griffith had led him to believe that it had all been cleared ahead of time. On a final note, he said that he would be open to work with the sisters—on an equitable basis—in the search for more Jesse James treasure at Wapanucka.

  On December 20, 1995, Jo Anne and Ceci Gillespie sent a fax “for immediate delivery to Mr. Michael Griffith,” at Griffith’s school. It said:

  This is official notification that you are not to enter our property in Johnston County at any time or for any reason. If you do set foot on our property again, you will be arrested as will your father, brother or anyone else remotely connected to you. You have never had permission to be on our property, have been asked to leave and have had the sheriff remove you. We have a copy of your KGC video taken on our property and will press criminal charges if the guns and 2 caches are not returned to us immediately.2

  The women received a hostile letter in response from Michael Griffith. He denied trespassing on their property and said he had received permission to be on the property “to camp with my son” from Ray Hackworth (the local cattleman who, at the time, held a pasture lease on the property). Until the time that he and Brewer had been warned off the property, he “ didn’t know who the owners were, until this matter was brought up.”3 The Gillespies took no further action. They have since been in touch with Bob, who, with their support, has made some initial attempts at discerning the larger depository layout in the area—with further joint efforts under consideration.

  Griffith recently put together a KGC informational package, with a videotape and reference booklet, priced at $50 and advertised on his home page on the Internet. In the introduction to his sales package, Griffith writes:

  I have known of treasure hunters, who, without doing the research necessary, and not actually knowing how to hunt, that have spent thousands of dollars and, as yet haven’t found a single real’s worth of treasure. Yet others, by quietly doing the necessary research, and knowing how to conduct the search, have, not by accident, managed to “bring home the bacon.”

  It is a matter of record that around fifteen to twenty million dollars are admitted by the treasure hunters willing to put forth the necessary effort to scientifically search out and trace down the clues and information readily available. …4

  In April 2002, Griffith said in a telephone interview that he had “retired” from the treasure-hunting circuit. He acknowledged that he had, in fact, recovered four small caches related to the Wapanucka Jesse James treasure map: the jar full of silver coins, along Delaware Creek in the direction of Bromide, with Bob; the spittoon filled with gold and silver coins near three tall trees shown on the map (which appear to be on the Gillespie property), as well as two subsequent caches of similar size and value on surrounding property. All four, he said, were in a precise, geometrically defined pattern at equal distances from each other. Griffith said that, unbeknownst to Bob at the time, he not only possessed the relatively detailed Wapanucka treasure map but a copy of a KGC “overlay,” which seemed to fit the map in question but was indefinite as to scale. Griffith acknowledged that while he initially had a general idea where a cache might be buried from the map-overlay combination, it took Bob’s ability to interpret clues on site to find that first treasure. Once the initial treasure—the jar with the silver coins—had been found, Griffith said he then was able to determine the precise scale and distance measurements for the “layout,” the map-overlay combination. He said that he used the precise scale to easily locate the three other spots, which were indicated as distinct points on the inner circle of the overlay, or template. He noted that the Wapanucka treasure map—with its clearly defined landmarks—was unusually detailed and made such a multicache recovery far less challenging than most KGC depository layouts, that is, once the requisite information from the field had been revealed.

  Griffith, in the interview, reiterated his denial—as stated to Bob in the motel room with Stan Vickery, back in 1995—that he had recovered a big cache at Addington. In fact, he said repeatedly, he had “never been to Addington” and had “never been to the site” near Monument Hill. He claimed that the large treasure recovered in the Wells Fargo strongbox, as cited in the Daily Oklahoman, came from a location “in eastern Oklahoma,” near his hometown of Poteau. This, however, contradicted what he had said to Brewer and Vickery in the motel room in Oklahoma. Then, he had said the safe full of Jesse James gold was found at the Wapanucka site.

  The Michael Griffith episode—and the apparent betrayal at Adding-ton—shook Bob deeply. It made him cynical, and that, perhaps, was what he hated most about the whole affair.

  Bob sank into depression during the holiday season at the end of 1995. Linda did her best to lift his spirits. She tried to keep him focused on the larger quest: his need to satisfy his curiosity about the history and hidden truth behind all this buried treasure. She told her husband that while Griffith may have snatched the Wolf treasure (and recklessly trampled on friendship and private pro
perty rights in so doing) Bob adhered to an ethical code. Besides, she said, he still held the key to unlocking the larger mystery of the hidden gold … and more prospects surely would beckon.

  Her prediction materialized within weeks. Just after the New Year, Bob’s spirits revived when a major new piece of the puzzle presented itself in a phone call from a stranger. This time, the geographic focal point was more than a thousand miles away, in Arizona, at the fabled Lost Dutchman treasure site in the Superstition Mountains. If he could solve this, perhaps the biggest treasure riddle in U.S. history, he would confirm his greatest suspicion: that the KGC had built an underground Federal Reserve stretching across the country.

  12

  The Lost Dutchman Legend

  THE legend of the Lost Dutchman Mine is by far America’s best-known tale of underground treasure. Its account of an improbable, fabulously rich gold mine in Arizona’s Superstition Mountains is also America’s most enduring yarn about hidden gold or “lost” mines. A dozen or so treasure seekers have died over the past century trying to find the rumored mine: their deaths attributed to the effects of brutal heat, snakebite, heart failure, high-elevation missteps, rockslides and, in a handful of cases, bullets fired by unknown assailants.

  Scores of mostly self-published books and hundreds of newspaper articles have been written about the Lost Dutchman mystery, which first emerged at the end of the nineteenth century.1 The initial reports—a colorful mix of limited facts and ample speculation—spurred a perennial wave of die-hard “Dutch hunters” in search of the elusive “gold mine” of prospector Jacob Waltz. (Some accounts refer to him as Jacob Walzer, but “Waltz” is the version more widely used for the quirky German immigrant, posthumously and affectionately known as the “Dutchman.”)