Rebel Gold

by Warren Getler

  To solve the stone maps (and assuming they were KGC waybills), he first had to connect their carved images and hidden messages to precise topographic features (as to location, date, scale, contour intervals) on U.S. Geological Survey topo maps of the target area. By now, he had learned that KGC waybills often were based on information contained in official maps. Logically, the government maps came first, with the encrypted waybill being created around specific features on the government maps—features that pointed to caches or cache-marker sites when incorporated into the ciphered KGC equation.

  Bob knew that the U.S. government produced its first detailed topographic “quadrangle” maps of the Far West in the decades following the Civil War. USGS topographic teams headed out (and risked their lives) to chart the American hinterland during a peak period between 1879 and 1890.4 These labor-intensive general purpose maps—designed to provide precise information about the natural resources and terrain in the so-called Western Country—were produced with fairly crude instruments and a lot of exertion. But the massive effort by the government’s backpacking cartographers, at least from Washington’s perspective, would pay huge dividends. The maps contained valuable data for military planning (in the wars against various Indian nations) and for the economic development of the interior (for agriculture, forestry, mining or the building of railroads) as pioneers migrated westward after the Civil War. The topo, today a wilderness hiker’s best friend, is distinguished from other types of maps by portraying not only man-made “cultural” features, but also in providing “by some means the configurations and elevations of the terrain—the shapes into which the Earth’s surface is sculptured by natural forces.”5

  Bob also knew that finding subtle clues hidden among the multitude of contour lines, trail lines, creeks, rivers, canyons, roadways and other calibrated markings on the quadrangle maps of the expansive West was going to be an unforgiving endeavor. Even more so, if the correct scale were not known.

  Map scale—the mathematical relationship between the measurements of the features designated on the map and the physical features themselves as they appear in the terrain—is expressed as a ratio. Thus 1:1,000,000 scale represents one unit of map distance equal to one million of the same unit on the ground, that is, in horizontal geographic distance. Greater scale translates to greater detail, or magnification. Most modern-day topographic maps (whose production has been made vastly more efficient through aerial photography) are a standard 1:24,000 scale, where one inch represents 2,000 feet, or 24,000 inches. Many of the older topos are of a smaller scale, 1:125,000, for example, and as such were designed for comprehensive views of large undeveloped areas.6 The USGS topographic “quadrangles” range from 1:20,000 to 1:250,000 in published scale.

  Bob recognized the importance of having maps with the same scale as those used by KGC cryptographers and cartographers. Also, he knew to look for alphabetic and numeric hints (usually free-floating characters or anagrams) that revealed specific range or township numbers. He recalled the impact of deciphering the veiled free-floating components, “R,” “7” and “W” (for Range 7 West) shown on the Wolf Map. These two elements—scale and potential township/range indicators—were crucial starting points.

  To ensure that his painstaking effort was not a waste of time, he began researching the Superstition stone tablets and the Lost Dutch-man’s Mine legend. He knew that many of the rumors surrounding the stone maps and the Lost Mine fit the profile of a KGC depository cover story. As such, the elements of a rudimentary, straightforward tale had been designed to mean one thing to average readers yet convey an entirely different hidden message for the informed elite. These stories typically included a revelation about a fabulously lucrative lost mine or lost cache; a threat from hostile Indians; the encryption of information about the mine or hidden caches prior to the impending massacre by Indians; or an eventual rash of suspiciously timed newspaper articles indicating a “gold rush” in the area.

  Bob had also recognized early on that the character and behavior patterns of Jacob Waltz fit the modus operandi of a KGC sentinel. Rather than secretly returning to his hidden mine (or aimlessly wandering about to find the alleged shaft, as some versions would have it), Waltz may just as easily have been on patrol guarding KGC cache sites from intruders. Moreover, Waltz may have been assigned the task of moving the caches and updating the treasure markers with the help of others, such as his resident Mexican laborers. Perhaps the gold ore that Waltz allegedly used as legal tender was, in fact, his “paycheck” from the KGC.

  Bob surmised that carefully stoked bits of “folklore” may have created the desired impression among townsfolk: that Dutch Jacob did, in fact, have a mine. If almost everyone in the region believed a lost mine was at stake—and not a labyrinthine network of buried Rebel caches—the invisible KGC hierarchy would have been well served.

  When Bob began to delve deeper into Waltz’s migratory trail within the United States, two of the Dutchman’s addresses—Natchez, Mississippi, and El Monte, California—sprang out as potential KGC markers. He knew, for instance, that Natchez—a southwestern Mississippi haunt of Anthony Quitman and Jefferson Davis (Davis’s plantation was some forty miles north at Davis Bend)—was a stronghold and recruiting ground for the KGC between the late 1830s and 1860. While the roots of the KGC were deeply set in Charleston, Natchez attracted numerous KGC sympathizers. These adherents would fan out and spread the secret society’s expansionist mission, not only across the Deep South but also out West, all the way to the California coast. During the height of KGC expansion, wealthy Northerners and owners of Caribbean island plantations flocked to the rich Mississippi bottomlands, such as Adams County, where Natchez was the capital. Through both legal and dubious means, these outsiders obtained title to thousands of acres of the rich black soil and created powerful plantation-based empires—eventually becoming the core political and financial support structure for the KGC.

  Could German immigrant Jacob Waltz’s alighting in Natchez—after stints in the gold fields of North Carolina and Georgia—be chalked up to mere coincidence? Not likely. Waltz’s trail from Germany to Natchez did not make much sense at all to Bob until he came across a couple of intriguing references. The first derived from J. Frank Dalton in Orvus Howk’s (Jesse Lee James) first book, Jesse James and the Lost Cause; the other from an informative thirty-eight-page historical-society booklet, “The Knights of the Golden Circle: In California with Special Emphasis on Southern California and San Bernardino County,” by Leonard B. Waitman.7

  In Jesse James and the Lost Cause, J. Frank Dalton is quoted:

  [KGC] Agents at work in Europe recruited German, Austrian, French and Italian tradesmen, and ex-soldiers who had served well in their own countries were persuaded to move to America. The Knights of the Golden Circle financed them, but first they had to take a blood oath of utter secrecy. They came over and were put on probation for a period of perhaps three years, more or less. After the probation period, they were then moved, as demand existed, into good jobs, such as brew-masters, distillers, stagecoach drivers, stagecoach relay station operators, livery stable operators, dairymen, truck gardeners, doctors, blacksmiths, shoe-cobblers, boot-makers, bakers, cabinet makers, jewelers, engineers, surveyors, geologists, and scientists. Each man brought with him his own specialized, specific trade.

  Over in Europe most of these high type craftsmen, artisans and scientists would have had a very meager existence at best, but over here in America they had every opportunity to expand, live and profit, so we encouraged them to do their best for us. They were already trained and educated soldiers. All we had to do was caution them to keep their mouths shut, keep a level head, and follow our orders.8

  Could Jacob Waltz, rumored to have been trained as an engineer, have been a KGC recruit from Europe? Might agents have met him in New York, sent him on probationary training to the gold fields of the Southeast, then on to full indoctrination in Natchez before being shipped with other KGC recruits to California? />
  Bob learned that many KGC initiates participated, for whatever reason, in the Gold Rush, digging and panning in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Others, in a later wave, headed to southern California following that unforgettable 1849–50 mother lode period. California, it seemed, would become an increasingly attractive target for KGC activity.

  The militant secret order made significant, albeit unsuccessful, efforts—through subversion and the activation of its sleeper cells—toward bringing the state into the Confederacy before and during the Civil War. California possessed huge mineral wealth, big seaports and a large population of pro-slavery Confederate sympathizers. As such, it would have been an ideal western anchor for the expanding Golden Circle empire had the KGC-led uprising there been successful. The state, with its 1860 Census population of 380,000, remained badly divided before the Civil War and then for its duration. At one point, it nearly split in two because of KGC political mobilization efforts within its predominantly pro-South southern counties. And, in key cities and towns of the north, including San Francisco, KGC agents and their “secesh” supporters occupied influential positions in government and the local press. They also held prominent posts in the mint, navy yard and local army quarters, according to Waitman and other researchers. These undercover agents—operating under a password RABE (an anagram for BEAR, as in “Bear State,” and a play on the term Rebel)—resorted to burning, plundering and stealing pro-Union assets in California as the war gripped the nation back East.

  After obtaining a copy of Waitman’s paper and archival references from the Civil War era, Bob was able to speculate on why El Monte, California, wound up as a principal stopover on Waltz’s American exodus. (He also recalled how Del Schrader—in his Herald Examiner article about the California-based KGC descendants’ reunion—quoted somebody as saying that El Monte was a KGC headquarters.) Waitman noted:

  The KGC began infiltrating California in the late 1840s. By 1850, there were some 100,000 southerners in southern California, and perhaps 18,000 were KGC agents. The KGC wanted to be ready to move when the secession movement began…. It is easy to see why the Knights had such an easy time infiltrating California. They came by way of well-known routes and in many disguises: as miners, traders, settlers, and in various professions, such as doctors, lawyers and teachers. They usually traveled in small bands, rarely numbering over five or six in number. After reaching California, these groups divided into smaller units, spread out and set up organizational headquarters throughout the state.

  The most active of these secessionist centers were in El Monte, San Bernardino, Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo, Mariposa, Stockton, Marysville, Sacramento and San Francisco.9

  El Monte, a KGC hotbed, was singled out at the time by a pro-Union newspaper editor who found himself engulfed by hostile secessionist sentiment in the San Bernardino County community that his paper served. As editor of the local Weekly Patriot, Edwin A. Sherman wrote confidentially to the commander of the U.S. Pacific Division, Army Gen. E. V. Sumner, on June 3, 1861:

  There exists amongst us through all these southern counties a secret organization of secessionists, and in a settlement near Los Angeles there is an organized cavalry company which is ready at almost any moment to break out, holding an inveterate hatred toward the citizens of this place, and it is at this point they would make their first attack, and there are some in our midst who would receive them cheerfully and help them in their treacherous designs…. The secessionists of [El] Monte are only waiting the withdrawal of the troops from Los Angeles before they commence operations.10

  Was it sheer chance, Bob wondered, that Waltz left El Monte for Arizona in 1863, settling in the Superstitions? Wanderlust and visions of gold could have played key roles. But there may have been a more complex explanation.

  Southern Arizona, in the early phase of the Civil War, was home to large numbers of Confederate sympathizers—and, by extension, underground KGC operatives. The foremost goal of these pro-Southern westerners was to link with like-minded operatives in neighboring California and then to usher that strategically important state into the Confederacy. While the KGC’s underground units likely remained active as fifth column operators in Arizona Territory throughout the Civil War, the Confederacy formed a formal, albeit short-lived, Arizona Brigade fighting force. It fought briefly in Arizona Territory—in the April 1862 Picacho Pass skirmish—before being driven from the territory by federal troops early on in the war. The seemingly insignificant Arizona–New Mexico engagements might have had significant repercussions for the Union if the Rebels had proven victorious and forged a viable link throughout the Southwest with their secessionist brethren in California.11

  An intriguing hypothesis crossed Bob’s mind. While Waltz was not known to have served as a Confederate soldier, he may have provided intelligence on the movement of Union forces occupying the territory. He also might have served as a sentinel for Rebel caches—treasure secreted both during the conflict and after the conclusion of the war.

  Waltz’s paper trail led Bob to his third avenue of attack for solving the Lost Dutchman riddle: searching for clues in the names of local landmarks. Two immediately stood out: Grayback Mountain and Dromedary Peak. He knew that Grayback was a nickname for Rebel soldiers and that Confederate notes were dubbed graybacks as a twist on President Lincoln’s new fiat money, greenbacks. As an anagram, the word spelled out “KGC RAAYB,” or a phonetic version of the KGC password, RABE.

  As for Dromedary Peak, it likely was a tip of the hat to Jefferson Davis and his pre–Civil War plan, as U.S. Secretary of War, to use Egyptian camels as pack animals in the U.S. Southwest. Davis’s bold 1855 proposal—to have dromedaries haul supplies and serve as mobile cavalry across the American deserts, including the brutal Sonoran in Arizona—received a $30,000 appropriation by Congress. But the U.S. Camel Corps quickly foundered for a host of reasons, including the fact that the seventy or so imported Egyptian camels had trouble adjusting to the rocky soil of the American deserts. Further, the Saharan imports frightened local pack animals, and their powerful odor proved too much for the olfactory sensibilities of American troops. Yet it was a noble effort, and a memorial to the dromedaries’ Middle Eastern–born handler, Hadji Ali, a.k.a. Hi Jolly, was erected in Quartzsite, Arizona. J. Frank Dalton, in Jesse James and the Lost Cause, makes specific reference to Davis’s “Camel Corp” and its denouement: wild, snorting camels inhabiting wide sections of the West, “especially Arizona” and intimidating the local fauna.12

  There were other conspicuous place names, such as Price, as in Gen. Sterling Price, the Confederate commander and participant in the Knights’ postwar exodus to Mexico. Bob also could not help but notice the mining town of Reymert, a ghost town since 1891 lying just south of the Superstitions. The town, he discovered, was named after James DeNoon Reymert, a lawyer/entrepreneur of Scotch-Norwegian descent. In the late 1800s, Reymert owned several mines—Reymert Silver Mines, five miles north of Heart Mountain and the Gila River—and was the editor of the Pinal Drill mining newspaper. Reymert also happened to be a close friend of Caleb Cushing, an early leading light of the KGC who had mining interests of his own in various parts of the country, including Minnesota, where Reymert had been professionally active earlier in his life.

  Reymert, who owned a law practice in New York City, corresponded extensively with Cushing. In an October 6, 1861 letter to Cushing, Reymert wrote cryptically: “I am anxious to lay before you some plans, which, if I can execute, will be of very great benefit to your interests in the Southwest, and, shall they meet your approval, I must hasten back to carry them out.”13 Reymert and Cushing also wrote to each other about plans for recruiting Scandinavian and other European engineers via a company called The Great European-American Emigration Land Co.

  These and other “coincidences” among strategically relevant place names led Bob to suspect that KGC agents somehow participated in naming key landmarks in the Superstitions area. In the back of his mind, he had begun to wonder whether
the Knights may have placed moles inside the U.S. Geological Survey.

  Another clue—again, embedded in the name of a local landmark—emerged during his months of off-site investigation. He had noticed a “Hewitt Ranch” as one of a handful of residences along the remote western end of the Superstition Range. Hewitt Ranch happened to be located near “Reavis Ranch,” named, of course, for Elisha Reavis, whom Bob suspected of having been a KGC sentinel. But what of this Hewitt, for which a canyon, a large ridge and a mountain road were named?

  In Jesse James Was One of His Names, Col. Roy Hewitt is listed as one of the aliases of Jesse Woodson James.14 In Jesse James and the Lost Cause, a photo of a rifle-toting, thickly bearded horseman carries the caption, “A rare photo of Jesse James when he was using the alias of Col. Roy Hewitt.”15

  Bob had no way of knowing if there was, in fact, a Jesse James connection to the Lost Dutchman, and, if so, whether it could hinge in part on the Hewitt Ranch. The notion of Jesse James’s involvement in the Superstitions’ enigma was compelling, particularly after Ballinger’s fairly strong statement that Jesse and Frank had traveled at least as far west as New Mexico (Arizona) Territory—and on KGC-cache business!

  There was one additional piece of potential “evidence” that might link Jesse with the Superstitions, although it was a long shot. Among his collection of photocopied letters, waybills and other documents from Howk (nearly all of which are signed JJ III or Jesse Lee James) was one particularly detailed waybill entitled “Arizona Desert Treasure.”16 It named the state that the alleged treasure was buried in, but, of course, omitted the location. No counties, no towns, no streets, no latitude-longitude coordinates … nothing. The waybill did contain, however, a drawing of a set of abandoned adobe buildings near the alleged buried treasure. Moreover, it presented a detailed account—however reliable—as to how the money ($440,000 in gold coins) was shipped to the region by rail, confiscated from the train and then buried, all part of an “inside” job involving Jesse Woodson James.