Rebel Gold

by Warren Getler

  Bob did not doubt the authenticity of the Arizona Desert Treasure map. The waybill, with its illustrations, apparently had been dictated by J. Frank Dalton to Howk. The telltale Howk signature “JJ III” appears twice on the map. The handwriting and the overall look of the pictogram closely resembles other photocopied waybills from J. Frank Dalton (via Howk) that Bob owned. Could this suspected Jesse James treasure site lie near the Lost Dutchman Mine? The thought seemed a stretch but not beyond reason. Bob resolved that finding the coordinates of the site would be one of his top, if not the top priority, on any scouting mission to Arizona.

  Yet he was not going anywhere until he made substantive progress cracking the stone tablets’ code. After weeks of concentrated effort, nothing definitive seemed to emerge. He simply could not develop the overall theme and flow of the multifaceted cryptogram. In search of fresh leads, he called up the Heart Mountain Group and asked for maps from a different period. As it turned out, these would help a great deal, for certain place names had changed over time. But the core problem remained: finding the all-important starting point to begin the step-by-step process of decoding.

  Frustration was building. The intermittent flashes of insight that had propelled him through the Wolf Map were stalled. Was his intuition failing him, or was something missing from the puzzle board itself?

  During those aggravating spells in the spring of 1996, Bob would take a morning break and head to McLain’s to unwind. While sipping coffee one morning, he bumped into a family friend, the widow of George Mitchell. Bob had known Mitchell, a veteran treasure hunter, only briefly before the local man died. He had met him at the very same coffee shop, in 1975, during a visit just before the Brewer family moved to Hatfield. The two men had chatted about local treasure lore, and Bob had come away impressed with the older man’s knowledge. He was particularly interested in Mitchell’s research into the so-called “Spider Rocks of Texas,” a mystery centered on web-like patterns chiseled into stone slabs.17 Now, more than two decades later, Bob realized that the Spider Rocks were likely symbolic representations of the circular KGC template—surrounded by jumbled text and numerals—carved into three stone tablets found at three separate locations near Abilene in the early 1900s. Was there a link between the Texas and Arizona stone tablets, he wondered.

  When Rita Mitchell asked Bob what he had been up to, he said that he had been spending far too much time working his way through a stubborn treasure knot, one centered in Arizona. He hesitated before saying any more—not because he feared giving anything away, but because he knew the woman hated the very mention of treasure hunting. There was no other word for it: she despised the vocation. Her husband’s all-consuming passion for treasure left her struggling to support young children when he died (a not uncommon experience in the hard-core treasure-hunting community). Yet, for some reason her hostility toward the topic seemed somewhat tempered that morning, and she volunteered that George had spent some time in Arizona looking for the Lost Dutchman gold mine.

  Bob’s heart jumped. He tried his best to stay cool. After he collected himself, he leaned forward and gently asked Rita if George had left any documentation of his work on the Dutchman. He expected a tongue-lashing, but surprisingly, after looking over her shoulder to see if anyone was eavesdropping, she said that she would rummage through George’s files.

  A week or two passed and, as it turned out, Bob and Rita Mitchell somehow managed to miss each other at the coffee shop. When they finally did connect, at Bob’s usual table, she told him that she had been carrying around a small file of papers in her car. After a few minutes of small talk, she suggested that they step outside. She asked Bob to climb into her car so that no one would see what they were doing. She said that she didn’t want anyone to know that she had anything to do with treasure hunting. But to Bob, it seemed as if she were particularly nervous about these papers. He didn’t press the point. Reaching under the front seat, she produced a coffee-stained manila folder entitled “Horse Maps.” In the folder were several sheets of carbon-copy paper, dated 1955, each one showing tracings of the original Superstition Mountain stone maps.18

  Bob’s reaction was gracious but low key at seeing the decades-old drawings. After all, he already had the set of professional photographs of the maps sent by the Heart Mountain Project. He had expected more. He asked if he could get copies of the papers made and then return the originals. She said she’d rather have the copies made herself and not let the originals out of her sight, but realizing that she already was late to work, she impulsively handed the stack to Bob and pleaded their speedy return. Bob made copies, returned the originals and hurried home to compare them to the photographs of the Arizona stone tablets. Right away, he saw dissimilarities.

  Back in his study, his pulse raced at the sight of a small, elephant-like figure on one of the carbon tracings. The weird creature—with oversized feet, an extended belly and floppy ears—stood upright. The image, inscribed to the left of the draft horse on the horse tablet, was not visible on the photographs. Either someone had altered the tablets or there was another set stored somewhere. Either way, the small rendering appeared to have special meaning.

  Attuned to the subtleties of the KGC’s hieroglyphic-like cipher, Bob guessed that the elephant’s importance was most likely to be found in some metaphor or allegory. He knew that the organization was fond of incorporating figures from the Old and New Testaments, the Jewish Kabbala and other tradition-bound sources, including the occult, into its encrypted messages. He theorized that the odd little creature was Behemoth, a giant animal—possibly a hippo or an elephant—mentioned in Job 40:15–24. He surmised that somewhere on the map of the area—in the physical topographic features—a giant beast was to be found. And it was not meant to be the well-known Elephant Butte landmark: an oddly shaped outcrop in the Superstitions that appears, in physical profile, to be an elephant’s head. No, that would be far too obvious, and such a conspicuous target would have been more a deliberate diversion, a decoy. It would serve to send the uninformed cache hunter or lost-mine seeker running off with picks and shovels on a quixotic mission to … dry holes.

  With this new variable, Bob experienced a burst of intuition. Behemoth—its trunk pointing east, directly at the horse’s head—was signaling for the horse to be made large, in fact, mammoth. Find the giant horse to the right, or east, of Elephant Butte. But where?

  All that night he hunched over the topos, looking for the outline of a horse in the hundreds of contour lines and marked trails, washes and streams of the eastern Superstitions. Bob took a clue from the ciphered Spanish text on the horse tablet—“I pasture north of the river”—to help narrow the search. Perhaps, he thought, north of the Gila River. But there was also lots of opportunity even further north, above the east-west running Queen Creek. He noticed that Hewitt Ranch was located where the north-south running Hewitt Canyon Road connected with Queen Creek. Was this a hint? Was the connection to the horse to be found in the immediate area of the Hewitt (Jesse James) ranch? (There was a JJ carving inscribed on the horse stone tablet, with the two J s placed upside down and back-to-back to the right of the horse’s tail!)

  Adrenaline surged through his body. He realized that RIO, Spanish for river, in YO PASTU AL NORTE DEL RIO (inscribed to the rear of the carved horse), was a wonderful cover for the second RIO found on the horse tablet. The second RIO carving was inscribed in front of the horse’s head, near its right ear, and between two wavy lines that appeared like rivers or creeks. But the lettering was slightly different: the right leg of the R extended downward and the I hinted perhaps of the numeral 1. Only because he had spent months decoding the Wolf Map, with its R7W (Range 7 West) camouflaged coordinates, could he have figured out that something fundamental, related to the horse, was located in Range 10—or R10—on the century-old Florence topo. Range 10 East happens to be where Queen Creek traverses east to west, paralleling the boundary line between Maricopa and Pinal counties. The Superstition Mountain stone tablet
s, like the Wolf Map before, were narrowing the search in a way that was quintessentially KGC.

  But Bob still could not see a horse in the 1:125,000-scale map. He was drained. Setting down his drafting pencil and dividers, he shuffled into the kitchen at dawn to get a cup of coffee. When he returned, he ran his eyes up along Hewitt Canyon Road on the topo. There, just to the west, he saw the downward-sloping oval of a horse’s eye. It was visible in the contour lines for a prominent peak in the area, Hewitt Ridge, near Mill-site Canyon. “My God,” he whispered to himself. “This is good!” Suddenly lightheaded, he dropped into his worn-out swivel chair, overcome with the same feelings of nausea he experienced when he broke the Wolf Map.

  “Amazing, amazing,” he repeated. After a few minutes, he was able to run his finger over the now traceable outline of a giant horse’s head. Hewitt Ranch formed one nostril along the horse’s muzzle that was created by the undulating line representing Queen Creek. Gently winding Hewitt Canyon Road defined the left upper jawline; Milk Ranch Creek Road the right upper jawline. Two upright ears also were visible, as was the slope of the neck, formed in part by Reavis Trail.

  Now not only could he see the nose, eyes, ears and neck but also the front legs and midsection. All this in the myriad squiggles and punctuated open spaces of a near century-old U.S. Geological Survey map—one that covered more than three hundred square miles! The only parts of the giant horse missing were the hind legs and tail. This was because the animal’s now penciled-in body ended at the east side of the topo grid, with its rump running off the page.

  Bob sensed that the engraved stone slabs were composed entirely from information shown on the 1900 Florence topo. Thus, the stone tablets could not date back to Spanish Colonial times or even to the mid-1840s era of the “Peraltas.” Topo surveys of the kind laid out on his drafting table were not made that long ago. The “Peralta” makers of the stone tablets would have had no such reference points to draw upon for their encrypted artwork.

  And what extraordinary art it was! The topographically rendered equine conformed beautifully to the shape and proportions of the artistically rendered horse on the stone tablet. He marveled at the clandestine ingenuity of the mapmakers and the men who carved the stone slabs. They had left behind their signature system of symbolism, too subtle for most to recognize and perhaps too clever for those in the know to be able to follow the encrypted signposts. The fabricated story of the “Peraltas” had been attached at some point as a smoke screen to throw off outsiders.

  He now faced the KGC draftsmen, surveyors, cartographers and cryptologists at their most masterful, if not brazen. Their esoteric purpose was to guide the informed, the initiated, back to the secret location of something immensely important. Such markers had to endure over an extended period, when the effects of weathering, erosion and vandalism might obliterate key signposts. The tablets, he guessed, were not absolutely required to solve the treasure trail mystery but at least seemed designed to make the job easier for cipher-literate insiders.

  For a while that morning, Bob walked quietly along the perimeter of his property, strolling past the vegetable garden and down to his stocked catfish pond. He questioned the validity of the intuitive leap that he had made. It seemed almost too much of a stretch. Only a short while back, the stone tablets appeared unsolvable, forever inscrutable. But now he felt confident of his analysis.

  In the days that followed, his intuitive floodgates opened wider. Having transposed the stone tablet horse to the old topo map, he repeated the process using other symbols from the tablets: the dagger and the priest-templar. A solitary stone-map/topo-map alignment might have seemed an anomaly. But three such associations in succession made the connection convincing. The carved dagger had its physical doppelgänger in an isolated knife-shaped mountain (seen topographically, it might also be described as a meat cleaver) lying west of the horse’s head and due south of Superstition Mountain. The symbolically represented priest had its look-alike image anchored in various topo features well to the southeast, below the Gila. Along with a peaked hood and a cross emblazoned on its sleeve, the priest-templar’s key topo features were his watchful eye (composed of the elliptical lines of a lone hill) and long nose (formed by contour lines running east-west below his hood). The giant figure was looking west, through Grayback Mountain and thus near the center of Bob’s initial zone of interest.

  Bob had found—through a mix of analysis, intuition and raw trial and error—the signposts that he needed to proceed.19 With the coded messages of the tablets seemingly resolved, he felt certain that he had defined the general parameters of the search area. Now all he had to do was follow the rules set down by the KGC and pray that there was a connection to the “Arizona Desert Treasure” waybill. Otherwise all the hard work—the unraveling of the symbolism—might amount to nothing.

  14

  Off to Arizona

  AFTER a long two-day drive, Bob arrived in south-central Arizona in July 1996. The heat was predictably intense. A bright scorcher, climbing to 110 degrees by noon, had enveloped the greater Phoenix area. Way too hot, he thought, for an Arkansas mountain man. At best, he would be able to hunt but a few hours a day with the principals from the Heart Mountain Project, Elwin “Ellie” Gardner, then of Phoenix, and Gardner’s brother-in-law, Brian MacLeod, of Seattle.

  On the road to Apache Junction, he saw signs for Florence, a former frontier town just south of the Gila River. Having arrived a day early, he decided to see if he could pick up a few leads. Jacob Waltz, according to the legend, had launched some of his clandestine treks into the Superstitions from nineteenth-century Florence, so it was worth asking around. He chatted with a few locals about the town’s history and fished for rumors of buried treasure. The woman at the gas station kidded him about looking for “that damned Dutchman’s mine.” Bob joked that, no, he was looking for something a lot harder to find.

  Exiting Florence, home to a giant POW camp during World War II, he noticed a historic plaque for Adamsville. The sign said the stamp-sized hamlet had been wiped out by the Gila’s floodwaters in the late 1800s. However brief its existence on the map, Adamsville, if he had to bet, was going to be central to solving the Dutchman puzzle. Its geographic location, at 33 degrees north, seemed well suited for a pivotal role, if, indeed, the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry were associated with the Dutchman’s Mine.

  9. Historic map of southwestern United States, showing longitude lines west of Washington, D.C. The KGC treasure search area of the Superstition Mountains falls within latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates involving the key Scottish Rite Masonic number 33.

  As he approached the small plot that was once Adamsville, some three miles southwest of Florence along Old Adamsville Road, he could not resist investigating a powerful hunch. He pulled over and spread a copy of the old Florence topo on the hood of his car. The USGS quadrangle was now full of precise directional lines that he had drawn in pencil: each tangent delineating a compass heading indicated by the code on the stone tablets. Two of the key lines—one running down the middle of the south-pointing topographic dagger (shown as “Dinosaur Mountain” on current maps), the other running down the end of the topographic priest’s contoured nose via Grayback—intersected precisely at Adamsville! If the past were any guide, the spot where two major lines converged yielded some critical dividend. He trusted that the Arizona lines would prove no different. Lying next to the unrolled topo map was the other key document: the J. Frank Dalton waybill to an “Arizona Desert Treasure,” as illustrated—with its adobe buildings—by Howk (signed JJ III).

  Bob drove to the spot where his two conceptual lines intersected. There, on the north side of Old Adamsville Road, stood a cluster of three adobe buildings, apparently abandoned and in disrepair. Next to one of the buildings was a wooden fence that had once perhaps formed the perimeter of a corral. The open area was not posted, so he briefly strolled around the roadside cluster of idle structures. As he walked over to inspect a large adobe to the south, he n
oticed an exposed floor foundation of what must have been another crumbled home or building. Running past the ruin was a faded dirt trail leading off to the west. It seemed somehow familiar.

  Seeing the exposed foundation within the context of the three adobes made Bob’s head reel. He was overcome with a dizzying sense of déjà vu. After a moment, he hurried to his car and grabbed the J. Frank Dalton waybill. He ran his forefinger across each sketched structure on the map in sequence, looking up each time to confirm the waybill’s fit with the buildings before him. It was a match. An exact match! This was the place; there was little doubt. Adamsville was the bull’s-eye location for the “Arizona Treasure Map.”

  On the waybill/map, he could see the same general layout of the buildings—the kicker being the slightly elevated, rectangular floor hardpan with a caption that read, “Adobe burned by Geronimo 1884.” Justbelow was written, “stage road.” (The destruction of the adobe must have taken place in the first weeks of 1884, for Geronimo is known to have surrendered—and not for the first time or the last—to federal troops in January or February of that year.)