This was different. What encoded information lay before him, in an obscure corner of the United States, bordered on “arcanum”: mysterious knowledge known only to the initiate.1 It was not merely weaving together the geometry, the hieroglyphic-like symbolism and the cartography. It was also knowing the interplay of historic names, places and dates over a wide spectrum—outlaws, Rebels, Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Knights Templar—all thrown down on a bewildering set of maps of south-central Arizona! But who would believe it, who could grasp the full picture? For a start, one would have to walk the lines and examine the evidence on the ground.
Armed with fresh visual information from HMP, Bob’s overarching goal at the start of his 2000 trip was to determine the size and shape of the giant depository, leading, in the end, to the centerpoint. The tablets’ horse, dagger and priest-templar images—all by now neatly transposed onto the 1900 map’s topographic features—had given him a lead. Whether he could locate the hot zone—the potential hub for aligning the circle design of the template and, consequently, for finding potential cache burial sites, as denoted by circular notches cut into his template—was an open question.
Bob strongly suspected that the centerpoint lay somewhere south of the topo horse’s head, between Queen Creek to the north and the Gila River to the south, and, on the east-west axis, between ranges 10 and 11. The hints thus far indicated that the template’s centerpoint could be found somewhere near the middle of the 1900 Florence quad. He felt positive of that.
Providing inspiration were directional lines that intersected just south and east of Dromedary Peak. Several tangents ran up through that area from the top of Grayback Mountain in the southeast. (A northeasterly line intersected the second I in Millsite Canyon on the topo, which lay near the bottom of the sloping “eye” of the topo horse and was a key factor in Bob’s detecting the face of the behemoth horse in the contour lines.) These lines radiating from Grayback led toward an enormous topographic heart shape, which Bob discerned in the center of the northwest section of the Florence quad. The contoured valentine ran from a place called Bark’s Ranch across to Randolph Canyon, down to Whitlow Canyon and then on a roughly symmetrical track to the west, to form the heart’s left lobe, and then, similarly, winding around another peak and canyon for the right lobe. But was it the heart?
The stone tablets had hinted at a centrally important heart or, in fact, multiple hearts: a prominent textual clue on the priest-templar tablet instructed one, in broken Spanish, to “look for the map” and then “look for the heart.”2 A small heart-like figure had been engraved to the left, or northwest, of the horse’s head on the horse tablet. Hidden inside that petite valentine were the numbers 7 and 5. These numbers provided what turned out to be distance measurements that Bob used to find this initial topographic heart and its surrounding diamond-shaped border.
11. Topographic map of Superstition Mountains area, north of Queen Creek.
There seemed to be value in searching for the heart—perhaps the overarching theme of the puzzle. A heart theme would be both consistent with KGC symbolism (as in the fight to restore the broken heart of the defeated South) and with symbols of Freemasonry and the Knights Templar. (In Templar legend, the heart represents “the Heart of Bruce” or Robert the Bruce, progenitor of the Stuart line of Scottish and English royalty.3 In Masonic lore, the Scottish-independence stalwart Bruce was “one of the patrons and encouragers of Scottish Freemasonry.”4) In the advanced degrees, the heart represents the heart of a mythical character by the name of Hiram Abiff, the supposed master builder of King Solomon’s Temple.
The topographic heart provided a line that ran through a mountain called Comet’s Peak, on through the near-center of the 1900 map. Bob saw a symbolic parallel: one of the stone tablets had a large incised heart pointing directly at a carved triangle that, in turn, was intersected by an engraved comet-like squiggle, à la Comet Peak.
The trail was playing itself out. Bob had been directed—through the tablet’s arcane code—to make the horse into a behemoth and to find that oversized horse “pasturing” north of the river. He had done just that, all above Queen Creek and the Gila River. He also had been told to find a giant heart; again, that he did, the equivalent of a mile or so west of the topographic quadruped’s head. He knew, from experience with the Wolf Map and other KGC ciphers, that important symbolic figures pointed to the next critical steps. The heart had a directional tip-point of its own. That much was clear. But what about the gargantuan horse? Was it providing a clue?
Knowing the resourcefulness of KGC cryptographers and their penchant for clever flourishes, Bob surmised that the textual clue DON (taking up one whole side of a stone tablet) was intended to be read in reverse, as NOD. If the giant horse’s head were to nod—“to let fall slightly forward when sleepy”—it would be facing the zone of interest, directly south. The stallion would be peering down somewhere between the long-abandoned mining hamlet of Reymert—put on the map by Caleb Cushing’s friend—and Picketpost Mountain.
The area near Reymert is dotted with old mines and, as denoted on the topo, is traversed by a long stairstep surveyor-line running northwest. Reymert was one of the first places that Bob had asked to see on his initial trip to the Superstitions two years before. Now he wanted to return with Gardner and MacLeod, to confirm that key directional lines pointed toward Reymert—and to understand why. The priest figure, he felt, might tell him that.
12. Outline of horse’s body (the Santa Fe horse shown on the Superstition stone tablet) and priest figure (shown on page 227) superimposed on contour lines, as discerned by Bob Brewer after hundreds of hours of map work. The four quadrants of the entire map (upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right) are shown here separately.
Bob had sensed that the priest figure represented a hooded medieval Knight Templar. He presumed that such a venerated icon—the soldier-monk—would hold further clues toward finding a starting point to on-site investigation. Simply delineating the priest-templar in the contoured mountain elevations and trails in the southeast corner of the Florence quad had been an enormous challenge.
In his analysis of the 1900 topo and associated USGS maps, he had discovered two potentially significant landmarks: a Crozier’s Peak, lying just beyond the southeast corner of the map, and a ravine called Ripsey Wash tucked inside the southeast corner. When he looked up the definition of “crozier” (also spelled “crosier”), he discovered that the word derived from the old French, “crossier,” for “staff bearer.” In modern parlance, the term stands chiefly for the staff of a bishop, abbot or some other holy person, but its traditional meaning was “the carrier of the staff.” The KGC cryptographers appeared to be instructing him to search for the cross-carrying priest-templar in the topographic features near Crozier’s Peak. And there were other subtle hints to follow: select place-names pregnant with meaning.
Bob had been struck by such names as Hewitt’s Ranch and Hewitt’s Canyon, with their possible ties to Jesse Woodson James. He also had suspected that the name “JJ Fraser Ranch” was coined to serve as a deliberate directional indicator. Was it, in fact, a shrouded reference to Jesse James and to the medieval Scottish clan leader Simon Fraser, who fought alongside Scots national hero Robert the Bruce?
According to an 1896 obituary that appeared in a local Arizona paper on the death of Elisha Reavis, rancher John J. “Jack” Fraser had purchased the Reavis Ranch soon after Reavis’s passing.5 The article reported that a “Billy G. Knight”—an “English cowboy” and foreman on Fraser’s ranch properties—had cautioned Reavis a couple of weeks before his mysterious death to “see a doctor.” Reading between the lines, the “English cowboy” could easily pass for a medieval Knight Templar, Bob thought. The G could well be a nod toward the hallmark symbol for “Geometry” (some say, “God”) in Freemasonry. And, he speculated, based on related clues uncovered in Arkansas and Oklahoma, “William” could suggest William Wallace, the heralded Scottish freedom fighter who sought to help Rober
t the Bruce gain the throne. The thematic Scots place-names appeared themselves to be a form of cipher: a way to tell a story within a story that would be noticed and understood only by those deeply versed in knowledge of the code.
In his youth, Bob noticed Grandpa Ashcraft and Uncle Ode engaging in such mysterious wordplay. Now those double meanings started to come sharply into focus.
Assuming “Fraser” to be a deliberate anagram, Bob derived FAR SE R, as in, find the “far southeast R” on the Florence quad. His best guess was the R in Ripsey Wash, an arroyo represented in the lower right-hand corner of the Florence topo. Ripsey, itself, was a possible anagram for Priest, with a y replacing the t. Using the trio of Crozier’s Peak, Ripsey Wash and Grayback Mountain as ciphered reference points for triangulating the approximate location of the hidden priest-templar figure, Bob eventually found the face of the holy man. The priest-templar’s silhouette, topographically speaking, stared directly into Grayback.
What other tricks did the priest-templar figure have up his sleeve? A number of things, each seemingly designed to direct the informed into a target zone between Reymert and Picketpost, Bob perceived. For a start, the priest-templar inscribed on the stone tablet appears to be standing on a three-tiered pedestal. Was this not a metaphor for the stairstep dotted-line configuration on the Florence quad that runs northwest—beginning near Silver Bell Mine, then passing Reymert onto Dromedary Peak and ending near Comet Peak?
The leads did not end there. Bob deduced further messages in the charm-like figures falling from the “cross” held by the holy figure, the last of which was a heart.
Assuming that the cross represented a crozier, as in Crozier’s Peak, and that the heart alluded to the large topo heart in the northwest quadrant near Fort McDowell, Bob guessed that the priest-templar was instructing him to align the template along a tangent that ran from Crozier’s Peak to some point inside the northwest quadrant’s heart. On close examination of the topo, he could see the following pattern: Crozier’s Peak, the R in Ripsey Wash, the highpoints of the stairsteps, and Comet Peak were all in a line leading to Fort McDowell. That same line intersected the giant topo heart just off center, in its left lobe. He recalled that, on the sculpted three-dimensional valentine that fits into the heart stone tablet, a large X had been inscribed in the same relative position … on the left lobe.
At this point, Bob took out the Lucite template and placed one of its two sloping “master lines” along the Crozier’s Peak tangent running northwest. Significantly, at a spot where the inner ring of the template intersected both the important reference point R in “Ripsey Wash” and another key reference point, the template’s center appeared directly over Reymert.
Bob sensed a sweet spot. Reymert was a possible centerpoint—the master-line X intersection or “cross”—of the template, insofar as it corresponded to key bearings and landmarks on the 1900 Florence quad. The engraved stone templar figure hinted at it with his cross and spilled charms; the carved horse on the flip side of that tablet seemed to be “nodding” at it; and the inscribed heart from another slab appeared to be pointing at it.
But why Reymert? It could not all be reduced to the Reymert-Cushing connection, however important that historic friendship to the overall scheme. For days Bob searched for an answer. Could it have been a clever play on “Outremer”—the Templars’ term for their monastic-Crusader stronghold in the Holy Land? Outremer (Palestine) was the “Land beyond the Sea.”6
Was Reymert the place where Waltz, Reavis and other likely KGC sentinels centrally patrolled, starting their treks from Adamsville and Florence, the nearest towns? Were the old abandoned Reymert “mines” really mines or just operational cover for cache-burial activities on a massive scale? The similarities to Brushy Creek, Arkansas, and its “mines” claimed by the likes of Bill Wiley, Grandpa Ashcraft and Bill Dobson seemed powerful.
In the spring of 2000, Bob returned to the Superstitions. His most pressing task was to search for landmarks that would give him confidence that his interpretation of the maps, carved symbols and stone tablets was correct for aligning the template on the 1900 topo. Most of all, he wanted to know if he needed to make precise adjustments, topographic fine tunings, that would force his hand and move the template’s X-spot to someplace new, perhaps not far from Reymert.
He suspected that the KGC masterminds would not have been content to settle for a direct “linear” solution to the puzzle. Perhaps they had simply thrown him a bone with Reymert [a potential scramble for TRY (OUT) REME (R)]. But only the very persistent and open-minded would think that more attempts at alignment were required to crack the maps, to resolve where the KGC had built its underground storehouses within the inner circle of the fixed geometry of the template.
13. A computer-assisted rendering of the KGC’s circle-in-square template, overlaid on an early 1900s topo map of the Superstition Mountains. The centerpoint of this grid is Reymert, but Bob decided upon further analysis that this was not correct.
Bob remained convinced that key symbols on the stone tablets would get him tantalizingly close to the template’s precise positioning. Yet, to solve the overall puzzle, those symbols had to be placed in proper context and in some logical sequence with other abstract markers found in the field.
One of the tablets’ small, yet seemingly important, symbols was a circle carved behind the neck of the stone-tablet horse. Projected onto the Florence topo, the “circle” showed up near the old Reavis Ranch in the eastern end of the Superstition range. Perhaps the circle, which had a dot at its center, was meant to symbolize a particular mountain peak, he thought. But, without any numeric distance or directional marker provided, it could be any one of a dozen buttes in the area.
Fortuitously Bob had come across a crucial clue on his last trip, while visiting a treasure-hunting supply and bookshop in Apache Junction. Thumbing through a booklet written by two local historians, Circle-stone: A Superstition Mountain Mystery, he had been drawn to an aerial photograph of a large circular rock monument. The monument’s layout appeared remarkably similar to the design of the KGC template.7 Up to that point, he had never heard of the “Circlestone,” a flat-lying stonewall geometric arrangement built just northwest of an extremely remote peak called Mound Mountain. Coincidentally, the mysterious (some say prehistoric) Circlestone “monument” lies in Section 33 of the local grid. It also lies at 33 28′ 35″ North latitude.
From then on, Bob was aware of the potential significance of the site described in detail by Apache Junction authors James Swanson and Thomas Kollenborn. The Circlestone, he guessed, was the topographic reference point for the circular symbol carved on the neck of the stone tablet horse. Little did the two local authors know that they were outlining the secret geometry of the KGC’s template. The site’s location—in Section 33, due north of Reymert and very near what was the full-time residence of assumed KGC sentinel Elisha Reavis—was highly suggestive. Bob wondered if it was a coincidence that Grandpa Ashcraft and Bill Wiley also had lived in Section 33 back home in Brushy Creek?
From the photos in the book, he could see that several stones appeared to have been deliberately removed from the pattern—most likely to prevent the Circlestone from being readily recognized for its true significance. Nonetheless, simply from the topographic information provided by the detailed booklet, Bob felt that the scope of the depository was becoming apparent. The Circlestone was in the north sector, and with Reymert near or in the center, there would need to be something south of Reymert to anchor the bottom of the outlying square perimeter of the circle-in-square template.
Among the first things Bob did upon returning to Arizona was to ask whether his HMP partners knew of any strange man-made structures lying south of Reymert, toward the Gila. Gardner said that, in fact, there was a mysterious row of beehive-like huts just west of a ghost town called Cochran. He had a file folder with a few photos of the “beehives,” locally known as the Florence coke ovens. The file material described some of the lore behi
nd the weird, thirty-five-foot-tall stone structures. They allegedly had been built by Welsh engineers as a place to convert local wood to coke, the latter being a more efficient fuel for smelting ore. But a close reading of the documents revealed that no one really knew the true origin, age or purpose of the peculiar domed structures. “We need to go there, tomorrow,” Bob declared, pointing at the photos.
The next day, the group headed out on a jarring four-wheel-drive expedition that required fording a section of the Gila from the south. The spike in blood pressure and rattling of kidneys was worth it. When Bob saw the ornate hives, he immediately sensed that these “smelters” were much more than what they seemed. They were too well built, too perfectly aligned, to be mere charcoal ovens for local miners of the last century. Moreover, he noticed that the structures were largely free from creosote stains around the vents. If the “ovens” had been used to make charcoal over any length of time, the light-colored stone would have been stained permanently. No, the ovens were built more for symbolic purposes than for actual use, he concluded.
Bob knew from his research that the beehive was a key Masonic symbol for industriousness.8 He surmised that the Florence coke ovens were KGC-Masonic in origin. Whatever their precise provenance, the row of domed structures anchored an important topo line, a centrally placed geographic clue to the overall puzzle, given their precise linear presentation.
A line-of-sight reading of the ovens’ path revealed what he had anticipated. They were aligned on a 4-degrees–true-north compass heading, pointing directly at the Circlestone! (If one took a protractor and measured the angle of the ovens, denoted as a short line with five dots on the modern topo of the area, 4 degrees true would show as the bearing. Topographic and other surveying maps are laid out on a true-north grid. True north is a constant, whereas magnetic north, which a compass reads, can vary, depending on where one is located.)
Rebel Gold Page 28
