Rebel Gold

by Warren Getler

  In excavating down to the machine’s maximum depth, some twenty-two feet, the group gradually uncovered a carefully laid out, vertical column of man-made objects placed at calibrated levels. At one point, they found five large wagon steering pins laid out in pattern; then four such pins were discovered a foot lower, then three more a foot lower, then two in sequence. At ten feet, the group discovered a lone horseshoe. At twelve feet, they encountered a sculpted metal heart, bent into form from a band of steel. Then the diggers uncovered a vertically implanted crowbar, its point heading down at a slight angle.

  At just over thirteen feet, the skull of what later was determined to be a Percheron draft horse was found, facing northeast—toward Grayback Mountain. It was lodged upright between a shovel head and a door from an old iron stove. (An ancient French breed from the Normandy region, the Percheron historically was used by medieval knights and crusaders as they rode into battle; around the 1880s, the modern draft-horse version of the breed became a popular import into America.)

  The propped-up horse skull was the clincher for Gardner: this was no accident but some relic of a strange plot, he thought. Still, he was befuddled by being so close to what appeared to be a spot associated with treasure, and yet finding none. Gardner and his team got a laugh when they discovered two pairs of decomposed cowboy boots (soles were all that remained), each pair found in a separate foothold in the shaft’s wall.

  After they had excavated to the limit of the earth-moving machine (at one point they nearly lost the backhoe and the operator to the precarious pit), the men covered up the hole and went home. With a bunch of rusted metal, tinted medicine bottles, pieces of china, bricks, animal bones and other miscellaneous items stacked in their pickups, they were not exactly whistling all the way to the bank. In fact, they didn’t know what to make of the experience.

  When Bob received a call from a weary Gardner shortly thereafter, he could not believe his ears. “What! You dug the site!” he exclaimed. He spent the next few minutes rebuking Gardner for not informing him about the dig. After a pause, he asked whether Gardner had finally heard from the rancher. “No,” the Arizonan replied. “Well, that’s your call,” Bob said, adding: “So, what the heck, tell me what you found. Did you record where everything was and where they were pointing?” Gardner said that they had dug within a few feet of where Bob had determined something could be buried. He said that they had done their best to be careful: plucking each piece out by hand, then using the bucket of the backhoe to clear the next exposed layer, and attempting to plot everything on paper in what turned out to be a difficult dig. Before launching into a long list of items recovered, Gardner explained that it at first seemed that they might have stumbled upon an old trash heap. But on closer inspection, he recounted, he could tell that everything uncovered had been carefully laid out—a feat of engineering that involved finely spaced footholds along the rim of the shaft. Then he ticked off the list of recovered “junk”: the crossed pipes, the china, the charcoal, the propped-up horse’s head, the metal heart.

  “You’ve found a map, perhaps the map, of one of the big depositories,” Bob said.

  After a few seconds of letting it all sink in, he explained to Gardner that on a number of occasions in Arkansas, he had run into buried metal clues involving similar cross-laid pieces of metal. The horse, he said, appeared to be a widely used KGC symbol perhaps suggestive of the Knights Templar and certainly a possible connection to the stone tablet horse figure and its double, the topo horse. That horse was stout, robust and suggested a draft animal. He reminded Gardner that the horse tablet, priest tablet and heart tablet all had contributed to his having found Adamsville in the first place, as the target site for the “Arizona Desert Treasure” map.

  “Ellie, think hard about this. You said the horse’s head pointed northeast. Do you remember … was it pointing at anything?” he asked. Gardner, pausing for a moment as he recalled the exposed layer with the horse skull, said, yes, it did. “Grayback. Grayback Mountain.”

  “Reinforces my lines,” Bob replied, without taking the discussion further. He knew that he had to appraise the situation in person.

  Bob told Gardner that it was impossible to assess the significance of the shaft now that its directional signposts had been removed. He conveyed his lingering annoyance about that fact and about Gardner’s jumping the gun. Still, out of fondness for his friend and his desire to see the KGC trail revealed, he promised that he would return to the Superstitions to inspect the recovered pieces. Perhaps in the minutiae he would find a directional gem in the rough. In the meantime, he suggested that Gardner try contacting the property owner to secure permission to attempt greater depths of excavation—this time with better equipment and proper safety precautions.

  When Gardner finally did manage to reach the rancher, he was stymied by the man’s reaction, or rather, lack of reaction. In the first few minutes of the call, Gardner acknowledged that a team of locals had conducted some probes on the property and that they had dug a pit and found all sorts of strange odds and ends. The rancher simply wanted to know: Were they digging in his crop fields? Gardner assured him that they were not. He explained that they had dug a narrow shaft in the old dirt trail running in front of the fenced field; had restored the site to an even better condition than before; and now wanted to complete the project and document it. The laconic owner said that he was not interested, for the time being, in any joint venture: all he cared about was running a successful farm. “Even if this project could earn you millions of dollars in possible buried treasure?” Gardner asked. The man said, no, he was not interested at the time, but said he would leave the door open for further talk. So ended the conversation, leaving Gardner perhaps more bewildered than ever.

  When Gardner described the conversation to Bob, the Arkansan was unfazed. Bob recounted the not dissimilar reaction of the rancher in Addington, Oklahoma, the suspected site of the Wolf Map treasure.

  In the wake of Gardner’s surprise dig in Adamsville, Bob sought out a famous treasure-hunting book by J. Frank Dobie, a legendary Texas and Southwest chronicler. Dobie’s classic Coronado’s Children, which held a prominent place among his library of treasure-hunting books, contained a fascinating and curiously relevant passage. In a chapter entitled “Down the Nueces,” Dobie relates a search for hidden gold by a Texas treasure-hunter named “Peg Leg Tumlinson.” According to hearsay cited by Dobie, Peg Leg was told by a Spanish Don to find a specific spot near an old corral, where a “burro load of gold money is buried.”2 Peg Leg was then advised to “dig down two feet and there he should find some charcoal; two feet under that he should find a saddle blanket; two feet under the saddle blanket, burro bones …” Peg Leg and his friends dug a ten-foot diameter pit, found what they were told to expect and then burrowed down to twenty-two feet, where they paused before digging all the way down to a depth of thirty-four feet. Ultimately they “struck a vein of water and quit.”

  Not only was the story from the early 1900s eerily parallel to what had just transpired in Adamsville; there were other odd “coincidences.” In Jesse James Was One of His Names, Schrader and Howk note that J. Frank Dalton was an avid reader of Dobie’s books and had earmarked pages of Dobie’s works “with strange symbols.” Additionally, the person who allegedly found the Superstition Mountain stone tablets in 1949 was a man named Travis Tumlinson.3 Some suggest that Travis Tumlinson was directly related to Peg Leg Tumlinson.4

  Bob thought this fascinating but didn’t know what to make of it. Was it a means of conveying insider knowledge of the depository burial system? Perhaps, he thought.

  In spring 2001, Bob returned to the Superstitions to meet with his HMP friends. He was eager to see the recovered items from Gardner’s Adamsville probe, and he was particularly interested in examining the smaller bits and pieces that no doubt had escaped the attention of the diggers. When he saw the material, stored neatly in a shed, he immediately focused on the seemingly insignificant finds: the glazed porcelain, the ap
othecary bottles and the rusted metal heart. The group had completely overlooked the significance of the small porcelain handle with the delicate Golden Circle glaze, as it had the piece with the rose petals.

  The emblematic Golden Circle shard was, for Bob, everything. It was the most explicit signature of a KGC depository that he had ever encountered. Holding the small piece of china in his hand, he could only smile at the mapmakers’ ingenuity.

  Little could the others have known that the helter-skelter pile of junk laid out before them, in the same layer-by-layer pattern in which it was found, served as an esoteric, subterranean map. One had to know where to look for the clues within. They were arranged as subtle visuals: some as anagrams, some as hieroglyphics, some as pictograms—all related to the surrounding topography in the Superstitions and its environs. Among the esoteric indicators: one of the apothecary bottles was half-filled with mustard seed. The lettering on the bottle’s label yielded “BIBLE” as an anagram. The Bible (Matt. 17:20) contains a parable in which Jesus says: “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove, and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”

  Was some secret society telling the discoverers of this “junk heap” that they needed to find the right mountain, shift it and then most of their worries on Earth would vanish?

  The answer, for Bob, was yes. The all-important horse skull had pointed to Grayback, along a northeasterly tangent. That strange, buried signpost had confirmed the critical directional line discerned at the outset of his Superstition investigation: the one running from the priest-templar’s face (from the eye down along the extended nose) through Grayback Mountain, on to Adamsville and exiting at the corner of the Florence 1900 topo map at 33 degrees latitude.

  Studying his Florence quad, he could see that between the priest-templar’s nose and Grayback was an inconspicuous topographic feature, depicted in the shape of a small heart with a circle in each lobe. If one were standing in Adamsville, this topographically heart-shaped hill to the northeast could be seen if Grayback were moved off the line, as in a mountain removing “hence to yonder place.” But that was only part of the equation. The priest-templar stone tablet had urged one to look for the map and look for the heart. Taking that lead, Bob envisioned drawing a line straight to Grayback from the priest-templar’s silhouette and, in so doing, piercing the small heart-shaped ridge shown on the old 1900 topo.

  Knowing that the heart theme was central to the overall puzzle, as it had been in numerous other KGC sites, Bob felt strongly that he was being directed into one of several important cache sites: the heart-shaped ridge, jutting off Grayback and lying in front of the priest-templar’s nose. The ridge lay at the intersection of two key lines, one involving the priest’s eye and the other incorporating the jack-o’-lantern-cutout in the cactus leaf. Perhaps most important, Bob recalled that when he had placed the translucent template over Picketpost, one of the key cutout circles on the Lucite grid had fallen directly over this same ridge off Grayback. If Woodson’s article in Treasure Hunter Confidential were correct, this would correlate to one of the shaded circles on the template’s key lines, or, in other words, a probable KGC cache site.

  When Bob took his HMP partners to the suspected Grayback cache site, the group encountered indicative signs along the way. At one point, they noticed a stack of colored stones set atop a large boulder, which Bob interpreted to be a rock monument of sorts, serving as a line marker. Atop the ridge, reached after a twenty-minute hike, the group came across a spot that appeared to have been disturbed long ago.

  Faintly discernible in the discolored soil was what looked to be the filled-in top of a deep shaft, some twelve feet wide. The surface area was dome-shaped and devoid of vegetation, while all around the soil plug was fairly thick brush. Another noticeable feature was stains from the last rains, indicating seepage into the apparent filled-in shaft. Finally, there was the faintly visible trace of a wagon trail running up to the top of the ridge and then disappearing altogether.

  After confirming with his GPS unit that the spot was precisely where the two directional lines crossed, Bob briefly switched on his metal detector. It responded with a marked deflection of the needle. He kept his emotions in check for he knew that whatever generated the signal was far too deep for any kind of definitive reading.

  Whatever lay below—perhaps a natural fault, perhaps a man-made burial shaft or an abandoned mine—would take a massive effort to identify. But there was an even bigger issue: the possible treasure shaft lay in the middle of federal land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.

  The group had known about that before setting out to find the possible master-cache site at the location. Moreover, they all had recognized that even if they were to find something tantalizingly suggestive on site, it might be for naught. Attempts to obtain BLM or National Forest Service permits for a treasure-trove recovery on federal land in Arizona fall through in most cases.

  Most of Bob’s projected sites in the surrounding area were on federal land and thus would require an extensive permitting process that might or might not yield a green light.

  In addition to the daunting regulatory gauntlet, Bob and his two partners, Gardner and MacLeod, would have to confront the large expense of bringing in sophisticated devices for detecting objects buried twenty to fifty feet below the surface. And there was the even greater cost of introducing heavy excavation equipment into the difficult terrain. Someday, they agreed, if everything lined up, they would set the process in motion for permitting and a recovery attempt.

  Nonetheless, atop Grayback’s ridge, there was a sense of victory. The puzzle had come into sharp focus. The clue-laden shaft uncovered in old Adamsville—found by intersecting lines developed from the stone tablets and cryptic clues from the field—had yielded a collection of symbols and markers that in turn had pointed to yet other prospective sites, such as the promontory where they currently stood. For now, it would be left an open question whether sealed stores of gold coins and bullion lie buried deep underground in the Superstitions, part of a multicache KGC master depository in south-central Arizona.

  Bob was convinced that, unlike so many tales of treasure that ultimately lack foundation, the “lost gold” of the Dutchman was more than a figment of an overheated imagination. The KGC had been there, planted its flag and buried its riches.

  18

  Arkansas: The Sentinel’s Treasure

  BOB BREWER’S education as a Confederate code-breaker had come full circle. As much as any outsider could, he had begun to lift the veil on the KGC. He had come to appreciate why some had described the secret organization as the most powerful subversive group in American history. Over five decades, beginning unawares with his great-uncle in the Ouachitas, he had uncovered numerous trails and unearthed certain treasures left behind by the conspirators. Along the way, he had encountered a number of snakes—some garden variety, some human. And he had made some good friends, among them Tilley, Fretz, London, Hardcastle, Gardner and MacLeod.

  To a man, these friends at first did not know what to make of Bob’s quest, his unbending effort to expose unwritten chapters of American history. But eventually they realized that his hunt was grounded in reality. It was not starry-eyed, but systematic; not unproductive, but enlightened and enlightening—and potentially lucrative. They had seen the evidence at the end of the trail and were awed, unlike others who, behind his back or to his face, had scoffed at his “obsession.”

  Bob had felt no real animus toward the naysayers, some of whom were kin. Even when faced with the cool-to-the-touch reality of the gold and silver coins, many found the dizzying story behind his finds just too much to follow, much less accept. Perhaps, in some cases, it was just jealousy, or a reluctance to eat one’s words when shown to be wrong.

  As for Michael Griffith, Bob had not completely purged the bitter memory of his dealings with the Oklahoma schoolteacher from his mind. On one occasion, he drove
through Griffith’s hometown of Poteau, near the Arkansas border, and pulled within sight of Griffith’s residence. On the hillside above Griffith’s modest mobile home stood a new, large modern Victorian-style house, surrounded by a high fence. This obvious “lifestyle change” was particularly notable, Bob thought, for someone on a schoolteacher’s salary and for a treasure-hunting hobbyist who had worried about not being able to afford attending a treasure symposium.1 Disgusted, he whipped the car around and headed home. As best he could manage, he put the past behind.

  Back in Hatfield, there were new forces pushing his investigation forward, into new locales. Through TreasureNet.com and other treasure-oriented websites and chat communities, word had gotten round that “Hillbilly Bob Brewer” was not the typical blowhard with nothing to show for his wisdom. Buzz on the Internet among veteran cache hunters was that “HBB” was a straightshooter who could “read the signs” and had found verifiable treasures.2

  Eventually, hundreds of curious folks from around the country—people who had never met Bob—started contacting him by email about possible KGC markers seen while hiking, hunting, fishing, logging, treasure hunting or simply working in their own backyards. Digitally transmitted photos, some showing century-old symbols possibly etched by Jesse James, started flooding into the computer in his war room.

  Bob was not used to being called an authority, and he got a kick out of the interest and curiosity expressed from far off corners of America. Sometimes, he would volunteer free advice on specific questions from newcomers to the treasure-hunting world. Other times, he would establish a working relationship and selectively agree to consult for a fee on specific projects. But there were instances when he would not respond, mostly out of disdain for the correspondents’ “need to know yesterday” approach or, at times, the presumptuousness of those who might simply have held a small piece of the KGC tiger by the tail. He had no truck with those who failed to respect the camouflaged and potentially dangerous beast that he had been dealing with nearly all his life.