Rebel Gold

by Warren Getler

  Still, in a sense, the correspondence was all a sideshow. He had a bigger mission to fulfill: closing the loop on Grandpa and Uncle Ode’s mystery, right there in his backyard.

  Just twelve miles west of his home in Hatfield stood Smoke Rock Mountain and its Bible Tree: critical landmarks to an enigmatic grid. That grid, he now realized, was a microcosm of the astounding puzzle that he had uncovered in Arizona and elsewhere across the South and Southwest.

  Bob settled down to assemble pieces of the Arkansas puzzle that he and Linda had diligently acquired from dozens of sources and hundreds of sites. There was little doubt, after his years on the trail, that the Brushy and Cossatot valleys were the setting for extensive KGC depositories. Jesse James likely had set it all in motion. Bill Wiley, Will and Odis Ashcraft, Isom and Ed Avants, J. P. Smith, Will Dobson, Jack Hicks and others, possibly including Goat Brown, had protected the layout for decades under supervision from unnamed higher-ups. All this, it appeared, was a part of a KGC master scheme initially sketched out by Albert Pike, Caleb Cushing and other powerful behind-the-scenes men of intrigue.

  So much had pointed in that direction, albeit in an indecipherable jumble, during his boyhood. With the wisdom that he since had acquired, he could analyze much more of the encrypted evidence for its true meaning and significance. The signs certainly were there: the difference was that he now had the computational lens to bring them into focus, to read between the lines, as it were. Moreover, years of conducting background checks into Jesse James, Albert Pike and others had paid dividends in his fieldwork. Of no less import were additional copies of Orvus Howk’s letters, waybills and other documents that had come his way from treasure-hunting associates.

  The textual and visual information in Orvus Lee Howk–Jesse Lee James’s letters and maps had worked! These, along with the general guidance provided in Schrader and Howk’s book and his own personal archive of historical and familial material, had helped propel him to the systematic recovery of treasure and other buried items in carefully laid, geometric grids.

  The Howk letters had provided crucial insights into the tricks that the KGC employed in burying its caches. They also had shed light on some of the most important strategic decisions made by the clandestine group’s top echelon. Perhaps the most fascinating example was the suggestion that the KGC—responding to intelligence reports that maps for key depositories in several states had fallen into the hands of “some thugs”—had ordered particular caches moved.3 These reburials, according to Howk, were said to have occurred in the 1930s and 1940s. This might explain the camouflaged activity of W. D. Ashcraft, Dobson and others in the backwoods around the Brushy and Cossatot valleys during that period, Bob surmised.

  Another case—one that helped persuade Bob that the James brothers and their KGC comrades had designated the Hatfield–Brushy Creek area for “master depository” status—was a cryptically written article in the Mena Star of May 21, 1931.4 If Bob Tilley’s wife Wanda, an avid genealogist and researcher of local history, had not scoured reel upon reel of microfilm, Bob and his lifelong friend might never have seen the embedded KGC waybill describing the layout of the local treasure grid.

  The story presented, on one level, an uncorroborated account of a second Jesse James stagecoach robbery just east of Hot Springs in the fall of 1874.

  Every James gang historian knows that the notorious outlaws robbed the Hot Springs stage in January 1874, but few have heard about the second time the gang allegedly hit the same stage, in September of that year. What caught Bob’s attention was the alleged escape route, from Hot Springs west to the Choctaw Nation in Indian Territory. If the account were taken at face value, a running gun battle had ensued while the outlaws rode west through Caddo Gap and then into the precise area where Albert Pike’s cabin had stood. The chase carried on toward Bill Wiley’s cabin, over a thickly wooded area known as Long Ridge, and then on to Brushy Valley to within a few hundred yards of the log cabin where Will Ashcraft spent most of his life. The outlaws’ reported route also would have taken them to the doorpost of Isom Avants’s homestead and within half a mile of the Brewers’ future home.

  Bob found it notable, as well, that the author quoted someone who said that “it had all been planned out well in advance … to follow an almost straight westward route towards the Choctaw Nation.”

  Bingo. Bob had no way of knowing whether the event had occurred. But, in applying this newfound knowledge to his fieldwork, he recognized the critical subtext. These “robbers” had traversed the KGC depository at almost its exact east-to-west centerline. To ride at a gallop through the remote system of streams and valleys of rugged west-central Arkansas is no small challenge: it would take a prescribed path marked by knowing scouts, the likes of Bill Wiley and, later, Will Ashcraft. The article ended with a sidebar describing a dashing “Capt. Smith”—a self-proclaimed associate of the James gang—arriving in the area with a horse named “Wild Bill.” The latter happened to be Wiley’s nickname.

  Bob was convinced that the article was meant to be read as a territorial marker and potential road map for those who knew the basics. Its real purpose was to inform members of the secret order of the depository’s general location and to mark its approximate center. At best, it was an “establishing” document: impenetrable to most and yet too general to show precisely where to retrieve a KGC cache.

  That indispensable knowledge—seldom if ever spelled out in text—would be passed on in the most mysterious of ways. It had everything to do with a rifle, a deer and the two larger-than-life characters from Bob’s boyhood adventures under the Ouachita canopy, Grandpa and Uncle Ode Ashcraft.

  When Aunt Bessie, Ode’s widow, had bequeathed Grandpa’s prized 1899 Savage rifle to Bob in the late 1980s, little did he realize how symbolically important the heirloom was—particularly as it was being handed down to someone outside the Ashcraft bloodline.5

  As a boy, Bob had been wildly impressed with the power and accuracy of the weapon. (It could shoot through thick pieces of metal with its high velocity cartridge, while the more common Winchesters could only dent the dangling metal squares.) As a grown man inheriting the well-oiled gun, he originally viewed the rifle merely as a fond keepsake. He felt a piece of history was being passed on: the weapon had belonged to Bill Wiley, who had given it to W. D. Ashcraft as a token of their friendship, who then had passed it on to his son, Ode.

  But now Bob was aware of something larger: the story of the rifle was somehow a symbolic link between members of a secret clan that lived in the Brushy and Cossatot valleys. It was a vital key, he realized, to Grandpa’s devotion to the woods, to the coded layout of the grid and to the old man’s attention to him as a youth. The gun was the shoot-to-kill weapon of a KGC sentinel, of W. D. Ashcraft, who had lived in Section 33, and who had been assigned to kill cowans on sight, questions asked later.

  The rifle’s arcane relation to the treasure grid would become apparent by chance. Bob had seen, in Wapanucka and numerous other sites, how the KGC had buried rifles, pistols and other firearms as pointers to important treasure markers or to the smaller caches themselves. The sleek 1899 Savage, however, had not been employed as such: it would not be left behind under inches of topsoil. Instead, it had been elevated to icon status in Brewer-Ashcraft family lore, in the oral tradition so important to many Arkansas backwoods families.

  Ode, according to family narrative, had used the rifle to fell the “biggest buck ever seen in the Ouachitas.” The woodsman, according to family tradition, had made a remarkable shot through stands of tall white oaks that wounded—but did not kill—the robust deer, sometime in 1932. The badly crippled buck, its shoulder shattered, had managed to clamber over three mountain crests before being tracked down by dogs and killed with a second shot from the Savage. In the end, the buck had traveled over three miles—on a route that passed known streams and watering holes—before succumbing. The story had seemed too elaborate to Bob when he first heard the tale as a kid. But the account, repea
ted a number of times by Grandpa and Uncle Ode, stuck in his memory because it was so unusual for an animal to wander so far after being hit by a bullet fired from such a high-velocity gun.

  Bob had not given the deer story much thought until some fifty years later. While visiting Jeff Ashcraft, a great-grandson of W.D., he came across a strange, carefully staged photograph of Grandpa sitting next to the trophy-head of Ode’s sturdy buck. The photo was among the contents of the old woodsman’s mysterious padlocked box—the same chest that Bob had sat upon as a child when visiting Grandpa in the Ashcraft cabin.

  The antiquated box, which Jeff Ashcraft had recovered from a barn owned by a relative, contained an assortment of W. D. Ashcraft memorabilia: a shoebox stuffed with photo negatives, a set of worn brass drafting tools and a brass pocket compass. The tools were nearly identical to the set Bob used for doing his precision map work.

  The drafting set and compass spoke to W.D.’s true profession, or at least to one of many. Grandpa was a mapmaker and a surveyor. Will Ashcraft—and most likely Bill Dobson—were not only assigned to protect the buried KGC gold in the region; they were also trusted operatives assigned the task of moving the caches! Why else, other than for measuring and placing lines on maps with absolute accuracy, would someone (no less an uneducated woodsman) keep such expensive drafting instruments locked up as prized possessions? The more Bob thought about it, the more sense it made. Moreover, this might explain why he had encountered so many dry holes where the old markers had told him to go.

  And, he learned, under the floorboards of the old cabin there was more evidence throwing light on Grandpa’s past. The curious assortment of artifacts also included two heavy, rusted ingot trays. Could it be that the secretive sentinel was not only in charge of overseeing the revised layout of a master KGC depository but perhaps also of making sure that incoming coinage be melted into bullion, stripped of all vestiges of its official origins and mintage?

  What caught Bob’s attention most of all were the box-camera negatives stacked in the shoebox. The old film should not have been there: he had been told by older Ashcraft relatives that Grandpa did not own a camera and thus did not leave behind any visual record of his activities. As it turned out, Bob found scores of photo negatives, possibly from the 1920s and 1930s. The negatives appeared to be mostly of outdoor scenes of the Ouachitas, although it was hard to be sure without having the prints in hand.

  Jeff Ashcraft later offered to convert a number of the negatives into black-and-white prints. As it turned out, they were mostly landscape shots: showing Will Ashcraft, his sons and various unidentified men standing with rifles in front of mountain outcrops, tunnels and other landmarks deep in the wooded hills.

  Bob noticed an uncanny pattern to the photos and soon found himself lost in the images. When he took the prints into his war room and scanned them into his computer for higher resolution, his fascination grew. He had been to nearly every location as a youth! He soon began to recall things about which he had thought little in decades. He remembered how, for instance, at nearly each location Grandpa or Ode had told some anecdote or another—about a hunting feat or the like.

  Now it was becoming clear why he had been the recipient of all this oral history in his boyhood and teens. He was being groomed to become a custodian of secret knowledge, for that day when the old-timers would be gone … when he well might be the only one around who knew the “story” about the designated sites. And there they were in the old photos, inconspicuous spots on trails, as snapped decades earlier: White Hole, Doe Hole, Blue Sky, Spanish Gold Mine, Blalock Fields, Jack Hicks’s homestead. Places frozen in his distant memory, all stemming from those cherished, youthful outings with his favorite pair of mountaineers.

  The strangest photo was that of W. D. Ashcraft grasping the deer mount from Odis’s grandiose hunting story. The “portrait” was taken in front of the stone chimney of the Ashcraft cabin. The old man’s eyeballs are rolled back, showing only the whites—the first thing to indicate that there might be something significant about the photo. Using a magnifying glass, Bob could see a strange but now oddly familiar set of symbols drawn on the chimney in the background: numbers, letters, hearts, triangles and a jack-o’-lantern face. He also could see that Grandpa’s left foot rested on a flat piece of metal with a hole in it. A small heart-shaped rock lay in the foreground, and a pyramid-shaped rock rested on a ledge between the mountaineer’s legs.

  It was a map, a photographic waybill!

  The KGC had resorted to all available means for conveying critical geographic information. On the receiving end were those who knew how to read the visual code and those with an aptitude for written and spoken allegory. An ultra-secret organization that dared not leave behind incriminating or revelatory texts (Orvus Howk’s mid-twentieth-century letters being a rare exception), it sought vehicles for ciphered correspondence, including abstract carvings on trees, rock faces, cacti and other landscape features; oral and written stories meant to serve as allegorical road maps; illustrated waybills that corresponded with topographic contour lines and directional lines marked by buried metallic clues; and finally, the overlying template, the indispensable element for integrating the depository system and locating the deeply buried master caches at specific sites. Now, adding to this extraordinary mix of esoteric nontextual communication, came a fascinating series of photographs, rich in content, with no captions attached.

  Over several days of analysis, in which he compared the new photographic data to information that he had already plotted on the old topos, Bob realized that the photo-map in Grandpa’s deer portrait was a symbolic rendition of the template. The site where the deer allegedly was first shot with the Savage was the approximate center of the template grid, and the allegorical trail taken by the deer over the three mountains was the centerline—all demarcating the revised layout anchored around Smoke Rock Mountain. He could well imagine that the Ouachita sentinels—Bill Wiley (who would die in 1930), and his sworn successor, Will Ashcraft—devised the plan under orders from the organization’s top ranks.

  Now Bob understood the importance of the gun. It was not the rifle so much as the deer. That was the key to the cipher. The solution was to follow the path of the bullet: from its discharge out of the gun barrel, to its penetration of the robust deer, to its final resting-place inside the animal’s carcass miles away. The photo-map was meaningless without the Ashcrafts’ oral waybill—a legend whose details were known only by a very few, indeed by those close to the family of the designated sentinel. The photo-map, no doubt, could also be used with the subtext of the 1931 Mena Star article, which was meant to create a lasting impression—a mental imprint—of the general location of the treasure layout. How brilliant, yet how obscure! Obviously too obscure, he realized, for a then-ten-year-old kid.

  As a seasoned adult, Bob did what the allegorical map in Ode’s hunting story—and thus in Grandpa’s deer-trophy photo—told him to do. With Linda, he followed the topographic details symbolically indicated in the photo to the end of the designated trail, to a specific location in the woods where the deer was said to have been killed. It turned out to be the precise spot—at what would be the northern tip of the aligned template—where he and Linda had recovered the teakettle stuffed with gold coins from the blown-apart Wells Fargo strongbox in April 1995. Here was incontrovertible proof that Grandpa was, in fact, a sentinel, that he had used an intricately choreographed and symbol-laden photo of himself as a road map to one of the treasures that he had guarded!

  The trail did not stop there. Grandpa’s photos, combined with the countless clues and signposts that Bob and Linda had uncovered over the decades, provided a narrow target zone for the centerpoint of the template. Now, with Ode’s deer story and Grandpa’s deer photo deciphered, Bob was able to determine the precise alignment of a KGC treasure grid on the local topographic map. He obtained confirmation of this, in part, by revisiting the spot where earlier he and his brother Jack had found the metal rod seen under Gra
ndpa’s foot in the deer photo: they had discovered the rod embedded in a spring on a line that Bob only now realized helped reveal the full layout of the depository. This, he knew, could not be chalked up to coincidence.

  The unraveling of the Ouachita KGC treasure grid was almost magical—indeed, automatic—from that point on. The properly aligned template indicated about a dozen spots where treasure caches would be buried, some along the key centerline indicated by the deer photo. At each indicated spot in the forested hills, all now on government property, Bob found an unmistakable burial marker. These were all but invisible to the untrained eye; yet he knew exactly what they were. Each time, it was almost as if he recognized the scribbled signature of family.

  He realized that he had arrived at another milestone.

  Directly below his feet, at each spot marked with a subtle distinct symbol, he knew that there was a sizable cache buried, no doubt similar to the coin-laden iron kettle that he and Linda had uncovered at the strongbox site. This time, he just walked away, empty-handed.

  As he left the sites, Bob’s mind veered back to the milestones in his quest. The Ouachita jars full of gold coins, the upturned strongbox, the Wapanucka and Wolf Map sites, the coin-filled teakettle, the innumerable carved and buried clues along the backcountry trails from Arkansas to Arizona, the Adamsville shaft and other burial locations—all these pointed to the bigger truth of the underground nationwide “system.” Now he had become aware of the precise location of multiple moorings to one section of that subterranean financial network: a secret subsurface bank guarded, he now fully comprehended, by some of his forebears. The deer photo—with Will Ashcraft cryptically pointing the way through a symbolic maze—had capped it all. It miraculously allowed Bob to redraw the cache-burial plan exactly like the one Grandpa and others originally had used to plot their multiple interments of hard currency. But to recognize the photo-map for what it truly was took a lifetime of learning.