Rebel Gold

by Warren Getler

  Further, the book’s authors go into detail in explaining how paintings by the French master Poussin had served as deliberate visual waybills for locating components of the grid.2 Andrews and Schellenberger demonstrate how key components of Poussin’s pastoral “Arcadia” paintings provide lines of investigation toward the final target: a mountain, on government land, where, the authors speculate, a tunnel or tomb holding the Templars’ ultimate secret is located. Yet the “practical” problems—of the tomb being buried under thousands of tons of rock inside the mountain “tunnel,” and of needing “permission of the local authorities and, in view of the implications, perhaps the French government”—prevent any easily achievable move toward substantiation of their hypothesis.3

  Had Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) deliberately painted an idyllic road “map” to provide clues to the repository of some fabulously important and dangerous secret? Had the painter David Teniers followed suit in the same general period? If true, to think that the KGC may have carried on a practice of providing coded road maps through visual arts: encrypted 1920s black-and-white photography from the likes of Will Ashcraft had followed in the stealthy tradition of Poussin’s cloaked masterworks in oil!

  The Knights Templar, according to Tomb of God and Holy Blood, Holy Grail and other popular texts, had absorbed many Jewish, Cabalist, Hermetic and Muslim traditions of the East during their long residence in Outremer, the Holy Land. As such, they may have sparked the beginning of a powerful mixed-faith spirituality movement—one that emphasized open-mindedness, individualism and a blend of religion, science and mysticism—giving rise to the seventeenth-century Rosicrucianism. With their emboldened foes of Vatican orthodoxy, their strident proponents of intellectual freedom and their mysterious symbol of the red rose, the Rosicrucians attracted many of the intellectual, scientific and cultural leading lights of the period.4 Here, perhaps, was the beginning of an enduring link between the KGC and the Templar phenomenon in Europe, Bob thought.

  He had come across a brief but perhaps significant sentence in Jesse James Was One of His Names. In their chapter “The Knights of the Golden Circle,” authors Schrader and Howk state: “Some of the craftiest, finest brains in the South directed the activities of The Knights of the Golden Circle…. A couple were members of the Rosicrucians.” It was almost as if, in the book’s three hundred pages about the exploits of Jesse James, the offhand remark was meant to be an aside. But it most likely was not, he thought.

  What might explain, he wondered, the odd timing of events occurring on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1800s? That is, the KGC’s designing vast and disparate depots for buried treasure and the discovery in France of encrypted parchments that ultimately revealed, according to Tomb of God, a “recurring system of symbolism” and an extensive topographic/geometric layout?5 Clearly, the groups behind such carefully planned layouts—whether in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona, the Ouachitas of Arkansas, or the rolling terrain of south-central France—had expert knowledge of surveying, engineering, mathematics, “sacred geometry,” Euclidean logic, geology, encryption. And they must have been powerfully motivated to go to such lengths. But why? Was there a religious connection?

  Father Saunière, the priest who discovered the coded parchments in France during the late nineteenth century, inexplicably placed a demon-figure sculpture inside his Church of Mary Magdalene: the demon happens to be making the key KGC hand signal—the tip of his right forefinger touching the tip of his thumb to form a circle. Saunière’s fantastic disclosure, coincidentally, resulted in his becoming quite wealthy—paid in vast sums of gold francs by unknown sources. Following his discovery the local priests affiliated with him suffered sudden, mysterious deaths.6 All this occurred around the same time as the enigmatic activities of Jacob Waltz, the Lost Dutchman, who seemed to have come into certain wealth, appeared to have had some connection to encrypted tablets or signposts and who apparently had placed a curse on those trying to find his gold in the Superstitions.

  Bob had no knowledge of a positive link between the events in France and the KGC. He speculated that they were connected through a Templar–Rosicrucian–Scottish Rite–KGC continuum. He found a connection in Holy Blood, Holy Grail. About halfway through the book, there is a specific reference to the Scottish Rite and to Rennes-le-Château.7 Citing the 1979 French book Treasure of the Golden Triangle by Jean Luc Chaumeil, and its “privileged sources” of information, the Holy Blood, Holy Grail’s authors say that Chaumeil noted that “a number of clerics involved in the enigma of Rennes-le-Château—Saunière, Boudet, quite probably others—were affiliated with a form of Scottish Rite Freemasonry.” They observe:

  … the Masonry M. Chaumeil describes would have been acceptable, despite papal condemnation, to devout Catholics—whether eighteenth-century Jacobites or nineteenth-century French priests…. Rome certainly disapproved—and quite vehemently. Nevertheless, the individuals involved seem not only to have persisted in regarding themselves as Christians and Catholics; they also seem, on the basis of the available evidence, to have received a major and exhilarating transfusion of faith—a transfusion that enabled them to see themselves as, if anything, more truly Christian than the papacy.8

  Because the available evidence was at best sketchy, Bob would not draw any hard conclusions about shared philosophical or spiritual ideas behind the grid-making under way on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid- to late-1800s. At best, Bob concluded, both groups of grid- and map-makers seem to have borrowed from Templar tradition, ritual and lore.

  Bob had spent decades exploring how the KGC employed Masonic ritual, imagery and symbolism: an effective means of communicating with an informed elite that left others in the dark. He had learned that where virtually no paper trail exists, as typically is the case with secret societies, analysis of symbols is the only substantive and effective way to investigate. That said, he recognized that there would always be ambiguity in interpretation.

  He did not have to look far for parallels in symbolism in the seemingly overlapping pattern of events in Europe and America. Leaving the geometry aside, Tomb of God describes a large, carved horse’s head observed in the side of a mountain. The book also refers to encrypted hidden messages translating as the “Horse of God.” Were the shadowy players in France aware of the modus operandi of those in Arkansas who had inscribed the Bible Tree with its central horse figure? Were they in lockstep with those in Arizona who had engraved the stone tablets with a draft horse (and the misspelled caption “EL COBOLLO DE SANTAFE”—HORSE OF HOLY FAITH) or those who had buried the Percheron horse skull in Adamsville? Did the Latin cipher in Saunière’s parchments have a direct parallel to the Spanish code in the Arizona stone tablets? Were the clues on both sides of the Atlantic indeed derived from the same symbolic set?

  One particular description about the symbolism in the Rennes area was evocative. Henry Lincoln, coauthor of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, reportedly had come across a rock face, near the historic town, that had been inscribed with a heart shot through with an arrow, and with a symbolic name and the date 1891 chiseled below. In his 1998 sequel about the mystery of the surrounding topographic grid, Key to the Sacred Pattern, Lincoln says the circumstances overshadowing his discovery of the carved symbol were disturbing: “It is to be the first evidence that our movements are being watched. And the watching eyes, it seems, are unfriendly and even unscrupulous. Our return visit produces a shock. The inscription is no longer there. It has been hacked from the rock. My photograph is the only evidence that the inscription ever existed.” 9

  There was little doubt in Bob’s mind that the KGC depositories and the grid around Rennes-le-Château, as described in Tomb of God and Holy Blood, Holy Grail, were connected to Templar/Masonic tradition. He knew of other sites in England and Scotland that could be placed in the same category, again because of the recurrent symbolism and an implied geometry centered on a perceived circle-in-square template. And then there was Oak Island, Nova Scotia, where a suspect
ed treasure—possibly associated with the Templars and Freemasons—had eluded discovery for centuries despite extensive excavation in a deep shaft known, yes, as the Money Pit.10 That no gold or other treasure had been recovered on Oak Island mattered little. What did matter to Bob were the mysterious artifacts that had been retrieved and recorded over many decades from the Canadian site: sculpted heart-shaped rocks; slabs with inscribed hieroglyphic-like writing; slabs with the letter G, slabs with drill holes; boulders shaped like skulls, deep earthen shafts with layers of charcoal and broken porcelain laid down; rock pile formations in the shapes of circles, arrowheads and crosses; and cryptic carvings in trees.11

  Were these signs and symbols—stretching from Europe to North America—all part of the unspoken, esoteric vocabulary of Grandpa and Uncle Ode? Perhaps. On his regular visits to Six Mile Cemetery, where his father and the two Ashcraft woodsmen lie buried in a hilly patch a mile from Hatfield, Bob thinks about such things, about unexpected connections. And he dreams about traveling, with Linda, to that mysterious village in southern France, to Oak Island and other places where such connections might exist.

  Placing his hand over etchings of single-stemmed roses on the Ashcrafts’ tombstones, he wonders about the hidden mission of the sentinels. He wonders whether the nation’s brutal Civil War might have had undercurrents that went beyond slavery and states’ rights. Each time he leaves the gates of Six Mile, he wonders whether the War Between the States might have been something far stranger in its genesis.

  The pursuit of independence by these confederated States has a very different aim from the redress of such shallow griefs as these.

  Whoever shall be able hereafter to reveal the secret history of these various conclaves which have held counsel on the repeated attempts to invade and conquer, —or, as the phrase was, liberate Cuba; whoever shall unfold the schemes of seizing Nicaragua, of aiding revolution in Mexico, of possessing Sonora, will make some pretty sure advances in disclosing the true pathway to the sources of this rebellion. The organization of the Knights of the Golden Circle, and their spread over the country; their meetings and transactions; who managed them and set them on to do their appointed work, —whoever shall penetrate into the midnight which veiled this order from view, will also open an authentic chapter in the history of this outbreak.

  —From the 1865 book Mr. Ambrose’s letters on the rebellion, by former U.S. Secretary of the Navy and Maryland congressman, John P. Kennedy.

  (1) William Daniel “Grandpa” Ashcraft on patrol in Arkansas’s Ouachita forests, protecting a KGC depository treasure.

  (2) The Brewer boys, Jack, Bob and Dave, with their beloved uncle, Odis Ashcraft, son of W. D. Odis, killed in a timber accident a few years later, also knew the secrets behind the treasure signs.

  (3) W. D. Ashcraft, eyes rolled back, poses outside his cabin in a coded photograph, with a deer head, chalked-in numerals and other items in background serving as signposts for the local treasure grid.

  (4) William Martin Wiley (right) with armed colleague Feck Davis. Wiley, an ex-Confederate from Texas, stood guard for decades over a KGC treasure depository near Hatfield, Ark. W.D. Ashcraft later assumed Wiley’s role as a KGC sentinel.

  (5) A coded photograph of a winking James Blalock, member of a clandestine KGC network operating in Arkansas’s Ouachita Mountains in the early twentieth century. Among many KGC symbols in the photo: a U.S. Large Cent coin, a symbol of the KGC, or “Copperheads,” on his lapel; an axe-head atop Blalock’s staff, also a symbol of the KGC; and in the instep of Blalock’s right foot, an image of a Masonic, all-seeing eye.

  (6) Jacket of Edmund Wright, one of several intriguing nineteenth-century exposés of the Knights of the Golden Circle. It names some prominent officials, such as U.S. Vice President John C. Breckinridge, as affiliated with the clandestine movement.

  (7) The Grand Seal of the KGC, from a nineteenth-century KGC membership card.

  (8) George Bickley, the quizzical frontman for the KGC, who promoted secession and was jailed during the Civil War by Abraham Lincoln.

  (9) General John Anthony Quit-man, a pro-slavery ideologue with high status in Scottish Rite Masonic circles. His pre—Civil War KGC affiliation is suggested by the star and crescent symbols on the horse’s riding apron.

  (10) Masonic leader Albert Pike, who at various points of his career served as a Confederate brigadier general and the highest-ranking Scottish Rite Freemason in the world. Evidence suggests he was a KGC mastermind.

  (11) Nathan Bedford Forrest, feared Confederate cavalry leader, who later became a leader of both the Knights of the Golden Circle and the Ku Klux Klan.

  (12) KGC cipher and encrypted message written inside the cover of a prayer book once in the possession of George Bickley and now at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

  (13) Confederate cipher as discovered by Union forces during the occupation of Richmond in April 1865.

  (14) The KGC-encrypted “Bible Tree,” first shown by W. D. Ashcraft to Bob Brewer as a youngster in 1950. The carved beech—here showing the horse or mule figure, the J.A.S. inscription and other chalked-in markings—served as a directional road map for various parts of the KGC’s Ouachita underground treasure grid, as Bob would later discover over decades of intensive research.

  (15) Another ancient carved beech in Brushy Valley, showing the names of KGC associates W. D. Ashcraft and J. Avants, with dates ranging from the 1850s through the early 1900s.

  (16) Pages from the daybook of Isom Avants. The pocket notebook reveals the names of locals, including Will Ashcraft and James Blalock, apparently involved in some undefined business operation centered around Shady, Arkansas—the guarding of hidden caches of former Rebel treasure.

  (17) This page from Avants’s “Memorandum” daybook, shows a spiderweb-like drawing that Bob Brewer would later discover to be a crude match for the circular “template” used by the KGC to lay out its treasure grids across the South and Southwest.

  (18) A spiderweb-like grid found on a “stone map” discovered in Texas and presumably outlining a KGC depository layout. Note the similarity to the drawing in Avants’s daybook.

  (19) Large KGC coded inscription on beech in Ouachitas. The swaying palm, seagull and crescent moon formed a Confederate montage found in numerous emblems of secession, including the South Carolina flag.

  (20) Another heavily inscribed beech, serving as a road map for locating KGC treasure, in the Arkansas backcountry. Note the vertical snake figure and the egg-laying turtle figure to its right. The turtle is a key KGC sign for treasure. This tree map—in combination with other carvings and numerous items buried in the shallow surface—helped lead Bob Brewer to treasure.

  (21) Bob Brewer’s lifelong friend and neighbor Bob Tilley, pointing to a carved snake. The snake form, in this instance, represents the course of a local stream.

  (22) Bob Smith, a treasure-hunting friend of Tilley and, for a short while, Brewer, holding up a large “heart rock” map that he dug up in the Brushy Valley. The rock is inscribed with numerous lines and dots. Hearts—carved into trees and rock faces or sculpted from stone or metal and buried in the ground—are key KGC markers for treasure. Brewer has identified more than a dozen such heart figures at suspected KGC depository sites.

  (23) Sculpted metal heart found jointly by the authors at a legendary Jesse James treasure site in Oklahoma, buried in an open field, about a foot deep, along a compass bearing that Brewer derived from nearby carved symbols.

  (24) A portrait of Jesse Woodson James as a young man.

  (25) Front-page story in Lawton, Oklahoma, newspaper from the late 1940s. The article sparked a nationwide controversy about the Jesse James saga and associated rumors of buried Confederate treasure.

  (26) Several telltale features, including a “JJ” for Jesse James and the date 1880, visible at a treasure site in Wapanucka, Oklahoma, where Bob Brewer and others located buried sign-posts and caches of coins.

  (27) Buried gun barrel as uncove
red by Bob Brewer and Michael Griffith on a high ledge above Delaware Creek at the Wapanucka site. The gun barrel provided an important directional pointer for solving the treasure grid.

  (28) U.S. gold and silver nineteenth-century coins found by Brewer and Michael Griffith at sites in and around Wapanucka, Oklahoma. The newest coins in the batch are dated 1880, corresponding to the 1880 designation on both the Jesse James map and the “JJ” “1880” carvings found at the site.

  (29) The priest-templar stone map from the Superstition Mountain area of south-central Arizona. In broken Spanish, instructions advise to “Look for the Map, Look for the Heart.” Bob Brewer was able to locate the topographic equivalent of the priest figure in the contour lines of a U.S. Geological Survey map of the Superstition area dating from the early 1900s.