Rebel Gold

by Warren Getler

  Such were the considerations as Bob tried to comprehend both the mechanics of the elaborate grid system before him and the nature of what he was looking for.

  Not only did the buried metal clues lie on indicated lines; more important, they also seemed to mark where two lines crossed. And there was another facet to consider. If the distances indicated thus far were in furlongs, what other American surveyor measurements might have been used in the system? Among the buried junk that he had found were random short links of chain and iron rods. If these were being used to indicate distance, could they not metaphorically represent surveyor gauges for linear measurement, known as chains (66 feet) and rods (161/2 feet), where 40 rods would equal 1 furlong, and 8 furlongs would equal one statute mile (5,280 feet)?9

  Bob began to grasp the ingenuity, the enormity of the puzzle. In the distribution of the carved clues and buried markers, there seemed to be a hidden logic, a symbolic language, a cunning intelligence to it all. These boys were surveyors, he thought to himself. The hunt was becoming intoxicating.

  When Bob told Linda that the scattered metal parts might not have been junk after all, she was not convinced. She was pleased for Bob and his new enthusiasm, but she still wondered what the real facts were and whether any treasure were actually involved. Bob had been saying “Spanish” treasure for more than a decade, and now, in the early 1990s, he was saying that it wasn’t Spanish. And what last week had been junk was now something useful.

  She was at a loss as to why he had nothing to show for his painstaking detective work except a bunch of withered metal scrap and weird-shaped rocks. She had several female friends whose husbands had been avid treasure hunters: to a man, they left their families poorer for the effort, never seeming to turn up much—in fact, anything at all—on the trail. She was also concerned for the safety of her husband, who, with failing eyesight, continued to venture out every day amid the deadly snakes and the treacherous crags. Still, the patient soft-spoken Sunday school teacher had not lost faith in Bob’s ability to succeed at whatever he started. She marveled at his mental discipline, his inquisitiveness, his ability to concentrate on an abstract, inscrutable puzzle for impossibly long stretches. Most of all, she marveled at his ability to disregard all detractors and doubters.

  Hearing Linda’s concern and acknowledging her forbearance over all these years, Bob reassured her that if he ever reached the point where it was obvious to both that he was not making progress, he would quit. And then he went back to work on his maps.

  Rather than sit home and worry, Linda started accompanying Bob more often. She loved the exercise of traversing the mountains. But most of all she craved the opportunity to spend more free time with her husband, whose renewed enthusiasm was infectious. In a matter of weeks, she became adept at spotting clues, working off Bob’s leads.

  Now, with a partner in tow, Bob’s rate of discovery of buried clues climbed exponentially. Linda, in turn, showed signs of becoming hooked on the hunt, watching the system of interconnected clues play itself out. Still, she harbored doubts that all his efforts would ever yield a substantial return, intellectual or financial.

  One April day in 1991, Bob’s hunt took him to an intriguing marker-filled area, where several lines appeared to cross. There, at a thickly wooded spot along a creek bank, he noticed some large odd-shaped rocks that looked out of place. Moreover, one of the surrounding trees—a maple—had a subtle vertical line cut into its bark. He recognized it as a “blaze,” a trail marker crafted by the sharp edge of a woodsman’s axe. That was the clincher, the subtle signal that the surrounding stones on the forest floor were clues.

  Because it was already dusk, he decided to head home and return the following day with Linda, who could provide a welcome second set of eyes. Vigilance was critical. It was well into snake season, and the timber rattlers, copperheads and water moccasins were energetically sloughing off hibernation. While he routinely carried a large .44 Magnum revolver loaded with snake shot, the weapon would not do much good if his eyes were focused exclusively on the clues at hand. The holstered gun also interfered with the operation of his metal detector, constantly requiring him to remove his gunbelt. As the site had looked promising, he decided to lose no time and return early the next day with his new detector. The device was capable of finding deeper targets, such as caches, rather than just smaller objects on the surface or just below.

  Soon after sunrise the next morning, with Linda at his side, Bob surveyed the base of the “blazed” tree, but his detector emitted no signal. He then aligned himself with the north-pointing tip of a large arrow-shaped rock, which lay a few feet from the blazed maple. He followed that line from the pointed rock across the creek, some twenty feet away. On the other bank, about fifteen feet from the creek bed, the detector sounded.

  Excitedly, he probed with a shovel and hit metal, about four inches deep. Reaching into the hole, he pulled up an old axe head and marked its precise southwest orientation on his topo. While washing off the axe head in the creek, he noticed that it had a small notch chipped in its blade. Recalling how other buried metal clues had similar grooves or notches, he thought that the grooves might represent surveyor’s distance markers.

  Which one, though? Walking southwest, back across the creek, precisely one chain—sixty-six feet—he came to a large, shoebox-shaped rock. Searching behind the rectangular boulder, he detected part of a buried metal singletree, a device used in harnessing horses. Noting the precise orientation of the object’s rounded tip, he took a compass heading. It pointed in the direction of the maple—providing a line that completed the third leg of a triangle. Bob held the detector low to the ground as he paced slowly in the southeasterly direction indicated by the singletree. Some twenty feet along that bearing, the detector swung to its maximum reading.

  As Bob started probing with the shovel, he realized that the object was buried deeper than usual. He carefully dug through the soft, loamy soil. At about eighteen inches, the shovel struck something that he knew was neither metal nor rock. Dropping to his knees, he reached into the hole and felt smooth glass. He groped again, this time retrieving a patina-coated, pint-sized fruit jar with his trembling hands. It was filled with gold and silver coins.

  The system had worked.

  The signs and the lines had led to treasure. In that brilliant second of discovery, Bob experienced a serene, indescribable calm. Intuitively, he knew that this breakthrough was no mere coincidence. Geometry, geography, navigation, cryptanalysis, intuition and raw persistence had meshed to bring him to this tiny spot in a vast wilderness.

  In that wonderful moment, he sensed that he had only just begun to unlock the code.

  Wiping the sweat from below the rim of his felt Stetson hat, he bowed his head and for a while was at a loss for words. He stood up, slowly, still unable to speak. He twirled the heavy glass container in his large palm, letting the sunshine bounce off the lustrous coins inside. “It’s gold,” he said softly to Linda, who ran over to hug him. He held her close as she took in what had happened. “Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness, honey! It looks so nice!” she blurted, her face now wet with tears. Her slight frame trembled and Bob looked at her, concerned. She laughed, and, with a kiss, reassured him: “Well, at least now I know you’re not crazy.”

  At this first major milestone in his odyssey, Bob felt dizzy and disoriented. Steadying his stocky five-foot-ten, two hundred twenty pound frame, he walked the cache to the nearby stream to rinse off the coins. Then he called out the dates and denominations of each washed coin. They were all U.S. Mint—nothing even remotely resembling Spanish pieces-of-eight. “Five dollar gold piece, 1866. Twenty dollar gold piece, 1854. Ten dollar gold, 1845,” and on and on. The tally: over $400 face value in gold coins (which, in today’s numismatic terms would be some 50 to 70 times that amount, depending on rarity and age), and around $60 face value in silver dollars (or a numismatic multiple of some 15 to 30 times that amount, depending on rarity and age), plus loose change. All were minted
between 1802 and 1889. The date on the bottom of the jar: June 1903.

  “This is outlaw money,” Bob exclaimed. “And those funny signs got us to it.”

  Those “funny signs,” in fact, were the coded inscriptions of the Knights of the Golden Circle and their post–Civil War adherents.

  5

  The KGC: The Hidden History

  THE only official document even to hint that the KGC, and thus a shadow Confederacy, may have gone underground in the Deep South in the final phase of the war is the Holt Report, on file at the Library of Congress.1 The 14,000-word submission to U.S. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, dated October 8, 1864, provides the most detailed account of the KGC. Entitled “A Western Conspiracy in Aid of the Southern Rebellion,” it is based upon Union intelligence from Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and the border states of Missouri and Kentucky, but not from the South itself.

  Written by the highest-ranking officer in the military-justice system at the time, Judge Advocate Gen. Joseph Holt, the report makes several trenchant points and describes the KGC as the “echo and faithful ally” of the Confederacy.

  Holt begins by acknowledging the existence of the KGC, “chiefly military in its character.” He asserts that as many as 500,000 Northerners were KGC members and estimates that as many as 340,000 men were trained and equipped for mobilization.2 No mention is made of the number of possible inductees in the South.

  The report emphasizes that the order promoted an individual’s “absolute right” to own slaves as private property and a state’s right to resist “coercion” from federal authorities.3 It goes on to point a finger squarely at the KGC for precipitating fratricidal conflict on American soil, noting that the subversive society’s “detestable plotting culminated in open rebellion and bloody Civil War.”4

  Holt concludes his report with the admonition: “Judea produced but one Judas Iscariot, and Rome, from the sinks of her demoralization, produced but one Cataline, and yet, as events prove, there has arisen together in our land an entire brood of such traitors, all animated by the same patricidal spirit, and all struggling with the same relentless malignity for the dismemberment of our Union.”5

  But by far Holt’s most intriguing comment appears near the end of the document. It is this: “A citizen, captured by a guerrilla band in Kentucky last summer, records the fact that the establishment of a new Confederacy as the deliberate purpose of the Western people was boastfully asserted by these outlaws, who also assured their prisoner that in the event of such establishment, there would be a greater rebellion than ever! Lastly, it is claimed that the new Confederacy is already organized; that it has a ‘provisional government,’ officers, departments, bureaus, etc. in secret operation.”6

  With that provocative lead, the snapshot view of the KGC might have been blown up, magnified to reveal the secret order’s full colors. It never was. History missed it, perhaps precisely because the KGC was so effective at concealing its real plans, its motivations, its intentions. Still, a reasonable attempt can be made to provide the fuller, true picture of the KGC—based on what is largely circumstantial evidence that plausibly links key players, places and organizations in a convincing, interpretive framework.

  None of the individuals described below acknowledged membership in the core KGC. To do so, according to the rare anonymous or pseudonymous-insider historical accounts that exist, would have been suicidal.

  The KGC’s Power Brokers

  Charleston was the crucible. The aristocratic coastal city, in whose busy harbor the Civil War would commence, spawned the KGC in its embryonic, nameless form in the 1830s. Two powerful social forces led to the formation of the secret organization.

  The first of these influences was the nullification/states’ rights/secession movement led by the formidable South Carolina statesman, aristocrat and pro-slavery ideologue, John C. Calhoun. The second was the establishment by the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry of a national Supreme Council in Charleston in May 1801.7

  What possibly could have served as a common thread between these two camps: one a radical political movement, the other an age-old, semi-secret fraternal order with European roots?

  The answer lies, in part, in a shared and passionate belief in rugged individualism (that is, at least for the white majority population at the time) and in the conviction that there is no higher good than individual freedom triumphing over a central, despotic authority. Essayist Robert Penn Warren, in his famous rumination, The Legacy of the Civil War, noted that one of the prime sources of “self-division” leading up to the War Between the States “was the universalist conception of freedom based on natural law, inherited from the Revolution.”8 Both secessionist and Masonic forces centered in Charleston saw Jeffersonian principles of “popular sovereignty” (essentially letting ultimate political power reside with individuals as a check on strong central government) as a radiant guiding light, although each followed that light in its own way.

  Calhoun was the nation’s leading advocate of states’ rights and its essential corollaries, the right to own slaves and to transport them as human chattel into the territories of the United States. His vision of America, shared with many others of his social class, was the “eighteenth-century agrarianism of a stable planter society,” as one historian noted.9

  Scottish Rite Freemasonry stressed an individual’s intellectual, scholarly and political freedom. Such is a legacy, perhaps, of what many believe is Freemasonry’s historical association with the medieval Knights Templar and that powerful French-based secret order’s flight from persecution by King Philip IV of France (who was not only jealous of the order’s growing influence but owed financial debts to the Knights) and the Roman Catholic Church of French-born Pope Clement V (who, under pressure from King Philip, turned on the former crusaders).10 It will never be known if there is a direct link between these soldier monks, known as “Templars” (from Knights of the Temple), and subsequent “Freemasons,” or whether early Freemasonry merely modeled itself after certain real or perceived Templar traditions, rituals and customs.11

  Some researchers believe that the persecuted monk warriors (excommunicated by Clement V in 1312) originally took refuge in Scotland and England,12 hiding within the stone-mason guilds, hence the provenance of the name “Mason.” That “Masonic” link between the United Kingdom—particularly Scotland—and the Continent likely further developed when two Scottish Masons living in exile in Paris in the early 1700s, Charles Radclyffe and Andrew Michael Ramsay, sparked a surge of interest in Freemasonry in France. All of this, in some combination, may have engendered the term Scottish Rite. No firm evidence exists, however, as to the true origin or meaning of the phrase, first used at the beginning of the nineteenth century.13 In any event, the early Freemasons, or, as some would have it, the neo-Templars, would find themselves repeatedly at odds with the Vatican, which they saw as an incorrigible foe of free thinking and civil liberties.

  Beyond any philosophical affinity, old-line Scottish Rite Freemasonry provided an organizational structure for the underground states’ rights/secessionist movement that would become the KGC. The Rite promoted democracy and democratic values, at least rhetorically. But it built its own governing structure pyramidally, with its select “Supreme Council” members at the top, in command of the most valued information and highly guarded secrets. The Rite, to be sure, pursued a universalist base, yet one overseen by an enlightened elite. With its ascending ritualistic degrees of initiation (a winnowing-out process), code words, tacit understandings, secret geometry and cryptic symbolism, this complex order of Masonry provided an ideal basis for the KGC to establish a hidden politico-military network. Moreover, the Scottish Rite’s chief headquarters in Charleston and its northern headquarters in New York, established in 1813, provided an ideal axis for a subversive organization seeking to expand its power nationwide.

  In the volatile political mix that stirred in antebellum Charleston, these two forceful sociopolitical influences of secession
ism and Scottish Rite Freemasonry became intertwined in the parlors and meeting rooms. Nowhere was this more potently felt than within the redbrick building on the corner of Church and Broad streets in Charleston—headquarters of the Scottish Rite’s Mother Supreme Council of the World.

  (The two-hundred-year-old Scottish Rite, the largest modern Freemasonic organization, is very much in existence today, with its world headquarters—The House of the Temple—now located on Sixteenth Street in Washington, D.C., not far from the White House. According to its literature, the Rite functions as an intellectual and philanthropic fraternity, with its initiates pursuing a goal of self-improvement and a commitment to voluntarism, public health and public education.)14

  As civil war approached, the Scottish Rite, although supposedly nondenominational and nonpolitical, found it increasingly difficult to deny harboring strong pro-Confederate tendencies and affiliations among its core leadership. One of the issues its Supreme Council would find hardest to explain, after war broke out, was the destruction by fire of all its internal documents from its founding in 1801 to 1860. Some observers have asserted that the records were deliberately destroyed to obliterate a treasonous, pro-Confederate paper trail involving key members of the Scottish Rite’s leadership. “The Charleston Supreme Council destroyed its proceedings, for more than a half century. From 1801 to 1860, no records exist,” wrote the former president of Wheaton College and Masonic critic, Jonathan Blanchard, in 1882. “Those records covered the period of Nullification and the rise of the Rebellion, and were doubtless ghastly with treason, with attempts to burn down Northern cities, and poison inhabitants; for such things were attempted.”15

  Who, then, were the key players behind these two powerful social forces?