Rebel Gold

by Warren Getler

  Tilley, a nephew of Isom Avants, had known Bob Brewer since the two were kids. A few years older, Tilley mostly had spent time with Bob’s older brother, Jack. But, since Bob’s return from military service, the two Bobs had become close friends. They shared an interest in local history, treasure lore and treasure hunting, and they seemed to have a common heritage: Isom Avants and Grandpa Ashcraft were the closest of friends, and partners in some obscure enterprise. That enterprise seemed to be related to “mining,” for the old-timers shared numerous “mining claims” in the heart of the Ouachitas.

  Because Tilley held a regular weekday job, he and Bob hunted treasure on weekends only. On one outing in late 1989, Tilley told Bob about his new treasure-hunting buddy, Bob Smith, and said that he would like to introduce the newcomer. The “Three Bobs” hit it off, initially, and Bob and Tilley both showed Smith many of the tree signs they had encountered over the years.

  Curiously, Smith was all ears and no talk. Other than calling the signs “Spanish,” not once did he offer any interpretation about what he had seen and, ultimately, photographed. It was not just his sponge-like behavior that unsettled Bob and Tilley: Smith, on the trail, acted as if he were paranoid. He constantly spoke of people “tailing him,” of incessant remote “surveillance” of his outings into the forest. Never would he venture out without his miniature electronic eavesdropping headset. And he always insisted on taking someone else’s vehicle because his was “bugged with a tracking device.”

  The two Hatfield locals did not know what to make of the outsider’s rantings and they laughingly brushed them aside. Smith’s anxieties, Bob thought at first, could be dismissed as eccentricities and therefore could be overlooked.

  But he was not able to ignore Smith’s subsequent moves: “backtrailing” by four-wheel drive to the sites, defacing clues, digging around the clue sites and then having the audacity to tell Tilley that he suspected “Brewer” of having done it all!

  Bob had begun to sense a bigger problem when he learned from Tilley that Smith was complaining about his bringing along a camera and then a video recorder on the hunt. When Tilley subsequently revealed that Smith also had been badmouthing Bob about a defaced tree sign, Bob blew his top. What Tilley did not know at that point was that Bob had already confronted Smith about the defaced sign. Smith, of course, had denied any such vandalism. As it was, on his reconnaissance mission back to the site, Bob had seen tracks from Smith’s pickup but did not bother to go further in making the point to Smith. He had already sworn off the outsider.

  What most disturbed Bob was that Tilley seemed to have come under the schemer’s spell. His lifelong friend was snubbing him for the first time. Tilley, in turn, had become so fed up with both Smith’s bad-mouthing and Bob’s subsequent protestations that he decided to stop treasure hunting with either one. It was around this time that Bob had run into Smith at McLain’s and rolled the gold coins in front of his nose.

  In the weeks after his encounter with Smith at the coffee shop, Bob invited another lifelong friend, Don Fretz, to go treasure hunting. Although he preferred to cache hunt alone into the Ouachitas, he knew that it was best to have someone along who knew the terrain. Over the next month, he gave Fretz a crash course in interpreting some of the treasure signs and bent-tree formations used as line markers. Fretz proved a quick study. He was grateful for the pointers and hoped that his miserable treasure hunting luck might soon change.

  As soon as Smith caught wind of these outings, he made his move. He ingratiated himself with Fretz and repeated what he had done with Tilley: drive a wedge between the two locals using the same self-serving tactics. Before Bob knew it, Fretz and Smith were hunting together, and Bob’s old friend would hardly speak to him.3

  Smith worked fast. Within weeks of learning from Bob about the origins of the Goat Brown stash, he found out everything he could from Hatfield residents about Brown’s abandoned property. One had even drawn him a map, showing the general location of a few rocked-up springs on the forested site.

  Soon thereafter, Smith approached Fretz at McLain’s and asked the experienced local if he could help scout a few trails around the old Jess Brown property. The two headed out, and Fretz found the area with little problem. At the time, Fretz had no idea that Bob had found a jar stuffed with gold coins on the homesite and that Smith knew about the recovery. When Fretz found one of the springs drawn on the local’s map, he noticed that a giant bent-knee marker tree was pointing directly at the spot. The disfigured oak was a near copy of one of the deformed trees that Bob recently had shown him. To his astonishment, he saw two other oaks in the distance with unnaturally curved trunks—each pointing a separate marker line toward the spring. He recalled Bob having said that two or, even better, three marked lines converging at a point could indicate a hot zone.

  When Fretz activated his metal detector and surveyed along a ten-yard radius from the spring, he received a strong electronic response to the east. The echo, he soon discovered, came from a horse-bridle bit buried just a few inches under the surface. Moving in the direction indicated by the rusted bit, toward the spring, Fretz was wholly unprepared for the loud signal he received a foot behind the waterhole. This was undisturbed, uninhabited territory in the deep woods. No one had been near the place for at least fifty years.

  Fretz was all but paralyzed with excitement. He grabbed his shovel and began to dig. Smith, watching from ten yards away, suddenly ran up and grabbed him by the arm. “Hold it…. You hear that?” he exclaimed. Fretz, who was hard of hearing, shook his head. “Hear what?” Smith replied: “The car. I heard a door slam. I think we better get out of here. There could be somebody watching us.” Fretz was afraid to continue. Just that week, he recalled, Smith had said something about “surveillance.” The two left immediately, agreeing to return the next day to dig up what Fretz believed would be his first treasure cache.

  When Fretz called up the next day to see if Smith was ready, Smith begged off, citing back pain. There was a litany of other excuses over the next several days. Smith then switched gears altogether, saying that he was tracking down a new, less risky site, over near Avants Mountain. As proof, he produced a waybill that he said had been ripped out from behind the wallpaper in Isom Avants’s abandoned home. Then he disappeared for a week.

  Fearing the worst, Fretz drove alone to Goat Brown’s spring. When he got to the spot where the detector had sounded, he was devastated to see that a hole had been dug and refilled with soil. When he stuck his hand into the pit, he could feel the smooth outline of a small shaft, precisely the size of a tall thin jar, with a round depression at the bottom. He was distraught as he drove to Bob Brewer’s ranch to tell his friend about what had happened.

  Bob felt for Fretz and barely managed to refrain from blurting out, “Told you so.” He and his forlorn friend headed to the site immediately. When he saw the layout, which lay less than a mile from the trellis where he had found his second cache, he thought that it might be part of the same system that had led him and Linda to the axe head and then to the jar filled with gold and silver coins. When Fretz related the whole story—about Smith’s hearing a door slam, about his wanting to check out the Avants site and his taking the map from the Avants home—Bob drew several inferences.

  The first was that Smith unquestionably could not be trusted. The second was that Smith seemed to know what he was doing. The third was that Smith seemed highly interested in treasure leads associated with Goat Brown, the Ashcrafts and the Avantses. (A subsequent trip to the abandoned Avants house confirmed that the wallpaper had been torn off and that someone had dug fresh holes in the yard and in the exposed cellar beneath the house.)

  Was there a connection, Bob began to wonder. Was his own quick-hit recovery of the jar at Goat Brown’s abandoned homestead as random a strike as it seemed, or was Jess Brown intimately connected with “the system”? Moreover, was there some kind of geometric grid being defined around Smoke Rock, with Grandpa anchoring the middle, Jess Brown and the
Avantses the east-west axis, and other Ashcrafts the north-south axis?

  All that Bob reasonably could deduce was that there may have been a group of individuals burying small caches of treasure in the Ouachitas in some seemingly encrypted, widely dispersed pattern. Smith seemed to have had some awareness of the scheme, and he may have been getting richer by that knowledge. Adding insult to injury, Smith showed conspicuous signs of a “lifestyle change” immediately after the incident at Goat Brown’s spring, buying all sorts of new home-entertainment equipment and going out to restaurants on a regular basis. And this all after making frequent self-described “business” trips to Dallas. Bob guessed that these trips could have been to cash in gold coins at pawnshops and rare-coin dealerships in the city. Fretz, for his part, managed to swallow his pain, and never directly confronted Smith, though he wanted to throttle him.

  During his alienation from Tilley and Fretz—the handiwork of Smith’s artful insinuations—Bob had reverted to his lone-wolf style of investigation. He returned to his most valued sources of information: the old-timers in town. In particular, he had sought out a ninety-two-year-old mountaineer, Melvin Mitchell Cogburn, who had been a friend of Bob’s father, Landon. The visit paid off. The woodsman—old as Methuselah, as they say in the Ouachitas—gave him an interesting lead: there could be some truth to a story that gold was buried near the Greasy Cove cabin of Albert Pike along the Little Missouri River. The site was along a tributary of the Ouachita River, just sixteen miles east of Grandpa’s cabin and twelve miles east of old Bill Wiley’s place.4

  At the time, Bob knew little about Pike, other than that he was a former Rebel general, who, after resigning from the Confederate Army, had lived a reclusive existence during the latter half of the war in a two-story cabin in Montgomery County, some thirty miles east of Hatfield. The wooded area had been turned into the Albert Pike Recreational Area, part of the Ouachita National Forest, during the early twentieth century.

  Cogburn, whose memory was still sharp, recounted how Pike had hired his maternal grandfather, Dick Whisenhunt, to build the cabin—and had paid the local handsomely in gold coin, as he had the previous owners of the property. He also revealed that another relative of his, on a tip from one of Pike’s black servants, had planned to raid Pike’s property in search of gold rumored to be stockpiled there. When word of the plan leaked out, Pike—forewarned of the raid by a neighbor and Masonic friend—fled in the middle of the night in a horse buggy. Pike departed with a trunk full of books, gold coins and loose clothing that he and his loyal servants had snatched up at the last minute from inside the cabin. According to Cogburn’s oral history, Pike had no time to recover any of his buried treasure. When the armed raiders arrived, led by Henry Page Cogburn (Mitchell’s great-uncle who, he said, had harbored Unionist sympathies and had switched sides in the middle of the war), they ransacked the house and burned it to the ground. The raiding party found a large iron washpot filled with hundreds of mid-nineteenth-century U.S. gold coins. It had been hidden below a rock used as a doorstep to the cabin: precisely where the robbers had been tipped to look by Pike’s servant.

  Cogburn had only one thing to add to the colorful account: he believed there was more of Pike’s gold buried in the area. Bob, amazed at the old man’s lucid recollection of the family lore, heartily thanked him for the local history lesson and the treasure leads.

  Back in his study, he immediately began to rummage through boxloads of local historical and treasure-oriented magazines collected at yard sales. There was no mention of Pike in any of the yellowed pages that he reviewed. But he did find something of interest in a copy of Old West magazine (owned by the same publisher as Frontier Times, where Mitchell’s article had appeared). It was an article from the 1970s that recounted how a family living around Greasy Cove in the early 1900s had recovered a buried iron washpot containing $100,000 in gold coins.5

  The article, “One Black Pot with a Yellow Fortune,” had a magical effect. Bob was struck by the subtitle, “All you have to locate is three beech trees in a triangle. Where to look—Montgomery County, Arkansas.” The article described carved beech trees in a geometrical formation. He read on: there were carvings (eight arrows and a cross) on each tree, which, the article said, had helped direct a group of four men and a young boy to a common point within the triangle formed by the trees. The site was located a few miles north of Pike’s cabin and just south of Little Missouri Falls, on the bank of the river.

  “It was either in 1907 or 1908 that we found the gold,” wrote Greasy Cove local Arthur Porter, recollecting the incident he experienced as a young boy. “I could see a little of one side of the rusty washpot. It didn’t take the men long to expose the entire top. It was covered with an old piece of sheet iron or some kind of sheet metal,” Porter recalled in the article. When the group tried to remove the gold-filled washpot—reportedly found with guidance from a smudged waybill—they could not lift it out of the hole because of the weight of the coins inside. Most intriguing to Bob was the article’s suggestion that the waybill (reportedly lost in the excitement of the washpot’s discovery) had indicated that another wash-pot, containing perhaps as much as $80,000 in gold coins, was buried in the same area. The second cache apparently had not been recovered, or at least no one had come forward claiming to have found it.

  Bob was fascinated. It added up to an uncannily familiar modus operandi: the cryptically carved beech trees, the location near a river, the geometric formations, the use of an iron washpot to contain the coins. Even more telling was the positioning of a large iron sheet—below ground but placed above the deeply buried pot—to ensure that those seeking to recover the money would notice compass gyrations at the correct location. Given what he had learned from Cogburn, Bob could not help but think this was Pike’s money: it was in the precise area where Pike had lived. If it were Pike’s money—and, as such, money stockpiled underground within a recognizable grid of cryptic symbols—could this suggest that the system was not only “outlaw” but also Confederate?

  Bob used an invitation to explore the Pike site as the means to re-launch his friendship with Fretz and Tilley after the Smith affair. In particular, he wanted to prove to the now skeptical Tilley some key points. First, that he knew what he was doing. Second, that this was not likely Spanish treasure. Third, that it was likely outlaw and possibly Rebel gold. And finally, that their own families may have been involved in its burial and oversight. It was not just a matter of satisfying his own powerful curiosity; he wanted to share his discoveries with trusted friends who could help solve the puzzle and provide some honest feedback. If they each made a little money, all the better.

  At this point in his quest, Bob wasn’t sure which internal force was predominant: the psychological thrill and financial reward of recovering the gold, or the higher “art” of breaking a bewildering code and revealing some kind of underlying system.

  Tilley, tucking a pinch of chewing tobacco into his cheek, said he regretted what had happened with Smith and was glad to be hitting the trail once again with his hometown buddy. As for Bob’s theory that Isom Avants may have been involved with all this underground gold, Tilley thought little of it. “Isom was a drinker,” and could not be trusted with all that money, he said.

  Any further questions about Spanish money and about Bob’s ability to interpret the signs to a point on a map were cast aside soon after the three reached the Pike site. Bob quickly located what appeared to be a depression where the washpot likely had been found in 1907, as indicated on the map drawn in the Old West article. Only one of the original three beeches still stood near the suspected treasure hole, but Bob and his two friends discovered a range of moss-covered clues in the bark of surrounding beech trees, spread over several square miles in the Little Missouri Valley. (Locals call the old trail along the river from Pike’s property upstream to the Little Missouri Falls the “Crowfoot Trail,” because so many of the beech trees are inscribed with three-toed bird tracks.)

  To
Bob’s great satisfaction, the beech-bark signs correlated closely to the ones that he had investigated at Smoke Rock. And they were just as complex. On one, carved into a thick sturdy tree with peeling bark, the letters PIKE were plainly visible. It had distinct etchings, a snake and a moose among them. Another ancient beech, some distance away, had an ornate carving of a palm tree, capped with a crescent moon overhead. Above, the initials A.P. were neatly inscribed. Nearby the scrambled letters GreawLGO, topped with the letter t, stood out. Recent “graffiti” cluttered the overall image somewhat, but the older, deeply incised carvings were still legible.

  Bob obtained a compass bearing off one of the key carvings and then led the group through the forest on the indicated bearing. Using the subtle tricks that he had developed for following the signs, they arrived at the first of two spots in the woods where metal clues were buried. He told Tilley and Fretz to walk along the lines indicated by the respective buried pointers and then to holler upon reaching the spot where the lines crossed. After a few minutes of pacing off, Tilley shouted back: “Do you want me to try to jump across this hole or walk around it?” Fretz and Tilley were standing on the edge of a three-foot-wide pit, where something sizable seemed to have been excavated a long time ago.