Rebel Gold

by Warren Getler

  Heading south the next morning along the compass bearing indicated by the rock carvings, Bob came to a disfigured oak tree about a quarter of a mile away. Its bent limbs pointed north, toward Delaware Creek. On a mossy ledge along the creek bank, Bob discovered a large neatly carved arrowhead figure aimed at the ground. Directly beneath the pointer was a large excavated hole—an apparent decoy or trick, Bob guessed, to make one think that a cache had been buried there but was now long gone. Not to be led astray by the spurious pit, he stayed put, closely examining the ledge for subtle clues that might lead him through the maze. Hidden beneath a layer of slimy mineral deposits was a barely visible carving of a turtle, about the size of a quarter. The head of the tiny turtle pointed back toward the head of the larger turtle engraving that he had seen on the other side of the creek, near the quarry. He knew then that he had discovered a major line, because terrapins ranked high in the pecking order of KGC pointers for gold.

  At the campsite later that day, Bob developed another line from a large turkey track carving that the group had found on a nearby bluff. The track pointed to a heavily engraved boulder, not more than thirty yards away, in the direction of the creek. The continuation of the line—from the combination of the turkey track and signs on the engraved boulder—brought the group to the top of a bluff across the creek, northwest of the campsite. A careful search along an exposed limestone shelf revealed a series of coded phrases and miscellaneous lettering. These included an arched line of letters, yielding LARCHDALE. Near it were two I s, a large number 4, a large plus sign, and the letters BHL. In LARCHDALE, the C was strangely constructed, with a small slanted line attached to the bottom curve, perhaps suggesting that the C could also be used as a G. The D, carved backward, was also part of a directional cipher or marker. Bob intuited a directional heading—running off the back of the reversed D—indicating west-southwest.

  Early the next day, at a distance of about one hundred yards from the LARCHDALE inscription, along a line derived from the carvings, the group carefully combed the area with their detectors. A few minutes later, they unearthed a buried 1894 Winchester rifle, intact except for the wooden gunstock. The gun barrel, as it turned out, lay on the same line indicated by the two turtle heads.

  Griffith was elated. His map said, in backward writing and misspelled, FIND GUN BERREL NEAR CREEK. After a few days of searching, Bob had found the spot. Griffith had looked in vain for the “gun barrel” for over three years with treasure map in hand—a map that he still refused to share with Bob. (Having earlier deduced an important directional line running between the gun barrel and the academy, Bob guessed that LARCHDALE BHL contained the important anagram, BERL ACAD, which, if one adds the dual C-G letter, could spell, G BERL ACAD, as in “follow the gun-barrel/academy line.” The anagram might also suggest, once having found the gun barrel, that the burial [read “berrel,” using Southern phonetics] site was located on the same line! As Bob would later learn, Griffith’s map did contain a key line running from the gun barrel through a rectangular figure—a seeming representation of the Wapanucka Academy—to a spot where another key line on the map crossed, near what appeared to be a row of three large trees. That spot on the map would later prove significant.)

  For now, Griffith’s selfishness mattered little to Bob. His mind was set on finding what he suspected was a master cache somewhere in the vicinity—and the rifle, he sensed, was a crucial orientation marker for the layout of what appeared to be a large KGC depository.

  Yet the search for the bigger prize around Wapanucka during the spring of 1994 was not to be. Bob had returned to the campsite around dusk on their first day and was waiting for Griffith and his father to show up, when a couple of men unexpectedly drove on to the property with treasure-hunting equipment. One of them eventually introduced himself, saying he was on the property looking for treasure and had written permission to be there from the owners, the Gillespie sisters of Tulsa. Eyeing the metal detectors scattered around, he asked Bob what his group was doing. Bob readily admitted to treasure hunting, saying that his party had permission to be on the property as well. The strangers drove off, and some minutes later the Griffiths returned. Bob described his encounter with the other treasure hunters, but Michael Griffith said nothing.

  Around noon the following day, just as Bob and Griffith were preparing to attempt a second recovery based on the discovery of the rifle barrel that morning, the pair received a visit from a young man who said that he was the foreman of the Gillespie property. In a few curt words, the watchman told them that they were trespassing. He said that the sheriff had been notified and would arrive to arrest them if they did not immediately depart.

  The group decamped, snatching up their gear and stacking it in Griffith’s pickup. Once inside the cab, Bob scolded his so-called partner for telling him that they had permission to be on the property. Griffith threw up his hands and said that the old overseer had said it was all right. The truth, Bob later discovered, was that the old-timer had no authority to allow treasure hunting on site; he merely leased the cattle grazing rights to the 600-acre ranchland. Permission to hunt treasure had to come from the owners, sisters Ceci and Jo Anne Gillespie, who lived more than 150 miles away in Tulsa.

  The whole affair embarrassed Bob and left him deeply disappointed in this junior-high school teacher who seemed to have a penchant for evasions. He knew, deep down, that this was probably a good time to part ways with Griffith, and he made no effort to contact him in the days after this latest excursion.

  A short while later Bob received a revealing handwritten letter from Griffith.6 He found it hard to believe, but Griffith had reconnoitered back on to the property, after being formally warned off the location just days earlier.

  In his letter, Griffith greets Bob with an exclamation and says that he has news to tell about his “location” and his “latest find.” He relates how he and his father “went down to the location about two days after we all had camped there.” He describes how they had parked on a highway and then walked some two miles to get to the grave, an apparent reference to the tombstone of a pioneer schoolteacher buried on the Gillespie property. The letter goes on to detail how Griffith paced off in a southeasterly direction and eventually came upon three big trees, those apparently drawn on the Wapanucka treasure map. It then recounts how Griffith and his dad uncovered a buried old Colt pistol, with ivory handles. The pistol barrel, Griffith writes, pointed to another tree where they recovered a cache of $100 (face value) of gold and silver dollars, dating from the 1830s to 1880. One of the gold coins, from 1844, is “worth $700” alone. “Bob, I now have the map figured out and now know where to look for the big one. I know it’s there. Just waiting to be found by us … with your help we can find it.”

  That turkey! Bob thought. Then Griffith called him, wanting to drive down to Hatfield to show off the newfound coins. Bob, undeniably interested in seeing Griffith’s claim validated but disgusted by the man’s conniving, reluctantly agreed to a brief visit. He suspected that Griffith was being less-than-factual about having used the Wapanucka Academy cemetery as a landmark to locate the second cache.7 He believed that Griffith, in fact, had used the rifle barrel together with the map to acquire the directional line that led to the treasure, which had been in a ceramic spittoon. Now, over the phone, the Oklahoman was claiming the find as his alone. It would be interesting to see, Bob thought, whether there would be a cut for him.

  Over the following weekend, Griffith and his son paid a visit. After a few awkward pleasantries at the door, Griffith placed a handful of gold coins into Linda Brewer’s hand. Thinking it was Bob’s share of the treasure, Linda thanked him—her surprise evident in the lilt of her words of gratitude. Immediately, Griffith grabbed back the coins, telling a now bewildered Linda that since Bob was not there when the cache was recovered, the Brewers would not get a share of the find. Adding insult to injury, he told them that the find was all on videotape. Bob ground his teeth. Strike three.

  The v
isit left the Brewers with feelings of resentment. Linda felt that her husband was being grossly used, but Bob was not willing to terminate all dealings with Griffith. He was convinced that the small stashes were mere clues to much bigger treasures and that the small finds would sooner or later lead to a significant cache recovery, at which he would be present. Any dealings with Griffith, he knew, would be a Faustian tradeoff: obtaining access and new insights into solving Jesse’s puzzles from someone who shared a burning passion to “find the big one” yet who seemed callous to others.

  There would be other costs involved, he knew. A silver lining was that the recovered antique revolvers, the old cap-and-ball gun and the Colt pistol, were known to be popular firearms during the James gang era.8 And the gold coins, many dated to 1880 and consistent with the “1880” written on Griffith’s map, meant that they probably had found part of “Jesse’s Pickins!” Nevertheless, Bob suspected that the next strike was not going to be as easy. Indeed, he viscerally knew that the trail to recovering a master cache would be exceedingly complex and not without peril.

  9

  The Wolf Map

  WAPANUCKA teased him. The carvings, the buried rifle and pistols, the coin-laden jar and spittoon had all hinted at some large treasure. So did Griffith’s ephemeral map. But Bob was still at a loss as to what the “key” to the KGC’s treasure troves might be and how solving that mystery might lead to a major cache. The cryptic “key” reference by J. Frank Dalton in the black book loomed ever large in his thinking.

  It was around this time, in early spring 1994, that the answer started to take shape. For years, beginning in the late 1980s, Bob suspected that a geometric pattern had been laid out, topographically, at each major site, beginning with the Bible Tree area. The “pattern” was just that: a standard shape—indicated by carvings, buried clues and other markers providing directional lines—that could be replicated, from site to site, differing only in scale. In his fieldwork in Arkansas, he had seen how the pattern seemed to be formed around two major intersecting lines, shaped in an “X” configuration. These lines stretched northeast to southwest, and northwest to southeast across a large section of the topographical quadrangle map for a given region. And there was more to it.

  He had discerned a pattern of lines radiating from the center of the “X” in every cardinal direction. This geometric hub, he imagined, marked the center of a circumscribed area where directional markers were distributed. Yet, he had also found other markers at equidistant locations outside the area of the interpolated circle. Like those key points within the circle, these outlying locations were found while he walked along magnetic-compass and Global Positioning System (GPS) headings. After he discovered one or two extraneous points, Bob found that he could project the approximate location of each subsequent outlying point via a series of triangulations. (Surveyors use triangulation to determine the relative position of three fixed points. By recording the known distance between two of the points and the measured angles of sight to the third, they can calculate the remaining sides and angle of the triangle formed by the points. Thus, triangulation is a preferred method to run lines and measure distances over mountains and across lakes and rivers.)

  Ultimately, Bob came to believe that these extraneous marker points revealed an overarching pattern: a square formed around an inner circle.

  His ability to envision this geometric layout stemmed, in part, from his Navy experience. Among his first assignments as a Navy metalsmith was painting aircraft, and one of his first tests was to paint the National Insignia—the five-pointed star surrounded by a circle—on a combat plane. (The original design of the circumscribed five-pointed star had been created using only dividers, a compass and a square, in a neat mathematical process known as the “squaring of the circle,” by which the circumference is divided into five equal parts by bisection.)

  The mathematically precise, grid-like system that Bob began to discern from the scattered forest carvings and buried metal markers was that of a neat circle bordered within a square, but with a multitude of bisecting lines within the figure. Adding to the complexity was that additional carvings or buried clues were found along eye-shaped elliptical lines, the end points of which extended beyond the square’s perimeter on the north-south axis and east-west axis. As such, Bob’s outlying square would need to be drawn with four identical D-shaped handles coming off each side.

  For some time, Bob had a powerful hunch that the ubiquitous signs and symbols were not merely directional markers used for following lines to some random endpoint. Rather, he felt, they were data points designed to orient knowledgeable insiders to the centerpoint of a circle-within-the-square configuration.

  He surmised that the learned elite of the KGC had employed centuries-old Masonic traditions in geometry to protect the secret society’s hidden financial reserves. He recalled how Isom Avants’s memorandum book from the 1920s had contained a hand-drawn spiderweb pattern of concentric circles that hinted at this overall design, but without the surrounding square. He also recalled the mysterious manner in which Grandpa Ashcraft and Uncle Odis had pointed out what later had proven to be specific parts of the geometric and topographic puzzle. And he further recalled how Isom Avants and W. D. Ashcraft were partners in “prospecting” and “mining” ventures in the Cossatot and Brushy region—the precise area where, as an adult, he had discerned the rough outline of the geometrical design.

  For these and other reasons, Bob suspected that the two Ashcrafts and Isom Avants were deeply involved in twentieth-century KGC activity and that the center of this spiderweb of ghostly lines and dimly marked points would be found somewhere within the old Ouachita mining district. From his collection of field notes and marked-up topo maps, he began to sketch out a more definitive shape of the overarching pattern: the fixed geometry with its various lines and curves and specific ratios of distance. He had not yet assigned a name to the pattern, which was still, rather amorphously, floating around in his mind.

  That all changed suddenly, during a visit from his out-of-town treasure-hunting associates Stan Vickery and John London. The men brought over a copy of a newsletter, Treasure Hunter Confidential, an entertaining flyer read by the cliquish treasure-hunting community. The back issue, dated April 1990, contained an intriguing article entitled “Knights of the Golden Circle.” Drawing from an interview with a curiously named California-based treasure hunter, James J. Woodson, the article suggested that there were rumors of the KGC’s having “had several major stashes throughout the South and West” and that some of those sites may have already “been cracked.” As for the existence of the KGC in the post–Civil War era, the article said: “Depending on whose story you believe, the Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) were either a short-lived group started by George Bickley in Cincinnati, Ohio, or a very well-heeled, powerful group who saw their destiny as that of saving the South….” (Bob would later learn that Woodson’s information largely came from a collection of letters and other personal effects from Orvus Lee Howk, a.k.a. Jesse Lee James.)

  The kicker came in the final three paragraphs. These served as a long caption to an accompanying drawing that showed a tilted square superimposed on a circle, with numerous dotted lines connecting various opposing points within the circle and square. There was also an inner circle, denoted by a dotted line. The drawing was, in short, the master “pattern” that Bob had already begun deciphering from the field—with the exception that the large circle shown was not fully encapsulated by the square. Moreover, the drawing showed numerous shaded boxes and shaded circles within the zone. The article claimed that the boxes represented large gold caches and the circles small stashes. It described the boxes as being along the circumference of the circle at the ends of the designated north-south and east-west axes and at the precise center of the pattern:

  Each square denotes a large treasure. Each circle represents small caches of gold, silver or money buried. Of course, the large, dark box in the center represents the treasure that i
n Woodson’s words is “so fabulous, it would stagger the imagination.” Usually these are in less than 30 feet of soil.

  The significant point about the circle is that if one can find one or two of the treasures, all the rest come easy. Everything is done on a north/south, east/west axis, so if you stumble across one of the treasures, you should be able to follow in a straight line until you come across the other treasure. Based on that heading, the rest of the treasures should stumble into place.

  The original scale of the KGC circle is one inch to the mile, so you should find a comparable scale if you were to find treasures that fit the general pattern seen in the circle. If you can locate two of them, then you know the approximate distance of the rest of the targets.

  Although seemingly oversimplified, the article resonated powerfully. Coming on the heels of the Howk-Schrader book, which provided a loose historical context, the published interview offered a generalized, schematic rendering of something that Bob intuitively knew to exist in some form or another at a couple of sites. (As it turned out, John London brought over a second template-like geometric pattern that resembled the one shown in the Treasure Hunter Confidential article. This other pattern, which London had acquired from a treasure-hunting colleague, had been in his possession for almost fifteen years, well before he began his friendship with Bob. London, however, had never understood the grid’s significance and thus decided that it was worth Bob’s taking a look.)

  Intrigued by the article, Bob began to search for other clues in print. He had only a few names to go by, other than the two authors of Jesse James Was One of His Names. While little turned up under Jesse Lee James (Orvus Howk), he did manage to find an April 22, 1973 newspaper article by Del Schrader in the now defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner.1 Schrader’s sensational feature, “$100 Billion in Treasure—The Search for Rebel Gold,” grabbed his attention.