Rebel Gold

by Warren Getler

  While the headline and other outlandish monetary figures cited in the article cast some doubt on the story, Bob was fascinated by several key points made in Schrader’s piece, which had been published two years before Schrader and Howk’s book. The article was based on interviews that Schrader had conducted with “sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of the elite Knights of the Golden Circle,” reportedly at an outdoor meeting of KGC descendants in California. The sources were not named, but initials were given, including J.L.J. (for Jesse Lee James, obviously). One of the old-timers—someone with the initials R.R.L.—told Schrader that there were a handful of depository maps in existence. (Schrader states that he, in fact, was allowed to make “Xerox copies” of some of these.) The KGC descendant cautioned, however, that “they won’t do anybody much good. The maps are accurate, as far as they go, but you’d need the two or three transparent overlays [italics added], which each fill in a landmark, for the specifics. In most cases, a vital point of reference is carved on a nearby rock.”

  Bob’s mind reeled. The Schrader article had revealed the “key” so cryptically referred to by J. Frank Dalton in Jesse James Was One of His Names. The key was the geometric pattern—in the form of a transportable “transparent overlay,” several in fact, that had to be placed over a topographic map to orient oneself to the correct layout of any given KGC treasure depository. The key, as Bob would call it from this point on, was a “template.” (The transparent overlay was probably—in the days before plastic—an oiled animal-membrane cloth.)

  How ingenious. The rare illustrated maps, the obscure carved signs on trees and rock faces, the text waybills—they were all small but significant pieces of the puzzle. In isolation, they were not valuable. They had to be used in combination to orient the template, to determine the one topographical focal point in the middle of the designated circle that lay inside the square in a particular geographic area. By placing the center of the fixed template over a specific “centerpoint” on the topo map, one theoretically could locate the discrete KGC mother lodes buried in the large depositories. These would lie in a constant position relative to each other, as marked by cutouts in the template, along master lines.

  Bob now had a theory, which might not be that easy to confirm. But it was a titillating concept. Adding to the thrill from reading the Schrader article, an accompanying photograph showed a template-like engraving on a rock face in New Mexico. The caption: “$40 million here? Master Compass Treasure in New Mexico is reported near this guide rock.”

  What Bob found most noteworthy was that the unnamed KGC sources in Schrader’s Examiner article apparently had wanted to get their story out; nonetheless, they opted to hold back the precise whereabouts of the KGC treasures. Bob sensed from the engrossing article that the KGC descendants possessed a general idea about the treasure locations but not much more than that. One of them, J.D.J., was quoted as saying: “We have all the aces, kings, queens and jacks. We know how to get at the treasure—Washington doesn’t.” The article concluded with a bold assertion from a man with the initials J.L.J.: “Are the old-time Confederates trying to ‘blackmail’ the U.S. government into a deal? No, not at all. The gold can just lie down there until doomsday, I guess. With our devalued dollar and poor balance of payments situation, Washington could use this long-forgotten gold. We’ll give it to them—but we believe we deserve 10 percent for a finder’s fee if nothing else.”

  With that, something clicked. Behind J.L.J.’s (Jesse Lee James’s) braggadocio, Bob sensed a certain desperation. Orvus Lee Howk–Jesse Lee James had been given the key—the template—by Dalton-James. But Howk-James did not know how to use the template! Applying its specific geometric pattern to locate KGC treasure might be straightforward if one knew how to find the centerpoint of a topographic layout.

  That was the rub. Not only did one need to have experience in accurately deciphering the field symbols, buried metal objects and various codes, one also had to understand how to navigate over land using triangulation, trigonometry and other techniques. And one needed to define scale and understand how to adjust for scale; the template was useless if the wrong scale was used. Finally, even if one were to get close to the centerpoint within the depository, the pinpointing and recovery of a large, deeply buried treasure would almost certainly require high-tech detection equipment (electromagnetic induction tools or advanced ground-penetrating radar) and expensive, heavy machinery for excavation. Spades, shovels and horse-and-mule teams were good, but only to a degree.

  For a number of years, Orvus Lee Howk had lived in the footsteps and shadows of an enigmatic man who undoubtedly knew where innumerable secret caches were buried; how frustrating must it have been for him not to have been able to find the precise spots! (Bob would later obtain copies of several letters written by Howk to family, friends and associates, some of them penned under the name Jesse Lee James or JJ III. The letters contain sketches and rough outlines of maps—ostensibly dictated by J. Frank Dalton to Howk. In some cases, it seems that Dalton-James may have taken Howk to the surrounding environs of the various depository sites themselves. The letters reveal a palpable frustration at not knowing precisely where the KGC money was hidden. The documents, distinct from those obtained by Woodson and which came to Bob from various treasure-hunting sources, leave little doubt that Orvus Howk–Jesse Lee James had some pecuniary motive in finding the buried loot.)2

  As for his own prospects, Bob had no idea whether he would be any more successful using the tools at hand. But he was determined to give it his damnedest, wherever the trail might lead.

  In the wake of Wapanucka, he knew it was only a matter of time before Griffith would call. He did not have to wait long. Griffith phoned in late April to say that he wanted to come over to discuss the other map—the one that he had given Bob in December with the wolf image and the complex series of lines and stick figures. Little did Griffith know that Bob had been working intensively to decipher it.

  Back in December, when he had held the photocopied map for the first time, Bob had recognized that he was gazing upon a crude masterpiece. The level of sophistication and abstraction was several orders of magnitude greater than the Wapanucka drawing. Resembling a doodle-sheet of some crazed mathematics professor, the presumed treasure map presented a matrix of intersecting horizontal, diagonal and vertical lines (several of which terminated at what looked to be an obscure mathematical equation written in Confederate code). It was clear that someone had invested a great deal of time and effort into this treasure chart, not only in transcribing hidden pointers to ostensible cash hoards but in creating a kind of linear work of art, with calculated symmetry and balance.

  From his initial cursory inspection, Bob had sensed that the detailed map was authentic. In the upper right-hand corner was a radiant sun, a KGC marker. Then there were several characteristic stick-figure animal renderings, as well as an abstract Indian pictograph with three-toed, birdlike (turkey-track) feet. There were also recognizable “vice-versa” symbols (a small circle with a slanted line running through it), telling the reader to interpret directions in a designated part of the map in reverse.

  His experience with treasure signs prepared him to expect the unexpected, to consider new theories regardless of how odd they seemed when they popped into his head. Moreover, he was well aware that the creators of these hieroglyphic-like maps were expert at mind games and had packed their rare directional charts with a full bag of tricks.

  True to the clandestine society’s custom, the map left no ready clue as to the depository’s location. That was the ultimate challenge: to find landmarks (some of whose names undoubtedly had changed over the past century or more) indicated by the code that was embedded in the scrambled letters, numbers and symbols drawn on the map. And just how old was the map? He could not tell for sure, but it appeared to be dated 1889, based on vertical and horizontal renderings of those numbers at the top of the photocopied page. Next to 1889 were the letters DAT. The period, he thought, dovetailed with
all his previous work on KGC activities.

  Bob was drawn to the map’s most distinct and prominent illustration. Sketched at the top of what appeared to be a pyramidal or triangular configuration, the central figure was that of a wolf-like creature with a long snout. Right above it, in block lettering, was the word TIME and, above that, five capital Ts grouped in an arch. For lack of a better name, Bob dubbed the apparent KGC treasure chart the “Wolf Map.”

  He had never seen anything as mind-boggling in his treasure-hunting career. Once he had set his eyes firmly on the rendering, the analytical side of his brain would not let go. Indeed, his fascination with the treasure hunt—and with this particular map—overwhelmed his dislike for its provider, Griffith. For the moment, he had to shake himself out of his mental daze: Griffith was asking what the chances were of breaking the seemingly indecipherable chart, which had been in circulation some sixty years among a coterie of treasure-hunters. Annoyed by Griffith’s pestering, Bob curtly said that he would let him know when he had completed the task. Under all circumstances, Bob declared, the take would be “fifty-fifty” upon recovery, no questions asked. The two men shook on that.

  For the next couple of months, Bob did little else than work on the Wolf Map. He was able to concentrate on the blizzard of lines and jumbled letters without much interruption. (By May 1994, Landon Brewer had been placed in a nursing home. Bob still devoted time to his care, but he no longer had to commit twelve out of every forty-eight hours to looking after his bedridden and increasingly senile father, who, months earlier, had nearly burned down the house. Landon Brewer would die at the nursing home in 1999. His parting words to Bob were: “Well, have you found the mother lode yet?”)

  Hunched over a table littered with drafting instruments and an assortment of pencils and colored pens, Bob spent hundreds of hours poring over the encrypted map, attempting to determine its precise point of reference in the continental United States. In the fog of information shown on the cryptogram, he sensed something significant and yet painfully elusive. His excitement would turn to frustration and sleepless nights as he mentally navigated into blind alleys.

  Linda had never seen her husband so engrossed. He would come out drenched with sweat, his eyes red and his stomach growling from hunger. And he would often complain of pounding headaches from concentrating without end on the baffling treasure grid. She recalled how much effort he had put into solving the Bible Tree in the nearby Ouachita woods, but this went far beyond. She knew that her husband was nothing if not disciplined, yet his immersion into the Wolf Map approached a kind of obsession. She did her best to leave him alone during his code-breaking marathons in the study, silent twelve- to twenty-hour episodes broken only for short meals.

  Eventually, Bob’s self-declared “stubborn hillbilly” persistence began to yield some light. He had resolved to isolate all the letters, numbers, abstract symbols and Confederate Code characters on the map as a step in breaking this KGC depository cipher. There were about one hundred such letters and characters jumbled throughout the page. Some were in plain sight; others hidden within the contorted shapes of adjoining letters or figures, while still others were written upside down or backwards or were merely suggested by a partial form that demanded interpolation. Whatever their representation, the characters and letters all seemed to have meaning. To solve the puzzle Bob would have to arrange them in a certain sequence, he believed. The decoded “text” would then have to be interpreted along with the information provided by the geometry and visual imagery on the map. Gradually—through the anagrams (the peculiar arrangement of random letters into a known word or phrase) and the replacement of the Confederate cipher with plaintext translations—Bob developed a series of individual words or phrases that began to make some sense.

  5. (Overleaf) The Wolf Map. This extraordinarily complex Jesse James treasure map gives no indication as to its precise location in the United States. Bob Brewer spent over 1,000 hours cracking the code and determined that it was an authentic KGC-ciphered depository map for a site located in Addington, Oklahoma. Key features—in addition to the Masonic and KGC radiant sun symbol—include: the wolf figure in the upper middle section, the scrambled word “Beaver” in the upper-right quadrant, and the vertically written “Stink” in the upper-left quadrant. These all correspond to names of creeks in southwestern Indian Territory (latter-day Oklahoma) in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bob determined that the letters “KC” in the lower-left quadrant referred to Kiowa-Comanche territory, and “IC” in the lower-left quadrant referred to Indian Camp, an important landmark.

  The first anagram assembled from the scattered lettering was ARBUCKLE, a name closely linked to the history of Indian Territory and latter-day Oklahoma. Fort Arbuckle and the picturesque Arbuckle Mountains, named for a decorated general in the U.S. Army, were two important landmarks in the rough-and-tumble southwest frontier of the mid- to late-nineteenth century. The A of the “Arbuckle” anagram was clearly visible at the bottom of the map’s midsection. Next to the A was a dotted R, which was hidden behind a K. A small lowercase cursive b had to be gleaned from the right side of the mathematical equation mentioned above. The C could be found turned on its back, just below the Indian pictograph, and the L was written upside down just to the left of the A. But what of the missing U and E? These were to be found by translating Confederate code written on the map.

  (The secret code used by the Confederate State Department and executive branch was found on April 6, 1865, in Richmond by Union officials. Assistant U.S. Secretary of War Charles A. Dana found the code in the Confederate State Department archives after the evacuation of the Confederate government. The code was not made public until Century Magazine published it in its June 1907 issue. A copy of the code was also printed in a 1946 U.S. Army publication, “Historical Background of the Signal Security Agency,” Volume 1, “Codes and Ciphers Prior to World War I, 1776–1917.”3 The code comprises six distinct sets of cryptic letters, numbers and figures. Messages written in the code used different subsets of the cipher, which made it extremely difficult to break.)

  A merged HE figure at the top midsection caught Bob’s eye. It looked like a form of Baconian cipher (named for Sir Francis Bacon, the English scholar, philosopher and Rosicrucian adherent, 1561–1626), in which text written in slightly different fonts or styles—in this case, touching or merged letters—contains hidden meaning. Such enciphered characters are clues for the knowledgeable that appear to the average reader to be mere lapses in penmanship, grammar, spelling or the like.

  Referring to his Confederate code matrix, Bob found that Confederate code subset #3 used an H for the plaintext letter U. He then found the required E in a merged EAN configuration in the top right corner of the map. The strange A-like figure appears in Confederate code subset #6 as a plaintext E. Unclear whether the now complete Arbuckle referred to the old fort or to the nearby mountain chain in south-central Oklahoma, Bob at least had a starting point as to the possible target area for the suspected KGC depository. The question was, what other landmarks could be discerned from the patchwork symbols on the Wolf Map?

  On the heels of ARBUCKLE came BEAVER. The name appeared in distorted form in the upper right-hand corner, just above the radiant sun figure. The b was in lowercase and scrambled, as mentioned, with the ciphered a. The E was in uppercase and scrambled in the ciphered EAN combination that yielded the uppercase A. The V was represented as an adjacent upside-down A. The second E was missing, while the R was clearly visible, in uppercase, next to the upside-down A.

  Bob reasoned that “beaver” was related directly to “wolf,” two animal clues that suggested some common feature in the local geography. He then managed to isolate STINKING as his third key anagram. Found in a partly obscured vertical column of text at the top of the page was STINK (the T being concealed as part of the fishhook curve of the lower-case g from the misspelled phrase at the top of the map, The greave is a wittnesd).

  All three names—Beaver,
Wolf and STINK (or STINKING, if one includes another I and an N in an apparent KIN character-combination, as well as the connected lowercase g from greave)—referred to local Indian Territory creeks southwest of Fort Arbuckle!

  Consulting U.S. government-issue maps of Indian Territory from the 1800s, Bob could see the outline of a Stinking Creek running between Fort Arbuckle (some sixty-five miles to the east) and a Beaver Creek (which ran a few miles to Stinking Creek’s west).4 Another Indian Territory map showed a Wolf Creek, just north and west of Stinking Creek. A comparison with contemporary maps showed that Stinking Creek had become Mud Creek; Beaver Creek—or a tributary thereof—had been renamed Cow Creek; and Wolf Creek had become Dry Creek.

  Bob was struck by the alignment of the three creeks on the Wolf Map. Their natural geographic relationship to each other was implied by the considered placement of the words Stinking and Beaver and by the drawing of the wolf figure, standing, as it were, above and in between the anagrams for the two creeks.

  At this point, Bob began to believe that the confluence of three creeks in the hill country of southern Oklahoma suggested a large KGC cache burial. His heart pounded with anticipation, yet he knew the beast—the elusive Wolf—was not fully cornered. He had taken the search for the Wolf Map depository from a “this could be anywhere” blank slate to a specific region of the country, home to Anadarko Basin oil patches and vast cattle ranches. It was an enormous advance. Still, he had to narrow his target zone to a sufficiently precise spot, say within a hundred square feet.

  Bob badly wanted to share his moment of discovery with Linda, but he held back. There was more decipherment, map reading and archival research ahead, and he wanted to be sure of his detective work before saying anything to anybody. In this game of locating the lustrous needle in the haystack, precision was everything.