(30) Another artistically rendered stone map allegedly discovered in the Superstitions sometime in the 1940s. By deciphering the code on the tablet and deciphering clues from the field, Bob Brewer was able to discern the outline of the horse’s body in topographic features of the area.
(31) Tracing of horse tablet which shows the “behemoth” figure to the left of the horse’s head. The figure is not shown in the photo of the stone tablet; it is possible that it was sanded off sometime after the tracing was made, which would explain the discrepancy.
(32) Bob Brewer was able to show how each symbol in this tablet corresponded to a specific reference point on an enormous topographic grid of the area—ultimately defining the outline of a giant KGC depository and the solution to the “Lost Dutchman” mystery.
(33) Elisha Reavis, a suspected KGC sentinel of the Superstition Mountain area.
(34) These odd metal objects found in a 22-foot shaft on a private ranch in Arizona formed a KGC “waybill” or map. Standing in the background, from left to right, Brian MacLeod, Ellie Gardner, Bob Brewer and Bob Schoose.
(35) Five “beehive” huts near Gila River. Bob Brewer suspects that these odd-shaped structures had a symbolic and topographic significance—providing key lines of sight for one or several large and deeply buried KGC treasures in the Superstition region.
(36) Giant skull-shaped boulder at Arizona site where Bob Brewer and Brian MacLeod were accosted by an armed interrogator who arrived by helicopter. The skull figure gazes into an area where a cluster of KGC markers were found.
(37) Enormous carvings of five-pointed star (center) and jack-o-lantern face (above, right) on cliff in Superstition Mountains. These markers lie on key directional lines that Bob Brewer was investigating.
Photograph credits: 1, 3: Don and Jeff Ashcraft; 2, 8, 14, 19–21, 23, 25, 27, 28, 33, 35, 36: Bob Brewer; 4, 5: Bob and Wanda Tilley; 6, 11: Library of Congress; 7: Collection of Fain McDaniel; 9: Historical Society of Pennsylvania; 12: National Archives; 15: Bob Brewer and Bob Tilley; 16, 17, 22: Collection of Bob Tilley; 18: Collection of Jerry Eckhart; 26: Ceci and Jo Anne Gillespie; 29, 30, 32, 34: Ellie Gardner; 31: Bob Brewer
Map credits: 1, 13, 14: Designed by Bob Brewer with DeLorme TOPO 4.0, used with permission; 2, 11: U. S. Geological Survey, Library of Congress; 4, 5: Collection of Bud Hardcastle, used with permission; 6, 9: Library of Congress; 7: Atlas of American History, Revised Edition, by Kenneth T. Jackson and John T. Adams, Charles Scribner’s Sons, © 1978, Charles Scribner’s Sons. Reprinted by Permission of the Gale Group.; 8: Oklahoma Treasures and Treasure Tales by Steve Wilson, used with permission; 3, 10, 12, 15: Bob Brewer
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Notes
1. THE EFFIGY
1. Phone interview with John London, Amarillo, Texas, July 2001. London, one of the participants in the outing with Bob Brewer and mutual friend Stanley Vickery, made these observations: “When we pulled up, it looked like they had hung the poor son-of-a-bitch and shot him. It made your heart hammer.” London took the effigy as a warning: “There was a feeling of evil about the place. It was pretty clear someone was saying, ‘Stay the hell away.’” Vickery, in a phone interview in March 2002 from his home in Alexandria, Louisiana, said he thought they had come across some kind of “occult ritual … it was spooky.”
2. Polk County (Ark.) sheriff Mike Ogelsby and chief deputy sheriff Tommy Hubbard confirmed that the incident was reported by deputy sheriff Randy Gibbons. Interview, Polk County Sheriff’s office, Mena, Arkansas, August 2001.
2. THE EDUCATION OF A CONFEDERATE CODE-BREAKER
1. See feature article about W. D. Ashcraft of Hatfield, Arkansas, in Mena (Ark.) Evening Star, November 15, 1967, in the “Around Polk County” column by J. C. Lawless.
2. Personal diary of W. D. Ashcraft in possession of his great-grandson, Jeff Ashcraft, in Texarkana, Arkansas. Don Ashcraft, Grandpa’s grandson and father to Jeff, related the story of Delia Ashcraft’s labor in an interview, Hatfield, August 2001.
3. See Albert G. Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, Volume I (Chicago: Masonic History Company, 1946), p. 249.
4. See George A. Mitchell, “Twin Springs Spanish Gold,” Frontier Times, December–January 1969, pp. 32–33. The article contains a loose description of the Avants family and gold intrigue in the immediate Shady-Brushy Creek, Arkansas, area. A primary source indicator of a direct link in “mining” operations between W. D. Ashcraft and the Avants family is Isom Avants’s memorandum book from 1920, in possession of Isom’s nephew, Bob Tilley, of Hatfield. The record book contains Avantses’ and Ashcrafts’ names, as well as an illustration that appears to be a spider-like grid or map, with “Shady, Ark. Aug. 23, 1920,” written below. Also, a list of multiple mining claims in an area held jointly by W. D. Ashcraft and the Avants brothers is on file at the Polk County courthouse in Mena, Arkansas.
5. Wells Fargo stagecoaches transported gold and other valuables in large iron-hinged oak crates, known as strongboxes, that were bolted to the stage’s floor with iron strips and padlocked for added security. Later versions were made of tempered steel.
6. Bob Brewer, “The First Motor Saw,” The Looking Glass Magazine (Murfreesboro, Ark.), Winter 1995, pp. 42–45. The article describes logging outings with Odis Ashcraft and Brewer boys.
7. See article by Larry Rhodes, in the Ouachita Mountaineer, Looking Glass Press, Murfreesboro, Ark., Spring 1996, pp. 30–34, on the path taken allegedly by Jesse James after reportedly holding up a stagecoach southeast of Hot Springs, Arkansas, on September 17, 1874. Also see Rhodes’s article in the Ouachita Mountaineer, Winter 1996, pp. 11–18, about an earlier, better-known Jesse James robbery in the area in January 1874.
8. Arley Woodrow, “After Gay Life in City Wiley Bill Retires to Mountain Cabin,” Fort Smith Southwest-Times Record (undated newspaper clipping from the early 1900s). The article states: “Bill Wiley makes his living in the woods. His chief occupation is mining, but no one has ever known Wiley to strike ‘paying’ dirt. … This hermit of the hills knows every tree and trail of importance in this part of the mountains. When he goes hunting, he knows just where the game is most likely to be.” In a 1993 interview with Bob Brewer, Wiley’s daughter Carrie Wiley Winters (of Pomona, Calif.) states that Bill Wiley had served as a Texas ranger before becoming a Confederate soldier and then moved to Arkansas sometime in the 1860s. She said that her father (married to Julia Ward in 1902) at one point had been “supervisor for all the mining in Texas and Arkansas.” Prior to living in the hut, Wiley had run a “mining” operation on another part of his property in the Ouachitas, known as Baby Ruth City, located near a large cold spring at the base of Hanna Mountain. A group of “miners,” including Wiley, had lived there in a bunkhouse, which stood four miles from Grandpa’s cabin, during the late 1880s. This was a time when local newspapers reported widely of a gold rush spreading through parts of the Brushy and Cossatot (Ark.) valleys.
3. KNIGHTS OF THE GOLDEN CIRCLE
1. See Reports on the Order of the American Knights, Records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Also, see Joseph Holt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and “Official Report of the Judge Advocate General on the Order of American Knights,” published in The War of Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C., 1880–1901), Ser. 2, Vol. 7, pp. 930–53.
2. An exception among mainstream Civil War treatments is the Pulitzer-Prize–winning book by Princeton University historian James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine/Oxford University Press, 1988), which makes multiple mentions of KGC activity before and
during the war. To be sure, McPherson does not suggest that the KGC had a huge membership, that it existed after the Civil War, or that it buried gold and other treasure to finance a second civil war. McPherson relies heavily on Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York: Viking, 1942), and various works by Frank Klement (see below).
3. Frank L. Klement, Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984). This narrowly focused academic book deals extensively with the prewar and wartime KGC in the Midwest, and its offshoots. Klement’s analysis downplays the scope and power of the KGC, describing it as a movement largely restricted to a few states—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa—and one at best with overblown potential. It also belittles another known and well-chronicled prewar and wartime KGC stronghold: the Republic, and then state, of Texas. The KGC’s strength in Texas is described in the first chapters of Donald S. Frazier’s Blood & Treasure: Confederate Empire in the Southwest (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995). Also helpful on Texan and Southern expansionism as eventually expressed through the KGC’s Southern strongholds is Robert E. May’s The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire: 1854–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973). At the opposite end of the spectrum from Klement’s dismissive treatment of the KGC is a speculative yet in parts compelling book, Anton Chaitkin’s Treason in America (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1984), which argues that the KGC was part of a powerful, internationally active, British-Swiss –masterminded conspiracy to bring about a divided United States. Such internal division, the theory goes, would keep America weak and thus beholden to certain European power elites.
4. For primary source overview on the early KGC and its goals, see a September 1859 pamphlet, Rules, Regulations and Principles of the K.G.C., in George Bickley Papers, Reports on the Order of American Knights, National Archives. Bickley is the presumed author. Also, in Official Reports, see government intelligence on the KGC in the John P. Sanderson Papers. For secondary mid-nineteenth-century authored sources, see I. Winslow Ayer, The Great North-Western Conspiracy in All Its Startling Details (Chicago: Rounds & James, 1865); Henry Conkling, An Inside View of the Rebellion (Cincinnati: C. Clark, 1864); and Thomas Prentice Kettell, History of the Great Rebellion (Cincinnati: F. A. Howe, 1866). Among twentieth-century secondary sources, see Ollinger Crenshaw, “The Knights of the Golden Circle: The Career of George Bickley,” American Historical Review 47 (October 1941), for an evenhanded view of the controversial, figurative head of the public KGC. Also see George Fort Milton, Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column (New York: Vanguard, 1942), a well-researched analysis although limited by its focus on the role of Bickley and the KGC in the North.
5. For a sketch of KGC operations in California, see “K.G.C.—A Tale of Fort Alcatraz,” The Overland Monthly (San Francisco, Ca.), March 1888.
6. See Conkling, p. 7, for an analysis of the KGC’s aim of establishing an agrarian-based oligarchy or monarchy in the South and perhaps beyond. The author cites numerous editorials from Southern newspapers and various correspondences. He also cites a February 1862 address by Andrew Johnson (who would become the Southern Democrat vice president to Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln’s second term) to the Third Minnesota Regiment, near Nashville, Tennessee. Conkling, p. 6, writes that Johnson had said that “he knew the leaders of this rebellion well, both personally and politically, and he declared it was the firm determination of the rebel leaders to overthrow popular Government, and establish a despotism instead of our present liberal institutions, and that the people of the South would not submit to a President who had sprung from the common people, as Abe Lincoln had.” Compare this with Bickley’s KGC manifesto: “We aim at the establishment of a great Democratic Monarchy—a Republican Empire, which shall vie in grandeur with the Old Roman Empire,” as stated in Rules, Regulations and Principles of the K.G.C., p. 57. Conkling’s brief 23-page book was published just months before the April 14, 1865, assassination of Lincoln.
7. Ayer, pp. 15–16. Ayer is mistaken in saying that the KGC “dissolved” and was replaced by the Order of American Knights.
8. McPherson, pp. 560, 591–609; Gray, pp. 112–15.
9. Klement, pp. 23–33; Ayer, p. 20.
10. Klement, p. 25, cites Indianapolis Daily Journal and state governor Oliver Morton as sources.
11. JohnWarner Barber, The Loyal West in Times of Rebellion (Cincinnati: F. A. Howe, 1865), pp. 276–79.
12. Klement, pp. 26–33, 141.
13. See, for instance, reports from Brig. Gen. Henry B. Carrington and Lafayette C. Baker, Records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General, National Archives.
14. Charles G. Leland, “The Knights of the Golden Circle,” Continental Monthly, May 1862, Vol. I, Issue 5, p. 574.
15. Ibid. Leland refers to quote in piece cited above.
16. Ayer, p. 18.
17. McPherson, p. 597.
18. None of the Union’s intelligence reports have any substantive information on the KGC’s core Southern-based operations.
19. For a nineteenth-century account of the riot, see John Benson Lossing, Our Country: A Household History for All Readers (New York: Johnson, Wilson & Co., 1875), pp. 1630–32.
20. Ibid.
21. Conkling, p. 16. The dogged author provides evidence of this view in a Sept. 21, 1863 letter from James Murray Mason, a Confederate diplomat and KGC operative, to the British foreign office’s Earl Russell. The letter notes that Confederate President Jefferson Davis had, by that time, written off British intervention as a non-starter, following several years of “overtures” by Mason.
4. COMING HOME: A GOLD-FILLED LEGACY
1. Polk County Circuit Court Records, August Term, 1884, Thursday, August 28, Case #133 Against T. A. Hatfield, for Murder.
2. Fort Smith (Arkansas) Elevator, July 18, 1884, p. 2; and Daily Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock), July 11, 1884, p. 6.
3. Mining claims, Polk County Courthouse, Mena, Arkansas.
4. Letter to Bob Brewer from J. Michael Howard, Arkansas Geological Commission. “There has been manganese mining in this area, but despite a great deal of prospecting for gold and silver, to our knowledge, none has been discovered, much less mined,” Howard wrote.
5. A number of articles appeared in the Mena Star in 1896–97, boasting (erroneously) of gold being found.
6. Interview with Jim Harris, Hatfield, August 2001.
7. Death certificate, William Chambers Dobson, Beasley-Wood Funeral Home, Mena, Arkansas. Cause of death cited is heart attack and stroke.
8. The Illustrated Book of Trees and Shrubs (London: Octopus Books, 1985), p. 15.
9. For an insightful analysis of the origins of American surveyor terms, see the recently published book by Andro Linklater, Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy (New York: Walker & Co., 2002).
5. THE KGC: THE HIDDEN HISTORY
1. See Joseph Holt Papers, Library of Congress, by far the most trenchant analysis in the government’s files of the prewar and wartime KGC.
2. Ibid., pp. 7–8. Holt gives credence to Vallandigham’s own estimate of 500,000.
3. Ibid., pp. 14, 16.
4. Ibid., p. 16.
5. Ibid., p. 29.
6. Ibid., pp. 26–27.
7. For a detailed history of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in America, see William L. Fox, Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle: Two Centuries of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in America’s Southern Jurisdiction (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997).
8. Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books Edition, 1998), p. 87.
9. See C. Hugh Holman’s introduction to Partisan Leader: A Tale of the Future by Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, 1836, as reprinted by the University of North Carolina Press, 1971. Tucker’s “fictional” story is a thinly veiled account of KGC-type subversi
ve activity in Virginia during the antebellum period, replete with descriptions of codes and secret grips. Originally “secretly” published in Washington, D.C., the novel clearly has John C. Calhoun as a disguised philosophical protagonist, in the view of Holman and others.
10. See Stephen Joel Trachtenberg’s foreword to Fox’s Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle. Trachtenberg is president of George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
11. This is an unanswerable question and the subject of lively debate. One informative contemporary source on Templar history and possible Freemasonic associations is John J. Robinson, Dungeon, Fire and Sword: The Knights Templar in the Crusades (New York: M. Evans, 1991), pp. 470–76.
12. See Laurence Gardner, The Illustrated Bloodline of the Holy Grail (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2000), p. 207.
13. For a solid analysis of the origins and modern influence of Freemasonry in Europe and America—and its possible Knight Templar connections—see John L. Robinson, Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry (New York: M. Evans & Co., 1989). See, in particular, pp. 181–84 on Ramsay, and for other references to the order’s ill-defined origins, see pp. 185, 281, 287, 288 and 291. Also, see Fox on Ramsay, pp. 8, 25 and 26. In addition, see Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (London: Dell, 1983), pp. 145–50, for a discussion of both Radclyffe and Ramsay roles.
14. See brochure, Presenting the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, The Supreme Council (Mother Council of the World), Southern Jurisdiction U.S.A., House of the Temple, 1733 Sixteenth St. NW, Washington, D.C., 1998.
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