Rebel Gold Read online

  1. Escape route taken by James Gang after an alleged September, 1874, Hot Springs, Arkansas, robbery.

  When Landon and Zetta Brewer finally bought an old two-story farmhouse in the rolling hills around Six Mile Creek near Hatfield, they made a pact to leave the transient lifestyle of a twenty-year military career behind. They knew there would be a period of adjustment for their three sons and their daughter in downshifting to a thumbnail town with little more than a school, a few churches, a couple of stores and a post office. Still, the rustic Arkansas backcountry near the headwaters of the Ouachita River would offer a simple, unencumbered existence that would set their kids on the right path.

  2. Close-up topographic map of Polk County, west-central Arkansas, showing Ouachita range and the towns of Hatfield and Cove, along with Smoke Rock Mountain, Six Mile Creek and other landmarks central to Bob Brewer’s upbringing in the wooded hill country.

  But the woods that blanket the Ouachitas have their own special temptations and distractions. It was only a matter of months before Bob’s simple life would become very complex.

  In the rugged mountains along the Oklahoma border, which include the better-known Ozarks to the north and the Ouachitas to the south, kin can run as thick as the trees. Extended families, with a bewildering number of relatives residing within a few miles of each other, are common. After the Brewers’ arrival in Hatfield nearly a hundred cousins, aunts, uncles and friends showed up for a reunion. Afterward, Bob barely could put faces to names, except for two imposing figures, forty-year-old Odis Ashcraft and Odis’s spry, seventy-four-year-old father, William Daniel Ashcraft, whom everybody, including the Brewers, called “Grandpa.” Both “Uncle Ode” (the husband of Landon’s sister, Bessie) and “Grandpa” Will Ashcraft had taken a special liking to Bob and his brothers the few times that the Brewers had visited Hatfield during Landon’s military service. The feeling was reciprocated by the Brewer boys, who saw in these tough, lean, laconic woodsmen the personification of the mountaineer.

  Grandpa Ashcraft was a powerful and revered figure, both in the family and within the tight-knit Hatfield community.1 Having arrived in the valley in 1907, Kentucky-born W. D. Ashcraft spent his early years raising livestock and helping transform Hatfield into the cattle- and hog-trading center for Polk County. He also trapped and hunted, selling some of the furs. During the Depression, he was known to have distributed freshly killed game to families struggling to put food on the table. And there were rumors of moonshine being made in the hills.

  Later in life, Grandpa’s occupation was not so easily defined or understood. W. D. Ashcraft took to the woods nearly every day on horseback, from sunup to sundown and sometimes through the night, with his well-oiled rifle tucked neatly into his saddle scabbard. On one occasion, he went off knowing full well that his pregnant wife, Delia, had gone into labor at home, delivering one of the couple’s thirteen children. “You little, short-legged sonofabitch! You just get on your horse and leave me with all of your kids!” she had screamed, but to absolutely no effect, family members recall.

  The ostensible mission behind such outings was “hunting cows,” as Grandpa would explain to family and as he would often note in his diary.2 Bob, for one, thought this odd because he had seldom seen significant numbers of cattle on his great-uncle’s property. He would discover as an adult what Grandpa Ashcraft meant.

  Grandpa’s diary, Bob would later learn, contained two unusual entries: “Found cow in cave” followed by the next day’s “Stayed home.” As a boy, Bob had no way of knowing that “cow” might have been shorthand for “cowan,” an old Masonic term for “intruder.”3 And while there had been rumors around the region for decades that Will Ashcraft may have killed a man or two, Bob would not become aware of them until he was well into his adult years.

  Grandpa’s family lived an austere, subsistence existence—through mid-century—in a pre–Civil War log cabin lit by kerosene lamps and devoid of plumbing, some ten miles from the Brewer farm. But no one within the Ashcraft clan ever seemed to complain, even though the small cabin—with its more than a dozen inhabitants—had but one or two windows and only a few beds. The Ashcrafts were self-sufficient and always seemed to have whatever basic food supplies—garden-grown vegetables and fruit, salted pork, wild hog, deer, squirrel and raccoon—and clothing they needed. Drinking water came from a spring next to the cabin. Heat was provided by a mud-and-stone fireplace and a wood-burning stove. The real mystery for the family at large was the grizzled mountaineer’s orthodox devotion to the woods: he was hardly ever at home.

  For Bob and his brothers, visits to the rustic cabin along Brushy Creek and to Uncle Ode’s house nearby were limited to weekends during the school year. But after school let out in May, and the crops were planted, the Brewer boys’ visits extended into weeks at a time. Now that the family had reestablished roots in the Brushy Valley, there would be plenty of time to learn the ways of the mountains: logging, prospecting, hunting, trapping, fishing and horsemanship.

  Within days of school’s shuttering for summer in 1950, Bob, his older brother Jack and his younger brother Dave climbed onto Uncle Ode’s wagon for a logging haul far into Brushy Creek’s interior. Grandpa, in the front seat, handed Bob the reins, and the youngster quickly took command while Odis looked on from the rear.

  The idea of steering a mule-drawn wagon across mountain trails was so exciting that Bob almost missed Grandpa’s casually spoken words. “Bobby, see that ol’ beech, there along the creek?” the old man said, pointing to a sturdy tree with soft, dapple-gray bark and dark green almond-shaped leaves. “That’s a treasure tree. It’s got carvings on it that tell where money is buried.” Bob, his eyebrows arched, stared intently at his great-uncle, seeking elaboration. All he got was a stern gaze from the old man. As the wagon rolled on, Will Ashcraft pointed toward a narrow hollow abutting Brushy Creek. “That’s where a Mexican is buried. Somebody found him messing where he shouldn’t have been messing and shot him.” This time, Bob pressed him with questions, but the mountaineer would say no more. He simply told the Brewer boys to jump out of the wagon and get busy with the log-splitting job ahead. W. D. Ashcraft had a reputation for being more than demanding—he was outright tough.

  In the silent moments that followed—and they were silent, for the Ouachitas are a place where youth show respect for elders and do not ask many questions—something began to stir within Bob’s head. What had Grandpa been talking about? The woodsman’s words were deliberate, premeditated, meant to sink in. And they did just that. The education of a Confederate code-breaker had begun.

  During the next few months, the theme of buried treasure filtered through Bob’s new life in the Arkansas forests. References to hidden gold were sporadic, always oblique and never satisfying. He sometimes overheard talk of “mining claims” among the Ashcrafts and two of their neighbors, brothers Isom and Ed Avants, descendants of John Avants, who had moved into the Brushy Creek valley right after the Civil War.4 And he sometimes observed mysterious visitors talking with Grandpa or Uncle Odis—rugged men who would unravel tattered topographic maps on the hood of a truck and ask the Ashcrafts for help in finding certain spots.

  Then there was Grandpa’s padlocked chest in the cabin’s kitchen. Bob would sit atop the chest and read the old man’s complete collection of National Geographic magazines. Once, he asked Delia Ashcraft what was inside. “That’s Grandpa’s. I don’t ask and you shouldn’t either,” she scolded. (It would take another fifty years before Bob would learn of the contents.)

  In his forest ramblings—whether helping Ode on logging excursions, collecting firewood, hunting game, or exploring old mine shafts—Bob occasionally stumbled across what by then he recognized as treasure signs. Over time, a menagerie of inscribed animal figures—horses, snakes, turtles, birds, turkey tracks—and a collection of cryptic lettering, dates and other abstract engravings revealed themselves on beech bark or rock faces along faint forest trails. Between bites of homemade biscuits with eggs and
ham—his usual lunchtime meal when working the hills—he would ask Ode about the obscure, coded guideposts. But Ode would just offhandedly confirm that what Bob had observed were in fact encrypted treasure markers and not idle graffiti.

  It was as if a scavenger hunt had been laid out but no one had explained its rules or purpose. Yet Bob knew that it was not a joke, a tease, a gimmick. It had to do with family: Grandpa and Ode were aware of some dark mystery, while Landon Brewer, who had a warm relationship with his sister Bessie and his brother-in-law, seemed detached from, if not completely ignorant of, the intrigue.

  Bob, who conversed little with his taciturn father, decided that it was best to keep his knowledge of the woods and its secrets to himself. The challenge was to absorb more, however, and whenever, he could. If the opportunity presented itself to take a break from schoolwork and the demanding chores around the farm, he would head off on foot or horseback to Aunt Bessie and Uncle Ode’s place on Brushy Creek. His aunt would have her biscuits, jams and fresh goat’s milk at the ready, and Ode invariably would offer up some entertaining enterprise outdoors. Odis Ashcraft had no children of his own, but he loved kids. Over time he made the Brewer boys, particularly the irrepressibly curious Bob, feel like his own sons. There was one other thing, Bob sensed: Ode was testing him.

  The test was not whether he would become a true mountaineer. That was all but assured. Ode, a logger by profession, quickly discovered that Bob had a keen and growing knowledge of the trees and plants in the forest, their value to the logging industry, their medicinal properties and their place in the ecosystem. (Little did Odis know that Bob already had read a prized set of Compton’s Encyclopedia, nearly cover to cover.) Like all local kids working summer jobs in timber, Bob could pump out his share of stave bolts, those narrow pieces of wood that form the sides of a barrel. He also had shown his mettle as an assured horseman and a clean shot with his .22 rifle. The test, Bob intuited, was how well he could absorb knowledge about the signs that he had seen in the forest and then explain the puzzle they presented.

  Bob vaguely perceived that he was undergoing a slow initiation into a hidden world. Every time he tried to quicken the pace, to ask probative questions, he hit a wall and was forced to slow down. But over the years a pattern began to emerge in which Ode, acknowledging Bob’s persistence, would let on a little more each time. He would describe certain signposts—grafted tree limbs, axe slices or “blazes” on tree trunks, rock piles laid out in subtle geometric patterns—and challenge the youngster to find these on the trails.

  One morning, while spearfishing in a remote bend of Brushy Creek with his brothers, Bob was startled to see Odis ride up on his stallion, “Rebel.” Without prompting, Ode abruptly pointed his rifle toward a steep ridge. “Boys,” he intoned, “there’s more money buried on that mountain than all of you could spend in a lifetime.” Bob, now in his early teens and feeling cocky, replied: “Then why don’t you just go dig it up, Uncle Ode! We could sure use it.” Odis paused before he responded. “Because it belongs to someone else and nobody can touch it,” he replied, coolly. He dismounted and asked the boys to follow him to a holly tree along the bank. The tree had a snake figure and various other symbols neatly carved into its bark. “Someday, perhaps one of you will learn how to read these signs and know where that money is,” he said cryptically, and departed.

  For the first time, Bob realized that a lot of money was involved and that perhaps it was still being watched. The whole idea was confusing and confounding. It didn’t seem to make sense: people living at near poverty levels and leaving treasure—and apparently lots of it—buried in the ground!

  Several months later, Uncle Ode flashed annoyance when the Brewer boys once again got ahead of the backwoods pace that the older men practiced. Jack had returned to Ode’s house from a brisk November squirrel hunt with news that he had found a rock carving of a rising sun that looked “like half the Japanese flag.” He had discovered the deep-cut engraving, which had odd lettering next to it, on a ledge partly overgrown with moss and lichen. Odis looked up from the meal he was eating as Jack went on about his find, but Bob could see that his brother’s tale about the sunrise symbol had unsettled their uncle. “Well Jack, I guess you found that gold,” Ode barked. “Now why don’t you go dig it up and share it with us all.”

  On another occasion, while out squirrel hunting, Bob had tripped over the rusted remnants of a partly unearthed Wells Fargo strongbox.5 The spot lay deep in the woods, along a remote trail allegedly taken by Jesse James after robbing the Hot Springs stage. When Bob ran to show the corroded iron frame to Odis, the logger brusquely told the boy to put the rusted strongbox back where he found it. Odis then grabbed the rusted frame and hung it on a tree limb next to the spot. Bob and his brothers never saw the old money box again.

  This pattern of baiting the Brewer boys—Bob most of all—and then swatting them down when they overreached would repeat itself over the next year. Bob took his unspoken initiation in stride; it was a chess game of sorts, and he was in the realm of a master, who, in turn, was son of a master boardsman. Yet whatever obscure wisdom was being imparted, and for whatever purpose, came to an abrupt halt in May 1955, when Odis was killed in a freak timber accident.

  A thirty-foot Yellow Boy pine had smashed the logger’s skull. Moments before, Odis had been talking with seventeen-year-old Jack Brewer, who was helping measure pines to be cut into poles for construction. A heavy chain saw—a technological innovation that was replacing the seven-foot crosscut saws pulled by a man on each end—had made short work of the tall pines.6 But the noisy saw had prevented Odis from hearing the sound of a falling precut tree that had been lodged precariously against another. The irony of a modern saw snuffing out the life of a woodsman so devoted to the past was not lost on Bob and his brothers, who were devastated by the passing of Ode, as was all of the Brushy Creek community.

  Odis’s death brought other changes to the rhythm of life in the Arkansas backwoods that year. Grandpa Ashcraft’s favorite son (of five) and apparent successor was gone. Soon, the old mountaineer’s health began to crumble. His regular outings, which could last several days at a time, stopped altogether. Will Ashcraft had finally slowed down. He and Delia abandoned the old cabin they had lived in since 1910 and moved closer to Hatfield. The weathered outdoorsman who had always trod his own secret path now sought the company of others, particularly Bob. The change in Grandpa’s behavior was obvious to the teenager, who sensed that he was being groomed as a surrogate Odis, a replacement on some kind of mission. It seemed to be linked to some type of vigil: watching over the Brushy Creek valley.

  About a year after Odis’s passing, Grandpa began asking Bob to accompany him on trips back to the cabin, to check on the old place. The old-timer had been commuting daily by Ford tractor, which he treated as if it were a horse, yelling “whoa” at it when he wanted to stop. In between odd jobs—cutting tall weeds around the adjacent smokehouse and fixing up the large barn—Grandpa would recount to Bob the history of the frontier cabin. He explained how its foot-thick hand-hewn logs had been tightly dovetailed, using no nails. He also related how Jesse James had paid more than one visit in the previous century. (The cabin was located on the James gang’s escape route from the Hot Springs robbery.)7 Further, he told of an ex-Confederate soldier, William Martin Wiley, from Van Zandt County, Texas, who had occupied a crude windowless hut on the Cossatot River nearby until his death at nearly one hundred in 1930.8 Bill Wiley was a tall, charismatic, long-haired, mustachioed pioneer who could play the fiddle with the same hair-trigger precision as he could shoot. He and Grandpa were the closest of friends, the old man explained. The two loved the woods; they knew its trails like no one else, and they marked them with their axe blades, accordingly. Both men “worked the mines,” and both were expert trackers and marksmen.

  Bob figured that there must be some connection among Jesse James, the Confederacy and solitary-minded men staking mining claims after the Civil War. But he had no idea at
the time that bits of a vast conspiracy were being revealed.

  Over time, Bob’s visits with his great-uncle became less frequent, as demands of high school and then, in his senior year, National Guard duty kept him occupied. Around the time he graduated from Hatfield High School in 1958, a rumor circulated that all who were recently on active duty in the state’s Guard unit would be drafted into the regular Army. Weighing his options, Bob decided to follow in his father’s footsteps. He joined the Navy in June of that year.

  When he broke the news to Grandpa that he had signed up and would be shipping out soon, he saw that the old man was hurt. It was, in fact, the first time that he had seen emotion creep over the face of the stoic mountaineer. No further words were exchanged. Bob began what would be a twenty-year career in the Navy, and he would not see the old man again for two years.

  During a brief home leave in 1961 with his new wife, Linda, Bob asked his father for a loan to buy a car. Landon Brewer, hit by hard times, could not spare the money and suggested that Bob speak to W. D. Ashcraft about some credit. Grandpa, thrilled to see Bob again, said that if he wanted cash, it would take a “day or so to dig it up.” Bob told him that he needed money for a family car and promised to repay on time with interest. The old man suggested that a check would suffice and immediately presented one. Bob, good to his word, repaid the loan with interest a little over a year later and looked forward to seeing more of the old-timer. But infrequent breaks from military duty over the next few years offered little time to visit with his parents and the Ashcrafts. After one last brief meeting, he departed for the first of two tours in Vietnam. He would never see W. D. Ashcraft again.