12 MAY8, 2022empty metal box, but they told the local papers they also found
carvings on trees that they interpreted as clues. In fact, their
failure only validated the almost mystical qualities they attributed
to James. One of the treasure hunters told the Zanesville Times
Recorder that the outlaw had foreseen the invention of metal
detectors but knew “how to cover [treasure] with something so no
machine will ever locate it.”
Treasure hunting maintains its grip on American culture, with
at least two dozen reality shows over the past decade devoted to
finding everything from the Holy Grail to the riches of the Knights
Templar, according to the database IMDb.com. The predictable,
tortured conclusion of these shows is nearly always the same: no
treasure — so it must still be out there. But I was descending into
the mystery anyway, enchanted in spite of myself. I had first
encountered Getler’s work on the Confederate underground in
2009, when I interviewed him about the oddly related mysteries of
Masonic symbology around Washington that best-selling novelist
Dan Brown centered in his D.C. thriller that year.
I’d come to see treasure hunting and amateur code breaking as
metaphors for our age, when the traditional arbiters of truth — the
media, government officials, political parties, religious institu-
tions — have lost some, or all, of their authority. We have to
decipher things on our own. The challenge in such a conspiratorial
climate is to distinguish truth from speculation: What’s the
difference between secret knowledge that guides you to a pot of
gold and, say, the signs that lead you to suspect that a presidential
election was stolen, or that a deadly virus is fake news? The men I
was with were looking for something tangibly precious, sure — but
in other ways, maybe they were also searching for something that
we’re all missing.A
t the beginning of the “National Treasure” sequel, Nicolas
Cage’s character lectures in Washington about a shadowy
fraternity called the Knights of the Golden Circle and a dark secret
contained in the missing pages of John Wilkes Booth’s diary. Had
the diary pages not been burned, he says, Abraham Lincoln’s
“killers may have found a vast treasure of gold, and the Union may
well have lost the Civil War.”
It sounds like a villainous conspiracy concocted in Hollywood
— except that the fiction is spiced with fact. The Knights of the
Golden Circle really did exist. According to one of the few
mainstream histories of the organization, “Knights of the Golden
Circle: Secret Empire, Southern Secession, Civil War” by David C.
Keehn, Booth and at least one other conspirator in plots to kidnap
or kill Lincoln probably were members.
The KGC was founded in the 1850s by a Virginia doctor
transplanted to — yes — Ohio. It was primarily a Southern group
but had plenty of Northern sympathizers, including hundreds in a
county about an hour north of Zanesville, according to a news
report at the time. The group attracted 50,000 members. Before
the war they focused on agitating for secession and building a
slaveholding empire in a geographic circle encompassing the
southern United States, the Caribbean and parts of Latin Ameri-
ca. During the war, they filled the ranks of Confederate forces.
After the war, the KGC seemed to melt away, possibly splintering
into pro-South successor groups or joining the Ku Klux Klan.
This was just when Jesse James was making his own transition
from wartime Confederate guerrilla to postwar, politically in-
spired, anti-Union bandit and killer. Over the next century,
legends of the KGC and myths of the outlaw became entwined and
endlessly embellished.
And Confederate gold did go missing. In the waning days of theI
clung to a rope on a nearly vertical hillside in rural Ohio,
gingerly inching my way down toward a hand-dug shaft
that was said to conceal an enormous cache of solid gold
bars. I lost my footing and started to slide, but the rope
saved me from rolling 70 feet to a creek below or crashing
into the trunks of pines and beeches that towered over the slope.
The old beech trees were especially haunting: Their smooth bark
was elaborately carved with rabbits, human faces, hearts, letters, a
boat and what looked like crude blueprints. The trees told an epic
story, according to the treasure hunters I was with.
The tale featured the outlaw Jesse James, a powerful secret
network of collaborators, and vast quantities of gold they allegedly
buried in “depositories” from here to Utah and New Mexico to
fund a Confederate uprising after the Civil War. The notorious
gunslinger had been a Confederate guerrilla during the Civil War
before turning to robbing banks and trains. The treasure hunters
were intrigued by a controversial theory that he was part of an
underground effort to help the South rise again.
It was a Wednesday in mid-March, the fourth day of the
expedition. So far, the findings seemed promising. Grainy video
from a camera snaked into a tunnel off the shaft showed
potentially man-made structures and possibly reflective material.
A metal detector capable of penetrating 25 feet was pinging and
showing large metallic targets. It was time to call in a track hoe and
start major digging.
“This is no longer a treasure hunt. This is a treasure recovery,”
declared Chad Somers, a wiry former rodeo bull rider who had
discovered the site. He was joined by Brad Richards, a retired high
school history teacher from Michigan who had appeared in two
seasons of the History channel series “The Curse of Civil War
Gold,” and Warren Getler, a former journalist and longtime
investigator of Confederate treasure claims who had been a
consultant on Disney’s 2007 treasure-hunting blockbuster “Na-
tional Treasure: Book of Secrets.” Somers had invited Getler for
his prominence in the field; Getler brought in Richards, a friend
from previous historical treasure investigations.
My disbelief was suspended as shakily as my body on the
hillside. I wanted to believe there was gold in them thar hills. But
Ohio is one of the last places I would have chosen to dig for
treasure buried by Jesse James. History books say he and his
brother, Frank, marauded farther west, from the 1860s until 1882,
when James Gang traitor Robert Ford shot him in the back of the
head in Missouri. During his unusually long career for an outlaw,
James cultivated his own mystique, teasing the lawmen on his trail
in cheeky letters to newspapers and staging robberies as spectacu-
lar, bloody public spectacles. He came to be seen as a noble Robin
Hood who was so slick he may have faked his own death. The claim
that he buried some of the loot he stole, as well as gold from other
sources, was a part of the myth that the treasure hunters hoped to
verify.
It seemed fitting that this hunt was in a secluded forest about
30 miles northwest of Zanesville, the birthplace of Zane Grey, the
prolific popularizer of the Old West in scores of novels. Whether
we found gold or not, we were plunging deep into American
mythologies of one sort or another: outlaw legends, fables of
rebellion, beguiling notions of hidden historical hands operating
behind the scenes.
Zanesville had been seized by treasure-hunting fever before. In
March 1949, a posse of men claiming to be intimates or kin of Jesse
James blew into town with a primitive land mine detector to
search for $1.5 million in gold that they said was buried
somewhere just to the north. In the end, all they dug up was an