THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 13the Civil War,” told me that the treasure hunters get at least one
important thing right about the outlaw: He was a much more
significant political figure than standard accounts portray. “With
Jesse, it was crime plus politics,” Stiles says. He and his gang
“weren’t modern terrorists, but what distinguishes him from all
the other criminals in the 19th century is the way he would use his
notoriety to promote a political cause” — namely, the Lost Cause of
the South and the maintenance of white supremacy. James was
part of a band that targeted banks connected to Unionists and
harassed election officials during the midterms of 1866. He
decried the postwar Republican party of Lincoln and advocated
against the reelection of Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. The treasure
hunters, says Stiles, leap “ahead of the evidence” when they extend
James’s political program to include burying gold to support a
Confederate resurrection or some other mysterious power grab.
James roamed as far north as Minnesota to rob a bank, but no
deeds in Ohio have been documented. And yet, this is undoubtedly
murky territory, which makes absolute proof of anything elusive.
James “lived his whole life underground, and there’s no collection
of [personal] letters from him,” Stiles says. “All the evidence about
him personally has to be delivered with a caveat, so that also
means that he’s more susceptible to revisions, and sometimes
weird revisions. ... Somebody is going to study, if they haven’t
already, [the connection] between this kind of conspiracy theory
approach to history in recent decades and people’s willingness to
believe that the election was stolen, for example — this belief in the
sensational and conspiracies and hidden hands.”
Getler says he admires the work of Stiles and Keehn but thinks
historians’ search for truth doesn’t cover all the ground. “They
don’t get their hands dirty in the field as an archaeologist or evenwar, in April 1865, Confederate President
Jefferson Davis fled Richmond with a
trainload of what was left of the Confeder-
ate treasury in gold and silver. Some of it
was lost or stolen in the chaos, and the case
remains a mystery. A popular theory in
treasure-hunting circles is that the KGC
may have had a hand in the matter, and
that the group also buried much more gold
from other sources in multiple locations.
KGC historian Keehn disagrees: “I never
really found anything that supports the
treasure-hunting thing,” he told me.
James entered the picture in the early
1960s and mid-1970s when a self-styled
private detective named Orvus Lee Howk,
who claimed to be James’s grandson, wrote
a book and contributed to another arguing
that the outlaw was a KGC leader who
buried gold. Howk presented no evidence
beyond his colorful yarns, but he had
joined the treasure hunt in Zanesville in
- Today, the James-KGC-gold con-
nection forms an active subculture within
treasure-hunting culture, spawning books
like “Jesse James and the Lost Templar
Treasure” and TV movies like “Jesse James’
Hidden Treasure.”
T.J. Stiles, author of the groundbreak-
ing biography “Jesse James: Last Rebel of
Chad Somers and
others at the dig site
in Ohio. Somers, who
grew up near the site,
vowed to find the
treasure when he was
about 10 years old,
after a neighbor told
him there was a
rumor that Jesse
James had buried
gold by a creek where
the boy played.
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Bradley Richards with
a high-powered metal
detector and his
father, Brad.