14 MAY 8, 2022
In response to a lawsuit filed by the treasure hunters, the agency
has been ordered to start releasing documents related to the dig
later this month.
Since the early 2000s, Getler has been an entrepreneur and
worked in communications for tech companies, including an
underground detection technology firm. Periodically in his spare
time, he returns to KGC treasure investigations. “He’s got his teeth
around the leg of this thing ... and he just won’t let it go,” Robert
Whitcomb, Getler’s former editor at the Herald Tribune, told me.
“He’s always been a very, very persistent writer and journalist.”
One of Getler’s closest friends, Andy Secher, a trilobite fossil
specialist affiliated with the American Museum of Natural
History in New York, says Getler always “had the idea that he had
a great purpose. That there was something in his writing, in his
future .... that was going to significantly impact a lot of people.” If
exposing gold cached by a secret network is that decisive project,
Secher says that he, for one, still needs to see proof it’s real. “From
the bottom of my heart, I can’t wish him more luck and every good
tiding,” he says. “But the question becomes at some point, show me
something. And I say that to him all the time.”
Getler told me he tries to approach the subject as the journalist
he used to be. “I’m not sitting here saying to people, ‘Believe,
believe, believe.’ It takes my own skepticism to be overcome to
start feeling good about the overall picture,” he says. “You cantreasure people,” he says. “There’s no way to get at this history
unless you’re being a guy who’s literally digging in the ground.”
Getler insists his speculations are not a conspiracy theory; rather,
they are a theory about a known conspiracy — the KGC — and
pushing the theory in new directions. “I’m the last person to say
this is all neatly integrated, seamless. ... It’s messy. It’s suggestive.
Much of it is not definitive. But there’s enough there to make the
case.”
E
ach of the trio of treasure hunters in Ohio was after something
more elusive than gold. A bit of bullion would be nice, of
course. They even discussed how they would document the
discovery, should there be one. But any gold they dug up would be
a token of something more personally priceless.
Getler, 61, a former reporter with the International Herald
Tribune, the Wall Street Journal and other publications, was a
senior writer for Discovery Communications in the late 1990s
when he started researching the history. (Getler is the son of the
late Michael Getler, who was a deputy managing editor and
ombudsman at The Washington Post.) That’s when he met a
veteran treasure hunter named Bob Brewer from Arkansas.
Brewer, who’d retired from a Navy career including combat
service in Vietnam, believed that some elders in his extended
family in the early 20th century had been “sentinels” guarding
caches of supposed KGC gold. One had showed him a “treasure
tree” scarred with strange carved symbols.
Brewer taught himself to read telltale signs left in trees and
rocks — such as hearts, turtles and turkey tracks — and to follow
lines of buried clues for miles through the hills and woods. Using
his system, in 1991, in a hilly forest in western Arkansas, he located
a cache of gold and silver coins minted between 1802 and 1889,
with a face value of nearly $460. Two years later he assisted in
another haul in Oklahoma, following a copy of a map with the
symbol “JJ” and attributed to Jesse James by other treasure
hunters.
Getler thought the implications of Brewer’s experiences — the
existence of a powerful secret network after the Civil War — could
be the biggest story of his career. It would add a missing chapter to
American history and would raise the question of what became of
the secret network. In the National Archives, Getler found KGC
records with examples of the group’s coded symbols. Brewer and
he located other markings that old stories tied to the KGC on
suspected treasure trails in several states. They also found symbols
similar to those cited by Howk as having been left by James. In
2003, Simon & Schuster published their book “Shadow of the
Sentinel” (retitled “Rebel Gold” for the paperback) with 21 pages
of endnotes, about the quest to crack the code of KGC treasure.
The work inspired a new generation of KGC treasure hunters;
even the FBI joined the chase. In 2018, a father-and-son
treasure-hunting team said they had detected a large cache of gold
in a forest at Dents Run in northwestern Pennsylvania: as much as
$50 million in suspected gold stolen from a mule-led Union Army
pack train in 1863. Citing Getler’s KGC research, an FBI agent
filed an affidavit seeking permission to dig up and seize the gold as
stolen federal property. The story of the lost gold, the agent wrote
in the affidavit, “fits the description of a KGC ‘waybill’ as it
provides a very detailed ‘map’ in its telling of an account, mixing
truth and symbols.”
In the end, the FBI said it found no gold. But the hunters grew
suspicious when the agents wouldn’t let them watch the excava-
tion, and after residents later told reporters they had heard
digging at night and seen convoys of FBI vehicles leaving the site.