16 MAY 8, 2022
could be a vault or a chest near where his heart should be.
Getler conceded that some of this could be graffiti left by lovers
— initials, hearts and arrows — but that’s how KGC treasure
hieroglyphics tend to work, he said. Clues are hiding in plain
sight, mixed intentionally or coincidentally with red herrings, he
said. A further point of validation, he added, is that some of the
symbology here in Ohio, such as the hearts and the “JJs,” matched
that found at other suspected treasure sites out west.
He hurried me on to another elaborately carved tree where he
said I would get to see James’s signature. Getler had spotted it on
his first visit in December. “When I saw his name on the tree, I
trembled and tears came out of my eyes,” he recalled. The tree’s
carvings told a story in three acts, he said, depicting how the
group brought the gold up the creek, buried it and certified that
the outlaw was their leader. But today the signature — “Jesse W.
James 1882” — was invisible, and he didn’t have a picture from
December. It had been raining. Getler fingered the moist bark.
“Damn it,” he said. “It’s too wet.”
We returned to that beech each day, waiting for the bark to dry
and for the signature to reappear. I was troubled that the
symbology seemed so malleable, open to the creation of more
than one story. The risk of confirmation bias — fitting the signs to
a desired meaning — seemed enormous. But I also found that I
was invested, too. One day I suddenly saw a long boat carved
across the trunk of the signature tree. Getler hadn’t known what
to make of those horizontal lines that converged upward into a
prow. He savored my addition to the story. “Maybe they’re saying
they came by barge here?” Getler asked.
Other evidence that Getler and Somers relied on included a
copy of a treasure map attributed to Howk — the alleged
confidant or grandson of James’s who had been on the 1949
Zanesville treasure hunt. The map is widely shared on the
Internet in treasure-hunting circles, but I couldn’t determine
who first posted it, and Getler didn’t know either. He had gone to
the trouble of checking signed initials on the map against the
handwriting in Howk’s letters in a Texas archive — but Howk’s
veracity is dismissed by historians. I wasn’t ready to trust the
map, but Getler’s and Somers’s interpretation revealed how they
approached the code breaking.
The map appeared to show geographical features of the Ohio
property. If so, a “Confederate Depository” was indicated at the
site where Somers started digging his shaft. But the map was
labeled — Getler and Somers would say intentionally mislabeled
— as describing a treasure site somewhere in Tennessee. Somers
scrutinized faint hand-lettering at the top of the map that
appeared to say “Battle Site.” He noticed the stem of the letter “B”
was detached from the curves, which could make it “13.” And
“attle” was written in such a way that could be read as “oHio.”
Rather than “Battle Site,” did it say “13 Ohio Site,” with 13
coinciding with the plat number of the property? In addition,
Somers and Getler proposed that when the map was turned to
reflect the north-south direction of the creek in Ohio, the “N” in
the locational note “From Nashville” could become the “Z” in
“From Zanesville.”
The treasure hunters also cited a letter from Howk to another
participant in the 1949 Zanesville treasure search. It referenced
clues including an old shovel, a wagon iron and a wolf trap, and
instructed, “Drive a stake at each point until we can run the
lines[;] then where the lines cross is your solution.” Somers had
uncovered a shovel, with the blade pointing toward the shaft, and
a wagon axle, also pointing toward the shaft. He had yet to find a
wolf trap.place to dig. He took a smoke break at one of the only flat places
on the hillside, a narrow ledge beside a tree shaped like a W.
Somers suddenly had what he described to me as a kind of vision
that featured James, wearing an oilskin duster, smoking a cigar,
announcing that he would bury his biggest treasure right here.
Somers commenced digging.
People around Purity laughed at him, thought he was wasting
his time. When he needed money, he suspended digging to
remodel houses or cut firewood. At one point he had made it
down 30 feet — I saw a picture of him down there — and stood on
what he thought could be the concrete top of a vault. To learn
more about what he was looking for, he ordered Getler and
Brewer’s book, and it became his bible. He brought it into the
field with him every day as he scoured the territory for the kinds of
markers and symbols that the authors described.
Late last year, he sent Getler a Facebook message about his
preliminary findings. Getler had received similar queries and
was wary. But when he heard how close Somers was to Zanesville,
“He was like, ‘I’ll call you back,’ and we’ve been in very close touch
ever since,” Somers says. Getler made an exploratory visit in
December.
Somers saw the treasure hunt in the largest possible terms. “I
think we can all agree that we need a little hope right now,” he told
me on the phone, before I went to Ohio. “... I want people that
really have nothing ... to see what they can do. I’m not saying
everybody can go out and find a treasure like this, but I’m saying
that with the right mind-set and determination, the things they
think are out of reach might be closer than they thought.”
Years ago, when I first discovered Getler and Brewer’s book on
cracking the KGC code, I read portions of it aloud to my eldest
daughter, then age 10. The way the authors described the
American landscape itself as potentially being an encoded map,
studded with clues that looked ordinary only to those lacking
imagination and skill, was magical. My daughter was familiar
with scavenger hunts, of course, and together we marveled at the
possibility that more than a century ago people laid clues for
anyone to find.
Now, in Ohio, as a journalist rather than as a dad, I was forced
to confront whether the power of this story lay in its truth or its
creativity — and I knew my job was to be on the lookout for signs
the magic was an illusion.
A
ll right, now the adventure begins,” Getler said on the first
day of the hunt as we trudged a muddy half-mile across a
field and through the woods to the site of the suspected treasure
trove.
Richards, the former teacher from Michigan, and his son,
Bradley, a high school freshman, were taking readings above the
shaft with a deep-penetrating metal detector hooked up to a
digital imaging system. Bradley tethered himself to a tree to run
the machine on the unforgiving incline. “The data will show what
the data will show,” Richards said as his son walked grids on the
hill.
Getler led me down to look at the carvings on the beech trees.
He said these offered some of the most promising evidence that
this could be a treasure site. On one, hearts and arrows were tilted
to point in the direction of the shaft. There were carved rabbits —
“rabbit trails” being a reference to paths leading to treasure — and
a pair of “Js” carved back-to-back, which, according to Jesse
James treasure lore, depicts the outlaw’s initials. There was a
diagram that Getler interpreted as a shaft with tunnels, and
beside it was a portrait of a man with a broad brim hat and what