THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 17heard. Lavina Nethers, 85, lives a short drive from the dig site.
Sitting in her living room, she told me how her late husband,
James Nethers, had been named for Jesse James and that his
great-great-grandmother had regularly washed the outlaw’s
clothes and given him a meal when he passed through the area.
One day, “she told Jesse that she wouldn’t be able to wash his
clothes or take care of him when he comes through again. And he
wanted to know why. She told him that they were going to
foreclose on the farm the next day and she wouldn’t be there. And
he said, ‘Don’t worry about it; I’ll take care of it. I’ll see you
tomorrow.’ He came back the next morning and had the money for
her foreclosure. ... The next day, the bank was robbed. She got to
keep the farm and they got their money.”
A potential problem with Nethers’s testimony, though, is that
stories about James paying off mortgages are legion. I was
reminded of a verse by Woody Guthrie: “Many a starvin’ farmer /
The same story told / How the outlaw paid their mortgage / And
saved their little homes.” Guthrie was singing about Pretty Boy
Floyd, not James, but paying off the mortgages of society’s
underdogs is an archetype of American outlaw legends, a refash-
ioning of Robin Hood with a gun instead of a longbow.
Later I called Eric James, in Danville, Ky., who runs a Jesse
James family website and genealogical database dedicated to
documenting the family tree back to Colonial Virginia and
correcting what he considers myths about the outlaw. Almost
every week he gets a letter or email from people with old family
stories about James. What is it about Jesse James that triggers a
sense of connection in so many, real or imagined? “People need
heroes,” says James, 79, who’s writing a five-volume history of the
James family, and whose research shows he’s a distant cousin of
Jesse James. “We don’t have heroes today.”
To many in the James family, the outlaw’s legend has been a
burden — including stories of buried treasure and periodic
Hollywood glamorization, such as 2007’s “The Assassination of
Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” starring Brad Pitt. “It’s
been going on ever since Jesse was assassinated,” Eric James says.
“And thanks to reality TV, it’s not going to stop in the near future
or the next 100 years.” He adds: “The funny part about it is, all the
James descendants would love for the treasure hunters to find theI
was pulling for Somers, Getler and
Richards to be right about all this,
despite what the historians said. It would
be a more interesting world if they were,
and it would give others the courage to
challenge conventional wisdom. But be-
fore I could become a true believer, I
needed to see if their narrative could
withstand attempts to poke holes in it.
First, the beech trees. Could they really
be that old? I had brought a tape measure
with me. While the treasure hunters were
taking metal-detector readings and explor-
ing related sites, I measured the circumfer-
ence of the trees that were pillars of their
story. Earlier I had called Scott Aker, head
of horticulture and education at the U.S.
National Arboretum in Washington, for a
briefing on the age of trees. He told me that,
indeed, beech trees can grow to be hun-
dreds of years old. Unfortunately, the sur-
est ways to tell a tree’s age is to cut it down,
or bore a hole into it, and count the rings.
However, one way some arborists esti-
mate a beech tree’s age is to divide a tree’s
circumference in inches by 3.14 (or pi) and
multiply by six. By that method, three of
the key trees range in age from about 130 to
170 years old, which would date them to
the mid- to late 19th century. But the tree
where Getler saw the signature would be
only about 110 years old. Aker cast doubt
on this method because it doesn’t account
for local growing conditions; the trees
could easily be older — or younger. Results
of my tree-measuring test: ambiguous.
I looked for neighbors of the Ohio site
who might have family lore about James,
in addition to the gold rumors Somers had
From left: A beech
tree with various
carvings. According to
the treasure hunters,
the carvings could
point the way to gold.
Warren Getler goes
over maps and clues
with the team at a
hotel in Newark, Ohio.
Behind him is Brad
Richards.