Buccaneer
12-27-2004, 07:24 PM
Some here know that I am an avid reader of the American Civil War and for Christmas, my wife found this book for me
Shadow of the Sentinel (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743219686/qid=1104195929/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-3014229-0318352)
It's a book about a historian/treasure hunter in the deep backwoods of Arkansas who is a descendant of Knights of the Golden Circle sentinels guarding Confederate gold caches. From looking at the photos, it involves cryptography, cartography, genealogy, geology, etc. - decifering clues left on the land (like markings on trees) and piecing together clues to form a pattern, namely the oft-used Templars grid. From reviews, the book does get into the Jesse James conspiracy, the cover-up that was the Lost Dutchman mine in Arizona and of course, the enigmatic subject of the Freemasons. But I had never read something like this before and since it was written by an investigative reporter out of DC, it becomes a page-turner. The first chapter or so gets into the treasure hunter's family - real hardscabble mountaineers of the Ouachitas Mountains. Anyway, here's review from amazon
http://g-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/common/customer-reviews/stars-5-0.gifBeyond the Farthest Stretches of American Imaginations, October 3, 2003
<TABLE><TBODY><TR><TD vAlign=top>Reviewer:</TD><TD>Dr. Larry T. McGehee (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member-glance/-/A2RM0FHYDO96IJ/1/ref=cm_cr_auth/104-3014229-0318352?%5Fencoding=UTF8) (Spartanburg, SC USA) - See all my reviews (http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2RM0FHYDO96IJ/ref=cm_cr_auth/104-3014229-0318352?%5Fencoding=UTF8)</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Erroneously, it turned out, we assumed that Shadow of the Sentinel: One Man's Quest to Find the Hidden Treasure of the Confederacy (Simon & Schuster, 2003), by Warren Getler and Bob Brewer, was going to be a new account of the search for the Confederate treasury that dwindled and disappeared along the path of Jefferson Davis's flight from Richmond and eventual capture in Georgia.The book is about much more money and much bigger mysteries than that.
Reading southern history and Civil War history over the years, we have sometimes stumbled across references to the Knights of the Golden Circle. Usually, the organization is depicted as a clandestine pre-Civil War group of filibusterers intent upon annexing Mexico or Cuba as slave states, or a Civil War-era group intent upon organizing Copperhead opposition to Lincoln and the war in the Old Northwest (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio). Sometimes parallels are drawn between the Freemasons and the Golden Circle, both of which operated with symbols, passwords, degrees of achievement and status, and secrecy.
In Getler's and Brewer's book, the Knights of the Golden Circle have intimate ties to Old World Knights and Scottish Rite Free Masonry, are linked to the highest circles of American Free Masons (through figures as diverse as John Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, General and Mississippi Governor J. A. Quitman, explorer and highest ranking Mason General Albert Pike, Jesse James, Massachusetts politician Caleb Cushing), are interlocked with Cherokee and Choctaw tribal leaders and territories but also with French Rosicrucians, and operated (and may still operate) secretly in a gamut of places such as Charleston, Natchez, Nashville, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Arizona.
As a youngster in western Arkansas, Bob Brewer was introduced to the woods around Polk County, especially under the wing of an uncle and great-uncle who introduced him to numerous hidden symbols and paths-pieces of metal, carvings on rocks and trees, rock formations, and the topography of the land. The old men around Brewer seemed to know secrets and to serve as custodians and watchmen for something, but they were never explicit about their knowledge. Brewer went off to make a career in the Navy, and when he retired in 1977, he returned to his Arkansas home. Readings and recalled signs and associations brought him into a fascination with the search for gold treasures said to be buried thereabouts.
For the next quarter-century, Brewer made the solving of the mystery of the symbols the dominant force in his life. He collected books, read widely, interviewed old-timers, met and worked with fellow treasure-hunters from other parts of the country, studied old maps, made forays and expeditions, collaborated and was betrayed with some parties and formed fruitful alliances with others, actually uncovered a couple of significant treasures, and painstakingly and single-mindedly pieced together a cryptic overlay map that he applied precisely and successfully to three widely separated treasure sites in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Arizona (the famous Lost Dutchman treasure).
A great deal of this account deals with speculations (including poisonings of Quitman and President Zachary Taylor) and shadows, hypotheses and incredibilities, and remarkable coincidences and happenstance findings. Critical to Brewer's successful searching is his early buying into the story that Jesse James was not killed by Bob Ford in 1882, but faked his own death, and that the J. Frank Dalton who claimed to be James and who died in 1951 at age 104 (or thereabouts) really was James and that he provided much information critical to the development of Brewer's overlay map.
The real proof of the pudding, of course, would be the actual uncovering of one or more enormous mother lodes of treasure in the sites Brewer identifies, but the authors beg off from that step, pleading that Brewer never was after gold itself but only after the unlocking of the key to where its locations, and that reverence for the sentinels who guarded it led them to leave it where it is. They claim to be more interested in having established the existence of a very large secret organization and the location of its treasure-perhaps buried to await a second Civil War or some very high spiritual cause-than in removing the millions or billions of dollars of treasure they apparently have located.
Theirs is a story that tests our ability to believe in conspiracies and causes that have been, up until now, invisible to historians or the naked eye. They have turned a mind-blowing mystery that defies everything we have learned into, at best, "a likely story." And, in the process, a likeable story, as well.
Shadow of the Sentinel (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743219686/qid=1104195929/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-3014229-0318352)
It's a book about a historian/treasure hunter in the deep backwoods of Arkansas who is a descendant of Knights of the Golden Circle sentinels guarding Confederate gold caches. From looking at the photos, it involves cryptography, cartography, genealogy, geology, etc. - decifering clues left on the land (like markings on trees) and piecing together clues to form a pattern, namely the oft-used Templars grid. From reviews, the book does get into the Jesse James conspiracy, the cover-up that was the Lost Dutchman mine in Arizona and of course, the enigmatic subject of the Freemasons. But I had never read something like this before and since it was written by an investigative reporter out of DC, it becomes a page-turner. The first chapter or so gets into the treasure hunter's family - real hardscabble mountaineers of the Ouachitas Mountains. Anyway, here's review from amazon
http://g-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/common/customer-reviews/stars-5-0.gifBeyond the Farthest Stretches of American Imaginations, October 3, 2003
<TABLE><TBODY><TR><TD vAlign=top>Reviewer:</TD><TD>Dr. Larry T. McGehee (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member-glance/-/A2RM0FHYDO96IJ/1/ref=cm_cr_auth/104-3014229-0318352?%5Fencoding=UTF8) (Spartanburg, SC USA) - See all my reviews (http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2RM0FHYDO96IJ/ref=cm_cr_auth/104-3014229-0318352?%5Fencoding=UTF8)</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Erroneously, it turned out, we assumed that Shadow of the Sentinel: One Man's Quest to Find the Hidden Treasure of the Confederacy (Simon & Schuster, 2003), by Warren Getler and Bob Brewer, was going to be a new account of the search for the Confederate treasury that dwindled and disappeared along the path of Jefferson Davis's flight from Richmond and eventual capture in Georgia.The book is about much more money and much bigger mysteries than that.
Reading southern history and Civil War history over the years, we have sometimes stumbled across references to the Knights of the Golden Circle. Usually, the organization is depicted as a clandestine pre-Civil War group of filibusterers intent upon annexing Mexico or Cuba as slave states, or a Civil War-era group intent upon organizing Copperhead opposition to Lincoln and the war in the Old Northwest (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio). Sometimes parallels are drawn between the Freemasons and the Golden Circle, both of which operated with symbols, passwords, degrees of achievement and status, and secrecy.
In Getler's and Brewer's book, the Knights of the Golden Circle have intimate ties to Old World Knights and Scottish Rite Free Masonry, are linked to the highest circles of American Free Masons (through figures as diverse as John Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, General and Mississippi Governor J. A. Quitman, explorer and highest ranking Mason General Albert Pike, Jesse James, Massachusetts politician Caleb Cushing), are interlocked with Cherokee and Choctaw tribal leaders and territories but also with French Rosicrucians, and operated (and may still operate) secretly in a gamut of places such as Charleston, Natchez, Nashville, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Arizona.
As a youngster in western Arkansas, Bob Brewer was introduced to the woods around Polk County, especially under the wing of an uncle and great-uncle who introduced him to numerous hidden symbols and paths-pieces of metal, carvings on rocks and trees, rock formations, and the topography of the land. The old men around Brewer seemed to know secrets and to serve as custodians and watchmen for something, but they were never explicit about their knowledge. Brewer went off to make a career in the Navy, and when he retired in 1977, he returned to his Arkansas home. Readings and recalled signs and associations brought him into a fascination with the search for gold treasures said to be buried thereabouts.
For the next quarter-century, Brewer made the solving of the mystery of the symbols the dominant force in his life. He collected books, read widely, interviewed old-timers, met and worked with fellow treasure-hunters from other parts of the country, studied old maps, made forays and expeditions, collaborated and was betrayed with some parties and formed fruitful alliances with others, actually uncovered a couple of significant treasures, and painstakingly and single-mindedly pieced together a cryptic overlay map that he applied precisely and successfully to three widely separated treasure sites in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Arizona (the famous Lost Dutchman treasure).
A great deal of this account deals with speculations (including poisonings of Quitman and President Zachary Taylor) and shadows, hypotheses and incredibilities, and remarkable coincidences and happenstance findings. Critical to Brewer's successful searching is his early buying into the story that Jesse James was not killed by Bob Ford in 1882, but faked his own death, and that the J. Frank Dalton who claimed to be James and who died in 1951 at age 104 (or thereabouts) really was James and that he provided much information critical to the development of Brewer's overlay map.
The real proof of the pudding, of course, would be the actual uncovering of one or more enormous mother lodes of treasure in the sites Brewer identifies, but the authors beg off from that step, pleading that Brewer never was after gold itself but only after the unlocking of the key to where its locations, and that reverence for the sentinels who guarded it led them to leave it where it is. They claim to be more interested in having established the existence of a very large secret organization and the location of its treasure-perhaps buried to await a second Civil War or some very high spiritual cause-than in removing the millions or billions of dollars of treasure they apparently have located.
Theirs is a story that tests our ability to believe in conspiracies and causes that have been, up until now, invisible to historians or the naked eye. They have turned a mind-blowing mystery that defies everything we have learned into, at best, "a likely story." And, in the process, a likeable story, as well.