Canada may still hold millions in secret
Confederate gold
Treasure
was buried for the day the South would rise again, Randy Boswell reports.
The Ottawa Citizen
Thursday, July 10, 2003
Southern spies preparing
for a Confederate resurgence after the U.S. Civil War may have buried millions
of dollars in gold at sites across Canada in the 1860s -- part of an enormous
treasure that, say the authors of a new book, is only now being unearthed.
Warren Getler and Bob
Brewer, who co-wrote Shadow of the Sentinel: One Man's Quest to Find the Hidden
Treasure of the Confederacy, say Canada was an important haven for Confederate
operatives during the Civil War who went on to form the nucleus of a secret
society -- the Knights of the Golden Circle -- that kept the South's dream of
independence alive for decades after the Union army's victory.
"By war's end, exiled
Confederate and KGC cadres operating out of Canada under the seasoned leadership
of Jacob Thompson, Clement Clay and Thomas Hines had amassed a treasury
estimated at more than $2 million in gold and silver coinage," the book
says.
The authors believe that
most of the money from Canadian bank accounts and coin caches, which totalled as
much as $5 million according to some of the book's sources, was eventually
repatriated and hidden in the American south.
But because of the strict
secrecy surrounding the Confederacy's cash reserves, and the generations that
have passed since the money was buried, no one can for say for sure where the
treasure is.
Mr. Brewer, who is
descended from members of the KGC, claims to have discovered -- among other
finds -- a fruit jar filled with gold and silver coins in the Arkansas backwoods
after deciphering a series of coded maps, inscribed stone tablets and other
landscape markers. The book offers only general clues about where other caches
might be found, since Mr. Brewer is continuing his own hunt for the Confederate
hoard.
"Bob and a few others
have been finding real treasure that was buried in this coded, geometric grid
system," said Mr. Getler, a journalist who has worked for the Wall Street
Journal and International Herald Tribune, yesterday in an interview.
Canada's connections to
the Confederacy are well-documented by historians, who have long been aware that
John Wilkes Booth -- who assassinated U.S. president Abraham Lincoln in April
1865 -- may have planned the attack a few months earlier during meetings in
Montreal with Confederate spies and Southern sympathizers.
"Agents -- some
people call them Confederate secret service, we call them KGC -- were operating
out of key areas such as Toronto, Montreal, Niagara Falls, Windsor," says
Mr. Getler. "They were operating there as a financial reserve or haven and
as an operational platform" conducting sabotage runs and robbery raids in
the northern U.S.
Among the key figures
involved in the KGC was Albert Pike, a Confederate exile in Canada whose
experience as a leading Freemason appears to explain the elaborate coding system
used to hide money and which Mr. Brewer is now unlocking to find treasure sites.
The treasure is believed
to have been amassed from the Confederacy's government reserves, from wartime
raids on northern banks and from tithes offered by northern supporters of the
Southern cause.
Mr. Getler and Mr. Brewer
say cash burials offered the only reliable method of safekeeping Confederate
wealth at the time. The authors believe that a network of KGC
"sentinels" were responsible for hiding various amounts gold and
silver, protecting the caches during their lifetime, and then passing on to
others the coded information that would one day yield the treasure locations and
help finance a second Civil War.
"I would say there is
a possibility that KGC treasure does exist in the north, because this
organization was operating throughout the country and in Canada," says Mr.
Getler. In particular, he adds, "there's a possibility that Confederate
treasure is buried in that region around Windsor." But the clues also point
to "treasures in the northwest of the country, places like Oregon and
Montana" and the sparsely settled Canadian west that bordered those states.
In another bizarre twist
in the story, the authors say that the infamous outlaw Jesse James was part of
the KGC network. He is alleged to have led a convoy with $80,000 worth of
Confederate gold to a hiding spot in New Mexico, while "other convoys
headed south into Florida, one went into Mexico, another into Canada, after
traveling west into Kansas and going north to avoid Union troops."
© Copyright
2003 The Ottawa Citizen