Brad Meltzer's Decoded (2010) s01e05 Episode Script
Confederate Gold
What if I were to tell you that almost $20 million in gold and silver simply disappeared at the end of the civil war? In early April 1865, confederate president Jefferson Davis decides to gather the riches of his government and flees to the deep south, where he hopes it's gonna be safe.
Over the next two months, the rebel gold travels by train and wagon across Dixie.
Along the way, Davis hides massive caches of gold and silver in the hopes that the confederacy will one day rise again.
Some say the group that he charged with stashing the rebel gold was the knights of the golden circle, the kgc, a secret society founded in the 1850s to promote the interests of the south.
The kgc used a code made up of an elaborate system of signs and symbols to mark the hiding spots.
To this day, most of the money is still missing.
I want to know how 150 years ago, something was hidden so well that modern technology still can't find it.
I'm Brad Meltzer.
I've spent my life collecting stories.
The best include signs, symbols, and codes, secret meanings that are hidden in plain sight.
Some have become the basis for my novels, but I've only scratched the surface of what's out there.
And now history has given me the resources to investigate the rest.
This is "decoded.
" I'm actually really excited for this morning.
All the time, I get people e-mailing me about hidden treasure.
Everybody loves hidden treasure.
This is our chance to find the rebel gold, but more important than treasure is my chance to find the truth.
[ Chuckles .]
So, who is up for some real digging? Oh, this one sounds good.
I've got my shovel.
Let's go.
The city of Richmond was the capital of the confederacy and the home to the executive mansion.
Think of it as the confederate white house.
When Davis grabbed the gold, that's where he ran from.
So buddy, Mac, and Scott are headed there first.
Welcome to the museum of the confederacy.
Well, the tales are actually true.
There was gold.
There was jewelry.
And it all left here when Richmond was abandoned.
And it consisted of u.
S.
Silver coin.
There was gold coin, as well.
And there was Mexican coins -- $200,000 worth of Mexican silver dollars.
Wow.
That's what they looked like.
Mexican silver dollars packed in 39 wooden kegs.
Are these the real deal? Those are real.
In addition to that, there were six Virginia banks that had their assets travel with the treasury south.
The confederate treasury amounted to $500,000 in 1865.
That's about $10 million today.
And the Virginia bank assets worked out to over $9 million today.
That meant Davis had over $19 million.
He knew it.
He had more than enough to finance a new army.
So secrecy about hiding that money was enormous to him.
But come on -- it is tough to keep a good secret.
And that's why they always have a way of getting out.
The treasury and gold first stopped at danville, and we paid out for worthless paper money.
Now, on the 6th, that treasury moved south and was counted for the first time.
There's $200,000 missing, and it's probably these Mexican silver dollars that was in the 39 kegs, which you're holding in your hand.
Where exactly did it go missing? Well, not anybody really knows where it is.
In fact, that's one of the legends of danville is that maybe it's been buried in a cemetery.
But it hasn't been adequately accounted for.
But danville's not the only place that money went missing.
Rebel gold vanished all across the south, including a little town called Washington, Georgia, where the train stopped.
And it was robbed at midnight, reportedly by 20 people on horseback.
[ Chuckles .]
They broke into the 40 kegs, and $251,000 was missing.
What they did with it and where it went, no one has been able to decode, if you will.
Good luck.
In order to track it down, we need to now divide and conquer.
Scott's headed to Georgia, while buddy and Mac are headed off to danville, Virginia, to meet Bob brewer.
Brewer's been searching for rebel gold for 30 years and found about $200,000 in today's dollars.
So he's not just some nut with a metal detector and too much time on his hands.
Bob is the real deal.
And Bob's also got a personal connection to one of the great untold stories of history -- the knights of the golden circle.
Do you feel like a yankee in confederate country? Yeah, I wonder how much he is willing to talk about it, because if his family and the sentinels before him protected it, is there some kind of disloyalty in talking about it? The secretive knights of the golden circle were controversial.
They grew out of an attempt in the 1850s to claim Mexico's yucatán peninsula as part of the United States.
When that failed, the movement changed its mission to upholding slavery in whatever new territory the u.
S.
Acquired as it expanded west of the Mississippi.
If that led to breaking up the union, the kgc was all for it.
Members had to swear they would bar anyone who wasn't a moral and upstanding white male.
The group's real power was hard to gauge, because it existed in the shadows.
But at the height of the war, rumors spread that the kgc had penetrated the entire union.
Pennsylvania was said to be overrun with kgc members who were plotting to overthrow the government, capture Washington, D.
C.
, then kidnap president Abraham Lincoln and cut off his head.
The kgc did have sympathizers in the north, but the group's true sphere of influence, its real power base, was south of the Mason-Dixon line.
I'm McKinley.
Hey, how do you do, McKinley? Bob brewer.
For background on Bob, he grew up in Arkansas, near hatfield.
This is where Bob's connection to the money began.
When he was a boy, he began to notice these strange symbols that were carved into nearby trees.
His grandfather and uncle seemed to know how to interpret those signs.
This has all the makings of a great ghost story.
And Bob was sure that, one day, they'd teach him also.
They never did.
Bob later became convinced that both his grandfather and his uncle were kgc sentinels.
And he resolved to break the code that marked their treasure.
It is a complete language by itself.
I, of course, was raised right in the middle of one of these big kgc depositories.
And it took you how long to be able to read a map and read the signs like this? I like to say it was about 12 pairs of boots.
[ Laughs .]
12 pairs of boots.
A little warning here.
Bob's system for interpreting the signs -- it is complicated.
But the bare bones of it is this -- each sign suggests a distance or a heading that leads to the next sign.
So Bob draws a line from sign to sign on a topographical map of the area, and when the lines intersect, when they cross, he'll either find treasure, or he'll find another sign that will lead him to the next clue.
Not very often, but once in a while, you would dig up something that would contribute to the family income.
Wow.
These things were worth some money, right? The gold coins are worth considerable money now.
Gold is $1,200 an ounce, you know? And it's not about finding the money for you.
Well, it used to be.
When I first started, I knew the money was there, because I was told when I was a kid.
My mission, I mean, I'm an old man, and I've got about all I need.
What I'm looking for now is I've still got a lingering question in my mind as to what all's going on.
So I go to every site, and I work it, and every time, we learn just a little more.
I'm not sure I really understand how Bob pieces all this stuff together, but he seems to have a good record, so I want to see how it works.
This is the first puzzle I worked on.
That is the Bible tree.
It's a famous Bible tree.
I mean, I see it as something intentional here, but clearly you see something I don't.
Each piece of that has a meaning.
This Phoenix bird is used in the layout.
The trunk of Bob's tree is covered with carvings he spent a lifetime trying to decode.
One of them refers to a specific Bible passage -- 1 thessalonians 2:3.
But other carvings seem purely symbolic.
A cross, a bell, a horse, a bird, and what looks like random numbers and letters.
What do they mean? Bob suspected that each of the 60 carvings was part of a code for something else.
The only way to find out was through trial and error.
He spent years analyzing the symbols, measuring distances, looking for other nearby signs.
But nothing on this tree is what it seems.
The kgc were masters of misdirection, who intentionally loaded their carvings with false leads.
They were betting that most treasure hunters would get so frustrated after chasing these bogus clues that they'd give up before they ever found anything.
But Bob kept trying.
Before long, he had a map full of coordinates that would ultimately lead him to the rebel gold.
So, Bob, what do we know for certain about the danville treasure? Do you think it's here? There's something here.
I mean, I read a bit in your book about the kgc sentinels.
Can you talk a little bit about who these guys were originally and what their job was? Well, the best that we can determine, they were almost all either sons or grandsons of confederate veterans.
I just want to make sure I understand this.
The kgc is still guarding the treasure? We don't know.
Okay? Now, I was in one place, and I won't say where it is, and some people came up in a truck, and then one of them walked over and walked through and looked at the back of my station wagon and seen metal detectors and all, and he told us it'd be better if we didn't hang around there.
Okay? I waited four or five months, six months.
I don't know however.
And I took another one of my friends, and we drove another vehicle.
We weren't there 10 minutes until this vehicle comes up again, different people in it.
But they still had the ak-47 and an ar-15 hanging in the back window of that pickup.
An ak-47 in the pickup? Yeah, yeah.
So, there's a degree of danger to what you're doing? There can be.
Let's just put it that way.
I'd agree.
Okay, these sentinels, awesome, right? Secret guards protecting confederate treasure for over a century? This is the best part of history.
I love it when secrets aren't just kept, but they're passed down from generation to generation -- secrets hidden within our own families.
Bob brewer seems to think that not only is the kgc still around today, but they're still guarding this cash.
And that's a level of dedication that makes me want to know not just what they're hiding.
It makes me want to know what their plan is.
Our investigation into the lost rebel gold has now taken us in two different directions.
Scott's in Washington, Georgia, seeking out the gold, while buddy and Mac are in danville, Virginia, with kgc treasure hunter Bob brewer, looking for silver.
We'd asked Bob to take a look around around green hill cemetery for any signs that the kgc might have buried treasure there.
What we don't know is, is anyone still guarding it? [ Vehicle door closes .]
This is the place that I determined we need to start working on this layout.
We call treasure areas "layouts" because they laid out the thing in a pattern.
So, this is an American holly tree.
You see how smooth the bark is.
The carvings last forever.
And this carving has been here a really long time.
Bob's never gonna tell us everything he knows about the kgc signs and symbols, but he's willing to give us some of the basics.
For example, the figure "8" carved in this tree might suggest a distance to the next sign.
We've got a count of some sort.
There's four dots.
This is the biggest one.
A little smaller, a little smaller, and then fairly small.
If you ever looked at a topographical map, the biggest circle is at the bottom of the hill.
Going up, it gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
Well, that's what they're telling us here.
We feel like those are probably surveyor's chains, which are 66 feet per chain.
And that would put us about 264 foot uphill.
And I think we're gonna find an "8.
" We're gonna find an "8"? The reason we're using this small, lightweight, disposable wheel is because if we have to get out of dodge quick, we can leave it behind.
All right.
Here we go.
I hope we don't.
Buddy, are you looking for snipers while we do this? Yeah, I'm [ chuckles .]
I told you, right? Buddy and Mac are starting to doubt it.
Bob's method for hunting kgc money is complex, and it's based on trial and error.
It is not an exact science.
Basically, Bob will interpret the clues he finds -- in this case, to look for a number 8, 264 feet uphill from where they are now.
And then he'll go where the clue tells him to go, and then he'll start looking for the next clue, or the next sign.
Whether you believe it or not, for all the time he's put into studying our nation's history, Bob brewer, at the very least, gets my respect.
That's 264 right there.
Right on the very edge.
Okay.
We got something right here, somewhere within eyesight from right at this point.
What we do have is a holly tree right there.
That's the place to look.
Hey, Bob.
Hi.
How are you? Scott.
Welcome to Washington.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate you having me down here.
We're on the trail of rebel gold, and apparently Jefferson Davis brought a big part of that stuff right here to this bank.
Is that correct? That's it.
It was a bank, even in 1865.
What happened to the money? Union cavalry arrived and occupied Washington.
And so the gold goes from being protected by Jefferson Davis and his confederate escort to now being protected by the United States army.
Where does it go from here? The federal commander here agrees to allow it to be taken to the railhead at abbeville.
But despite the fact he has two companies of cavalry, he only assigns five privates and two sergeants to guard these five wagonloads of gold.
Everyone at Washington must have known about the treasure train.
And the countryside was full of former confederates and deserters from the union army, all armed, all desperate.
The treasure train got 18 miles east of here to a farm near the chennault plantation, where the robbery actually took place on the night of may 24, 1865.
There's some kind of a little marking right here.
Anybody see anything? What I'm seeing is this one right here.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Let me back up.
Let me back up.
This looks very, very familiar.
What I see is kind of a priestly-like figure.
Is that what I'm seeing? Yeah, or a ghost.
Oh, a ghost.
Let's see.
There's a head.
Like a hooded robe, isn't it? Yeah, just exactly.
An arm, an arm.
Okay.
That's a ghost sign.
That's telling us a grave is involved.
We've got to find a grave.
Not necessarily gold in the grave.
Just a grave is involved.
Probably got some codes on it.
So, you've seen this kind of symbol before, clearly.
Well, yeah, we've seen it several places.
But anyway, we've got a grave involved, and the grave should be somewhere in this vicinity.
But that's got eight sides.
That's an octagon.
That gazebo -- that's our "8.
" That's our "8" reference? That's our 8.
That's where the point we're supposed to go right there.
Well, I didn't pay attention to it.
And then we've got a grave to find from that point.
Let's do it.
Let's see what we missed.
This is the chennault plantation.
It was ground zero for the story of the robbery of the treasure train.
At 11:00 at night, a man in a blue uniform rode by.
Then, within an hour after that, 20 raiders attacked the treasure train.
The attack was so swift, it was so quiet, it was so well-organized, that the family living in the house next to where the wagons were parked never heard a thing.
This guy in the blue uniform -- is there any thoughts as to who that might have been? Well, the raiders themselves said they were members of the 7th and 8th Tennessee cavalry United States army.
The 7th and 8th were former confederates from east Tennessee who had joined the union army.
I love this story.
You got a group of soldiers who used to be in the confederate army, and then they switch sides to become part of the union army.
And after the war is over, they then disguise themselves as confederates and they rob the guys they were supposed to be working for.
And it just gets better from there.
The raiders busted open barrels of gold and sacks of gold.
They stuffed their pockets.
They stuffed their saddlebags, their haversacks with gold.
One poor soldier didn't realize his haversack had a hole in it, and so he rides off with his treasure, leaving a trail of coins behind him.
According to some accounts, the raiders left as much as $40,000 on the ground.
Witnesses reported that gold was piled as high as their ankles.
And local legend said that some of the stolen gold was actually buried near the plantation, and after a heavy rain, the coins would wash up on the dirt roads nearby.
That is a high-class litter problem.
So it's completely unclear where this money ended up.
Some of it is still out there.
Some of it could be.
I don't see why it couldn't be.
Despite the fact that there was nothing to link the chennault family to the robbery, they paid a huge price for the raid that took place on their property.
Angry union soldiers tortured the men, strip-searched the women, and even shot the family dog, whose name was Jeff Davis.
The chennaults were thrown in jail, but were soon proven innocent and set free.
So, you're looking for a grave that you can see from the gazebo? Something that's obviously not in place.
Something that's out of place.
We came right through here.
Let's go back out this way.
All we know at this point is that we're supposed to be looking for a grave in a graveyard.
No problem.
So I'm torn between thinking that we're wasting our time and that Bob really does know what he's doing.
He's used these methods to find gold before.
So I'm willing to follow wherever he leads us.
And right now, that leads us to the grave of lieutenant r.
S.
Jones, a confederate soldier.
There's no way I can really read it, I don't think.
Oh, "died of wounds" "He died of wounds received at sailor's creek.
" And "sailor's" is spelled s-a-I-l-o-r-s.
And the geographic spelling of it, the correct spelling of the creek up there in Virginia, is s-a-y-l-e-r-s.
It's spelled incorrectly on this.
That's a clue to me that they're playing with my mind a little bit.
On purpose? I think so.
I'm sure that the confederates especially would not have misspelled it.
It's only 70 miles up here.
In other words, people would have known what the name of the creek is.
They should have spelled the word right.
So, does this stuff that you're seeing have confederate underground code written all over it? Yeah.
Jumped up and bit me right in the rear.
Wild.
It's an anagram, because it's not used correctly.
It's an anagram, and this is where I get a clue that tells me, "look to the rails south.
" In Bob's experience, the kgc used anagrams to hide the true nature of their clues.
That's the anagram.
They start talking about us to go to the railroad, south, which is right over here.
This is the exact railbed that they used.
And railroads are always real handy with this rebel treasure.
You almost always have a railroad track real close by.
You're making it sound like this is just a signpost, not really a true grave.
Well, the information on it, I think, is for our use as a treasure sleuth to try to figure out where the money is.
So it's not a grave? Well, I don't know that for 100%.
But do you think it's possible that there's confederate treasure? All these coincidences are starting to look like a pattern, huh? Well, yeah, it's starting to stink.
[ Chuckling .]
Like what? Been smelling like money to me and John.
Bob's system for interpreting the supposed kgc signs is complicated.
And by "complicated," I mean it seems like he's not just on the crazy train, he's the engineer.
But that doesn't mean he's wrong.
After all, this guy's managed to find several kgc caches in the past, and there's no reason to believe he'll be any less successful here in danville.
We are looking for rebel gold.
Buddy and Mac are searching green hill cemetery in danville, Virginia, with kgc treasure expert Bob brewer.
At the same time, Scott's with Bob Davis, civil war expert at chennault plantation near Washington, Georgia, the site of a major raid where confederate gold was confiscated by the union army.
But the big question is, who masterminded the raid in the first place? We've been hearing about this mysterious organization, the kgc.
Do you think there was any involvement with them? The knights of the golden circle? They had the dream of a giant American-controlled sugar-plantation society that would include all of the Caribbean.
That's the golden circle that they're talking about.
So, historically, we know that the kgc existed.
The famous Missouri outlaw Jesse James was believed to have been an operative of the knights of the golden circle.
Really? The assassin John wilkes booth, even the bank officials who were here overseeing the gold.
How do we know that they weren't members of the knights of the golden circle? But then that's the problem with secret societies.
They tend to be secret.
So while there's no proof that the kgc were involved in the raid at the chennault plantation, there's no evidence that they weren't, either.
I'm done here at chennault, and it's time to head back to danville.
So, this is your x-y coordinate system? That's what it is.
Now, if you've got a gun or anything on you, make sure you don't get close to it.
That's right.
I've got to unload my pockets, as well.
Okay, I got to unpack.
[ Metal detector squeals .]
To make sure the Jones grave doesn't hold the silver, Bob and John sweep their metal detector over an area they've gridded out.
The data is recorded and plotted electronically like on a radar map.
[ Beeping slowly .]
[ Beeping rapidly .]
That's it.
Three beeps.
She's mapped.
We got her.
You dump the metal detector's output signal into this, and it's gonna show you stuff that you wouldn't believe.
So, where do we go from here? You said the south rail? Okay.
We're gonna go to rail south.
A lot of these symbols are easy to miss.
You walk by them five times, and all of a sudden, it'll strike you.
Rail south is right behind that little hill down there.
The line comes through here somewhere.
Bob, we've got a holly tree here, and it's got our favorite "h" carved into it.
Wow.
That's a nice large side on the left, just like in the pictures that I showed you.
What's it mean? Well, it can mean several things.
It can mean "heart.
" It can mean "heaven.
" Why wouldn't they just put a "t" for "treasure," a "c" for "confederate"? I mean, you can take any letter and make -- that would blow the code, then, wouldn't it? Looks like we've got a travel sign on the back.
Oh, we sure do.
Travel sign.
Go uphill.
That direction and what's uphill, and up that direction? Rail south, right there.
I don't think that Bob and John are being deliberately cryptic, but it's almost as if they speak a different language and we only understand a few words.
And what we need to do is find something right here in line at the rails.
There's something here, John.
I don't know what it is.
But a tag or a mark or I don't see anything there.
You follow from gazebo to gazebo, through to the rail.
Yeah.
This is close enough, we ought to be finding something around here, if we could.
That railroad is supposed to be our, maybe, stopping point on that line.
Uh-huh.
Or something right here by a rail sign.
Uh-huh.
We really can't figure out what the rail south clue is supposed to be, and the geologger data from the Jones grave revealed nothing, so we're wrapping it up at the cemetery.
Brad, it's really fun, and these guys are the real deal, you know? Yeah.
They have legitimately found treasure before, and the methods they use obviously work.
However, when we were just in the cemetery with them, some of it seems to reach pretty far.
You know, there's an outline that maybe looks like a ghost, or there's an anagram that turns into a hint.
I just wonder if they're kind of hiding something from us, as well.
[ Chuckles .]
In terms of what, just not wanting to show you it or I think that Bob believes that he's part of a higher calling, in a sense, and so I think he's proprietary.
He wants to tell us, but he knows that it's for the initiated, and we're not it.
No one wants to feel like they're being a sucker, ever.
Yeah.
But what I say is this.
People have looked their whole lives to find the confederate treasure and found nothing.
So if brewer is finding new clues and he's adding that puzzle piece, that's amazing.
That, to me, is real decoding.
Hi, there.
Hey.
Hello.
The story that we heard is that at the end of the war, a bunch of treasure left Richmond.
And jewels, and -- in a big hurry.
It took a very circuitous route, and it ended up, possibly some of it ended up here.
Yeah, the nine trains actually left Richmond to bring all the government officials and the treasure to danville.
The second train to leave actually had the floor of one of the boxcars to collapse.
Wait, the floor of the -- the floor of one of the cars behind the engine collapsed, derailed the engine, and as a result, five soldiers lost their lives.
Only two of the soldiers in the crash were identified, so it seems a little suspicious to me.
Why wouldn't they know everyone's name? Legend has it that perhaps an additional three soldiers weren't buried there, but it may have been a big hold-up, you see? Too big for two guys? It would seem that way, yeah.
Oh.
Could contain kegs of silver.
Who knows.
And that's been a portion of the legend, you might say, for those years.
So, do you think this crash site would be a good place for us to check out? Yeah, I would think so.
If it's still buried, then someone's being very patient.
When Jefferson Davis left danville, his objective at that time appears to have been west of the Mississippi, to re-form, to gather his forces, and to maintain conflict with the federal government.
In doing that, you can't sustain war without funding.
Are there people who feel they're waiting for the right moment still? [ Chuckles .]
I would think so.
Maybe they have a vested interest.
In the south fighting the federal government? Or are we talking about a different kind of uprising? I think that's a key word is "uprising.
" Like a revolution.
Against? Against -- we're witnessing so much anti-government sentiment right now that, you know, it's out there.
Think about it.
We've got armed militias all over the country.
Remember, Bob brewer is convinced that kgc sentinels are out there, guarding the money caches.
No one is touching that money.
I want to know why.
Did you get anything about kgc? Some confederate soldiers dressed as union soldiers knew this was gonna happen, and they actually planned and committed the robbery.
Now, I don't know whether these people that took it from there are kgc or not.
I'm not sure.
But it does seem like they had an organized plot and conspiracy to come take this.
So they're taking back some of their own money, in their minds.
That's what it seems like to me.
We're into something that's much bigger than just these caches, I think.
Right, and my question is -- has the time for that common purpose passed, or are these people, whoever they are, do they still exist, and are they still waiting for that time when they dig up their treasure and get to work on whatever their purpose is? To me, the clues to the silver buried in green hill cemetery just aren't clear enough.
Bob hasn't been able to zero in on any one location.
But at the site where the money train crashed and where the soldiers were supposedly buried, we have a much more precise place to look.
If the silver is spread out, as mcfall believed it was, then maybe some of it's buried there, and some of it's buried in the cemetery.
Somebody has broken the bottom bolt out of here.
It's broken out here, and the stake, the keeper, has been pulled to the outside.
My eyes are tricking me right now in that shade, but does that not look like a deep depression there? Oh, it's a pretty good depression.
Hey, buddy.
Treasure men, this is our partner, Scott rolle.
How are you? Hey, Scott.
I've heard about you.
Good to meet you.
Good to meet you guys.
Thanks.
I didn't expect, like, a real sort of official gravesite.
It is a gravesite.
But we've noticed two or three things here that are kind of troublesome to me.
This has been dug sometime in the past few years.
Really? There's a depression right there, and there should be not that deep of a depression.
They put the stone in here in 1933.
Yeah.
The stone is 1933, and the 1933 kind of snaps back to the other cemetery on Jones' grave.
Okay.
I'm just trying to draw a direct line from the cemetery to here.
Jones' grave, that footstone was put there, I think, in '33, or maybe '32.
This grave has a '33 date on it.
That's close enough for me to start thinking "connection.
" Now, if this is cold, in the work that you do, what's your next step? We'll use it as a point, and we'll try to develop something from it to one of our other points.
You mean a point on a map? Yeah.
We're looking for lines.
Intersecting lines.
We want a line from this to whatever it goes to, and then another one that crosses it, and at that point, we'll find something.
It may be a clue, and it may be a treasure.
I know it seems like a stretch.
No doubt about it, Bob makes some pretty huge leaps in logic.
It's like watching that guy from "a beautiful mind.
" But I'll say this over and over again -- that doesn't mean he's wrong.
And most important, Bob isn't just searching for treasure.
He's searching for his family.
He will be looking harder than anyone.
And I think we need to follow his process through to the end.
Outside of danville, Virginia, there's a gravesite of five soldiers who died in a train accident as confederate president Jefferson Davis fled Richmond with almost $20 million worth of rebel gold and silver.
Local legend holds that some of the silver was buried here along with the soldiers' bodies.
Yes, Bob and John rely on low-tech powers like observation and deduction, but they absolutely know when to go high-tech.
And though they were still convinced that green hill cemetery was the place to look, they were still waiting for that breakthrough, that "aha" moment that would take us all to the next stage in the hunt.
And so we're at that point right now, we're looking for something to please help us.
We need help.
So where the lines cross is ultimately what you're looking for.
I think when we get back there, we're gonna find something very exciting.
We're finding the same exact -- not similar, but the exact symbols -- in danville that we found in Arkansas and we found in other places.
The "h" we found on a holly tree is very, very similar to the "h" on the Bible tree there.
And do the h's typically have a biblical reference? Back in the older days, most people were pretty much deeply religious.
And so these people knew their Bible, and therefore they could use that Bible as a code.
This is an important point.
The kgc code relies so much on biblical chapters and verse.
Today, most of us have to open a Bible if we want to know what a particular Bible reference is.
But back when the kgcs were leaving secret signs to mark their caches, everybody would have known what Matthew 7:7 meant.
And I'm telling you right now, if you want to know what Matthew 7:7 is, go look it up.
I didn't just pick that out of thin air.
But I'm telling you, the kgc members knew what it was.
And I have this book.
It's called "confederate treasure in danville.
" The very opening on the fly leaf of this book, there's a biblical verse.
Matthew.
That says, "for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
" There's a heart on that tree.
You see that? And there's also an "h" on that tree.
Well, in the cemetery and around places we've been looking with you, we haven't seen a heart yet.
You're right.
And I think the "h" is either referring to heaven or heart, or maybe both.
Basically, what he's saying is that there's a heart in this layout somewhere, probably in the cemetery.
And we've got to find it.
So, John felt good about this.
Yeah, he says that we got it, and I feel like we probably do, too.
All right, anything you see out of the ordinary through here.
That's our line right there, going to the little bush.
I'd like to go get our new map and let's look at it and see what there is here.
Wow.
Okay, we got this from the superintendent of the cemetery.
This is the monument.
We came from here through here, and our stop sign is right about here.
Do you see what I see? I do see it.
What? I do see it.
A heart.
Look at that.
You found it.
It's even fatter on the left side.
Yes.
It looks exactly like the one we saw on the tree.
Oh, my goodness.
This is the template.
Oh, my God.
Bob's template is a rectangular piece of clear plastic with some holes drilled in it.
It's ridiculous, right? How does it look so simple and how does he possibly find rebel gold with that? The man who gave it to them said he'd found it in a trunk belonging to a long-dead confederate veteran of the civil war.
Bob immediately suspected that the crude hand-drawn document was an overlay.
If he placed it on top of a map that had coordinates based on kgc symbols, it might point the way to buried treasure.
Finally, in 1998, after years of trial and error, Bob got his answer.
The template actually worked.
He and John had found their own version of the rosetta stone -- a device they could use to uncover the kgc's most closely guarded treasure.
We'll center the template over the monument right there.
Mm-hmm.
So I'm gonna draw now the heart, and this heart is gonna strike a line on the template right here.
So, you're saying, or thinking that maybe this template, which was based on one that was found in a trunk in amarillo, is somehow based on the topography of this cemetery.
No, I'm just saying this cemetery is based on the plan that they had for this template.
So, this is the way they did it, wherever they were.
This template is the master plan for all of the treasures in America.
There may be a clue buried in this monument or around it.
Honest opinion is we have been directed here, and there's probably gonna be a dodge.
At this point, I'm beginning to understand what Bob means by a "dodge.
" He says the kgc left behind as many false clues as they did real clues to discourage the wrong people from finding the money.
99.
8%, no treasure.
But maybe a clue.
Maybe a clue.
But worth looking at.
Worth looking at.
What do we use to check it out? Well, we can use almost anything we've got, but I think we'd bring in ground-penetrating radar.
Ground-penetrating radar works like regular radar.
It sends out an electromagnetic pulse to the target, and that pulse bounces back from the underground target, and we receive an image.
Gpr can pick up almost any object that's at least an inch in diameter.
So it can either tell you to dig or tell you not to dig.
Not to bother, yeah.
All right.
Well, I hope this one's telling us to dig.
It measures just straight down, right? Correct.
This was built in 1876, and the only way the treasure could be here, if it was the silver, is that they would have had to move it, or it was buried in the ground to start with.
It makes sense.
The real cool thing that I think about is this was about the first confederate civil war monument in America.
But it was still basically reconstruction days, you see.
Right, the smoke is still hanging over the hillsides, essentially.
And the rebels are not really able to admit defeat.
They ain't done yet.
They hadn't given it up yet.
They hadn't given it all up.
There's a pretty large area of disturbance down here, about 4, 4.
5 feet.
And it goes down about 6 feet.
So you got something? Don't be yelling "bingo" just yet.
But the fact that the gpr picked up some kind of anomaly or area of disturbance, that's good stuff.
If we find anything here, it will prove that Bob brewer was able to crack the kgc's code, and we may just uncover a long-lost piece of the missing confederate treasury.
After following a series of clues in and around green hill cemetery, we've decided it's time to pull out the big guns.
We're using ground-penetrating radar to scan an area that Bob brewer believes either holds a hidden cache of silver or another clue for us to follow.
So far, the gpr has paid off.
We found an anomaly exactly where Bob told us to look.
How dense is it? Can you tell? Well, you're starting around 4 feet, and your secondary is right around 6 feet.
'Cause when you're going around this, you can actually see the soil density change, and you see actually right here where it comes into, like, a trench right at this corner of the monument.
I mean, it could be from the monument.
Different soil makeups.
Could have dumped a lot of gravel, a lot of rock, a lot of clay here, and it just As opposed to metal.
Right.
If there was something besides soil disturbance, something heavy and metallic down there, would it look different? Yes.
It would be a brighter white.
Looked like it might have been disturbed after the mound was put here.
So we got a false alarm? Why was it disturbed after the mound was put here is the question.
Somebody come in on the railroad at night and thought it was here and dug.
Have you been digging here, Bob? Yep.
Yep.
[ Laughter .]
Buddy was out here with a shovel last night.
My granddaddy told me where it was, and I got it a long time ago.
In my and John's opinion -- I'm sure John agrees with me -- there is no treasure that we can find any sign of in the cemetery.
I'm gonna bet the little gazebo is the center of the treasure layout.
That's where you put your 0.
0 on your template? That's when I looked up and got goose bumps.
Okay, that template is gonna extend for probably 18 miles in each direction from here.
Okay, and so him not finding treasure actually supports that this is the center of your map? This supports the fact that the treasure is elsewhere.
And we've got maybe a good idea of where it is, and maybe we don't.
Are you gonna tell us if you did have a good idea? No, I wouldn't.
You can tell me.
Okay.
I won't tell anybody else.
They all say that.
What's up with that? Let me ask you boys this -- does it still smell like money? Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Big money.
But not in this place.
We followed a few clues that didn't pan out.
Right.
But those are necessarily built in because they try to discourage a person to where he will give up.
And, well, we don't give up.
We never have.
Do you guys want to know where it is so you can find it, or so you can guard it? I sometimes wonder about that myself.
[ Train whistle blows .]
I think that Bob brewer is a sentinel of a literary kind, and he's passing on just enough information that the right person's gonna catch it.
And so in his own words, what I'm gonna say is this whole thing has been a dodge.
I don't necessarily think Bob is looking for treasure.
I think he's exploring the soul of his family.
And it seems like the symbols are getting a little more faded, and a little harder to follow, and a little more far-reaching as the distance between now and the civil war gets greater.
It just seems like there's a little heartbroken-ness in it.
I do think that there is some missing treasure out there somewhere.
But, you know, everybody's dream and fantasy is to find buried treasure.
I mean, didn't you think that when you were a kid? You know, opening up a treasure chest -- I thought that two days ago.
Exactly.
And I don't think there's any question -- I don't think any of us can question that there's still some of this stuff out there.
I don't think it's necessarily being hidden.
But it's -- some of it's gonna be found.
Somebody's gonna get lucky.
You never know if there is a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.
Right? Right? Okay? Let's do it.
Let's go.
Listen, we are a country founded on legends and myths.
We love them -- especially legends of treasure.
Looking for treasure isn't just part of being an American -- it is America.
I believe the rebel gold is still out there somewhere.
But the bottom line is, the only reason the treasure's remained hidden for more than 150 years is because it was put there by experts.
If it was easy to find, it would have been unearthed a long time ago.
And as time marches on, the people with the necessary knowledge, like Bob brewer, become fewer and farther between.
Over the next two months, the rebel gold travels by train and wagon across Dixie.
Along the way, Davis hides massive caches of gold and silver in the hopes that the confederacy will one day rise again.
Some say the group that he charged with stashing the rebel gold was the knights of the golden circle, the kgc, a secret society founded in the 1850s to promote the interests of the south.
The kgc used a code made up of an elaborate system of signs and symbols to mark the hiding spots.
To this day, most of the money is still missing.
I want to know how 150 years ago, something was hidden so well that modern technology still can't find it.
I'm Brad Meltzer.
I've spent my life collecting stories.
The best include signs, symbols, and codes, secret meanings that are hidden in plain sight.
Some have become the basis for my novels, but I've only scratched the surface of what's out there.
And now history has given me the resources to investigate the rest.
This is "decoded.
" I'm actually really excited for this morning.
All the time, I get people e-mailing me about hidden treasure.
Everybody loves hidden treasure.
This is our chance to find the rebel gold, but more important than treasure is my chance to find the truth.
[ Chuckles .]
So, who is up for some real digging? Oh, this one sounds good.
I've got my shovel.
Let's go.
The city of Richmond was the capital of the confederacy and the home to the executive mansion.
Think of it as the confederate white house.
When Davis grabbed the gold, that's where he ran from.
So buddy, Mac, and Scott are headed there first.
Welcome to the museum of the confederacy.
Well, the tales are actually true.
There was gold.
There was jewelry.
And it all left here when Richmond was abandoned.
And it consisted of u.
S.
Silver coin.
There was gold coin, as well.
And there was Mexican coins -- $200,000 worth of Mexican silver dollars.
Wow.
That's what they looked like.
Mexican silver dollars packed in 39 wooden kegs.
Are these the real deal? Those are real.
In addition to that, there were six Virginia banks that had their assets travel with the treasury south.
The confederate treasury amounted to $500,000 in 1865.
That's about $10 million today.
And the Virginia bank assets worked out to over $9 million today.
That meant Davis had over $19 million.
He knew it.
He had more than enough to finance a new army.
So secrecy about hiding that money was enormous to him.
But come on -- it is tough to keep a good secret.
And that's why they always have a way of getting out.
The treasury and gold first stopped at danville, and we paid out for worthless paper money.
Now, on the 6th, that treasury moved south and was counted for the first time.
There's $200,000 missing, and it's probably these Mexican silver dollars that was in the 39 kegs, which you're holding in your hand.
Where exactly did it go missing? Well, not anybody really knows where it is.
In fact, that's one of the legends of danville is that maybe it's been buried in a cemetery.
But it hasn't been adequately accounted for.
But danville's not the only place that money went missing.
Rebel gold vanished all across the south, including a little town called Washington, Georgia, where the train stopped.
And it was robbed at midnight, reportedly by 20 people on horseback.
[ Chuckles .]
They broke into the 40 kegs, and $251,000 was missing.
What they did with it and where it went, no one has been able to decode, if you will.
Good luck.
In order to track it down, we need to now divide and conquer.
Scott's headed to Georgia, while buddy and Mac are headed off to danville, Virginia, to meet Bob brewer.
Brewer's been searching for rebel gold for 30 years and found about $200,000 in today's dollars.
So he's not just some nut with a metal detector and too much time on his hands.
Bob is the real deal.
And Bob's also got a personal connection to one of the great untold stories of history -- the knights of the golden circle.
Do you feel like a yankee in confederate country? Yeah, I wonder how much he is willing to talk about it, because if his family and the sentinels before him protected it, is there some kind of disloyalty in talking about it? The secretive knights of the golden circle were controversial.
They grew out of an attempt in the 1850s to claim Mexico's yucatán peninsula as part of the United States.
When that failed, the movement changed its mission to upholding slavery in whatever new territory the u.
S.
Acquired as it expanded west of the Mississippi.
If that led to breaking up the union, the kgc was all for it.
Members had to swear they would bar anyone who wasn't a moral and upstanding white male.
The group's real power was hard to gauge, because it existed in the shadows.
But at the height of the war, rumors spread that the kgc had penetrated the entire union.
Pennsylvania was said to be overrun with kgc members who were plotting to overthrow the government, capture Washington, D.
C.
, then kidnap president Abraham Lincoln and cut off his head.
The kgc did have sympathizers in the north, but the group's true sphere of influence, its real power base, was south of the Mason-Dixon line.
I'm McKinley.
Hey, how do you do, McKinley? Bob brewer.
For background on Bob, he grew up in Arkansas, near hatfield.
This is where Bob's connection to the money began.
When he was a boy, he began to notice these strange symbols that were carved into nearby trees.
His grandfather and uncle seemed to know how to interpret those signs.
This has all the makings of a great ghost story.
And Bob was sure that, one day, they'd teach him also.
They never did.
Bob later became convinced that both his grandfather and his uncle were kgc sentinels.
And he resolved to break the code that marked their treasure.
It is a complete language by itself.
I, of course, was raised right in the middle of one of these big kgc depositories.
And it took you how long to be able to read a map and read the signs like this? I like to say it was about 12 pairs of boots.
[ Laughs .]
12 pairs of boots.
A little warning here.
Bob's system for interpreting the signs -- it is complicated.
But the bare bones of it is this -- each sign suggests a distance or a heading that leads to the next sign.
So Bob draws a line from sign to sign on a topographical map of the area, and when the lines intersect, when they cross, he'll either find treasure, or he'll find another sign that will lead him to the next clue.
Not very often, but once in a while, you would dig up something that would contribute to the family income.
Wow.
These things were worth some money, right? The gold coins are worth considerable money now.
Gold is $1,200 an ounce, you know? And it's not about finding the money for you.
Well, it used to be.
When I first started, I knew the money was there, because I was told when I was a kid.
My mission, I mean, I'm an old man, and I've got about all I need.
What I'm looking for now is I've still got a lingering question in my mind as to what all's going on.
So I go to every site, and I work it, and every time, we learn just a little more.
I'm not sure I really understand how Bob pieces all this stuff together, but he seems to have a good record, so I want to see how it works.
This is the first puzzle I worked on.
That is the Bible tree.
It's a famous Bible tree.
I mean, I see it as something intentional here, but clearly you see something I don't.
Each piece of that has a meaning.
This Phoenix bird is used in the layout.
The trunk of Bob's tree is covered with carvings he spent a lifetime trying to decode.
One of them refers to a specific Bible passage -- 1 thessalonians 2:3.
But other carvings seem purely symbolic.
A cross, a bell, a horse, a bird, and what looks like random numbers and letters.
What do they mean? Bob suspected that each of the 60 carvings was part of a code for something else.
The only way to find out was through trial and error.
He spent years analyzing the symbols, measuring distances, looking for other nearby signs.
But nothing on this tree is what it seems.
The kgc were masters of misdirection, who intentionally loaded their carvings with false leads.
They were betting that most treasure hunters would get so frustrated after chasing these bogus clues that they'd give up before they ever found anything.
But Bob kept trying.
Before long, he had a map full of coordinates that would ultimately lead him to the rebel gold.
So, Bob, what do we know for certain about the danville treasure? Do you think it's here? There's something here.
I mean, I read a bit in your book about the kgc sentinels.
Can you talk a little bit about who these guys were originally and what their job was? Well, the best that we can determine, they were almost all either sons or grandsons of confederate veterans.
I just want to make sure I understand this.
The kgc is still guarding the treasure? We don't know.
Okay? Now, I was in one place, and I won't say where it is, and some people came up in a truck, and then one of them walked over and walked through and looked at the back of my station wagon and seen metal detectors and all, and he told us it'd be better if we didn't hang around there.
Okay? I waited four or five months, six months.
I don't know however.
And I took another one of my friends, and we drove another vehicle.
We weren't there 10 minutes until this vehicle comes up again, different people in it.
But they still had the ak-47 and an ar-15 hanging in the back window of that pickup.
An ak-47 in the pickup? Yeah, yeah.
So, there's a degree of danger to what you're doing? There can be.
Let's just put it that way.
I'd agree.
Okay, these sentinels, awesome, right? Secret guards protecting confederate treasure for over a century? This is the best part of history.
I love it when secrets aren't just kept, but they're passed down from generation to generation -- secrets hidden within our own families.
Bob brewer seems to think that not only is the kgc still around today, but they're still guarding this cash.
And that's a level of dedication that makes me want to know not just what they're hiding.
It makes me want to know what their plan is.
Our investigation into the lost rebel gold has now taken us in two different directions.
Scott's in Washington, Georgia, seeking out the gold, while buddy and Mac are in danville, Virginia, with kgc treasure hunter Bob brewer, looking for silver.
We'd asked Bob to take a look around around green hill cemetery for any signs that the kgc might have buried treasure there.
What we don't know is, is anyone still guarding it? [ Vehicle door closes .]
This is the place that I determined we need to start working on this layout.
We call treasure areas "layouts" because they laid out the thing in a pattern.
So, this is an American holly tree.
You see how smooth the bark is.
The carvings last forever.
And this carving has been here a really long time.
Bob's never gonna tell us everything he knows about the kgc signs and symbols, but he's willing to give us some of the basics.
For example, the figure "8" carved in this tree might suggest a distance to the next sign.
We've got a count of some sort.
There's four dots.
This is the biggest one.
A little smaller, a little smaller, and then fairly small.
If you ever looked at a topographical map, the biggest circle is at the bottom of the hill.
Going up, it gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
Well, that's what they're telling us here.
We feel like those are probably surveyor's chains, which are 66 feet per chain.
And that would put us about 264 foot uphill.
And I think we're gonna find an "8.
" We're gonna find an "8"? The reason we're using this small, lightweight, disposable wheel is because if we have to get out of dodge quick, we can leave it behind.
All right.
Here we go.
I hope we don't.
Buddy, are you looking for snipers while we do this? Yeah, I'm [ chuckles .]
I told you, right? Buddy and Mac are starting to doubt it.
Bob's method for hunting kgc money is complex, and it's based on trial and error.
It is not an exact science.
Basically, Bob will interpret the clues he finds -- in this case, to look for a number 8, 264 feet uphill from where they are now.
And then he'll go where the clue tells him to go, and then he'll start looking for the next clue, or the next sign.
Whether you believe it or not, for all the time he's put into studying our nation's history, Bob brewer, at the very least, gets my respect.
That's 264 right there.
Right on the very edge.
Okay.
We got something right here, somewhere within eyesight from right at this point.
What we do have is a holly tree right there.
That's the place to look.
Hey, Bob.
Hi.
How are you? Scott.
Welcome to Washington.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate you having me down here.
We're on the trail of rebel gold, and apparently Jefferson Davis brought a big part of that stuff right here to this bank.
Is that correct? That's it.
It was a bank, even in 1865.
What happened to the money? Union cavalry arrived and occupied Washington.
And so the gold goes from being protected by Jefferson Davis and his confederate escort to now being protected by the United States army.
Where does it go from here? The federal commander here agrees to allow it to be taken to the railhead at abbeville.
But despite the fact he has two companies of cavalry, he only assigns five privates and two sergeants to guard these five wagonloads of gold.
Everyone at Washington must have known about the treasure train.
And the countryside was full of former confederates and deserters from the union army, all armed, all desperate.
The treasure train got 18 miles east of here to a farm near the chennault plantation, where the robbery actually took place on the night of may 24, 1865.
There's some kind of a little marking right here.
Anybody see anything? What I'm seeing is this one right here.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Let me back up.
Let me back up.
This looks very, very familiar.
What I see is kind of a priestly-like figure.
Is that what I'm seeing? Yeah, or a ghost.
Oh, a ghost.
Let's see.
There's a head.
Like a hooded robe, isn't it? Yeah, just exactly.
An arm, an arm.
Okay.
That's a ghost sign.
That's telling us a grave is involved.
We've got to find a grave.
Not necessarily gold in the grave.
Just a grave is involved.
Probably got some codes on it.
So, you've seen this kind of symbol before, clearly.
Well, yeah, we've seen it several places.
But anyway, we've got a grave involved, and the grave should be somewhere in this vicinity.
But that's got eight sides.
That's an octagon.
That gazebo -- that's our "8.
" That's our "8" reference? That's our 8.
That's where the point we're supposed to go right there.
Well, I didn't pay attention to it.
And then we've got a grave to find from that point.
Let's do it.
Let's see what we missed.
This is the chennault plantation.
It was ground zero for the story of the robbery of the treasure train.
At 11:00 at night, a man in a blue uniform rode by.
Then, within an hour after that, 20 raiders attacked the treasure train.
The attack was so swift, it was so quiet, it was so well-organized, that the family living in the house next to where the wagons were parked never heard a thing.
This guy in the blue uniform -- is there any thoughts as to who that might have been? Well, the raiders themselves said they were members of the 7th and 8th Tennessee cavalry United States army.
The 7th and 8th were former confederates from east Tennessee who had joined the union army.
I love this story.
You got a group of soldiers who used to be in the confederate army, and then they switch sides to become part of the union army.
And after the war is over, they then disguise themselves as confederates and they rob the guys they were supposed to be working for.
And it just gets better from there.
The raiders busted open barrels of gold and sacks of gold.
They stuffed their pockets.
They stuffed their saddlebags, their haversacks with gold.
One poor soldier didn't realize his haversack had a hole in it, and so he rides off with his treasure, leaving a trail of coins behind him.
According to some accounts, the raiders left as much as $40,000 on the ground.
Witnesses reported that gold was piled as high as their ankles.
And local legend said that some of the stolen gold was actually buried near the plantation, and after a heavy rain, the coins would wash up on the dirt roads nearby.
That is a high-class litter problem.
So it's completely unclear where this money ended up.
Some of it is still out there.
Some of it could be.
I don't see why it couldn't be.
Despite the fact that there was nothing to link the chennault family to the robbery, they paid a huge price for the raid that took place on their property.
Angry union soldiers tortured the men, strip-searched the women, and even shot the family dog, whose name was Jeff Davis.
The chennaults were thrown in jail, but were soon proven innocent and set free.
So, you're looking for a grave that you can see from the gazebo? Something that's obviously not in place.
Something that's out of place.
We came right through here.
Let's go back out this way.
All we know at this point is that we're supposed to be looking for a grave in a graveyard.
No problem.
So I'm torn between thinking that we're wasting our time and that Bob really does know what he's doing.
He's used these methods to find gold before.
So I'm willing to follow wherever he leads us.
And right now, that leads us to the grave of lieutenant r.
S.
Jones, a confederate soldier.
There's no way I can really read it, I don't think.
Oh, "died of wounds" "He died of wounds received at sailor's creek.
" And "sailor's" is spelled s-a-I-l-o-r-s.
And the geographic spelling of it, the correct spelling of the creek up there in Virginia, is s-a-y-l-e-r-s.
It's spelled incorrectly on this.
That's a clue to me that they're playing with my mind a little bit.
On purpose? I think so.
I'm sure that the confederates especially would not have misspelled it.
It's only 70 miles up here.
In other words, people would have known what the name of the creek is.
They should have spelled the word right.
So, does this stuff that you're seeing have confederate underground code written all over it? Yeah.
Jumped up and bit me right in the rear.
Wild.
It's an anagram, because it's not used correctly.
It's an anagram, and this is where I get a clue that tells me, "look to the rails south.
" In Bob's experience, the kgc used anagrams to hide the true nature of their clues.
That's the anagram.
They start talking about us to go to the railroad, south, which is right over here.
This is the exact railbed that they used.
And railroads are always real handy with this rebel treasure.
You almost always have a railroad track real close by.
You're making it sound like this is just a signpost, not really a true grave.
Well, the information on it, I think, is for our use as a treasure sleuth to try to figure out where the money is.
So it's not a grave? Well, I don't know that for 100%.
But do you think it's possible that there's confederate treasure? All these coincidences are starting to look like a pattern, huh? Well, yeah, it's starting to stink.
[ Chuckling .]
Like what? Been smelling like money to me and John.
Bob's system for interpreting the supposed kgc signs is complicated.
And by "complicated," I mean it seems like he's not just on the crazy train, he's the engineer.
But that doesn't mean he's wrong.
After all, this guy's managed to find several kgc caches in the past, and there's no reason to believe he'll be any less successful here in danville.
We are looking for rebel gold.
Buddy and Mac are searching green hill cemetery in danville, Virginia, with kgc treasure expert Bob brewer.
At the same time, Scott's with Bob Davis, civil war expert at chennault plantation near Washington, Georgia, the site of a major raid where confederate gold was confiscated by the union army.
But the big question is, who masterminded the raid in the first place? We've been hearing about this mysterious organization, the kgc.
Do you think there was any involvement with them? The knights of the golden circle? They had the dream of a giant American-controlled sugar-plantation society that would include all of the Caribbean.
That's the golden circle that they're talking about.
So, historically, we know that the kgc existed.
The famous Missouri outlaw Jesse James was believed to have been an operative of the knights of the golden circle.
Really? The assassin John wilkes booth, even the bank officials who were here overseeing the gold.
How do we know that they weren't members of the knights of the golden circle? But then that's the problem with secret societies.
They tend to be secret.
So while there's no proof that the kgc were involved in the raid at the chennault plantation, there's no evidence that they weren't, either.
I'm done here at chennault, and it's time to head back to danville.
So, this is your x-y coordinate system? That's what it is.
Now, if you've got a gun or anything on you, make sure you don't get close to it.
That's right.
I've got to unload my pockets, as well.
Okay, I got to unpack.
[ Metal detector squeals .]
To make sure the Jones grave doesn't hold the silver, Bob and John sweep their metal detector over an area they've gridded out.
The data is recorded and plotted electronically like on a radar map.
[ Beeping slowly .]
[ Beeping rapidly .]
That's it.
Three beeps.
She's mapped.
We got her.
You dump the metal detector's output signal into this, and it's gonna show you stuff that you wouldn't believe.
So, where do we go from here? You said the south rail? Okay.
We're gonna go to rail south.
A lot of these symbols are easy to miss.
You walk by them five times, and all of a sudden, it'll strike you.
Rail south is right behind that little hill down there.
The line comes through here somewhere.
Bob, we've got a holly tree here, and it's got our favorite "h" carved into it.
Wow.
That's a nice large side on the left, just like in the pictures that I showed you.
What's it mean? Well, it can mean several things.
It can mean "heart.
" It can mean "heaven.
" Why wouldn't they just put a "t" for "treasure," a "c" for "confederate"? I mean, you can take any letter and make -- that would blow the code, then, wouldn't it? Looks like we've got a travel sign on the back.
Oh, we sure do.
Travel sign.
Go uphill.
That direction and what's uphill, and up that direction? Rail south, right there.
I don't think that Bob and John are being deliberately cryptic, but it's almost as if they speak a different language and we only understand a few words.
And what we need to do is find something right here in line at the rails.
There's something here, John.
I don't know what it is.
But a tag or a mark or I don't see anything there.
You follow from gazebo to gazebo, through to the rail.
Yeah.
This is close enough, we ought to be finding something around here, if we could.
That railroad is supposed to be our, maybe, stopping point on that line.
Uh-huh.
Or something right here by a rail sign.
Uh-huh.
We really can't figure out what the rail south clue is supposed to be, and the geologger data from the Jones grave revealed nothing, so we're wrapping it up at the cemetery.
Brad, it's really fun, and these guys are the real deal, you know? Yeah.
They have legitimately found treasure before, and the methods they use obviously work.
However, when we were just in the cemetery with them, some of it seems to reach pretty far.
You know, there's an outline that maybe looks like a ghost, or there's an anagram that turns into a hint.
I just wonder if they're kind of hiding something from us, as well.
[ Chuckles .]
In terms of what, just not wanting to show you it or I think that Bob believes that he's part of a higher calling, in a sense, and so I think he's proprietary.
He wants to tell us, but he knows that it's for the initiated, and we're not it.
No one wants to feel like they're being a sucker, ever.
Yeah.
But what I say is this.
People have looked their whole lives to find the confederate treasure and found nothing.
So if brewer is finding new clues and he's adding that puzzle piece, that's amazing.
That, to me, is real decoding.
Hi, there.
Hey.
Hello.
The story that we heard is that at the end of the war, a bunch of treasure left Richmond.
And jewels, and -- in a big hurry.
It took a very circuitous route, and it ended up, possibly some of it ended up here.
Yeah, the nine trains actually left Richmond to bring all the government officials and the treasure to danville.
The second train to leave actually had the floor of one of the boxcars to collapse.
Wait, the floor of the -- the floor of one of the cars behind the engine collapsed, derailed the engine, and as a result, five soldiers lost their lives.
Only two of the soldiers in the crash were identified, so it seems a little suspicious to me.
Why wouldn't they know everyone's name? Legend has it that perhaps an additional three soldiers weren't buried there, but it may have been a big hold-up, you see? Too big for two guys? It would seem that way, yeah.
Oh.
Could contain kegs of silver.
Who knows.
And that's been a portion of the legend, you might say, for those years.
So, do you think this crash site would be a good place for us to check out? Yeah, I would think so.
If it's still buried, then someone's being very patient.
When Jefferson Davis left danville, his objective at that time appears to have been west of the Mississippi, to re-form, to gather his forces, and to maintain conflict with the federal government.
In doing that, you can't sustain war without funding.
Are there people who feel they're waiting for the right moment still? [ Chuckles .]
I would think so.
Maybe they have a vested interest.
In the south fighting the federal government? Or are we talking about a different kind of uprising? I think that's a key word is "uprising.
" Like a revolution.
Against? Against -- we're witnessing so much anti-government sentiment right now that, you know, it's out there.
Think about it.
We've got armed militias all over the country.
Remember, Bob brewer is convinced that kgc sentinels are out there, guarding the money caches.
No one is touching that money.
I want to know why.
Did you get anything about kgc? Some confederate soldiers dressed as union soldiers knew this was gonna happen, and they actually planned and committed the robbery.
Now, I don't know whether these people that took it from there are kgc or not.
I'm not sure.
But it does seem like they had an organized plot and conspiracy to come take this.
So they're taking back some of their own money, in their minds.
That's what it seems like to me.
We're into something that's much bigger than just these caches, I think.
Right, and my question is -- has the time for that common purpose passed, or are these people, whoever they are, do they still exist, and are they still waiting for that time when they dig up their treasure and get to work on whatever their purpose is? To me, the clues to the silver buried in green hill cemetery just aren't clear enough.
Bob hasn't been able to zero in on any one location.
But at the site where the money train crashed and where the soldiers were supposedly buried, we have a much more precise place to look.
If the silver is spread out, as mcfall believed it was, then maybe some of it's buried there, and some of it's buried in the cemetery.
Somebody has broken the bottom bolt out of here.
It's broken out here, and the stake, the keeper, has been pulled to the outside.
My eyes are tricking me right now in that shade, but does that not look like a deep depression there? Oh, it's a pretty good depression.
Hey, buddy.
Treasure men, this is our partner, Scott rolle.
How are you? Hey, Scott.
I've heard about you.
Good to meet you.
Good to meet you guys.
Thanks.
I didn't expect, like, a real sort of official gravesite.
It is a gravesite.
But we've noticed two or three things here that are kind of troublesome to me.
This has been dug sometime in the past few years.
Really? There's a depression right there, and there should be not that deep of a depression.
They put the stone in here in 1933.
Yeah.
The stone is 1933, and the 1933 kind of snaps back to the other cemetery on Jones' grave.
Okay.
I'm just trying to draw a direct line from the cemetery to here.
Jones' grave, that footstone was put there, I think, in '33, or maybe '32.
This grave has a '33 date on it.
That's close enough for me to start thinking "connection.
" Now, if this is cold, in the work that you do, what's your next step? We'll use it as a point, and we'll try to develop something from it to one of our other points.
You mean a point on a map? Yeah.
We're looking for lines.
Intersecting lines.
We want a line from this to whatever it goes to, and then another one that crosses it, and at that point, we'll find something.
It may be a clue, and it may be a treasure.
I know it seems like a stretch.
No doubt about it, Bob makes some pretty huge leaps in logic.
It's like watching that guy from "a beautiful mind.
" But I'll say this over and over again -- that doesn't mean he's wrong.
And most important, Bob isn't just searching for treasure.
He's searching for his family.
He will be looking harder than anyone.
And I think we need to follow his process through to the end.
Outside of danville, Virginia, there's a gravesite of five soldiers who died in a train accident as confederate president Jefferson Davis fled Richmond with almost $20 million worth of rebel gold and silver.
Local legend holds that some of the silver was buried here along with the soldiers' bodies.
Yes, Bob and John rely on low-tech powers like observation and deduction, but they absolutely know when to go high-tech.
And though they were still convinced that green hill cemetery was the place to look, they were still waiting for that breakthrough, that "aha" moment that would take us all to the next stage in the hunt.
And so we're at that point right now, we're looking for something to please help us.
We need help.
So where the lines cross is ultimately what you're looking for.
I think when we get back there, we're gonna find something very exciting.
We're finding the same exact -- not similar, but the exact symbols -- in danville that we found in Arkansas and we found in other places.
The "h" we found on a holly tree is very, very similar to the "h" on the Bible tree there.
And do the h's typically have a biblical reference? Back in the older days, most people were pretty much deeply religious.
And so these people knew their Bible, and therefore they could use that Bible as a code.
This is an important point.
The kgc code relies so much on biblical chapters and verse.
Today, most of us have to open a Bible if we want to know what a particular Bible reference is.
But back when the kgcs were leaving secret signs to mark their caches, everybody would have known what Matthew 7:7 meant.
And I'm telling you right now, if you want to know what Matthew 7:7 is, go look it up.
I didn't just pick that out of thin air.
But I'm telling you, the kgc members knew what it was.
And I have this book.
It's called "confederate treasure in danville.
" The very opening on the fly leaf of this book, there's a biblical verse.
Matthew.
That says, "for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
" There's a heart on that tree.
You see that? And there's also an "h" on that tree.
Well, in the cemetery and around places we've been looking with you, we haven't seen a heart yet.
You're right.
And I think the "h" is either referring to heaven or heart, or maybe both.
Basically, what he's saying is that there's a heart in this layout somewhere, probably in the cemetery.
And we've got to find it.
So, John felt good about this.
Yeah, he says that we got it, and I feel like we probably do, too.
All right, anything you see out of the ordinary through here.
That's our line right there, going to the little bush.
I'd like to go get our new map and let's look at it and see what there is here.
Wow.
Okay, we got this from the superintendent of the cemetery.
This is the monument.
We came from here through here, and our stop sign is right about here.
Do you see what I see? I do see it.
What? I do see it.
A heart.
Look at that.
You found it.
It's even fatter on the left side.
Yes.
It looks exactly like the one we saw on the tree.
Oh, my goodness.
This is the template.
Oh, my God.
Bob's template is a rectangular piece of clear plastic with some holes drilled in it.
It's ridiculous, right? How does it look so simple and how does he possibly find rebel gold with that? The man who gave it to them said he'd found it in a trunk belonging to a long-dead confederate veteran of the civil war.
Bob immediately suspected that the crude hand-drawn document was an overlay.
If he placed it on top of a map that had coordinates based on kgc symbols, it might point the way to buried treasure.
Finally, in 1998, after years of trial and error, Bob got his answer.
The template actually worked.
He and John had found their own version of the rosetta stone -- a device they could use to uncover the kgc's most closely guarded treasure.
We'll center the template over the monument right there.
Mm-hmm.
So I'm gonna draw now the heart, and this heart is gonna strike a line on the template right here.
So, you're saying, or thinking that maybe this template, which was based on one that was found in a trunk in amarillo, is somehow based on the topography of this cemetery.
No, I'm just saying this cemetery is based on the plan that they had for this template.
So, this is the way they did it, wherever they were.
This template is the master plan for all of the treasures in America.
There may be a clue buried in this monument or around it.
Honest opinion is we have been directed here, and there's probably gonna be a dodge.
At this point, I'm beginning to understand what Bob means by a "dodge.
" He says the kgc left behind as many false clues as they did real clues to discourage the wrong people from finding the money.
99.
8%, no treasure.
But maybe a clue.
Maybe a clue.
But worth looking at.
Worth looking at.
What do we use to check it out? Well, we can use almost anything we've got, but I think we'd bring in ground-penetrating radar.
Ground-penetrating radar works like regular radar.
It sends out an electromagnetic pulse to the target, and that pulse bounces back from the underground target, and we receive an image.
Gpr can pick up almost any object that's at least an inch in diameter.
So it can either tell you to dig or tell you not to dig.
Not to bother, yeah.
All right.
Well, I hope this one's telling us to dig.
It measures just straight down, right? Correct.
This was built in 1876, and the only way the treasure could be here, if it was the silver, is that they would have had to move it, or it was buried in the ground to start with.
It makes sense.
The real cool thing that I think about is this was about the first confederate civil war monument in America.
But it was still basically reconstruction days, you see.
Right, the smoke is still hanging over the hillsides, essentially.
And the rebels are not really able to admit defeat.
They ain't done yet.
They hadn't given it up yet.
They hadn't given it all up.
There's a pretty large area of disturbance down here, about 4, 4.
5 feet.
And it goes down about 6 feet.
So you got something? Don't be yelling "bingo" just yet.
But the fact that the gpr picked up some kind of anomaly or area of disturbance, that's good stuff.
If we find anything here, it will prove that Bob brewer was able to crack the kgc's code, and we may just uncover a long-lost piece of the missing confederate treasury.
After following a series of clues in and around green hill cemetery, we've decided it's time to pull out the big guns.
We're using ground-penetrating radar to scan an area that Bob brewer believes either holds a hidden cache of silver or another clue for us to follow.
So far, the gpr has paid off.
We found an anomaly exactly where Bob told us to look.
How dense is it? Can you tell? Well, you're starting around 4 feet, and your secondary is right around 6 feet.
'Cause when you're going around this, you can actually see the soil density change, and you see actually right here where it comes into, like, a trench right at this corner of the monument.
I mean, it could be from the monument.
Different soil makeups.
Could have dumped a lot of gravel, a lot of rock, a lot of clay here, and it just As opposed to metal.
Right.
If there was something besides soil disturbance, something heavy and metallic down there, would it look different? Yes.
It would be a brighter white.
Looked like it might have been disturbed after the mound was put here.
So we got a false alarm? Why was it disturbed after the mound was put here is the question.
Somebody come in on the railroad at night and thought it was here and dug.
Have you been digging here, Bob? Yep.
Yep.
[ Laughter .]
Buddy was out here with a shovel last night.
My granddaddy told me where it was, and I got it a long time ago.
In my and John's opinion -- I'm sure John agrees with me -- there is no treasure that we can find any sign of in the cemetery.
I'm gonna bet the little gazebo is the center of the treasure layout.
That's where you put your 0.
0 on your template? That's when I looked up and got goose bumps.
Okay, that template is gonna extend for probably 18 miles in each direction from here.
Okay, and so him not finding treasure actually supports that this is the center of your map? This supports the fact that the treasure is elsewhere.
And we've got maybe a good idea of where it is, and maybe we don't.
Are you gonna tell us if you did have a good idea? No, I wouldn't.
You can tell me.
Okay.
I won't tell anybody else.
They all say that.
What's up with that? Let me ask you boys this -- does it still smell like money? Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Big money.
But not in this place.
We followed a few clues that didn't pan out.
Right.
But those are necessarily built in because they try to discourage a person to where he will give up.
And, well, we don't give up.
We never have.
Do you guys want to know where it is so you can find it, or so you can guard it? I sometimes wonder about that myself.
[ Train whistle blows .]
I think that Bob brewer is a sentinel of a literary kind, and he's passing on just enough information that the right person's gonna catch it.
And so in his own words, what I'm gonna say is this whole thing has been a dodge.
I don't necessarily think Bob is looking for treasure.
I think he's exploring the soul of his family.
And it seems like the symbols are getting a little more faded, and a little harder to follow, and a little more far-reaching as the distance between now and the civil war gets greater.
It just seems like there's a little heartbroken-ness in it.
I do think that there is some missing treasure out there somewhere.
But, you know, everybody's dream and fantasy is to find buried treasure.
I mean, didn't you think that when you were a kid? You know, opening up a treasure chest -- I thought that two days ago.
Exactly.
And I don't think there's any question -- I don't think any of us can question that there's still some of this stuff out there.
I don't think it's necessarily being hidden.
But it's -- some of it's gonna be found.
Somebody's gonna get lucky.
You never know if there is a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.
Right? Right? Okay? Let's do it.
Let's go.
Listen, we are a country founded on legends and myths.
We love them -- especially legends of treasure.
Looking for treasure isn't just part of being an American -- it is America.
I believe the rebel gold is still out there somewhere.
But the bottom line is, the only reason the treasure's remained hidden for more than 150 years is because it was put there by experts.
If it was easy to find, it would have been unearthed a long time ago.
And as time marches on, the people with the necessary knowledge, like Bob brewer, become fewer and farther between.