Volume 11 , Issue 52

2nd Week In January 2009 Summary

During the second week of january 2009 we experienced a big, bright Full Moon that really lit up the whole San Juan snowy mountains. AND ? Our NWTechie was incorporating a random selection of our photos into each OkieLegacy Issue that change time you view the page. You might have notice these larger photos around the OkieLegacy Statistics area and business cards Ads submitted for viewing on down the page.

It was the 2nd week of January 2009 we connected with a descendant of Floyd H. Huddelston that our Uncle Robert "Bob" McGill had gone to school with at the Kemper Military school in Boonesville, Missouri in 1938 and also played in a dance swing band in third class tourist aboard the Ship Europa during the Summer of 1938 to Europe. It is always fascinating to hear from those connected through our ancestors. Thanks to everyone for letting us come into your life through the OkieLegacy eZine.

We also learned a little bit about the Wichita Mountains of SW Oklahoma ? where the Pawnee moved to Oklahoma in 1876 and were given a reservation in the North ridge of hills in southwestern Oklahoma called the Wichita Mountains.

Fletcher, Oklahoma was another northeastern Comanche county, in Oklahoma that we learned a little bit about. The post office was established, May 10, 1902. Named for Fletcher Dodge, local early day resident. According to Wikipedia, Fletcher is a town in Comanche County, Oklahoma with a population that was 1.022 at the 2000 census. It is included in the Lawton, Oklahoma Metropolitan Statistical area.

We also learned that Indian Territory was home to other Native American tribes, including Apache, Choctaw and Comanche. These tribes had to share their land and resources with the Cherokee. The white encroachment on Indian lands was spreading further and further West. Sam and Belle Starr also settled in the Briartown area, naming their homestead Younger's Bend. Younger's Bend became a haven for outlaws. Ironically, Frank West lived only a few miles away. Sam and Belle were arrested in 1882 when deputy marshalls found stolen horses in their stables. Sam was arrested on many counts of hold-ups of US Mail hacks and post offices. Belle was indicted for Larceny in stealing horses and robbery. She often wore mens clothing in her raids and was dubbed "gang leader" after a robbery in Cache of horses and about $40.

Speaking of the legendary Belle Starr (1848-1889, Belle developed a reputation as a "Bandit Queen" of the Old West. Belle was an expert rider who could handle a gun and was associated with famous outlaws such as Frank and Jesse James. Many accounts of her life conatind more legend than fact, though. She has been credited with a long list of spectacular crimes, but it appears she did little more than steal some horses and harbor some fugitive friends.

Belle Starr was born as Myra Maybelle Shirley on February 5, 1848, in Jasper County, Missouri, near Carthage. Her parents were John Shirley and Eliza (Pennington) Shirley, who called their daughter Belle. John Shirley, married three times, was the black sheep of an affluent Virginia family. Pennington, his third wife, came from the Hatfield family of the famous Hatfield-McCoy feud. In 1839, Shirley moved his family to southwest Missouri, where he became wealthy raising wheat, corn, horses, and livestock.

This last year (2009), the 2nd week of January, we wrote about the James Gangs $2 million Gold treasure hidden in Oklahoma and wondered if anyone had ever discovered it in the Wichita Mountains of South west Oklahoma near Old Fort Sill and the Keechi Hills. The source of the fabled gold and its final place of burial have often varied. BUT ? all stories lead to the Wichita Mountains and most often begin with the year 1876. As the story goes, the most wanted outlaw of the West, Jesse Woodson James, painfully pounded the letters into an old brass kettle: "This, the 5th day of March 1876, in the year of our Lord ...."

Each member of the infamous outlaw band was bound to secrecy about a golden treasure's hiding place. Jesse carefully chiseled the names of twelve deadly outlaws below the contract and then buried the brass bucket and its secret. The place was Tarbone Mountain, a roughhewn granite colossus easily approached from the north in the Wichita Mountains, in what was then Indian Territory. Jesse worked out a clever plan that no other outlaw of his time had devised. It had all resulted from the winter before.

It all began somewhere in northern Chihuahua, Mexico, not far from the southwestern settlement of El Paso, Texas, when Jesse and Frank and ten members of their gang surprised a detail of Mexican guardsmen driving eighteen burros transporting gold bullion. The brigands led the heavily laden pack-train across the Rio Grande and over the plains of central Texas.

Their destination was Indian Territory, a haven for wanted men and a region already familiar to both Jesse and Frank. When the outlaws entered the Wichitas, they were greeted by a severe winter blizzard. For three and a half days they traveled with little rest through snow almost a foot deep. Jesse and his men were cold and weary, and Jesse knew that the gold had to be buried. It was now obvious that their exhausted animals could travel little farther.

It was after almost three hours of slow, arduous travel east of Cache Creek, that Jesse and Frank agreed to bury the golden cargo and burn the packsaddles to warm their chilled bodies.

At the head of a small arroyo the gang of outlaws untied the packs from the burros and watched as the gold bars sank into the snow-covered ravine. After concealing the Mexican treasure with rocks and boulders and kicking the half frozen earth off the side of the arroyo with their boot heels, the horsemen gathered round the packsaddles and set them afire. One lame burro was shot, while the others were set free to wander.

Jesse made two final but lasting signs to the gold. A burro shoe nailed into the bank of a tree served as one. Into a nearby cottonwood Jesse emptied both his six shooters for a second mark. They would do until the day when the men could return to plant their gold in a much safer place. March 5, 1876 Jesse had made up his mind about what to do with part of the two million dollars, plus other proceeds the gunmen had gathered while terrorizing banks and trains from Missouri to Mexico.

As Jesse carved the contract into the brass kettle, he thought to himself that neither he nor any of his cohorts would ever want for money ... If and when they were taken by the law. But if anyone violated the "brass bucket pact," that fellow would personally answer to him. With that, Jesse James placed the brass bucket beneath a rock ledge on the side of Tarbone Mountain.

The brass bucket with its secret treasure code was never to be retrieved by Jesse or any of his men, even though several would try years later. Only six months later almost to the day, the notorious James gang was shot up and dispersed while attempting to rob the Northfield, Minnesota bank. Jesse and Frank were among the few to escape.

Finally, on April 3, 1882, Jesse James met his death by the hand of a "coward" in St. Joseph, Missouri. Frank later stood trial and was acquitted of his past crimes. Frank had not forgotten the hidden gold down in Indian Territory. He was waiting only for the right time to return as inconspicuously as possible.

Frank James in 1898, before he returned to his Oklahoma haunts to settle on a farm near Fletcher. Frank spent most of the remaining years of his life seeking outlaw gold in the Wichitas and the nearby Keechi Hills.

We also learned about the Cole younger search for the Brass Bucket that Jesse James left behind in the Wichita mountains of SW Oklahoma. His name would also appear on the "brass bucket contract." Cole Younger had just completed a twenty-five year sentence for his part in the Northfield, Minnesota bank robbery. When he was released from prison, Cole made tracks for the Wichitas.

In December 1903, Younger was in Lawton, Oklahoma, a frontier boom town barely two years old. Cole was not particular about what he told the press. One paper reported in November that Younger was in Ardmore visiting a relative and planned to visit Dallas and the Texas Panhandle and then return home to Lee's Summit, Missouri about December 1st.

BUT... Cole changed his mind. On December 1st 1903 he was in Lawton. The papers reported, "Cole Younger was in the city Friday and Saturday with a view to locating there. Reports have it that he will go into the newspaper business. He was given a reception by the citizens and is pleased with the city." How long Cole Younger visited is not known, but apparently Frank was not convinced that he found much.

Then there was the meeting of Billy Royce and Frank James. The two men had met almost forty years before. Yet neither had forgotten that accidental run-in so many miles away up in Montana Territory. It was early in the 1870's, remembered Royce, that Frank, Jesse, and five others were making tracks between them and the law. After a long day's ride the brothers ran into a group of buffalo hunters.

One long-haired sharpshooter recognized Frank and called out to him. Frank placed his hand close to his six shooter and then almost instantly recognized the hunter as William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody himself. That evening they camped together. Cody's cooks served a hot meal of venison and wild turkey. One of the cooks was Billy Royce, then only a tousled haired youth of fourteen. Billy was the son of an Irishman who had served as a doorkeeper at the White house when Lincoln was president.

Billy Royce homesteaded in the Keechi Hills, the very place where Frank and Jesse had hidden part of their booty and holed up on more occasions than Frank cared to recall.

As to James retrieving the caches of gold, the story goes that from the time Frank retrieved the cache of gold, Royce became a persistent treasure hunter of the Keechi Hills. In a newspaper article about him in 1932 the eighty-year-old settler reported that within only a few days a niece of Frank James and some male companions were due to arrive on a mysterious hunt.

What they found has never been learned, but the story of Frank's niece turns up time and again in as many locations over the Wichita Mountains of what she was seeking. She kept to herself and divulged very little with people she talked to. There was at least one other cache that Frank removed successfully from its secret depository, and there are stories of still others. There is no question that Frank James dug up two caches hidden near the Wichita Mountains. There were rumors that he recovered more, each carefully guarded by landmarks known only to him or Jesse.

Even though Frank recovered a portion of the outlaw loot, he did not retrieve it all, because he did not find the "brass bucket with the outlaw contract" carved into it. Nor did he find the "iron teapot," which he must have walked over a thousand times in the Keechi Hills while searching Belle Hedlund's and Billy Royce's farms.

When Frank James finally left his Oklahoma farm about 1914 (a year before he died), he must have thought often of the brass bucket pact and the two million dollars in gold hidden during that bitter winter of 1875, so many years before. Perhaps it was his niece who came back to find them, with Frank's final instructions. She was no more successful than Frank James, though. It was after 30 years had passed since the border gold was hidden during the bitter winter of 1876, when Frank James made known his return this old stomping grounds of SW Oklahoma.

In 1907 he and his wife, Ann, settled two miles north of Fletcher on a 160 acre farm between the Wichita Mountains and the Keechi Hills, the latter where Frank was later to dig up a least six thousand dollars of the outlaw loot.

Years before, Frank had hung up his guns for a final time. He was no longer the surly, gentlemanly, outlaw whom so many had read about. At sixty-four and balding, he remained soft spoken and took no pleasure in recounting the past. His objectives he now kept mainly to himself. The news of Frank's purchase of the farm spread fast when papers announced the story in November, 1907. Frank was then building his new home and planned to move in during the spring. Frank was also busy helping celebrate Oklahoma's statehood.

On Frank's sandy farm land he built a frame house, worked a plot of ground, and planted a grove of peach trees. Just before his mother died, in February, 1911, she visited Frank and his wife at their farm. She died in Oklahoma City while en route back to Missouri. It was reported by old timers that say Frank James wore out six horses riding the trails, searching for landmarks to put him back on the road to the golden treasure. But the country had now been fenced and plowed. The Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation had been opened to white settlement in August, 1901. Miners had swarmed into the Wichita Mountains to seek their own fortunes. Towns had grown up overnight, and new roads were traveled. The old trails were not called by the names the outlaws had known them. Frank hoped that the old landmarks would help him recall his secluded haunts of thirty years before, the treasure code Jesse had laid down, and the brass bucket somewhere on Tarbone Mountain.

It was one of Frank's day after day rides that attracted the eye of Dr. L. C. Knee, a highly respected physician of early Lawton. While paying house calls near Apache, Dr. Knee observed every day for a week or more that Frank had ridden to the top of a hill about four miles east of Apache. There he sat astride his mount, facing south, staring as if in a kind of trance.

One day, out of curiosity, Dr. Knee drove his buggy up to Frank James. After the usual comments about the weather, Dr. Knee dismissed his manners and said, "I don't want to seem inquisitive, Frank, but why do you sit in that saddle up here for so long, just staring at the bald prairie? What is it you're looking for?"

It was not known what Frank replied, but it was not many weeks later that the doctor and two local men arrived with teams and fresno scrapers and dug out a portion of a small canyon. Their search yielded the proper clues, for they had not dug long when they uncovered the skeleton of a burro, and not far away they found a burro shoe firmly embedded in a large tree. But it was their last clue, and after spending more than four thousand dollars, Dr. Knee gave up in disgust.

Frank had once explained that the eighteen burros had traveled so slowly after they forded Cache Creek in the winter of 1875 that it would take him only about a fifteen minute ride on a good horse to cover the same distance to where they had unloaded the heavy golden cargo.

Dr. Knee may have known the old Fort Sill stage driver, Holsey Green Bennett, who one winter day early in 1876 spotted seventeen burros grazing at the base of Mount Scott. Bennett had thought it strange, for o military animals were allowed to roam that far from the fort, and the animals he saw carried no government brand.

One piece of property just east of Cement in the Keechi Hills, attracted Frank James. It was the farm of a teacher, Mrs. Belle Hedlund. In 1907, Frank inquired about an old spring and some symbols etched on a rock and asked Mrs. Hedlund whether he could look over her land.

The schoolteacher was curious and walked along with the stranger (Frank James) as he poked an iron rod into the ground in an inviting spot. She showed him the only spring she knew about, at the foot of a lone knoll with a natural cave through one side, known as Buzzard Roost.

Frank pointing to a nearby rock as he bent down to reach under a stone and pulled out a rusted spoon, declared, "If this is the right place, this was Jesse's Kitchen."

As Frank continued his search, he confided in Mrs. Hedlund that he was seeking sixty-four thousand dollars that Jesse had taken during a robbery at Independence, Missouri.

Jesse had carved a map and directions on a large rock and turned it upside down. That rock Frank believed was on Mrs. Hedlund's farm, near the spring, where the outlaws had camped on many an occasion. Frank revealed that Jesse drew a similar map on his boot, later transferred it to paper, and gave it to his mother.

Some time later Frank found some of the markings he was seeking. At the foot of "Buzzard Roost" he found the carving of a pair of crossed rifles cut deeply into a rock. The barrel of one pointed east to an aged tree, on which were etched the letters "M. O. O." and below, the letter "Y." Beneath the carvings was a "mule shoe nailed into a blaze."

Not far from that tree Frank unearthed a copper kettle with a crock cover containing six thousand dollars -- or so he said. One old settler who was sure that Frank's claim was true was Uncle Billy Royce, who owned the farm adjacent to Mrs. Hedlund's. Billy Royce knew that the kettle of loot was not all that Frank was seeking. One day while Frank was in Cement buying supplies, Royce first spotted him. He took a double look and then hollered out, "Hello, Frank!" The old outlaw wheeled around, staring, as if trying to remember where he had seen him before.

To read more about the treasure trail beginnings, you can go to our "Archives" for Vol. 11, January 2009, click on the second issue of Volume 11.
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