Volume 11 , Issue 2

Billy Royce & Frank James Meeting

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.

Retrieving the Caches of Gold
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.
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