For a country that’s just a couple hundred years old, America sure has its fair share of history. For my part, I’m absolutely fascinated by the myths and legends of our young nation. Take the idea of buried treasure, for example. If you were to count up every story about buried caches of pirate booty, stashed loot from Wild West bank robberies, abandoned gold mines or lost Native American cities, it almost seems as if every square foot of this country should be concealing some kind of hidden fortune. Just slam a pickax into the ground– you’re sure to turn up something!
Of course in real life, finding buried treasure is incredibly hard… and Bob Brewer is a man who knows this well. After his service in the Navy was through, Brewer headed back to his native Arkansas to live a quiet life in the Ozark foothills, much the same way as his ancestors had done. He spends most of his free time off in the woods, studying the cryptic carvings that his relatives had taken such pains to point out to him as a child. And over time, Brewer began to suspect that these mysterious clues, combined with the hand-drawn maps and coded messages that were passed down within his family, might all be connected somehow. Could his relatives, descendants of Civil War veterans, actually have been part of a long line of guardians sworn to watch over the secret treasury of the Confederacy? Admittedly, this story seems like a stretch… but then, how else could one explain Brewer’s knack for discovering caches of gold and silver coins?
“Rebel Gold” was described to me as a story about a conspiracy theory, one that “exposes the black helicopters of the Confederacy”, so naturally I had to buy it. This book throws a spotlight on The Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret society whose members are set on continuing the Civil War. To hear Brewer tell it, the KGC’s shadowy legacy stretched on for decades after President Lincoln’s assassination. And now, after reading it, I can’t stop wondering:
-If the outlaw Jesse James and his gang were actually committing all their holdups as part of an orchestrated effort to refill the South’s coffers?
-Whether or not the Ku Klux Klan was really founded to be an enforcement arm of the exiled Confederate government?
-And, most importantly– could massive caches of Rebel gold really have been buried in secret across the continental United States, their locations marked only with a series of carved landmarks and cryptic ciphers?
I could go on and on about Mr. Brewer’s theories, but I don’t want to take anything away from your own reading experience. Because no matter if this story is completely true, completely false, or somewhere in between, it really does make for an incredible tale…
