Shadow of the Sentinel One Man's Quest to Find the Hidden Treasure of the Confederacy

Chapter Four:Coming Home: A Gold-Filled Legacy The phrase "Knights of the Golden Circle" meant nothing to Bob Brewer in 1977, the year that he moved his young family to Hatfield after a nineteen-year career in the Navy. It would take another sixteen years before "KGC" entered his vocabulary. Once he had resettled in the Arkansas hill country, a powerful desire to solve the mystery of Grandpa's deep-woods excursions -- and their links to possible treasure -- was never far from his mind. In fact, in that small Polk County mountain town, where everyone seemed to know each other, the topic of hidden treasure was all but unavoidable.Bob spent the first year at home unwinding, adjusting to the pace of civilian life. He put his modest savings toward fixing up a small ranch that he and Linda had purchased a few miles from town. It felt good having stretches of free time, the first since his youth.But, notwithstanding the buffer of a military pension, he also recognized that with three young boys to feed and a daughter going off to college, he had to enter the civilian workforce. To troll for job leads and catch up with old acquaintances, he would drive to McLain's, the coffee shop on the edge of town, where burly men from the timber and trucking industries would gather for breakfast. Much of the conversation centered on the hunting season, the mills and local politics. Almost invariably, amid the din, someone would slip in a line or two about hunting treasure, "Spanish gold," to be specific.It struck Bob as odd just how much treasure talk there was. Some of the conversationalists -- locals such as Art Akins and George Icke -- were self-avowed, full-time "treasure hunters." Others claimed to do their "coin shooting" for sport in their free time. No one claimed outright to have found hidden caches. Yet many spoke of having uncovered mysterious "Spanish treasure" signs in the surrounding mountains.Bob could only grin. Among the many vague descriptions of such signs from these well-meaning men -- all of whom claimed to know more than they actually did -- he would occasionally hear a precise account of one of the carved symbols that he had seen with Grandpa and Ode. When told about carvings that were unfamiliar, he carefully would sketch them on loose pieces of paper. If a location was given (and there was an implicit level of trust among these mountain men), he would head to the woods to investigate. On several occasions, he concluded, the tree- or rock-face engravings fit a pattern: the same knowing hand or hands had created them. That knowledge he quietly kept to himself. In his study at home, he began incorporating each field report into a master, color-coded topographical layout of the Brushy Creek area near Smoke Rock Mountain.He recognized a certain irony in all this seemingly haphazard talk about "lost Spanish treasure" in landlocked Arkansas. He had just arrived from the Florida Keys, his last Navy posting, where an effort had been under way to find the sunken Spanish galleon,Nuestra Senora de Atocha, and its reputed millions. During his "twilight tour" at Naval Air Station Boca Chica, Bob occasionally had bumped into high-profile treasure hunter Mel Fisher at local establishments in nearby Key West. He learned that Fisher's treasure-hunting team was focused, well-equipped and maintained asystematicapproach to finding its target. At some point, Bob speculated, Fisher was going to find the mother lode in the shallow waters off the Keys. (Fisher did just that with theAtocha, in 1985, for a total recovery estimated at more than $400 million in gold coin, ingots, jewels and gems. In the process, Fisher lost a son, a daughter-in-law and another diver to a freak salvage-boat accident.)In their last encounter in Key West in 1976, Bob had told the veteran offshore treasure hunter that as a boy growing up in the Ouachitas he had been shown treasure markGetler, Warren is the author of 'Shadow of the Sentinel One Man's Quest to Find the Hidden Treasure of the Confederacy' with ISBN 9780743219686 and ISBN 0743219686.