4
CONNECTING THE DOTS
Shortly after my mother wrote Jesse James Lived and Died in Texas, we were contacted by many people armed with stories of Jesse James, treasure, and sometimes both. Most of the treasure stories turned out to be tall tales, but there are a few that turned out to be true.
One of those true stories came from a man by the name of George Roming from El Paso, Texas. We got to know George well, and after a few years he wanted to tell us his amazing story. George Roming, a 32nd-degree Freemason, Shriner, and World War II veteran, was born in 1920, not far from where Jesse James aka James Lafayette Courtney lived in the small rural community of Buttermilk, Texas, later renamed Blevins. As a young boy and later a teenager, George would walk past Jesse’s farm. When Jesse saw him, he would invite him to sit on the front porch and talk for a while. They got to know one another, and Jesse trusted him. In the 1930s, Jesse had George swear an oath of secrecy and hired him to help move 700 bars of gold. George said that after they had transported the gold in a large wagon to a ranch owned by one of Jesse’s friends, Jesse removed 20 bars for himself. This friend’s ranch was approximately 20 miles away. When they arrived, they were met by two other old men and two boys around George’s age. They buried the gold in a rectangular field. They found the center of the field, and from that center, Jesse paced 40 steps to the north and instructed them to dig a hole approximately 8 feet in depth. They lined the bottom of the hole with large timbers, unloaded the gold into the hole, covered it up, and left.
When asked if the other two boys could have ever told anyone, George replied that he knew for a fact that they had not. He did not elaborate, adding that he was only telling us because he was the only one left, he trusted us, and we were Jesse’s descendants. George drew a map for us on a piece of brown paper and described to us exactly where they buried the gold. The place he described is now under Lake Belton, which was created in 1954 by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. When I informed George of this, he gritted his teeth, looked down, and shook his head in disappointment. George Roming died in 2007 at the age of eighty-six. He was a good man and a good friend.
A little more than a year after we met George, we were contacted by Nita Callahan. She was associated with former Texas State Attorney General Waggoner Carr, and she wanted to show us the locations of two treasures that had been recovered. We were not disappointed. The first site was located in Georgetown, Texas, approximately 2.5 miles west of the Williamson County courthouse. It was said to have held a very large cache of gold bars weighing close to 80 pounds each. I found it strange that the gold was said to have been Spanish gold, even though it was allegedly a KGC treasure cache.
Hearing “Spanish gold,” I immediately thought of Victorio Peak in New Mexico. When I returned home I pulled out the maps and started drawing lines. As I stated before, the line from Victorio Peak to the Bruton Parish Church is 1,715 miles long. I then drew a line from Victorio Peak to the site near Georgetown, Texas. That line is 548 miles long, and the angle off the main line (the line from Victorio Peak to the Bruton Parish Church) is 33 degrees. I don’t know about you, but to me there seemed to be a lot of coincidences here. Not only is the number 33 associated with Freemasonry, but it also happens to be the number of Bacon (as in Francis Bacon) when using gematria along with the Elizabethan alphabet of his day.*1 But the lines had no resemblance to the lines on the so-called KGC template.
The second site Mrs. Callahan showed us was located to the northeast, on a property next to a cemetery almost 1 mile south-southwest of the main intersection in Little River-Academy, Texas. While the treasure that used to be located on this site was smaller than the one in Georgetown, it was said to have been worth millions of dollars in gold alone. We were told that a railroad track was laid there and was used to unload the treasure into an underground vault. The remains of the track were clearly visible, and the earth around the location of the recovered treasure was marked by a large depression. Although the treasures had long since been recovered, knowing the locations provided valuable information that could possibly help in locating the treasure indicated in my great-great-grandfather’s map.
Each time I learned of a treasure site, I would plot the location on a map and work with the KGC template to see if it fit or not. It was not until just over a year later, when I learned of yet another treasure site, that it all started to fall into place. This alleged treasure site is located on the outskirts of the small town of Tow, Texas. Tow (pronounced Tau) is on the eastern side of Llano County, Texas, near where the Colorado River runs into Lake Buchanan. One of the stories connected with this treasure is that a mule train carrying a government payroll was ambushed, and the gold was brought to this location and deposited. It is said to be booby trapped with water, the water being provided by the nearby Colorado River.
Now, in addition to the Victorio Peak and Bruton Vault sites, I had four treasure sites in Texas to work with, but I couldn’t figure out how or if they would fit the template. Searching for more answers to the questions that were piling up, I had to ask myself, who buried these treasures? George Roming told me that he had helped my great-great-grandfather bury one. The others are said to have been Spanish and/or KGC treasures. I personally don’t believe that the gold found in Georgetown, Texas, or Victorio Peak in New Mexico was Spanish treasure, nor do I believe it was a KGC treasure cache. Some of it may have been put in place by Spaniards, but I seriously doubt the Spanish Crown or any other government had any knowledge of it. But at the time I tried to find a logical explanation of how the alleged treasure vault at the Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, said to have been laid there by the successors of the Englishman Francis Bacon, could have had anything to do with Spanish or KGC treasure in New Mexico and Texas. I also wondered if the Georgetown site had any connections with the Bruton Vault and the Victorio Peak treasures. The numbers 33 and 1,715 associated with the sites might just be a strange coincidence, but I felt it warranted more research just to make sure. If the sites are connected, then what is the connection shared by Jesse James aka James Lafayette Courtney, Albert Pike, Francis Bacon, and the Spaniards? If they are connected, then there must be a common link. The only answer I had—and it felt as if I was going way out on a limb—was Freemasonry.
If Freemasons were responsible for burying these treasures, then the next obvious question would have to be why? What purpose could they or anyone else have had for burying so much wealth? Looking back through history, we can find many examples of why someone or some group with so much wealth would feel the need to bury it for safekeeping. One such example would be the Knights Templar.