Original subtitles

(gun firing)

- Tonight, the infamous outlaw, Jesse James,

and the hunt for his hidden loot.

- He robbed banks and railroads blind for 16 years.

- Cash, jewels,

$2 million in gold bars.

- Legend says he did not spend it,

he hid it.

- There are stories about him stashing loot

all over the United States.

- Only a fraction of the millions

Jesse James supposedly hid

has actually been found.

- For many, it's as if James is taunting them

from beyond the grave,

saying, "Go ahead, try to find my treasure."

- Now, we'll explore the top theories

around an enduring mystery.

If James and his gang hid a fortune,

where could it be?

- It could be in caves, in mountains.

- Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas.

- In one case,

he just let it sink to the bottom of a river.

- What really happened to the lost treasure of Jesse James?

(dramatic music)

- [Laurence] April, 1882,

St. Joseph, Missouri.

Although the residents don't know it,

the most wanted man in America

is secretly living just outside their town.

- He's posing as a family man named Thomas Howard.

He's there with his wife, his two kids,

and living in a nice house just outside of town.

- This seemingly humble farmer

is in fact America's most notorious outlaw,

by the name of Jesse James.

- Bad man of Missouri,

the Robin Hood of the Ozarks,

the last fighting rebel of the Civil War.

He and his gang have been knocking off banks,

stage coaches, and trains for nearly 16 years.

- By 1882, there were multiple bounties

on Jesse James's head.

The largest was $10,000,

which was offered by the governor of Missouri

to anyone, a detective,

a lawman, just a regular person,

whoever could bring him in

would get a huge payday.

- Law enforcement was always on his tail,

yet he always managed to stay

one step ahead of the authorities.

- On April 3rd, 1882,

Jesse James is meeting with Robert Ford,

who is a new prospective member of the gang.

- [Laurence] In truth,

Bob Ford has something more sinister planned.

- Bob Ford had heard about the $10,000 bounty

and figured this was his chance.

And so he takes out his own weapon.

(gun cocking)

He shoots Jesse James in the back of the head.

(gun firing)

And kills him instantly.

- The death of Jesse James is huge news.

The whole country is abuzz about his death.

- Jesse James' run is officially over,

but what he left behind

still fascinates treasure hunters today.

- We know that Jesse James

participated in dozens of heists

and must have acquired millions of dollars.

But what we don't know is where it all went

because we haven't found any of it.

Maybe he didn't even put it all in one place.

(pensive music)

- [Laurence] His story begins with his youth

on America's frontier.

- Jesse James is born in 1847

to a strongly Southern family.

They're in Western Missouri,

though they're not wealthy, own slaves.

And just as Jesse's maturing,

we see the outbreak of the Civil War

where those Southern sympathies

are inflamed to a radical degree.

- His older brother, Frank, goes on to join a group

that is known as the Bushwhackers.

And the Bushwhackers, to be clear,

are fighting guerrilla style.

They're not affiliated officially

with Confederate military.

It's much more barbaric.

(explosion booming)

- They would not only surprise and engage soldiers,

but sometimes others,

sometimes innocent bystanders

would be beaten or killed.

(guns firing)

- It was brutal, it was bloody.

It was probably the worst violence

of the entire Civil War.

- Frank was out there committing atrocities,

and the Union soldiers and patrols

were well aware of this,

and they were looking for Frank.

So the best place to go would be to his home.

(tense music)

- They rode onto the James farm looking for Frank James.

And they didn't find Frank.

Frank wasn't there, but Jesse was.

- Where is he?

- They strapped him to a plow and severely beat him.

They rode onto the house.

They horse whipped his mother.

And then they hung his stepdad

until he was brain damaged permanently.

- It's this moment that really galvanizes Jesse James.

- [Laurence] Burning with a need for revenge,

16-year-old James joins one of the most feared

Confederate guerrilla groups of the day.

- In 1864, Jesse and his older brother, Frank,

joined a group of Confederate irregulars

under the command of Bloody Bill Anderson.

Bloody Bill is one of the most deplorable villains

to fight during the Civil War.

(guns firing)

A man who rode into battle

with the body parts of his victims

strewn about his saddle.

But this was who 16-year-old Jesse

is looking up to.

(explosion booming)

- [Laurence] Bloody Bill himself

is eventually killed in a skirmish.

Those of his unit who survive

are declared outlaws at the end of the war.

- Even before the war ends,

Confederate guerrillas were wanted criminals.

They were considered outlaws.

- They weren't allowed amnesty

like regular Confederate troops.

If they turned themselves in,

they were given a quick trial and executed.

- [Laurence] The James Brothers refuse to surrender

and launch a different kind of insurgency

against the Union.

- If you're an outlaw, you might just say,

"What have I got to lose? Let's go for it."

So they just went full speed ahead

and they started robbing banks.

(gun firing)

- And they start going after these banks

that specifically have a Union connection

because they still feel that they wanna fight

the good fight of the Confederacy.

- [Laurence] Then in 1869,

a brazen bank job

puts the name Jesse James on the map.

- Jesse and Frank James decide to rob a bank

in Gallatin, Missouri.

And the reason they choose it

is that Jesse believes that a clerk in the bank

is one of the Union militia

responsible for killing Bloody Bill Anderson.

- Jesse walked in

and he just killed him right there.

(gun firing)

Drew his gun and shot,

no questions asked.

(gun firing)

- Following the Gallatin shooting,

his reputation as the roughest,

toughest, swaggering outlaw in the West is born.

- It is around this time

that James and his brother, Frank,

joined together with one of their old Confederates,

Cole Younger and his two younger brothers,

to form what is one of the most famous gangs

in the history of the old West,

the James-Younger Gang.

- They start pulling bank robberies

almost on a weekly basis.

They stole hundreds of thousands of dollars

and quickly became notorious.

- Jesse was certainly the face of the gang.

There's no question about that.

- Jesse James knew the value of public relations.

He would leave written accounts

of their exploits behind

at the banks that he robbed,

knowing that newspapermen of the time

would print it verbatim.

Saying it was principled resistance to the Union.

- And people were just eating this stuff up,

so he understood how to market himself.

- And an elevated version of Jesse James

enters our popular culture,

and this notion of him as a Robin Hood

really takes hold,

a man who had been an outright racist terrorist.

And it's an image that we still to this day

struggle to shed.

- [Laurence] As the Jesse James legend grows,

law enforcement becomes more desperate to stop him,

but James is always one step ahead.

- By 1873, the banks across the Midwest

start to tighten up security.

And they become a lot harder to rob.

- Jesse and Frank James

realize they need a new target.

And they decide a great target,

a ripe target would be trains.

(train horn blowing)

- Robbing a train really had two benefits for them.

They would make a huge amount of money

because it carried a lot of cash,

and it was one more way to stick it to the North.

- It's literally the tendrils of the North

extending across the United States,

bringing with it

the pernicious influence of Northern industrialists.

- [Laurence] On January 31st, 1874,

the James-Younger Gang

robs one of the largest railroads in the Midwest.

(train horn blowing)

- The gang targets the Little Rock Express

that is going to be stopping in the small town

of Gads Hill, Missouri.

- Because the town is so small,

James and his accomplices

are able to effectively take the entire town hostage.

They round everybody up,

and then they move over to this train station.

- They are able to redirect the train

onto a sidetrack.

They jump out from underneath the platform,

take the conductor.

- So aside from robbing the passengers,

the real target was gold bullion and cash

that was on that train.

- [Laurence] Reports on the gang's total haul

range as high as $22,000,

over half a million in today's currency.

Like all of Jesse James' stolen loot,

it's never recovered.

- The Gads Hill heist

was really the most high-profile robbery

that they had undertaken to date

and the most lucrative.

- After they get off the train,

there's a big sheriff's posse on the way.

The James Gang has to get out of there.

They've got a lot of gold and it's heavy.

They can't just take off.

- It was strategically advantageous

to hide some of it.

(dramatic music)

- A local legend begins really early on

that the majority of the money

taken from the Gads Hill robbery

is still in Gads Hill somewhere.

About 74 years later, in 1948,

a timber worker named Harry Wilcox is digging around,

and he discovers the entry to a cave.

- He claims that after some exploration,

he comes to a large chamber.

And in the chamber

are what we might describe as certain artifacts.

And it is the story of those artifacts

that causes a sensation in Gads Hill.

- [Laurence] Word spreads through town that Harry Wilcox

found some of Jesse James's lost treasure.

All Wilcox will tell the press

is that he's met with US Treasury agents

investigating the matter.

- The rumors are just flying everywhere,

and one of those rumors

is that Harry found $100,000 worth of treasure.

- Wilcox is being fairly tight-lipped

about what it is that he's found,

which only stokes the flames of speculation

about whether or not he has found Jesse James' treasure.

- He seems to be enjoying the attention,

telling the story,

but then all of a sudden he downplays it

and says he only found a little bit of money

and an old gun.

And the question is,

why would he meet with Treasury agents

unless he found something significant and important?

- So Harry Wilcox's descent into the cave

is really one of the first moments

in which Jesse James's lost loot

becomes a part of the American imagination,

and all of these different theories

and all of these searches begin.

- So where else might we start looking?

Well, maybe we just follow the James Gang

a little bit further down the trail.

- [Laurence] January 31st, 1874,

Gads Hill, Missouri.

The James-Younger Gang, led by Jesse James,

robs a train carrying a haul

worth more than half a million dollars today.

But where they're hiding their stolen loot

remains a mystery.

- Some people believe that the gang

made it out of Gads Hill,

they did not stop to stash it in a cave.

- But the Gads Hill train robbery

is incredibly lucrative.

And in addition to it being a lot of value,

it's a lot to carry.

It was literally burdening them and their horses,

slowing them down.

- There's a huge posse of at least 50 men

coming after them, maybe from other directions.

That's a lot of weight to carry

when you've got a posse chasing you.

- Jesse James has local law enforcement

looking out for him,

he's got US deputy marshals,

and he also now has to deal with private law enforcement

in the form of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

- When the Pinkerton Agency got involved,

it was worse than the reward

being offered on their heads.

The Pinkertons didn't stop,

they always got their man.

And they didn't play nice.

- With all of these forces chasing him,

it would've benefited Jesse James

and the James-Younger Gang a great deal

to stash a lot of this loot

to continue to stay one step ahead of the authorities.

- [Laurence] Some are convinced that Jesse James

waited until they were further along in their getaway

to stow their loot.

- There are a lot of people

that don't buy the Gads Hill treasure

being hidden in the cave.

A lot of people think that they went farther,

in fact, across the border into Arkansas

and dropped the treasure in the Black River.

(dramatic music)

- Over time, rumors begin that the treasure is there.

And how do we know it's there?

Well, because not one,

but two psychics said so.

- In the 1920s,

a local treasure hunter named LC Sells

consults, two separate fortune tellers

who both tell him to look for Jesse James's treasure

in the same spot on the Black River.

- Based on the word of two fortune tellers,

LC Sells puts all of his money into finding it.

So he goes to the river bank

and he starts to dig.

- He and as many as a dozen other men

who he enlists to help him in this enterprise

discover a three-foot strongbox

that they are able to collectively lift

out of the hole, but then they drop it.

And it falls into the river and disappears from sight.

- He continues to invest his money and his time

in finding this thing,

he even goes back to the psychics,

and the psychic says,

"Well, I know you haven't found it yet,

but that's good because two members of your excavation team

had planned on killing you

and stealing it the whole time."

- That information is enough to spook Sells,

and he immediately abandons his search for the strongbox.

- [Laurence] In 1953, LC Sells' son, Floyd,

picks up where his father left off.

- Floyd Sells has more tools to his disposal

than his father did, and he employs them.

Earth movers, conveyors, water pumps.

He hires armed guards.

- Using heavy equipment,

is able to dig effectively a mineshaft

in the middle of the river,

all the way down to the bottom and beyond.

- And at one point,

they're down about 22 feet with a shaft,

and they're using a probe.

And they hit something, and they think, "Oh my gosh,

we found what Dad dropped down here."

- But just as they find the treasure,

the shaft collapses

and the treasure is lost once again.

- After the shaft collapsed,

he kept spending more money,

and eventually he was about to go broke

and he had to abandon the project.

- [Laurence] Neither the cave in Missouri

nor the river in Arkansas

have yielded loot from Gads Hill.

But it was only one of dozens of robberies

committed by Jesse James during his crime spree.

- Gads Hill turns out to be just a small part

of the vast fortune that Jesse James

was able to accumulate.

This was just the beginning.

- 1874 turned out to be a pretty good year

for the James-Younger Gang.

Started it in Gads Hill,

and then they ended it in Muncie, Kansas,

where they robbed a Kansas Pacific Railroad train.

- And this time, their haul is much bigger,

about $30,000, which in today's currency

is around $800,000.

But that heist is but a mere drop in the bucket

for what comes next for Jesse James and his crew.

(train horn blowing)

- [Laurence] By the start of 1875,

the James-Younger Gang are coming off a banner year,

robbing trains and stagecoaches

throughout the Midwest.

- It's what they have in mind next, however,

that fuels more speculation

about Jesse James' treasure.

This would not only be the biggest haul of James's career,

it would be the biggest haul

in the history of American West outlawry.

- So, legend has it that the next big score

happens after the James-Younger Gang

learns that the Mexican government

has sent a mule train carrying gold bars

up through the state of Chihuahua,

just across the border.

- If it was the amount that the rumors had said,

which is $2 million in gold,

that would've weighed more than 6,000 pounds,

which is more than three tons.

- Using some of their bushwhacker skills,

the gang is able to steal

as many as 18 mules laden with gold,

take them across the border,

through the plains of Texas

and into Oklahoma.

- [Laurence] According to local Oklahoma historians,

the James-Younger Gang runs into trouble

while making their way through Oklahoma's Wichita Mountains.

- A big blizzard hits them

in the middle of Indian territory.

The group is forced to try to make their way

through at least a foot of snow,

and eventually realizes

that they're not gonna be able to carry

all of this gold through the blizzard.

- The idea quickly comes up,

"How do we hide and stash this loot,

and save our lives?"

- James identifies a potential hiding space up a ravine,

and that's where they take the money.

(dramatic music)

They hide it in a cave.

He then writes up something of a contract

in an unusual way.

- Jesse reportedly took a bucket

and engraved in it the date

and then the names of all of the men

who were with him in that gang,

and left it as a marker.

- We might ask the question,

why not return for the treasure?

Well, the answer is that the James-Younger Gang

very soon makes the fateful decision to rob a bank

in Northfield, Minnesota.

- Jesse James finds out there's $75,000

in the Northfield Bank

that belongs to Adelbert Ames

and Benjamin Butler,

two of the most high-profile Union generals

from the Civil War.

And it becomes an irresistible target for him.

- For James and his gang,

this is the continuation of the Southern fight

against the Union Army.

- [Laurence] On September 7th, 1876,

eight members of the James-Younger Gang

ride into Northfield, Minnesota.

- Maybe they thought that this would be an easier score,

but as it turned out,

it was anything but that.

- Northfield, Minnesota, at this time,

is a growing and thriving milling town

of about 2,000 people.

This is an admittedly unusual target.

Frank and Cole were concerned

about how remote this was,

that it was not a terrain that they were familiar with,

that they didn't have allies there.

- So the James Gang rides into town.

They pretend to be cattle buyers, if asked.

Frank enters the bank,

followed by two others.

The rest of the gang stayed outside keeping guard.

If anything happened,

they were supposed to shoot and warn the others.

- It's only minutes after Frank enters the bank

that one member of the town,

purportedly a hardware store owner,

yells, "They're robbing the bank,"

and he begins dolling out rifles.

- The townspeople, now armed,

run to the bank, weapons in hand,

and a full on shootout takes place.

(guns firing)

Frank tries to grab whatever money he can.

That turns out to be about $26 in nickels.

- All the while, out on the street,

the rest of the gang is being shot to pieces.

- The guys are shot up.

Jim Younger had a bullet through his jaw.

Cole Younger had 11 bullets in him

after it was all said and done.

Frank ended up getting shot in the knee.

- Two of the gang are killed,

the Youngers are apprehended,

and it is only Jesse and Frank who are able to escape.

- This is basically the end of the Jesse James heyday,

after this botched fiasco of a heist.

- We now have a reason

why nobody would go back,

at least not immediately,

to retrieve that money.

The gang is no more,

the heat is on in a way it never has been before,

and Jesse James does, in fact, lay low

and lives, for three years,

the persona of Thomas Howard.

In 1881, Missouri Governor Crittenden

places a $10,000 reward on Jesse James.

- When you put a reward on someone's head,

everybody and their dog

wants a piece of that.

That's when he meets Bob and Charlie Ford.

They got close to Jesse

and shot him in the back of the head.

(gun cocking)

(gun firing) (thudding)

April 3rd, 1882.

- [Laurence] The stunning news of Jesse James' death

renews interest in his hidden fortune.

But anyone who knows where it is

isn't talking.

- Six months after his brother is killed,

Frank turns himself in.

But despite enduring a couple of trials,

he has acquitted

'cause there is not enough evidence to convict him.

- Frank and his wife

inexplicably pick up and move to Oklahoma,

more than 400 miles away

from the farm where they grew up.

They move to this area called Cement,

near the Wichita Mountains.

- Very close to where he is alleged

to have helped bury millions of dollars

in Mexican gold.

Some people claim

that he's looking for that $2 million in gold,

and if anybody would know where it is,

he would.

- Curiously, Frank isn't the only former member of the gang

with his sight set on Oklahoma.

When he is released from prison,

Cole Younger also visits the area.

- He comes to Lawton, Oklahoma,

which is also nearby.

But of course, the rumor is that he is there

because he also wants to find the gold.

- Rumors persist for years after Jesse James's death

that his millions in ill-gotten gains

were hidden away for safekeeping.

But only the few survivors

of the James-Younger Gang would know for sure.

First among them, his brother, Frank James.

- In his retirement from banditry,

Frank James has a number of occupations.

A curious one is that he is a farmer

for a period of time.

- In 1906, Frank James buys this property

in Oklahoma, near the Wichita Mountains,

where that $2 million possibly is buried.

- A few years earlier, Cole Younger gets out of prison

and decides he's gonna move out into that area too.

- It is, of course, tempting to speculate

that he was there for the same reason

that Frank might have been,

to try to recover the treasure.

- [Laurence] Frank James, now in his 60s,

plants a small grove of peach trees,

but locals say he doesn't seem

all that interested in farming.

- Neighbors often say

that he rides up to high ground in Oklahoma,

near the Wichita Mountains,

and he just is just looking around,

surveying the area,

like he's looking for something specific.

- Now, if Frank ever found anything,

he was smart enough not to say a word.

If he found gold, he kept it to himself.

- So rumor has it that, at some point,

Frank James did find a copper kettle

with about $6,000 worth of gold coins inside.

Of course, that's nowhere near the millions of dollars of gold

that were reported buried there.

- [Laurence] The search for Jesse James's Oklahoma treasure

goes on for decades.

Finally, in the mid-20th century,

there's a new lead.

- In 1948, there's a local Oklahoma police officer

named Joe Hunter

who comes across a huge discovery,

a bombshell discovery, and lets the press know,

"I found the bucket."

- The bucket is dated to March 5th, 1876,

and it includes the names

of the members of the James Gang,

including Jesse, Frank, and Cole,

and states that the men below

are entitled to the treasure.

- When Joe Hunter finds this bucket,

this seems to be not only proof

that the treasure actually exists,

but it's buried somewhere in this area.

Unfortunately, he never finds any of it

and he searches until he dies in the 1950s.

- [Laurence] While some suspect the Oklahoma treasure

was long since dug up,

others believe there's more to find

1,000 miles away.

- In 1949, one year after Joe Hunter

finds the bucket in the Wichita Mountains,

a mysterious group of people show up in Zanesville, Ohio,

a place where Jesse James

was never known to be.

But they claim that they are descendants

of the notorious outlaw.

- This is actually the first time

we hear rumors that Jesse James

perhaps was not killed by Bob Ford.

- The story that this group tells

is that James had faked his death in 1882

and relocated to Ohio,

and in the process,

burying as much as $1 million in gold

that he had originally stolen back in Mexico.

(dramatic music)

- The strangest part of the Zanesville story

is that one of the newcomers

claims to have been part of the Jesse James Gang.

An elderly African American man

named Uncle John Trammell

says that he rode with the notorious outlaws

and was their cook

during their exploits in the West.

- He talks to newspapers

and really anyone who will listen,

telling them he participated

in all of these robberies,

and that they had come back to Ohio

and buried a lot of their treasure there.

- One of the claims from this group

is that Jesse James left clues

as to where he had buried his treasure

by carving his initials, JJ,

into the trunks of trees,

and that there were other symbols

that could, once coordinated,

lead you to a particular place on a map.

- They found two Js that were carved on trees

at a couple of different locations.

And they followed the clues

that they thought would lead them to the treasure.

And in fact, it did lead them to a metal box.

But when they open it,

to their dismay, it is empty.

- [Laurence] Nearly 70 years later in 2018,

Zanesville, Ohio is back in the spotlight.

- A man named Chad Somers

had been at a yard sale in Zanesville, Ohio,

and he found a never-seen-before photograph

that he claimed had Frank and Jesse James

and some other people pictured in it.

- Why would there be a photograph of Jesse James

in Ohio if Jesse James never came to Ohio?

That is the thread that Summers begins to pull.

- This convinces him that the James brothers

had actually been there

and that they had buried their loot.

And so this starts him on this quest.

- As he starts looking,

he too finds those strange marks on those tree trunks

that the Zanesville gang found in the 1940s.

- [Laurence] As Somers continues his search in Ohio,

another theory emerges that could tie

all the alleged Jesse James hiding spots together.

- How might we connect treasure

hidden in Missouri and Oklahoma

and Ohio together?

Possibly there's some larger plot at work here.

- [Laurence] Tales of Jesse James's buried treasure

abound across the United States.

Some say all that money was hidden away

as part of a much larger conspiracy.

- Recently, another theory emerged

that Jesse James's treasure

wasn't actually buried in one place,

but was very deliberately stashed in Missouri,

Oklahoma, Ohio, Arkansas,

and many, many other places.

And it's possible that hiding all of this gold

might've been for a much larger,

much more nefarious purpose.

- [Laurence] In 2003,

investigative journalist Warren Getter's book, "Rebel Gold,"

claims that Jesse James

was an active member of a sinister secret society.

- The Knights of the Golden Circle

was an organization of Southerners founded in 1854

that advocated for the annexation

of a golden circle of slave-owning states

that would begin in the American South

and stretch around the Gulf of Mexico,

into Central America.

- They were working toward a pro-slavery society

and the creation of really an empire of slavery.

- The Knights of the Golden Circle

were rumored to be working as a spy network

that was operating throughout the Confederate South

during the entirety of the Civil War.

- They were thought to be involved

in a lot of different actions,

including the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

- We know that this organization exists,

we know that there was a plan,

but it's what happens after the Civil War

where things become dramatic.

As this theory goes,

after the Civil War,

the Knights of the Golden Circle go underground.

They become a secret society.

- [Laurence] Getler's theory is that the spoils

of Jesse James's robberies, at least in part,

were earmarked for that cause.

- According to this theory,

Jesse James was a high-level operative

within the Knights of the Golden Circle,

that his job was not only to acquire

this huge amount of wealth,

but then also to stash it, hide it and store it

deliberately in various places.

- This was an attempt to fund

what would hopefully, for the Knights,

be the treasury that would create this slave nation

that they wanted to desperately build.

- Could it be that James

was not just fighting a Civil War rhetorically,

that his criminal activities

were designed to raise a stash of money

that could be hidden around the country

to help finance a second Civil War?

(dramatic music)

- They still imagined a future

where the South would rise again.

So as a diehard Confederate,

Jesse James would've gladly offered

to support an organization

that was working to restore

the power of the slave-holding South.

- He would've taken orders from Confederate officials,

like Jefferson Davis,

who in fact left Richmond

with a load of Confederate gold that also disappeared,

and Nathan Bedford Forrest,

who was a fellow Confederate guerrilla

turned founder of the KKK.

- When they got their loot,

they would put it in this location

as directed by whoever was in charge,

then put it here, put it there, put it there.

- Warren Getler goes to the archives,

he researches the Knights of the Golden Circle,

and he determines

that they did a lot of communicating in code,

that they used a lot of symbology.

- They weren't just stupid farm boys

running around the South.

Some of these guys were very skilled,

and they were spies.

They were very good at keeping a secret.

- And the symbols that Jesse James used, JJ,

are included in a group of known symbols

used by the Knights of the Golden Circle.

Sometimes they would use the JJ,

sometimes they would write the JJ backwards.

- This explains some of what we see

around Jesse James's treasure,

where there are particular markings

around where treasure may or may not have been.

It's possible that Jesse James's own men

never really knew the extent of what was going on.

- [Laurence] Since 2013,

Utah treasure hunter, Holly Remkes,

finds what she believes

are new clues for where James hid gold

for the Knights of the Golden Circle.

- 10 years after Getler's book comes out,

a woman named Holly Remkes emerges in Utah.

And she has done a lot of research herself

into Getler's theory

that Jesse James was engaged

in this kind of secret messaging

with the Knights of the Golden Circle.

- Holly Remkes determined that the symbols

used by the Knights of the Golden Circle and Jesse James,

not just the JJ, but the orientation of the JJ,

could be triangulated and coordinated

to specific sites.

- If the J is pointing a certain direction,

it means one thing.

If it's pointing in another direction,

it means go another thing.

It could vary from distance to direction.

Compass points, compass bearings,

it's very hard to crack.

- She also finds a map dated to 1895

that has a number of misspellings and small errors

that she thinks are not misspellings and small errors,

but in fact, secret clues

coordinated with the Knights of the Golden Circle

and Jesse James

in an effort to hide and then find the hidden loot.

- She has compiled a list

of more than 20 possible locations

for that hidden gold,

and is still looking for Jesse's lost loot.

- [Laurence] As the James-Younger Gang

pulls off a dazzling series of robberies

across the Midwest,

they inspire fear and hatred

in many of their victims.

But some see a more generous side to these outlaws.

- Jesse James is seen as a folk hero

to a lot of people, a modern-day Robin Hood.

Robbing from the rich, AKA the Union,

and giving it to the poor.

- A lot of people say that Jesse James

just gave his treasures away.

(dramatic music)

- It's theorized that maybe he gave away a lot of his loot.

That's why it's been so difficult to find.

It's not that it's buried anywhere specifically,

it's that he's given it

to so many people that were in need.

- There are certainly many stories

immortalized countless times in fiction and film

of Jesse doing this.

A story of him and his gang

coming upon a poor widow

who can't afford the mortgage,

and them giving her not only one payment,

but enough to pay off the entire mortgage.

- There are stories of them being hidden by kindly widows

who would feed them a wonderful meal.

And once the strangers had left,

they found $20 gold coins under the plates.

[Laurence] While the stories of Jesse James

quickly became folklore,

there was intention behind them.

- A significant portion of Jesse James's story

that we need to keep in mind

is that he was able to write the story himself.

- He wanted to craft that image,

and he made an effort to do that

with the letters that were published.

Obviously, he wanted to paint himself

in a positive way.

- Despite all of the robberies that he commits,

Jesse James actually sees himself

as sort of a modern-day Robin Hood.

He writes one letter in particular

to a newspaper criticizing Ulysses S. Grant.

He writes, quote, "Grant's party has no respect for anyone.

They rob the poor and rich.

And we rob the rich to give to the poor."

- The problem is a lot of these stories are unfounded.

And they're appearing in newspapers

only because those newspapers

were owned by Confederate sympathizers

who were looking for a Southern hero.

And they turned Jesse James into that man.

- And he found his most ardent champion

in a former Confederate soldier turned newspaper man

named James Newman Edwards.

- Edwards had served in the Confederate Army

during the Civil War.

He became a newspaper editor after the war ended.

And he published letters

that he said Jesse James had written to him

about his heists.

Really praising his audacity

as something to be admired

across the American South.

- A crazy example of this is when John Newman Edwards

writes an article called "The Chivalry of Crime,"

where he compares Frank and Jesse James

to the Knights of the Round Table.

More than anyone else,

Edwards is really responsible

for creating this romantic,

glamorous version of Jesse James.

- But the brutal irony of this situation,

which is so often the case when such savior figures emerge,

is that reality does not match up to the rhetoric.

There is no evidence whatsoever

that Jesse James gave away profits from his robberies

to the poor or to the needy.

Jesse James was not a Robin Hood of the Ozarks.

He robbed from everybody, for nobody but himself,

and killed many of the people who got in his way.

- [Laurence] 150 years after Jesse James's heyday,

he leaves behind a complicated legacy

and a trail of secrets.

- It's possible that this was a case

of people looking for something

that really isn't there.

But everyone also likes a great treasure hunt,

and if the loot of Jesse James is still out there,

this story is far from finished.

- Jesse James is a very complicated character,

and the more you learn about him,

the more mysterious and weird he becomes.

Like everything in life,

there's two sides to the story,

and the truth is more complicated

than sometimes we wanna believe.

- Jesse James may have been a ruthless outlaw,

but he was also a brilliant image maker,

a master of hype.

It's possible all of these tales of hidden fortune

were nothing more than clever fabrications on his part

meant to tantalize the public.

But until the world knows for sure,

the search for Jesse James's lost loot goes on.

I'm Laurence Fishburne, thank you for watching

"History's Greatest Mysteries."

(dramatic music)