Buried Treasure

Neal Karlinsky will have a piece on "Nightline" tonight on a new gold rush in Arizona.  John Donvan remembers doing a similar piece in 2003 on a die hard treasure hunter who was searching for Gold he suspected was buried by confederate soldiers in the Civil war. Watch it here.

John Donvan Reports:

X marks the Spot. That’s the name of a piece I reported back in 2003 about a man named Bob Brewer, who has spent a good chunk of his adult life hunting for gold he now believes was buried by diehard Confederates during and after the Civil War in the hopes of someday funding a new rebellion. 

Bob, as the story explains, served in the Navy in Vietnam before coming back home to small town Arkansas. He was also a teacher for a time. But he became a treasure hunter after figuring out, he says, that his own family had been part of the conspiracy and that somewhere out in the hills beyond his home there was a fortune waiting to be dug up.

At the time we met him, Bob was pretty sure he knew some of the various burial spots and hinted that he’d already pulled in a fairly good haul. It was tricky, because he didn’t want actually to show us any of what he was hinting he’d found. Producer Ted Gerstein and I spent a fair amount of time out there with Bob, watching him dig.

Well, fake dig, actually, because Bob was worried that we or someone watching our piece might want to steal the gold that was out there. So he was poking at a hole in the ground where again, he was hinting he’d found something, but wouldn’t say. Ted Gerstein, bless his wisdom and clear-sightedness, suspected the whole thing was a little nutty, given especially that Ted thinks most conspiracy theories are a little nutty. I was more generous, and found Bob actually really smart, well-read and well-traveled for a guy who kept calling himself a "hillbilly." Anyway, it was a fun journey.