Beyond Oak Island: The search for secret treasure of the Confederacy that will finance a second civil war

This week on Beyond Oak Island, the team is looking into the missing treasure of the Confederate states that vanished at the end of the Civil War.

We heard how in 1865, as Union soldiers closed in on the southern capital at Richmond, VA., Jefferson Davis and his band of cohorts fled the area in two trains and took the treasury of the CSA with him.

At some point, as capture became inevitable, they abandoned the treasure, perhaps burying it in the ground with the view to recovery at a later date so that the South might rise again. But the millions of dollars have never been recovered.

However, this episode sees the guys focus on helping out treasure hunters Warren Getler and Molly Remkes, who have bigger fish to fry than the old Confederacy’s treasury. They’re after the treasure of the shadowy Confederate organization known as the Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC).

The KGC was a clandestine group of the South that engaged in amassing wealth to help build a massive Confederate slave country that would encircle the entire Caribbean, and after the war, to continue the fight. They used both legal and illegal methods, including robbing the US treasury to steal cash.

The KCG wished to fund a second civil war

According to Getler and Remkes, the KCG continued to steal and bury money for their cause long after the Civil War had ended. Most shockingly, they argue that the infamous outlaw Jesse James was a key operative of the group and their main financer.

Getler argued that despite the millions of dollars James stole, he never got rich because the money was to be used to finance a second civil war. He says a lot of the money is probably still out there and that it is still guarded by the descendants of the KGC.

Remkes has located numerous sites in the Utah desert with symbols that she believes are codes that can be deciphered to show where the KCG and Jesse James hid their loot.

The symbols appear to be masonic in nature, which leads Getler to believe that James and the KCG are linked to the Freemasons and even the Knight’s Templar.

The interest of the Oak Island guys is instantly piqued at the mention of the Mason’s and the Templars as this shows there’s a possible link to Oak Island.

And the similarities with Oak Island don’t end there; Getler says the KCG used booby traps and flood tunnels to keep their treasure hidden, both of which are features found on the island.

The KCG’s use of boulders as markers and the masonic symbols are both also characteristics of Oak Island too.

The team find Jesse James’s signature

Oak Island researcher Matty Blake met up with Getler and Remkes in the beautiful and desolate desert of Millard County in Utah to examine these symbols himself. And sure enough, they found the backward J symbol that was Jesse James’s signature and numerous other symbols that indicate the nearby presence of treasure.

Unfortunately, the site was on Federal land, which means digging for treasure is illegal. There was also the unnerving prospect of shadowy figures protecting the sites.

Remkes claims that she has been intimidated, followed, and even shot at as she investigated some of these potential sites. And as the guys were filming, a suspicious-looking truck with tinted windows and no plates drove slowly past their location on two occasions.

Chillingly, it did seem as though they were being watched.

Beyond Oak Island airs at 10/9c on History.