OKGenWeb Project

Contributed by Sharon Crawford

The Wichita Mountain Range in southwestern Oklahoma, lying from central Comanche County to southern Kiowa County.

My uncle, Dean Salyer, believed Jesse and Frank James buried one hundred and eighty thousand dollars, a part of a payroll robbery at Dodge City, somewhere in the Wichita Mountains hidden in a sealed cave.
A natural stone corral known to the outlaws as Horse Thief Corral, a log cabin in Cutthroat Gap, and a Winchester rifle mounted in the fork of a tree were the signs leading to the hidden cave. He was told this by an old outlaw in Brownwood, Texas, who was a good friend of Jesse and Frank.
After Frank was acquitted of his crimes, he used to come to Brownwood and talk over old times with this man known as Conley. Conley was a look out man for Jesse in the old days and had one of three copies of a cowhide map of where the treasure was buried according to my uncle who spent many a years looking for the buried treasure with an old prospector left over from the gold-rush days, J.B. "Burt" Holderbaum.
They discovered the old stone corral at Cutthroat Gap, a valley into the mountains from the north that got it's name in 1833 when Osages massacred their Kiowa neighbors. Holderbaum was one of the few living persons who knew the location of the rock pen which is at the base of Mount Pinchot, the highest peak in the Wichitas.
Uncle Dean never found the treasure but the clues have been too many to dismiss as legend, and Jesse James's treasure, secreted in the Wichita Mountains at a time when those hills harbored some of the deadliest outlaws of the West is still hidden somewhere along the old Chisholm Trail between Fort Sill and the Keechi Hills. It awaits some lucky finder, one who can break its secret code and follow the long trail that Frank James rode hard enough to wear out six horses.