Cold Case Files: Civil War marauders seeking treasure from a Sallisaw livestock dealer committed murder most foul

In the timbered hills above what is now Sallisaw, a Civil War fortune is still missing, and the only witness to the location of the cache was a child who never learned exactly where it went into the ground.

Phillip Usray was a mixed Cherokee stockman living near Marble City when the war tore the Indian Territory apart. Federal troops had pulled out of the old posts.

Confederate officers were raising Cherokee and Choctaw companies. Neutral men with horses and mules suddenly looked like a bank. Usray sold his stock to the Union at Fort Gibson and came home paid in gold.

He was not young. His wife was already dead. His children were grown. On the night he returned, he called his grandson George into the house and opened a tin box he treated as a safe. Inside, he placed th the gold coins from the sale, a fine gold watch, and the jewelry that had belonged to the boy’s grandmother.

He wrapped the box in a sheepskin rug, took a shovel from the barn, and walked the child as far as an old spring near the cabin.

Then he told George to wait. He stepped off into the hills, vanished behind hackberry and timber, and came back empty-handed. He made the boy swear never to speak of the walk.

They ate supper. The knock came before the dishes were cleared. Three masked men chopped the door down and demanded the gold they already knew existed. Usray refused.

He said he had worked for it, that he was too old for the war and too old to start over, and that a man only dies once. They dragged him to the spring, threw a rope over a limb, lifted him, dropped him, beat him, and asked again. In the version the family later told a field worker in 1930, they pulled his toenails and cut out his tongue before they stabbed him and left him hanging.

George had been shoved under the puncheon floor. He saw enough to faint. When he came to, the riders were gone and his grandfather was dead in the tree.

The boy ran about three miles through the dark to his uncle Tobe Usray. Tobe cut the body down. The family interview says they buried Phillip in the old graveyard near Skullyville, the early Choctaw town that became Spiro, a cemetery with stones from 1839 and unmarked boards older still. The gold did not go with him. It stayed wherever he had left the tin box after he walked away from the spring.

That is the hard core of the story, and it is older than the paperback treasure books that later printed it. On October 13, 1930, Josephine Usray Latimer sat down in Oklahoma City with interviewer Amelia Harris for the Indian Pioneer History Project. She named Phillip as her paternal grandfather, half Cherokee, married to a woman whose name she had forgotten, a sister of Chief Bowl of East Texas.

She named James Usray as her father and Malinda Roebuck as her mother. She placed Phillip at Marble City, now Sallisaw, living alone at the start of the war, wealthy in cattle, horses, and mules, neutral, paid in gold at Fort Gibson.

She described the tin box, the sheepskin, the spring, the hills, the three masked men, the hanging, and George’s flight to Tobe. She added that relatives had dug all over the Kiamichi hills and never found it.

The geography in the telling does not sit still, and that is part of why the cache stays lost.

Sallisaw and old Marble City lie in Sequoyah County, Cherokee country, on the south edge of the Ozark Plateau between Sallisaw Creek and Little Sallisaw Creek, twenty miles west of the Arkansas line.

Fort Gibson, where the gold was paid, sits at the meeting of the Grand, Verdigris, and Arkansas rivers, the Union’s main hold in the Territory after 1863. Skullyville and the Kiamichi country, where the family later searched and where Tobe is said to have buried the body, lie farther south in historic Choctaw lands.

The Usrays and Roebucks intermarried across both nations. James Shelby Usray, son of Philip and Harriet in other genealogies, lived and held office in Kiamichi County near Hugo. George and Isaac Tobie, the Tobe of the story, appear in the same tangled line. A family that moved between Cherokee hills and Choctaw bottoms could honestly hunt in the wrong range for a lifetime.

The year matters. In 1861, Indian Territory was not a quiet backwater. Union garrisons abandoned the forts. Stand Watie raised Cherokee Confederate horse. Creek leader Opothle Yahola tried to take thousands north to Kansas and fought a winter running battle remembered as the Trail of Blood on Ice.

Livestock was currency and target. By war’s end, some three hundred thousand head of cattle had been stripped from the Territory. A man who sold mules for gold and tried to stay out of both armies was exactly the kind of mark guerrilla bands looked for.

The three men at Usray’s door may have been Confederate irregulars, Union scouts gone bad, or simple thieves wearing masks in a country where masks were common. No indictment, no newspaper notice, and no named suspects have surfaced.

What was in the box is guesswork stacked on family memory. The sale of a string of horses and mules at wartime prices, plus a watch and jewelry, would have been a heavy tin. George, in the later retellings, could not lift the strongbox when his grandfather took it from the wagon. That is the language of a child remembering weight, not an inventory. No dollar figure appears in the 1930 interview. Treasure compilers later wrote as if the sum were known. It is not.

The search history is almost as old as the grave. Josephine said her people dug the Kiamichi hills and failed. Treasure hunters who found the story in mid-century magazines pointed their detectors at the ridges around Sallisaw instead, walking out from vanished cabin sites toward any seep that could be called an old spring.

Marble City as a name drifted. Present Sallisaw grew after the railroad, on ground that had been Childer’s Station, while an earlier Sallisaw post office sat miles north. Homesteads burned or were swallowed by later farms. Springs dry. Hackberry thickets look like every other thicket after a hundred and sixty years of leaf fall. If the box was iron or tin, rust and soil chemistry have had a long time to work. If it was only coins in a rotting wrap, they may have scattered a few feet and then stayed put, or they may have been found quietly by someone who never talked.

There is no map. There is a spring that no longer has a house. There is a boy who was told to wait and a man who walked into the timber with a shovel and came back without one. There is a grave near Spiro that may or may not hold Phillip Usray, and a set of holes in the Kiamichi that hold nothing but family disappointment.

Sallisaw still sits where the hills meet the valley. The creeks still run. Somewhere in that short radius, if the story is true, a sheepskin and a tin box finished their work a long time ago, and the ground has not been persuaded to give them up.