Cold Case Files: The hills in and around Yell County still echo the legend of buried treasure from Franki and Jesse James
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The hills between Plainview and Hot Springs still carry the oldest printed version of the tale. In 1931 Fred W. Allsopp wrote that a young man named Alvin Gilpin found a large sandstone in those mountains. Cut into one face were the names Frank, Jeff, and Jesse James, the sum of $32,000, the year 1877, a code flag, a three-pronged fork, a Bowie knife, and a cross.
People around Plainview took the rock for a marker left after the James gang robbed a stagecoach south of Hot Springs on January 15, 1874.
A later comment in the Plainview history group on Facebook added a local layer that Allsopp never recorded. The writer said the money was buried in three separate locations. One of those caches was found. Another still lies on Danville Mountain, now on private land and never recovered. The same person remembered seeing markings on a tree when young, marks that matched the ones on the stone Gilpin kept.
The tree is gone. The writing on it was in code.
That is the version that lives in Yell County now. The robbery itself is a matter of record. The gang stopped the coach near Gulpha Creek, took cash and jewelry from the passengers, and rode west through the broken country that includes present-day Yell County.
A gold watch taken from one of those passengers later turned up among Jesse James’s belongings after he was killed in Missouri in 1882. Everything after that, the three holes in the ground, the coded tree on Danville Mountain, the stone Gilpin carried home, belongs to folklore.
Historians who have gone through the letters and newspapers find no proof that Jesse or Frank systematically buried loot. They spent what they stole. The three-cache story, like most outlaw treasure stories in the Ouachitas, survives because a carved rock once existed, a marked tree once stood, and the mountain is now closed to strangers.
People still walk the ridges with detectors. They find old iron and Civil War lead. They have not produced a box with the James names on it.
The Facebook claim keeps the hunt alive the way these stories always do: one part recovered, two parts still in the ground, and the last witness already gone.
