Treasure Hunters May Have Found JESSE JAMES'S LOST GOLD

The legendary treasure could be worth tens of millions-if the team can dig it out of the ground.

- DAVID HOWARD

After Chad Somers saw the vision, he started digging with his bare hands. It was a halfcrazy way to get Jesse James's buried treasure, he knew, but he hadn't brought a shovel with him that day, so he just gouged at the soft ground on the hillside. Within minutes he had clawed his way down a foot, then two.

He knew how it would look if anyone had been there to see him. People would say he'd lost his mind and laugh. And Hope would roll her eyes and say that he was off chasing another one of his obsessive dreams. But Somers was surprised at how easily the shale gave way. He wasn't yet thinking about why that might be the case, or how it all might fit together: the old yard-sale picture, the strange carvings on nearby beech trees, the weird gold-mine legend. That would be later. For now, it was a beautiful day in the summer of 2018, and he was alone in those quiet woods, and there was only him and the oddly permeable soil.

He'd gone there that day, as he had hundreds of times before, to hike and sort things out in his mind. After roaming around for a while, he'd taken a break to smoke a cigarette on a slender ledge hard up against a huge old birch tree, situated two-thirds of the way down the steep, several-hundred-foot bluff. Somers had always noticed that tree. Its base split off into three large limbs that formed a cockeyed W, and it stood largely alone, as if it had bought out its neighbors.