Image from "Life and Confession of the Noted Outlaw James Copeland," University of Mississippi Press.
The legend of James Copeland, along with his treasure, is largely drawn from the somewhat questionable account of Sheriff J.R.S. Pitts, who arrested the pirate before his hanging in 1857. Image from Life and Confession of the Noted Outlaw James Copeland, University of Mississippi Press.
Catahoula Creek is a thin and meandering waterway that stretches twenty-five or so miles through south Mississippi before joining the Jourdan River near the Gulf Coast. This is Hancock County, just east of St. Tammany Parish, across the state line. The creek moves through a rural area where forests grow so thick that the world can appear darker than it is, and the air, down near where the water runs, can feel slow, damp, and cool, like something ancient is at hand.
For more than 150 years, people have been trekking up and down the Catahoula looking for a cache of gold that a nineteenth-century land pirate claimed to have buried somewhere nearby. According to Robert G. Scharff’s 1999 book, Louisiana’s Loss, Mississippi’s Gain: A History of Hancock County, Mississippi from the Stone Age to the Space Age, most of them bring shovels.
“There are many holes along Catahoula Creek where people have dug for this gold,” Scharff wrote.
When I went to the creek earlier this year with my kayak, I wasn’t necessarily looking for gold as much as adventure, and perhaps some of the remnants of what Scharff describes: if not freshly dug holes, then old indentations along the bank, evidence of the lure a buried treasure story can hold. Of course, if I happened to stumble onto the gold, that would be even better.
I was not holding my breath for the treasure itself. After all, the pirate who said it was out there wasn’t exactly the most dependable fellow. He made the claim while awaiting execution for murder—why should we believe him?
It’s also possible that he never made the claim at all. The man who said the pirate made the claim had a financial stake in circulating the rumor: he had a book to sell. Also, it was only after the pirate was dead and buried that the book was published.
But then, maybe, just maybe—now a full circle—the knowledge of his pending death had this pirate wanting to unburden himself, and the man he told simply shared the truth with the world: Somewhere in the ground along Catahoula Creek, there was gold waiting to be found.
All of this to say, the story of this buried treasure is a riddle, one that allegedly originated from the mouth of a thief and convicted murderer, which then made its way into the world via a book its author was peddling.
In other words, as buried treasure stories go, you’d be hard pressed to find a better one.
The name James Copeland is mostly forgotten today. There was a time, though, as the historian John D.W. Guice said, that it “was a household word from Mobile Bay to Lake Pontchartrain.” Upon its utterance, Gulf Coast residents would check for shadows over their shoulders and watch carefully what they said.
For roughly three decades, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Copeland and a small band of criminals moved through the wilderness between Texas and Alabama, looting, robbing, and exacting revenge upon anyone who crossed them. Mostly, they stole livestock and kidnapped slaves. They murdered, too, and eventually the law caught up to Copeland. In the fall of 1857, at the age of thirty-four, he was hanged near Old Augusta, a now-vanished town in south Mississippi. Word had spread far and wide of his mysterious ways, and a crowd came to watch. The following year, the book about Copeland’s life appeared on shelves, shrouded in its own mystery.
Life and Confession of the Noted Outlaw James Copeland was written by Sheriff J.R.S. Pitts, the man who ultimately arrested the pirate. In the book, the sheriff claimes he received Copeland’s life story during his final days behind bars while he awaited his execution. Pitts wrote it all down, and, in 1858, sent it into the world.
Written in the first-person, as if Copeland was speaking, the book was a sensation. Then, suddenly, it vanished: No copy is known to exist today. As the story goes, members of Copeland’s gang—men still living at the time of the book’s publication—were outed in its pages, and they organized an effort to destroy every copy. Some of them also sued Pitts. He was convicted of libel and spent a short time in an Alabama jail. (He always claimed that the trial was a sham.) In 1874, Pitts, by then a respected country doctor, published a second, expanded edition, one that he altered in order to avoid lawsuits. This book, though, became difficult to find, too. In 1909, Pitts’ son brought out a third edition, expanding even more. Only a few copies of it are known to exist. From one of them, though, the University Press of Mississippi, in 1980, published an edition of Life and Confession of the Noted Outlaw James Copeland, which can be found in libraries across the Gulf Coast today.
In an introduction to this newest edition, the historian John Guice takes on the matter of whether everything Pitts attributed to Copeland should be taken as fact. He concludes that each reader has to make his or her own decision, but points out that items in the book that can be fact-checked against other historical documents—descriptions of far-flung cities, the everyday lives of Southerners in the 1840s, some of Copeland’s alleged crimes, etc.—all pass the test of truthfulness. Regardless, the fact remains that just about everything we know about Copeland comes from the pages of Pitts’ book, including the tale about the gold buried along Catahoula Creek.
As the story goes, Copeland buried the gold with the help of his cohort Gale H. Wages, who built a house near Catahoula Creek. Together, they buried three wooden barrels—each one containing $10,000's worth of gold—near the house, for safekeeping. In the pages of Life and Confession of the Noted Outlaw James Copleand, the place where they put them is described as being “a mile and a half or two miles from [Wages’] house.” Copeland kept a map to the spot, which Pitts described in the book like this: “[D]esignated by a large pine tree that grew at the margin of the swamp, to the northeast, and about thirty-five yards from where the kegs were deposited, and a magnolia tree that grew about ten yards to the southeast.”
Some time after burying the barrels, Wages was killed by a man named James Harvey over an unrelated matter. Copeland later shot Harvey for revenge—that murder is what ultimately led to his execution—but during the gunfight, he lost his map to the Catahoula loot, and could never again locate it. That gunfight was in 1848. The first edition of Life and Confession of the Noted Outlaw James Copeland appeared ten years later, and that, presumably, is when people began searching for the gold.
In the subsequent editions of the book, Pitts wrote that the map Copeland lost had made its way to a man in Mobile named George Cleveland. “From that time to the day of his death,” Pitts wrote, “[Cleveland] remained independent, all the while increasing rapidly in wealth and external prosperity,”—a not-so-subtle suggestion that Cleveland had, in fact, retrieved the gold. This, however, has never deterred the treasure hunters. As historian James Penick wrote in The Gulf Coast Historical Review in 1987, they are “optimistic souls who continue to hope that Pitts was mistaken in his claim that Cleveland dug up the fabled whiskey barrels long ago.”
Tales of these searches are scattered across twentieth century newspapers. In 1921, a story in The Times-Democrat, a New Orleans paper, claimed that “a chest containing several thousand dollars has been found” in “the swamp of Catahoula Creek.” In 1952, a historian writing in The Picayune-Item newspaper suggested that the gold was still there. In 1957, though, a 73-year-old woman named Eliza Pearson Durham, who grew up near Catahoula Creek, told a reporter from The Picayune-Item that when she was a child, her father showed her the spot, not far from their family farm, where the barrels had been dug up and hauled away. She recalled seeing a rusted iron band in the ground, a detail which piqued my interest because it matched something Pitts claimed Copeland said: that the barrels were “well iron-hooped.”
I checked the veracity of Durham’s account a little more. According to The Picayune-Item article, her father’s name was “R.R. Pearson.” At a Hancock County public library near Catahoula Creek, I found an 1880 Census record from the county that listed a twenty-one-year-old named “R. Pearson” as living and working on a family farm. I also found, in a history of local families, that a man named “Reuben R. Pearson” married a woman named “Alveretta Burge” on Dec. 15, 1880. Durham was born four years later. This had to be her father.
So in February, when I took my kayak to Catahoula Creek, I put in close to Old Bouie Road—not far from the old Pearson family farm. It was a promising spot, I figured, to begin looking for man-made holes, rusted pieces of iron, and a pirate’s lost gold.
The creek, judging by the dark stillness of its surface, was maybe ten feet deep in some places. In others the water barely reached my shins. This made for tough going. Complicating matters was the fact that, every thirty or so yards, I encountered a beaver dam or fallen tree. I spent almost as much time walking through the water, dragging my kayak behind me, as I did paddling down the creek. For almost three hours I plodded along, getting caked in mud and soaked in cool, dark creek water.
I never did spot any gold, rusted iron, or even a magnolia tree, which I was also looking for. About two miles or so downstream from where I put in, though, I came across a hole, about four feet wide and four feet deep, that looked manmade. I cannot say with certainty it was a treasure hunter’s work, but since it seemed like an odd spot for a random indentation, I took a picture and then quickly moved on. By then I had other, more immediate concerns. I was coming up on being an hour late for the checkpoint where my wife was to pick me up. Because I could not reach her on my cell phone—there was no service—I needed to hurry up.
As I quickened my pace and my breathing grew heavy, I noticed how quiet the area was. Other than a single huge white bird, whose flapping wings I only glimpsed up through tree branches, I saw no animals. Where life was concerned, the area seemed vacant to the point of being abandoned. If Copeland indeed chose to bury his loot there, I thought to myself that he made a fine decision.
Eventually, due to so many fallen trees, I could not paddle my kayak on the creek. The density of the foliage made it almost impossible to drag it behind me. So I ditched it. I pulled it up on the bank, laid it between two trees and began walking. A little more than thirty minutes later I reached the pickup point. “You smell like a swamp,” my relieved wife said, and we went for burgers.
What did my search yield? Nothing, really. I only exhausted myself, in the good way, and lost a kayak. There was something fulfilling about the experience, though. After all, as James Dodson, an Oklahoman treasure hunter, once told me: “It’s not the idea of finding buried treasure that is so appealing, but rather the search for it.”
Maybe one day I will go back and retrieve my kayak from those woods. If I do, I plan on taking a shovel, too. Until then, anyone who ventures into the swamp along Catahoula Creek might see it—proof of someone else drawn into the area by the legend of Copeland’s gold.
