W.C. Jameson’s terrific, terrifying, and true tales of unearthing hidden treasures

W.C. Jameson of Llano is a rare find. He’s a successful treasure hunter who, at 82 years old, was planning his next expedition when he sat down for an interview with The Picayune Magazine.  

“I’ve done this all my life,” he said. “I’ve been hunting treasure since I was 11 years old.” 

Hunting and finding. 

The author of over 100 books, most on treasure hunting, Jameson has recovered Spanish gold and silver from caves, canyons, and crevices across the southwestern United States. His finds have helped pay for living expenses, vehicles, and homes, including the one in which he now resides. 

“We had a pretty good success rate,” said Jameson, referring to the three men who worked with him on most of the expeditions over the years. “Our rate was far less than 10 percent, but sometimes that 10 percent made you wealthy for a while.”

The discovery rate far exceeded the amount of treasure actually recovered.  

“A lot of it had to be left behind,” he said. “We were backpacking for weeks at a time. We could only take out what we could carry. Looking at 30- and 40-pound gold ingots, that’s not a lot, but it beats working.”

So far, Jameson has been on nearly 200 expeditions, many involving trespassing and smuggling. When confronted by landowners, ranch hands, or the Border Patrol, he and his compadres passed themselves off as birdwatchers or snake venom collectors. 

In one case, a group of who they thought were enlisted men wearing a hodgepodge of U.S. military uniforms threatened to execute Jameson and his companions if they ever told anyone that they saw them moving “lead” ingots out of a cave. This was a rare instance when Jameson was searching for a cache of gold with the permission of the person who owned rights to the find.

Jameson did tell, of course, which resulted in investigations, a lawsuit, death threats, harassment, and being shot at. Fortunately, only the bed of his pickup truck sustained an injury. 

Jameson decries government rules on salvage and recovery, calling them “absurd laws that turn people like me—hardworking, honest researchers—into outlaws.”

“(The authorities) did none of the research, invested nothing into our travels, and took none of the risks,” he explained. “They helped us not at all in any of the recovery, then they want us to relinquish what we found.” 

Readers of Jameson’s books soon realize the words “hardworking” and “risk” in this context are understatements. Just a few of the scenes from his award-winning “Treasure Hunter: A Memoir of Caches, Curses, and Confrontations” are enough to give readers nightmares. 

On a 10-day trek by horseback into the Sierra Madre mountains in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, Jameson and fellow ranch hand Gilberto Reyes found an estimated $1 million in silver straps—long, thin bars of metal—each weighing about 8 pounds. They carried 40 of them to their campsite with plans to return to civilization the next day. Sometime in the night, a mountain lion killed one of their horses and scared off the rest. Jameson and Reyes hid 39 of the straps and started on foot with only one, which they hoped to use to buy or rent horses to come back for the rest.

Along the way, they stretched out in a shady spot for a nap. Jameson woke up with a poisonous scorpion on his arm and quickly realized they were surrounded by hundreds of the deadly arachnids. Farther along the road, the soles of Reyes’ shoes disintegrated, and soon, his feet were cut and bloody. By this time, they had no food or water. 

Jameson left Reyes behind to go get help. He walked all night and again the next day before finding someone with horses. He returned with supplies, transportation, and several cowboys to protect them from bandits, but it was too late. Reyes was dead. 

Three years later, Jameson returned to the site but was unable to find the cache of silver straps. 

His next partners were three men who convinced him to return to the Sierra Madres, this time in search of a completely different hidden treasure. James Poet, Mungo Slade, and Dr. Trenton Stanley joined Jameson in a number of successful searches for Spanish silver and gold. A research professor, Stanley spent months at a time in Mexico going through archives in monasteries and libraries, where he uncovered multiple documents detailing where Spanish conquistadors left behind treasure.

In one of the group’s last expeditions together, Jameson estimates they found $10 million in gold ingots. The treasure was behind a wall of caved-in rock that they would need dynamite to move and on the wrong side of a cavern full of hundreds of writhing rattlesnakes. The incessant rattling was so loud the men could not hear themselves talk over the noise. Stanley was bitten as they made their escape, and they never went back.

Another time, they counted 541 gold bars at an undisclosed location in Mexico, along with dozens of deadly scorpions and three human skeletons believed to have been Spanish explorers. They managed to carry out 40 of the 20-pound bars but had to bury them on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande during a storm that flooded the river. All markers to the burial site were washed away, and the gold was never recovered.

The treasure hunters also had to face down curses, although they all claimed not to believe in them. Sixty-seven stacks of gold ingots discovered in the Datil Mountains outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, had to be left behind because of “cursed” air. They retrieved five ingots before a thick, luminous dust forced them out of a cave. Gas masks offered little protection. Slade had to be helped out of the shaft as they beat a hasty retreat, coughing, hacking, and nearly blinded. 

Back in the Sierra Madres on a different mission, a guide warned the four men that the canyon they wanted to explore was cursed. They went anyway, dragging the nervous guide with them. 

They found 50-plus buried mummies, around eight of which had been uncovered over time. Under their peeling wraps, the bodies wore gold necklaces, bracelets, and rings. Jameson and his partners rewrapped and reburied the bodies without removing a single item of jewelry. In “Treasure Hunter,” he recounts returning to the site three times over the years to rebury other unearthed bodies, despite the enormous rattlesnakes that seem to guard the place. 

“The buzzing of rattlesnakes in the brush that lined the rarely used trail accompanied us as we rode,” Jameson wrote. 

He then describes a snake “with a body thicker than a football, with the head and tail hidden in the grasses growing on both sides of the six-foot-wide passageway.”

There’s more. Much, much more, and this in just one of his over 32 books on treasure hunting. Jameson has also authored books about writing, cooking, infamous figures like Jesse James and Billy the Kid, unsolved mysteries, and ghosts. His list of published works also includes poetry and fiction. 

Currently, he’s writing another treasure-hunting tome with the working title “Confessions of an Outlaw Treasure Hunter.” Both the already published book and the one underway came about at the urging of his late wife, nationally lauded poet Laurie Wagner Buyer, whose list of published books rivals her husband’s. The two lived in Llano for 12 years before she died in 2021.

Along with treasure hunting, Jameson continues to write music and perform, scheduling at least two tours a year across West Texas and New Mexico. He is hired for speaking engagements and teaches writing at Lago Vista Public Library on a regular basis, and occasionally at Lakeshore Library in Buchanan Dam. He can be found many mornings at one of the wooden tables in Fuel Coffee House in downtown Llano, working on either his own manuscripts or editing others for friends or pay.

He has worked on ranches and played bit parts in movies, including as one of a mob of outlaws in Clint Eastwood’s “Hang ’Em High.” His father supplied the horses for the movie, which was filmed on parts of the Jameson ranch. 

He wrote a syndicated column and taught college for 30 years, even though he said he barely graduated from high school. 

“The last thing I ever considered was going to college,” Jameson said. “I worked jobs loading docks, worked at rodeos, boxed, was a disc jockey, a lifeguard, a bunch of stuff.”

He said he was a crappy student but read a lot. He decided to go to college so he could talk about the books he was reading, which included works by John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Charles Darwin, and the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. 

“I wanted desperately to talk about what I was reading, but the guys working on the loading docks were not well versed in this kind of literature,” Jameson said. “It occurred to me at a late date that it is in college where people do this stuff.” 

He earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Texas at El Paso and a master’s in meteorology and a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Oklahoma. He taught geography and writing for 30 years at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.

“It’s a no-brainer to me that (film directors) George Lucas and Steven Spielberg gave Indiana Jones the job of college professor,” Jameson said. “I spent my summers on treasure-hunting adventures and, in between, had literary adventures.” 

He refuses to call life in his 80s retirement. 

“I didn’t retire, I quit,” he said of his years as a professor. 

But that was all he quit.

When asked about his upcoming foray into the wilderness in search of hidden treasure, he dissembled, first saying West Texas, then New Mexico, then maybe the Texas-New Mexico border. The search is certainly not local. 

“There’s the Lost San Saba Mines, except they are not lost, they are just played out,” he said, when asked about local prospects. “I’ve been into a bunch of them.”

Wherever he’s going and whether he finds anything or not doesn’t matter, he said. 

“Many of my expeditions yielded little or no treasure but supplied an abundance of adventure,” he said. “I am still on the hunt.”

suzanne@thepicayune.com