Lost Treasure – Red Jack Gang Outlaw Loot

The $900,000 Ghost: Hunting the Red Jack Gang’s Missing Gold

Gold fever. It makes men do crazy things. It makes them lie. It makes them kill. And sometimes, it makes them put on a dress and hijack a stagecoach. Welcome to one of the weirdest, most twisted tales of the American West. We are looking for loot. Not just a handful of silver dollars, but a massive cache of stolen blood money.

The desert doesn’t forgive. It just swallows secrets. And somewhere out there, baking under the relentless sun of Arizona, lies a fortune that has driven treasure hunters to the brink of madness for over a century.

We are talking about the Red Jack Gang. Vicious? Yes. Effective? Terrifyingly so. But they weren’t your average rough-and-tumble cowboys. They had a gimmick. A bizarre, theatrical twist that caught lawmen completely off guard. And when the smoke cleared and the bodies hit the dirt, the gold vanished. Poof. Gone.

The Numbers: A Fortune in the Dirt

Let’s cut to the chase. What are we hunting for? The legends whisper about 8,000 gold coins. In 1883, that was a retirement fund for a king. Today? If those coins are in mint condition—Double Eagles, perhaps—the numismatic value explodes. We aren’t looking at chump change.

Estimated Modern Value: $900,000+ (conservative estimate).

But where is it? The map is messy. The history books are torn. Some sources point to the rugged terrain near Prescott. Others swear the hoard is buried near the gang’s southern hideouts. Is it in a cave? A dry creek bed? Or is it sitting right under a modern parking lot?

The Man Behind the Mask (and the Skirt)

To find the treasure, you have to understand the villain. Meet “Red Jack” Almer. Also known as Jack Averill. Also known as… a random female passenger?

The year is 1883. The Wild West is dying, but it’s kicking and screaming on its way out. Stagecoach robberies were common. You hold up the driver, throw down the strongbox, and ride off. Boring. Predictable. Red Jack Almer wanted an edge.

He was a gambler. A drinker. A sociopath with a flair for the dramatic. Almer realized that the Wells Fargo guards—the famous “shotgun messengers”—were too good. They were crack shots. Charging a stagecoach head-on was a suicide mission. So, Red Jack stopped playing by the rules. He started playing with psychology.

The Trojan Horse Tactic

August 10, 1883. Riverside, Arizona. A stagecoach rumbles along the San Pedro River. It’s hot. Dusty. Miserable. Inside the coach, passengers are sweating through their clothes. Among them sits a woman. Quiet. Unassuming. Maybe she fanned herself against the heat. Maybe she looked nervous.

The stage slows down. Suddenly, bandits emerge from the brush. The Red Jack Gang. They shout for the stage to halt. The driver freezes.

The Wells Fargo guard, a man paid to protect the cargo with his life, sneers. “We ain’t got no gold!” he shouts. He grips his weapon. He’s ready to fight. He scans the bandits in front of him. He is calculating the odds.

Big mistake. The threat wasn’t in front of him. It was sitting right behind him.

The “female passenger” suddenly leaps from the stage. But she doesn’t scream. She doesn’t run. She yells, “You’re a liar!” in a voice that sounds suspiciously like a gravel-chewing outlaw.

It was Red Jack Almer. In full drag. A disguise so convincing it fooled a wagon full of people for miles.

Before the guard could process what was happening—before he could even turn his head—Almer hiked up his long, flowing skirts. He didn’t pull out a handkerchief. He pulled out a revolver.

Bang.

The guard hit the ground, dead before he landed. The gang didn’t hesitate. They stripped the stage. They took the currency. They took the gold. Roughly $3,000 in a matter of minutes. Then, they vanished into the harsh landscape, leaving a cloud of dust and a corpse in their wake.

The Lawman: Enter “The Bull of the Woods”

You can’t have a great villain without a legendary hero. Enter Sheriff Bob Paul. If you saw this guy in a movie, you’d say he was exaggerated. He wasn’t. He was a giant. Six-foot-four. Over 240 pounds. They called him the “Bull of the Woods.”

Bob Paul was the real deal. He was friends with Wyatt Earp. He had survived countless shootouts. When he heard about the Riverside robbery—about the cheap shot, the disguise, the murder of the guard—he didn’t just get mad. He got even.

Paul didn’t care about the heat. He didn’t care about the terrain. He organized a posse that was less of a search party and more of a hunting pack. They tracked the Red Jack Gang for miles. They read the dirt like a newspaper.

The Final Showdown

History gets a little fuzzy here, but most accounts agree on the ending. Sheriff Paul caught up to them. He didn’t read them their rights. This was frontier justice. The posse cornered Red Jack and his crew. Bullets flew. The “woman” who murdered the guard? Almer died with his boots on, riddled with lead.

The gang was wiped out. The threat was neutralized. But there was one problem. One massive, glaring problem that brings us to this very page, right now.

Where was the rest of the money?

They recovered some loot from the Riverside job. But Red Jack had been robbing stages for years. He had been hitting the San Pedro line hard. The math didn’t add up. The pockets were empty. The hideout was bare.

The Mystery of the Buried $900,000

This is where the conspiracy begins. This is where the shovel hits the dirt.

Outlaws in the 1880s didn’t have bank accounts. They didn’t have 401(k)s. When they stole gold, they buried it. They cached it. They hid it in “post holes”—shallow graves for coins—marked by strange rocks or twisted trees. They assumed they would come back for it later.

Red Jack never came back. He’s dead. His gang is dead.

So, the gold is still out there. Waiting.

The Prescott vs. Willcox Anomaly

Here is where things get tricky. If you are a serious treasure hunter, pay attention. The original text above mentions the stash is near Prescott, Arizona. But wait. Pause. Think about the geography.

The Red Jack Gang operated heavily along the San Pedro River. They robbed the stage near Riverside. Their hideout was reportedly near Willcox, way down in the southeast corner of the state. Prescott is roughly 200 miles northwest of Willcox. That is a long, hard ride on a horse.

Why the discrepancy? Three theories exist:

• Theory A: The Moving Target. Did the gang move their stash north to Prescott to cool off? Was Prescott their “retirement plan” location, far away from the heat of the San Pedro crime scenes?
• Theory B: The Decoy. Outlaws often spread rumors of false locations to throw Sheriff Bob Paul off the scent. Is “Prescott” just a lie that survived for 140 years?
• Theory C: The Willcox Cache. Many historians believe the gold never left the Willcox area. They say it’s buried in the Dragoon Mountains or near the ghostly remains of their camp.

The “Broncho Mine” Connection?

Dig deeper into the folklore. Some old timers whisper that Red Jack Almer wasn’t just hiding gold in the ground; he was hiding it in an old mine. The “Broncho Mine” is often cited in association with lost outlaw loot in this region. Is the gold sitting in a rusted ore cart, deep in a flooded shaft?

Imagine the scene. A dark tunnel. A rotting wooden crate. The dull shine of American gold eagles. It’s enough to make you grab a pickaxe.

What Would You Find Today?

Let’s play “What If.” Suppose you go out there this weekend. You pack your metal detector. You brave the rattlesnakes and the scorpions. You get a strong signal. You dig.

What are you actually looking at?

The loot is described as 8,000 gold coins. In the 1880s, these would likely be $20 Liberty Head Double Eagles or $10 Eagles. Gold is heavy. Dense. 8,000 coins would weigh hundreds of pounds. This wasn’t something they carried in a saddlebag. This was a heavy haul. They had to bury it. They couldn’t run with it.

If you find it, you aren’t just finding gold. You are finding history. Blood money. Coins touched by one of the most eccentric sociopaths of the Old West.

Modern Tech vs. Ancient Dirt

Why hasn’t it been found? We have ground-penetrating radar. We have satellite imaging. We have drones.

Arizona is vast. It is rugged. The terrain shifts during monsoons. Flash floods move boulders the size of cars. A stash buried three feet deep in 1883 might be under twenty feet of silt today. Or, it might have been exposed by a storm in 1950 and kicked into a ravine, scattered like gravel.

Or… maybe someone already found it.

That’s the darkest theory. The quiet find. A rancher in the 1970s sees a glint in the dirt. He digs it up. He tells no one. He melts it down. The history is erased. The treasure is gone.

The Verdict

The story of Red Jack Almer is more than a robbery. It’s a psychological thriller. A man who used gender norms as a weapon. A sheriff who was a force of nature. And a pile of gold that vanished into the ether.

Is the loot near Prescott? Is it near Willcox? Is it scattered along the San Pedro River?

The desert keeps its secrets. But every time the wind blows through the canyons of Arizona, you have to wonder… is it uncovering a gold coin? Just one? Waiting for the sun to hit it just right?

The treasure is out there. But remember: Red Jack didn’t give up his gold easily when he was alive. He probably won’t give it up easily now that he’s a ghost.

Pack plenty of water. Watch out for snakes. And if you see a stagecoach ghost with a long skirt and a revolver… run.

Originally posted 2016-08-23 11:31:51. Republished by Blog Post Promoter