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A SECOND BURIED FORTUNE: THE COFFEYVILLE EVE CACHE
There is a third treasure story tangled up with Doolin's name, and it predates the Wild Bunch entirely. In the weeks before the Dalton Gang's disastrous double bank robbery at Coffeyville, Kansas, in October 1892, the Dalton brothers pulled off two smaller but successful jobs: a Missouri-Kansas-Texas train robbery near Adair, Oklahoma Territory, which netted about ten thousand dollars, and a bank robbery in El Reno, Oklahoma Territory, which brought in another seventeen thousand. According to accounts published in True West Magazine, the gang spent part of that money on new saddles and clothes but carried the rest in their saddlebags as they rode toward Coffeyville for the final job. On the night before the raid, the gang camped at Onion Creek, where it meets the Verdigris River near the Kansas-Oklahoma border, and legend holds that they buried a portion of their remaining gold and silver coin there rather than risk carrying all of it into town. Estimates of that buried sum range from nine thousand to twenty thousand dollars in 1892 money, or $2.2 million to $4.8 million at the series' modern gold-value rate.
If the story is accurate, the cache was never recovered, because four of the five men who might have known its location died in the street at Coffeyville the next morning, and the fifth, Emmett Dalton, spent the following fourteen years in prison. This is where Doolin's disputed role as the gang's sixth man becomes relevant to the treasure hunt. If Doolin really was the rider who held the horses in the alley at Coffeyville and slipped away before the shooting started, he would have been one of the last people alive who might have known where that Onion Creek cache was hidden, assuming he had not already collected his own share before the raid. He never spoke of it publicly, and no interview, letter, or trial record ties him directly to the Onion Creek site. The connection remains circumstantial, built on the sixth-man theory rather than any direct evidence, and readers should weigh it as an intriguing possibility rather than a documented fact.
RIVAL LEGENDS: ROBBERS CAVE AND THE SAND SPRINGS CAVES
Doolin's Kansas cache is the best documented of the Wild Bunch treasure stories, but it is not the only one connected to the gang's Oklahoma years. Local legend in Latimer County holds that Doolin, along with Henry Starr, Belle Starr, the Dalton Gang, the Younger brothers, and even Jesse and Frank James, used a natural sandstone hideout in the Sans Bois Mountains as a place to lie low and, according to some tellings, to cache stolen goods. That hideout sits inside what is now Robbers Cave State Park, five miles north of Wilburton, Oklahoma, at approximately 34°59'42"N, 95°19'37"W. No documented recovery of outlaw loot has ever come out of the park, and the cave's connection to Doolin specifically is folklore rather than confirmed history, but the site remains one of the most visited outlaw landmarks in the state.
A second, thinner strand of local lore places some of the Dalton gang's hidden loot in caves near Sand Springs, just west of Tulsa, a rumor repeated in regional treasure-hunting guides but never tied to a specific robbery or a documented search. A third variation, recorded by researcher Will Welton in a regional survey of Indian Territory treasure stories, claims that unnamed outlaw gangs buried loot at what is now Roman Nose State Park near Watonga in Blaine County, and that a separate cache of roughly half a bushel of silver coins was hidden along a roadside in Le Flore County near an old bridge crossing. None of these stories name Doolin specifically, and none carry the kind of documentation behind the Burden, Kansas property, but they show how thoroughly outlaw treasure lore spread across the territory during and after the Wild Bunch years.
Readers should treat the Robbers Cave, Sand Springs, Roman Nose, and Le Flore County stories as regional folklore layered onto a real outlaw history, distinct from the more carefully documented Burden, Kansas site connected directly to Doolin's own property and the years he spent as an active fugitive.
WHAT HAS BEEN FOUND, AND WHAT HAS NOT
Measured against the drama of the story, the recovery record for Wild Bunch treasure is thin. No portion of Doolin's buried cache near Burden has ever surfaced in a documented find, despite generations of searchers working the old homestead site with shovels and, more recently, metal detectors. No cache tied to the gang has turned up at Robbers Cave or in the caves near Sand Springs either, though both sites continue to draw visitors hoping to be the first.
That leaves the entire documented haul of the Wild Bunch, an estimated fourteen thousand dollars in 1890s money and $3.26 million in today's gold-value terms, unaccounted for. Some of it was certainly spent by gang members living well in the months before their deaths; men who paid cash freely at hotels and saloons in Ingalls were not saving for retirement. But Doolin's own insistence on burying his share, and his death before he could return for it, leaves open the real possibility that at least part of that fortune is still sitting in the ground near the Kansas line, exactly where he left it in 1896.
It is worth being honest about the odds. Burden, Kansas has grown and changed considerably since 1896, and a shack sitting on weed-covered land in the 1890s could sit under a modern building, a plowed field, or a county road by now. Metal detecting technology has improved enormously since the first searchers went looking, and it is entirely possible that someone has already found part of Doolin's cache without realizing what it was, especially if the coins had scattered from a rotted container over the decades. What can be said with confidence is that no documented, publicly reported recovery of Doolin's buried fortune exists in any newspaper archive, historical society record, or outlaw-history publication located during the research for this chapter.
REWARD MONEY AND WHO COLLECTED IT
Marshal Nix and the federal government placed standing rewards on every member of the Wild Bunch as the body count climbed, and those rewards shaped how the gang's story ended almost as much as any posse did. The Dunn brothers collected a five-thousand-dollar bounty on “Bitter Creek” Newcomb’s head after they killed him and Charley Pierce in 1895, a payday that also cost Newcomb his relationship with Rosa Dunn, whose own brothers turned him in. Bill Tilghman collected reward money for capturing Doolin at Eureka Springs, and lawmen photographed Doolin's body after his death at Lawson specifically so departments could confirm his identity and process the bounty claims tied to his name.
The rewards illustrate something about how the Wild Bunch fell apart. It was not one dramatic shootout that ended the gang, the way Coffeyville ended the Daltons. It was a slow bleed of bounty hunters, deputy marshals, and former friends turning informant for cash, picking off one outlaw at a time over six years until nobody was left to ride.
Individual rewards for gang members climbed as the death toll from Ingalls sank in with the public. Territorial and federal authorities, along with railroad companies and banking associations that had been robbed, all added money to the bounties on Doolin's men, and by 1895 a deputy or bounty hunter who brought in a top member of the gang, dead or alive, could expect a payday worth several years of an ordinary working wage. That kind of money explains why the Dunn brothers, who had known Newcomb and Pierce personally, were willing to shoot two men they had once called friends rather than let them ride on.
WHO GOT CAUGHT, AND WHO WENT FREE
Of the eleven men most closely tied to the Wild Bunch at its peak, not one lived out a natural life free of violence. Oliver Yantis was killed by a posse in November 1892, the first to fall. Bill Dalton was killed by an Anadarko posse in June 1894. Bitter Creek Newcomb and Charley Pierce died together at the hands of the Dunn brothers in May 1895. Tulsa Jack Blake was killed at Dover in April 1895. Little Bill Raidler was captured that September, survived his wounds, was eventually paroled, and died in 1904, the closest thing the gang had to a peaceful end. Red Buck Waightman was killed near Arapaho in March 1896. Bill Doolin himself was killed at Lawson that August. Dynamite Dick Clifton was captured, escaped, recaptured, and finally killed near Checotah in November 1897. Little Dick West, the last man standing, was killed in Logan County in April 1898.
Only Arkansas Tom Jones, captured at Ingalls in 1893, avoided a fatal shootout in the years immediately following the gang's collapse. He served time, won a pardon in 1910, and lived another fourteen years as a free man before old habits caught up with him. In 1924 he was shot and killed by Joplin, Missouri, police while attempting to rob a bank, the last member of the Wild Bunch to die and the only one whose death came decades after the gang itself had ceased to exist. No member of Bill Doolin's gang ever walked away from the outlaw life for good.
WHY THIS GANG, AND NOT A BLOODIER ONE
Oklahoma Territory produced no shortage of violent outlaw bands in the 1890s, and one obvious rival for the title of "wildest gang" deserves mention here: the Rufus Buck Gang. Over roughly thirteen days in the summer of 1895, five young men led by Rufus Buck committed a spree of armed robbery, assault, and murder across the Creek Nation that shocked even a territory numb to outlaw violence. Measured strictly by brutality per day on the run, the Buck gang was the more vicious outfit, and all five members were captured, tried, and hung together within months of their spree.
The Buck gang is left out of the main story here for two reasons. First, their run was short and left no significant stolen fortune behind; whatever money changed hands during their thirteen days was minor compared to a string of bank and train robberies planned over years. Second, and more to the point of a treasure legend, no credible buried-cache story survives attached to their name. Rufus Buck and his four companions, Lucky Davis, Sam Sampson, Maomi July, and Lewis Davis, were captured within two weeks of starting their spree, tried in Judge Isaac Parker's federal court at Fort Smith, and hanged together on July 1, 1896, less than a year after their crimes began. Their story is a real and documented piece of Oklahoma outlaw history, but it produced no fortune, no long manhunt, and no unsolved mystery about missing money.
Bill Doolin's gang, by contrast, terrorized the territory for the better part of four years, pulled in a documented fortune across half a dozen major robberies, and left behind a leader who buried his share of the money and died before he could dig it up. For a story built around what was stolen, where it went, and what is still missing, the Wild Bunch is the gang whose reign fits every part of the question.
GPS COORDINATES FOR SEARCHERS AND VISITORS
Readers interested in tracing the Wild Bunch's Oklahoma story firsthand can visit several documented sites tied to the gang's rise and fall. Ingalls, the ghost town where the Battle of Ingalls unfolded on September 1, 1893, sits at 36°06'06"N, 96°52'53"W in eastern Payne County, about nine miles east of Stillwater; a stone monument marks the spot where three deputy marshals died. Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Doolin's final resting place in the Boot Hill section, sits at 35°53'45"N, 97°24'12"W. Quay, Oklahoma, formerly the town of Lawson where Doolin was killed on August 24, 1896, sits at 36°09'35"N, 96°42'32"W on the Pawnee-Payne county line. Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where Tilghman captured Doolin in a bathhouse, sits at 36°24'38"N, 93°44'42"W. Robbers Cave State Park, tied to Doolin and a long list of other outlaws by local legend, sits at 34°59'42"N, 95°19'37"W, five miles north of Wilburton.
Doolin's buried cache, according to the most detailed published account of the legend, lies near the town of Burden, Kansas, forty miles southeast of Wichita, though no source has published an exact parcel location for the old homestead, and the site has changed hands and appearance many times over the last century.
IF YOU GO
Oklahoma treasure hunting comes with real legal limits worth knowing before anyone heads out with a shovel or a metal detector. Landowner permission is required everywhere, and searching on state or federal land, including inside Robbers Cave State Park itself, is prohibited without special authorization. Any artifact recovered on public land that is more than one hundred years old is protected under state and federal law and must be reported rather than kept. Kansas applies similar landowner-consent rules to the Burden property and the surrounding Cowley County farmland, so a search there requires the same courtesy and the same legal caution as a search on the Oklahoma side of the border.
Readers with a solid lead on the Burden, Kansas property, or with family documents connected to the Wild Bunch's final months, are encouraged to contact the Oklahoma Historical Society or the Cowley County Historical Society in Kansas, both of which maintain research files on outlaw-era land records that are not fully digitized or searchable online. County courthouse deed records from the 1890s, where they survive, remain the most reliable way to trace who owned land near Burden during the years Doolin was active, and a patient researcher working through those records has a better shot at narrowing down the old homestead site than anyone relying on legend alone.
THE LEGEND LIVES ON
More than a century after Heck Thomas's posse cut Bill Doolin down at Lawson, the Wild Bunch remains one of the most retold outlaw stories to come out of Oklahoma Territory. Bailey C. Hanes published a full biography, Bill Doolin, Outlaw O.T., through the University of Oklahoma Press in 1968, and the gang has since appeared in Western films, television documentaries, and a song by the band the Eagles titled "Doolin-Dalton," which traces the arc from the original Dalton Gang's destruction at Coffeyville through the rise and fall of Doolin's crew. The stone monument at Ingalls, erected by local residents in 1938, still stands on Ash Street near the site where three deputy marshals died, though its original bronze plaque was stolen sometime before the 1990s and later replaced.
Every summer, Ingalls draws visitors interested in Old West history despite having a population that has hovered under two hundred people for decades. A handful of the town's original buildings, including a replica of the Pierce O.K. Hotel where the gang gathered before the gunfight, still stand as reminders of the single morning that put the little farm town into every history of the American outlaw era. The land around Ingalls today is held largely by three families who have lived there for generations, a detail that connects the present day directly back to the town's outlaw-sheltering past.
Nearby Stillwater, home to Oklahoma State University, promotes the Ingalls story as part of its regional history tourism, and a self-guided driving tour through north central Oklahoma now stops at the Battle of Ingalls monument alongside other Payne County landmarks. What began as a shootout the town's own residents tried to prevent, hoping to keep their outlaw neighbors and their spending money in town a while longer, has become the very thing that put Ingalls on the map more than a century after the last shot was fired.
A FORTUNE STILL WAITING
Strip away the gunfights and the folk-hero reputation, and the Wild Bunch story comes down to a simple set of facts. A cowboy turned outlaw led a gang that stole somewhere near fourteen thousand dollars across four years of robberies, worth $3.26 million in today's gold-value terms. That gang killed at least five people directly, three deputy marshals and two civilians, and lost every one of its own members to violent death or long imprisonment except for a single man who survived to be pardoned decades later. Its leader hid a share of the money on a small piece of land he told almost no one about, and he died with the secret only partly shared, leaving behind a wife and young son who may have known the general area but never recovered anything from it in the historical record.
That combination, a real and substantial fortune, a documented burial, and a leader who ran out of time before he could dig it back up, is what separates the Doolin story from dozens of other outlaw tales scattered across Oklahoma folklore. Robbers Cave and the Sand Springs caves may hold outlaw loot from a dozen different bandits who passed through over the decades, but no one can point to a specific robbery, a specific sum, and a specific man who buried it there. Burden, Kansas can. Whether that makes the search worth undertaking is a question every reader must answer for themselves, weighed against the legal restrictions and the very real odds that more than a century of farming, construction, and erosion have already scattered or destroyed whatever Doolin left behind. What the record supports is this: as of the most recent published research on the subject, nobody has ever come forward with a documented recovery, and the ground near that old homestead has never been ruled out.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This chapter draws on the documented outlaw history of Bill Doolin's Wild Bunch, cross-checked across contemporary newspaper accounts, the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, National Register and USGS location records, and modern outlaw-history research including True West Magazine's long-running coverage of unrecovered Wild West treasure. The buried cache near Burden, Kansas, remains unconfirmed and unrecovered as of this writing. Its status has not changed in the years since True West Magazine first published the fullest account of the story, and no public record of a find has surfaced anywhere in the research for this chapter.
SOURCES CONSULTED
Alchetron. "Bill Doolin." alchetron.com.
Biographics. "The Doolin-Dalton Gang: The Wild Bunch of the Wild West." biographics.org, August 9, 2023.
Encyclopedia of Arkansas. "Bill Doolin (1858-1896)." encyclopediaofarkansas.net, July 16, 2024.
Find a Grave. "Bill Doolin (1858-1896)." findagrave.com, Memorial ID 1215.
Genealogy.com Forum. "Re: Boyd/Wheelock name in Wy." genealogy.com.
Grokipedia. "Bill Doolin." grokipedia.com, accessed 2026.
Historical Marker Database. "The Battle of Ingalls Historical Marker." hmdb.org.
HISTORY.com. "Outlaw Bill Doolin Is Killed." history.com, August 25 feature, updated May 27, 2025.
HistoryNet. "The Southwest City Raid: Bill Doolin Wasn't Foolin'." historynet.com, October 4, 2018.
In2013Dollars.com. "$1 in 1894 to 2026" and related inflation calculations. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI data.
Kansas and Its Surnames. "Bill Doolin and the Town of Burden, Kansas." kansasoakland.blogspot.com, April 28, 2010.
Legends of America. "Bill Doolin - Leading the Oklahombres." legendsofamerica.com.
Legends of America. "Doolin-Dalton Gang - Oklahombres." legendsofamerica.com.
Legends of America. "The Deadly Dalton Gang." legendsofamerica.com.
Legends of America. "Ingalls, Oklahoma Gunfight With the Doolin Gang." legendsofamerica.com.
National Park Service, Fort Smith National Historic Site. "Bill Doolin." home.nps.gov, accessed 2026.
Oklahoma Historical Society. "Doolin, William M." Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, okhistory.org.
Oklahoma State Parks. "Robbers Cave State Park Facility Details." okstateparks.reserveamerica.com.
Rizzo, Tom. "Battle of Ingalls." tomrizzo.com, June 10, 2024.
Spartacus Educational. "Bill Doolin." spartacus-educational.com.
The Mag Life. "Bill Doolin: Last of the Old West Outlaws." gunmagwarehouse.com, October 5, 2023.
The Wild West. "The Wild Bunch." thewildwest.org, March 25, 2020.
Tulsa World. "Only in Oklahoma: Doolin Gang Won Ingalls Battle, but Lost War." tulsaworld.com, February 24, 2019.
True West Magazine. "Outlaw Treasure - Paydirt-It's Still Out There!" truewestmagazine.com, September 30, 2013.
U.S. Marshals Service. "Deputies Versus the Wild Bunch." Historical Reading Room, usmarshals.gov.
Vulich, Nick. "Dynamite Dick Clifton: The Most Killed Outlaw in the American West." nickvulich.com.
Wikipedia. "Battle of Ingalls." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Bill Doolin." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Burden, Kansas." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Ingalls, Oklahoma." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Quay, Oklahoma." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Robbers Cave State Park." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Summit View Cemetery." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Wild Bunch." en.wikipedia.org.
There is a third treasure story tangled up with Doolin's name, and it predates the Wild Bunch entirely. In the weeks before the Dalton Gang's disastrous double bank robbery at Coffeyville, Kansas, in October 1892, the Dalton brothers pulled off two smaller but successful jobs: a Missouri-Kansas-Texas train robbery near Adair, Oklahoma Territory, which netted about ten thousand dollars, and a bank robbery in El Reno, Oklahoma Territory, which brought in another seventeen thousand. According to accounts published in True West Magazine, the gang spent part of that money on new saddles and clothes but carried the rest in their saddlebags as they rode toward Coffeyville for the final job. On the night before the raid, the gang camped at Onion Creek, where it meets the Verdigris River near the Kansas-Oklahoma border, and legend holds that they buried a portion of their remaining gold and silver coin there rather than risk carrying all of it into town. Estimates of that buried sum range from nine thousand to twenty thousand dollars in 1892 money, or $2.2 million to $4.8 million at the series' modern gold-value rate.
If the story is accurate, the cache was never recovered, because four of the five men who might have known its location died in the street at Coffeyville the next morning, and the fifth, Emmett Dalton, spent the following fourteen years in prison. This is where Doolin's disputed role as the gang's sixth man becomes relevant to the treasure hunt. If Doolin really was the rider who held the horses in the alley at Coffeyville and slipped away before the shooting started, he would have been one of the last people alive who might have known where that Onion Creek cache was hidden, assuming he had not already collected his own share before the raid. He never spoke of it publicly, and no interview, letter, or trial record ties him directly to the Onion Creek site. The connection remains circumstantial, built on the sixth-man theory rather than any direct evidence, and readers should weigh it as an intriguing possibility rather than a documented fact.
RIVAL LEGENDS: ROBBERS CAVE AND THE SAND SPRINGS CAVES
Doolin's Kansas cache is the best documented of the Wild Bunch treasure stories, but it is not the only one connected to the gang's Oklahoma years. Local legend in Latimer County holds that Doolin, along with Henry Starr, Belle Starr, the Dalton Gang, the Younger brothers, and even Jesse and Frank James, used a natural sandstone hideout in the Sans Bois Mountains as a place to lie low and, according to some tellings, to cache stolen goods. That hideout sits inside what is now Robbers Cave State Park, five miles north of Wilburton, Oklahoma, at approximately 34°59'42"N, 95°19'37"W. No documented recovery of outlaw loot has ever come out of the park, and the cave's connection to Doolin specifically is folklore rather than confirmed history, but the site remains one of the most visited outlaw landmarks in the state.
A second, thinner strand of local lore places some of the Dalton gang's hidden loot in caves near Sand Springs, just west of Tulsa, a rumor repeated in regional treasure-hunting guides but never tied to a specific robbery or a documented search. A third variation, recorded by researcher Will Welton in a regional survey of Indian Territory treasure stories, claims that unnamed outlaw gangs buried loot at what is now Roman Nose State Park near Watonga in Blaine County, and that a separate cache of roughly half a bushel of silver coins was hidden along a roadside in Le Flore County near an old bridge crossing. None of these stories name Doolin specifically, and none carry the kind of documentation behind the Burden, Kansas property, but they show how thoroughly outlaw treasure lore spread across the territory during and after the Wild Bunch years.
Readers should treat the Robbers Cave, Sand Springs, Roman Nose, and Le Flore County stories as regional folklore layered onto a real outlaw history, distinct from the more carefully documented Burden, Kansas site connected directly to Doolin's own property and the years he spent as an active fugitive.
WHAT HAS BEEN FOUND, AND WHAT HAS NOT
Measured against the drama of the story, the recovery record for Wild Bunch treasure is thin. No portion of Doolin's buried cache near Burden has ever surfaced in a documented find, despite generations of searchers working the old homestead site with shovels and, more recently, metal detectors. No cache tied to the gang has turned up at Robbers Cave or in the caves near Sand Springs either, though both sites continue to draw visitors hoping to be the first.
That leaves the entire documented haul of the Wild Bunch, an estimated fourteen thousand dollars in 1890s money and $3.26 million in today's gold-value terms, unaccounted for. Some of it was certainly spent by gang members living well in the months before their deaths; men who paid cash freely at hotels and saloons in Ingalls were not saving for retirement. But Doolin's own insistence on burying his share, and his death before he could return for it, leaves open the real possibility that at least part of that fortune is still sitting in the ground near the Kansas line, exactly where he left it in 1896.
It is worth being honest about the odds. Burden, Kansas has grown and changed considerably since 1896, and a shack sitting on weed-covered land in the 1890s could sit under a modern building, a plowed field, or a county road by now. Metal detecting technology has improved enormously since the first searchers went looking, and it is entirely possible that someone has already found part of Doolin's cache without realizing what it was, especially if the coins had scattered from a rotted container over the decades. What can be said with confidence is that no documented, publicly reported recovery of Doolin's buried fortune exists in any newspaper archive, historical society record, or outlaw-history publication located during the research for this chapter.
REWARD MONEY AND WHO COLLECTED IT
Marshal Nix and the federal government placed standing rewards on every member of the Wild Bunch as the body count climbed, and those rewards shaped how the gang's story ended almost as much as any posse did. The Dunn brothers collected a five-thousand-dollar bounty on “Bitter Creek” Newcomb’s head after they killed him and Charley Pierce in 1895, a payday that also cost Newcomb his relationship with Rosa Dunn, whose own brothers turned him in. Bill Tilghman collected reward money for capturing Doolin at Eureka Springs, and lawmen photographed Doolin's body after his death at Lawson specifically so departments could confirm his identity and process the bounty claims tied to his name.
The rewards illustrate something about how the Wild Bunch fell apart. It was not one dramatic shootout that ended the gang, the way Coffeyville ended the Daltons. It was a slow bleed of bounty hunters, deputy marshals, and former friends turning informant for cash, picking off one outlaw at a time over six years until nobody was left to ride.
Individual rewards for gang members climbed as the death toll from Ingalls sank in with the public. Territorial and federal authorities, along with railroad companies and banking associations that had been robbed, all added money to the bounties on Doolin's men, and by 1895 a deputy or bounty hunter who brought in a top member of the gang, dead or alive, could expect a payday worth several years of an ordinary working wage. That kind of money explains why the Dunn brothers, who had known Newcomb and Pierce personally, were willing to shoot two men they had once called friends rather than let them ride on.
WHO GOT CAUGHT, AND WHO WENT FREE
Of the eleven men most closely tied to the Wild Bunch at its peak, not one lived out a natural life free of violence. Oliver Yantis was killed by a posse in November 1892, the first to fall. Bill Dalton was killed by an Anadarko posse in June 1894. Bitter Creek Newcomb and Charley Pierce died together at the hands of the Dunn brothers in May 1895. Tulsa Jack Blake was killed at Dover in April 1895. Little Bill Raidler was captured that September, survived his wounds, was eventually paroled, and died in 1904, the closest thing the gang had to a peaceful end. Red Buck Waightman was killed near Arapaho in March 1896. Bill Doolin himself was killed at Lawson that August. Dynamite Dick Clifton was captured, escaped, recaptured, and finally killed near Checotah in November 1897. Little Dick West, the last man standing, was killed in Logan County in April 1898.
Only Arkansas Tom Jones, captured at Ingalls in 1893, avoided a fatal shootout in the years immediately following the gang's collapse. He served time, won a pardon in 1910, and lived another fourteen years as a free man before old habits caught up with him. In 1924 he was shot and killed by Joplin, Missouri, police while attempting to rob a bank, the last member of the Wild Bunch to die and the only one whose death came decades after the gang itself had ceased to exist. No member of Bill Doolin's gang ever walked away from the outlaw life for good.
WHY THIS GANG, AND NOT A BLOODIER ONE
Oklahoma Territory produced no shortage of violent outlaw bands in the 1890s, and one obvious rival for the title of "wildest gang" deserves mention here: the Rufus Buck Gang. Over roughly thirteen days in the summer of 1895, five young men led by Rufus Buck committed a spree of armed robbery, assault, and murder across the Creek Nation that shocked even a territory numb to outlaw violence. Measured strictly by brutality per day on the run, the Buck gang was the more vicious outfit, and all five members were captured, tried, and hung together within months of their spree.
The Buck gang is left out of the main story here for two reasons. First, their run was short and left no significant stolen fortune behind; whatever money changed hands during their thirteen days was minor compared to a string of bank and train robberies planned over years. Second, and more to the point of a treasure legend, no credible buried-cache story survives attached to their name. Rufus Buck and his four companions, Lucky Davis, Sam Sampson, Maomi July, and Lewis Davis, were captured within two weeks of starting their spree, tried in Judge Isaac Parker's federal court at Fort Smith, and hanged together on July 1, 1896, less than a year after their crimes began. Their story is a real and documented piece of Oklahoma outlaw history, but it produced no fortune, no long manhunt, and no unsolved mystery about missing money.
Bill Doolin's gang, by contrast, terrorized the territory for the better part of four years, pulled in a documented fortune across half a dozen major robberies, and left behind a leader who buried his share of the money and died before he could dig it up. For a story built around what was stolen, where it went, and what is still missing, the Wild Bunch is the gang whose reign fits every part of the question.
GPS COORDINATES FOR SEARCHERS AND VISITORS
Readers interested in tracing the Wild Bunch's Oklahoma story firsthand can visit several documented sites tied to the gang's rise and fall. Ingalls, the ghost town where the Battle of Ingalls unfolded on September 1, 1893, sits at 36°06'06"N, 96°52'53"W in eastern Payne County, about nine miles east of Stillwater; a stone monument marks the spot where three deputy marshals died. Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Doolin's final resting place in the Boot Hill section, sits at 35°53'45"N, 97°24'12"W. Quay, Oklahoma, formerly the town of Lawson where Doolin was killed on August 24, 1896, sits at 36°09'35"N, 96°42'32"W on the Pawnee-Payne county line. Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where Tilghman captured Doolin in a bathhouse, sits at 36°24'38"N, 93°44'42"W. Robbers Cave State Park, tied to Doolin and a long list of other outlaws by local legend, sits at 34°59'42"N, 95°19'37"W, five miles north of Wilburton.
Doolin's buried cache, according to the most detailed published account of the legend, lies near the town of Burden, Kansas, forty miles southeast of Wichita, though no source has published an exact parcel location for the old homestead, and the site has changed hands and appearance many times over the last century.
IF YOU GO
Oklahoma treasure hunting comes with real legal limits worth knowing before anyone heads out with a shovel or a metal detector. Landowner permission is required everywhere, and searching on state or federal land, including inside Robbers Cave State Park itself, is prohibited without special authorization. Any artifact recovered on public land that is more than one hundred years old is protected under state and federal law and must be reported rather than kept. Kansas applies similar landowner-consent rules to the Burden property and the surrounding Cowley County farmland, so a search there requires the same courtesy and the same legal caution as a search on the Oklahoma side of the border.
Readers with a solid lead on the Burden, Kansas property, or with family documents connected to the Wild Bunch's final months, are encouraged to contact the Oklahoma Historical Society or the Cowley County Historical Society in Kansas, both of which maintain research files on outlaw-era land records that are not fully digitized or searchable online. County courthouse deed records from the 1890s, where they survive, remain the most reliable way to trace who owned land near Burden during the years Doolin was active, and a patient researcher working through those records has a better shot at narrowing down the old homestead site than anyone relying on legend alone.
THE LEGEND LIVES ON
More than a century after Heck Thomas's posse cut Bill Doolin down at Lawson, the Wild Bunch remains one of the most retold outlaw stories to come out of Oklahoma Territory. Bailey C. Hanes published a full biography, Bill Doolin, Outlaw O.T., through the University of Oklahoma Press in 1968, and the gang has since appeared in Western films, television documentaries, and a song by the band the Eagles titled "Doolin-Dalton," which traces the arc from the original Dalton Gang's destruction at Coffeyville through the rise and fall of Doolin's crew. The stone monument at Ingalls, erected by local residents in 1938, still stands on Ash Street near the site where three deputy marshals died, though its original bronze plaque was stolen sometime before the 1990s and later replaced.
Every summer, Ingalls draws visitors interested in Old West history despite having a population that has hovered under two hundred people for decades. A handful of the town's original buildings, including a replica of the Pierce O.K. Hotel where the gang gathered before the gunfight, still stand as reminders of the single morning that put the little farm town into every history of the American outlaw era. The land around Ingalls today is held largely by three families who have lived there for generations, a detail that connects the present day directly back to the town's outlaw-sheltering past.
Nearby Stillwater, home to Oklahoma State University, promotes the Ingalls story as part of its regional history tourism, and a self-guided driving tour through north central Oklahoma now stops at the Battle of Ingalls monument alongside other Payne County landmarks. What began as a shootout the town's own residents tried to prevent, hoping to keep their outlaw neighbors and their spending money in town a while longer, has become the very thing that put Ingalls on the map more than a century after the last shot was fired.
A FORTUNE STILL WAITING
Strip away the gunfights and the folk-hero reputation, and the Wild Bunch story comes down to a simple set of facts. A cowboy turned outlaw led a gang that stole somewhere near fourteen thousand dollars across four years of robberies, worth $3.26 million in today's gold-value terms. That gang killed at least five people directly, three deputy marshals and two civilians, and lost every one of its own members to violent death or long imprisonment except for a single man who survived to be pardoned decades later. Its leader hid a share of the money on a small piece of land he told almost no one about, and he died with the secret only partly shared, leaving behind a wife and young son who may have known the general area but never recovered anything from it in the historical record.
That combination, a real and substantial fortune, a documented burial, and a leader who ran out of time before he could dig it back up, is what separates the Doolin story from dozens of other outlaw tales scattered across Oklahoma folklore. Robbers Cave and the Sand Springs caves may hold outlaw loot from a dozen different bandits who passed through over the decades, but no one can point to a specific robbery, a specific sum, and a specific man who buried it there. Burden, Kansas can. Whether that makes the search worth undertaking is a question every reader must answer for themselves, weighed against the legal restrictions and the very real odds that more than a century of farming, construction, and erosion have already scattered or destroyed whatever Doolin left behind. What the record supports is this: as of the most recent published research on the subject, nobody has ever come forward with a documented recovery, and the ground near that old homestead has never been ruled out.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This chapter draws on the documented outlaw history of Bill Doolin's Wild Bunch, cross-checked across contemporary newspaper accounts, the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, National Register and USGS location records, and modern outlaw-history research including True West Magazine's long-running coverage of unrecovered Wild West treasure. The buried cache near Burden, Kansas, remains unconfirmed and unrecovered as of this writing. Its status has not changed in the years since True West Magazine first published the fullest account of the story, and no public record of a find has surfaced anywhere in the research for this chapter.
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