In the 1830s, Pike distinguished himself as an editor of the Arkansas Advocate and as a lawyer in private practice in Little Rock. But it was through Cushing's political patronage that he was able to develop a political machine in Arkansas by the 1840s. A large, heavily bearded man with dark, thick, flowing hair and brooding eyes, he was an imposing, shrewd, and generally brilliant character in his own right. Northern commentators, including those writing in Continental Monthly in the early Civil War, fingered the "brutal and arrogant" Pike - in contrast to the "miserable quack" George Bickley - as the dark genius behind the Masonic influenced, hidden Confederacy, the KGC(54).
Pike -through Scottish Rite connections in Charleston, Little Rock, Washington, Louisville, New Orleans, Nashville, Atlanta, Natchez, and Indian Territory - had established a powerful, hidden network of KGC operatives. While a dispersed network of discreet partisans was a necessary condition for success, it was not sufficient. He needed to build a secret organizational infrastructure that allowed for ultimate impact with maximum command, control and communication capabilities. This he achieved through a Masonic-based ritual of initiation(61).
After resigning from the Confederate Army, Pike sequestered himself in a remote part of the Ouachita Mountains, called Greasy Cove, in west-central Arkansas. There, in a two-storied house along the Little Missouri River, he maintained a hermit-like existence with his extensive library, beginning in the spring of 1863. Ostensibly, he had retreated from society to continue the revision of the Scottish Rite rituals. Could it be that he was devising a greater, more carefully considered plan of the KGC and its budding underground network of hidden depositories? (62)
Various local legends existed at the time (and continue to this day) about what Pike was doing in the cabin next to Little Missouri Falls. Rumors swirled about a substantial amount of gold that he supposedly had brought with him. Whether at the hands of Union marauders or simply of greedy interlopers, Pike's place eventually became the target of a raid. Pike is said to have paid his informants, friends from nearby Caddo Gap, with a handful of gold coins before fleeing in a horse-drawn buggy(62).
...If Pike's real mission in Greasy Cove was to develop new codes and protocols for the inner temple of the KGC, it might have been in response to damaging exposes that had started to appear in the pro Union press by late 1861. No doubt, the secret order's tried-and-tested subversion methods were still largely intact and troublesome to the North: they simply may have required new types of camouflage in the later and, for the South, more desperate stages of the war. As the author of Narrative of Edmund Wright observed in 1864: "Who conveys in untranslatable cipher or cunningly devised hieroglyphics information to our Southern foe of our plans and movements?" With Pike at work refining "new" rituals for his beloved Scottish Rite, could he not also have been overlaying those new rituals - codes, hieroglyphics, passwords, grips, insignia and organizational structure - on the highly transmutable KGC?
If one knows where to look, numerous overlaps can be found between the abstruse symbols and language of the super-secret KGC and those of the Scottish Rite. The KGC's seal as discovered among Bickley's possessions consists of a Maltese cross with an eight-pointed gold star affixed in the center, all circumscribed by a narrow golden circle adorned with sixteen small points. That badge compares closely with the far more ornate "Scottish Rite jewel belonging to Grand Commander, Albert Pike, with the exception of the jewel's inner star being a bit larger and having nine points, and its outer circle taking the form of a snake biting its tail. The author of Narrative of Edmund Wright observed a Confederate officer wearing the KGC seal into battle at Antietam: "Among the marks of his rank, there sparkled a strange jewel, a golden serpent coiled in a circle, and crested with jet enamel. The eyes of the serpent were formed of beautiful diamonds, that fired and sparkled with every movement of the wearer. The ornament conveys no riddle...the coil was a golden circle. What more simple: Knight of the Golden Circle!" A fiery image of a "Golden Serpent" figures prominently in the dark, closeted initiation ceremony of the KGC, as do human skeletons...
-Getler, Shadow of the Sentinel
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