William Carl “W.C.” Jameson has lived a life that most Americans can hardly imagine. A cowboy, student, lifeguard, dock worker, radio announcer, soldier, treasure hunter, singer, songwriter, musician, storyteller, artist and prolific author, he has managed to earn a living for years by doing whatever he chooses while hardly ever punching a time clock or sitting in an office.

Jameson was born and raised in the little West Texas town of Ysleta in December of 1942 (Ysleta is now a Tigua Indian pueblo inside the city limits of El Paso), where he entertained himself as a boy by exploring the deserts and mountains on both sides of the Mexican border, just 400 yards from his home. “I was a reverse illegal,” he says. He tells how he had his first opportunity to go on a treasure hunt when he was just 11 years old, and how he helped a group “unload gold bars in the Guadalupe Mountains.” It was the first of an estimated 200 treasure-hunting expeditions across the western United States and in Mexico.

During his high school years, W.C. began playing the guitar and writing songs. He is a little reticent about his early years (he doesn’t like doing interviews), but recalls that he “played football a couple of years” and “rodeo’d a little.” He may be trying to be modest; other reports indicate that he was an accomplished boxer and rodeo performer during those years. He does admit to serving in the military and becoming a martial arts expert. He also recalls that he “gradually fell in with some touring musicians,” and that he met Waylon Jennings, who worked at a cotton gin before he became a country music star, and other “heavy hitters” of country music during his younger days.

In the meantime, Jameson “timidly signed up” at Texas Western University (now University of Texas at El Paso) three years after he graduated from high school, earning a degree in biology in the late ‘60s. But he was “curious about a lot of subjects,” and “fascinated with college;” soon he began working his way through grad school by playing music, selling pen-and-ink wildlife drawings, and doing other odd jobs, including writing stories for various magazines. He eventually earned a Master’s in meteorology and a Ph.D. in geography. He was offered an “assistantship” in the geography department at the University of Oklahoma, and moved there for a couple of years before migrating to the University of Central Arkansas in 1975. Starting as a professor, he soon became chairman of the geography department there, all the while continuing his treasure-hunting, singing, studying, speaking and writing. He served as editor of Mid-South Geography, as president of the Arkansas Geographic Society, the Ozark Creative Writers and the Western Writers of America; he also began writing his now-famous “Buried Treasures of America” series. His first “commercially successful” book was Buried Treasures of the American Southwest, which he says has sold “tens of thousands” of copies in “6 or 7” editions. He has now written “more than 60” books and more than 1,000 newspaper and magazine articles. He has won numerous awards and honors for his writing; his memoirs are scheduled for publication sometime next year.

In 1998, when Jameson was in Colorado Springs to address a meeting of the Western Writers Association, he met another award-winning author: Laurie Wagner Buyer (she has written Red Colt Canyon, Across the High Divide, Side Canyons, Spring’s Edge and five other books; her tenth book, Infinite Possibilities: A Haiku Journal is due for release in January). They met again and again at literary conferences; on their first date, they visited Fredericksburg, Enchanted Rock and Cooper’s BBQ in Llano. They were married in 2006, in the Guadalupe Mountains.

By then, Jameson had retired from the University of Central Arkansas, and had returned to Texas from what he now calls “Darkest Arkansas” in 2002 (he still keeps in touch with many Arkansas friends; he recently hosted Buddy Case, the celebrated country singer whose band won the Arkansas State Championship in the 2003 Colgate Country Showdown, at concerts in Llano and Luckenbach). In 2005, W.C. caused quite a stir with his book Billy the Kid: Beyond the Grave, and his literary career got another boost this year, when Texas Monthly reported that a Los Angeles man had discovered a multi-million dollar treasure using only Jameson’s book and Google Earth for directions.

W.C. and Laurie both remain very active although they are technically retired at their modest home in Llano. When they are not on tour, making speeches or performing, they often ride their bicycles to their unofficial “office” at the Fuel Coffeehouse in Llano’s historic downtown, where they use the free wireless internet to catch up on email correspondence while mingling with locals and catching up on smalltown gossip. W.C. hosts a highly successful monthly concert series at Fuel, called “Songwriters in the Round,” where he brings quality singer/songwriters together (some big-name entertainers, some promising beginners or undiscovered veterans) every Third Thursday. W.C. himself is one of the stars; with his rich baritone voice, his musical skill, his nearly flawless showmanship and his well-written songs, he often smooths over the rough patches for less-experienced performers and keeps the concerts entertaining. He has written more than 300 songs, two and a half sound tracks for documentaries (he had help with The Spoils of War, and even wrote a musical (called Whatever Happened to the Outlaw, Jesse James?) in which he plays six different instruments and sings all the songs. His song “Life was a Whole Lot Better When Roy Rogers was Around,” was aired by The Western Channel as a theme for a special movie month.

Jameson is not very forthcoming about his treasure-hunting adventures (perhaps not all his searches were government-approved), but says most were not as exciting as readers might assume. “Ninety percent of the search is done in the libraries,” he explains. And because so much has changed over the centuries, “We often don’t find anything.”

Still, about twenty of the expeditions (he’s been hunting treasure off and on since the 1960s) have been really exciting. In perhaps his greatest adventure, W.C. and three (ex-military) friends came upon a cache of silver from the 1760s in the mountains along the Sonora/Chihuahua border in Mexico. Because they were on horseback in rugged terrain, they were able to carry only a few of the hundreds of silver bars they found. On their way back, they found themselves under fire; one of his friends was hit in the leg and W.C. actually had his horse shot out from under him (“a huge adrenaline rush,” he recalls). They never saw the shooters, but realized they were in a dangerous place, and never went back to try to recover the rest of the silver bars.

While W.C. Jameson is not so famous as Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, his exploits (even the verifiable exploits) dwarf those of many celebrities. He is a truly remarkable man and a great entertainer (you can order his books and/or CDs at www.wcjameson.com, or come to Llano for his Third Thursday performances at the Fuel Coffeehouse). We are proud to have him as a Hill Country neighbor, and we think Dos Equis hired the wrong person for their “Most Interesting Man” commercials.