WHAT IS IT?
A cache of gold and silver, mined in Colorado between 1819 and 1821, which was then hidden in or around the town of Bedford, Virginia. The treasure’s nature and location were encoded in three ciphers by one Thomas J. Beale. When decoded, they gave the following description:
‘The first deposit consisted of ten hundred and fourteen pounds of gold, and thirty-eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver, deposited Nov. eighteen nineteen. The second was made Dec. eighteen twenty-one, and consisted of nineteen hundred and seven pounds of gold, and twelve hundred and eighty-eight of silver; also jewels, obtained in St. Louis in exchange for silver to save transportation, and valued at thirteen thousand dollars.
The above is securely packed in iron pots, with iron covers. The vault is roughly lined with stone, and the vessels rest on solid stone, and are covered with others.’
HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH TO YOU?
Since Beale conveniently gave exact details of the treasure, it’s easy enough for you to check the price of a pound of gold or silver online. At the time of writing, however, those amounts would equate to $53 million in gold, $1.7 million in silver, and about a quarter million in jewels. So, let’s call it a nice round $55 million.
THE STORY
In May 1817, 30 men left Virginia for St Louis, Missouri, in order to form an expedition to hunt buffalo and bear. Under advice from local guides, they organized themselves into a militia, captained by Thomas Jefferson Beale, so that they were more prepared for any trouble with local tribes.
They headed south and spent the winter in Santa Fe, in what is now New Mexico. In the spring of 1818, while hunting somewhere 250–300 miles north of Santa Fe, they stumbled across a ravine with rich seams of gold and silver ore. By 1819, they had mined a fair amount, and decided to find somewhere to store until they were ready to take their shares and go their separate ways. They also traded some of it for jewellery, which was lighter and easier to carry. The men knew of a cave near Buford’s Tavern in Bedford County, Virginia, which might suit their purpose. While 20 men continued digging, Beale led ten to visit Bedford for a month.
They discovered that the cave was used by local hunters and farmers, and cached the treasure they had so far in a different spot. It then occurred to Beale and company that if anything happened to the group, their relatives would never know where their inheritance was. So, they decided to find a trustworthy person who could hold some form of information for safekeeping.
Beale then spent some time getting to know Robert Morriss, innkeeper of the Washington Hotel in Lynchburg, Virginia, and thought he was just the bloke to be entrusted with such documentation. Beale stayed there over the winter of 1819–20, before returning to the mysterious ravine, where his cohorts were still digging. He returned to the Washington Hotel in early 1822, having deposited more gold and silver in its secret hiding place, and entrusted Morriss with an iron strongbox. He told Morriss to open the box and pass on the details to the men’s next of kin if they didn’t return within a decade. A few months later, Beale sent Morriss a letter from St Louis, saying that the strongbox contained details of the nature and location of the treasures they had discovered, and the identities of his company. He also said that a second letter would come from a friend of his, and would contain the key to the cipher in which the documents were encoded.
Morriss never heard from Beale again, and no second letter ever arrived. Despite the temptation of the location of a huge stash of gold, he basically forgot about the box for two decades. In 1845, he opened it, and found three papers covered entirely in numbers of between one and three digits. According to the letter, the first paper gave the location of the cache, the second gave the details of what was stashed, and the third listed the people involved. There was no cipher key, however, and Morriss wasn’t up to cracking the code himself, so he forgot about it for another 20 years.
In 1862, Morriss knew that he was dying, and passed the box on to a nameless friend, who spent (you guessed it) 20 years trying to decipher the papers. Eventually, he realised that the code was a book cipher, meaning the key was in the form of an existing text. In this case the text was the Declaration Of Independence. Using the Declaration as a key, the second of the three papers gave up the plain text translation describing how roughly 3 tons of gold and silver are stashed within 4 miles of Buford’s Tavern. The first and third papers, however, kept their secrets.
In 1885, the anonymous translator enlisted one James B. Ward to make the story and ciphers public, perhaps in the hope of prompting an appearance of the missing cipher keys, in the form of a pamphlet. The pamphlet was expensive – a dozen pages for the equivalent of $15 today – but it was also very successful. So successful, in fact, that people have tried to crack the other two ciphers ever since. So far nobody has succeeded, despite the best efforts of both professional and amateur cryptographers from around the world.
Despite this failure, some of those people, and others just taking wild stabs in the dark, have also been digging up Bedford County ever since. This has brought plenty of tourist dollars in to the County economy, but has also proved something of a pain for local residents, who are doubtless heartily sick of the attention by now, and envy those who need only worry about moles or gophers.
PREVIOUS SEARCHES IN FACT AND FICTION
Over 130 years there have been many searches for the Beale treasure, however most of these have not involved metal detectors, libraries, or fights and car chases with rivals. Rather, most seekers of the Beale treasure have gone the route of simply obtaining copies of the three published cipher papers and trying to crack the code. The first attempts are actually mentioned in the pamphlet itself, as part of the story. What Morriss did in his attempts to decode the ciphers isn’t described in detail, but his nameless friend says that the Declaration of Independence gave ‘assistance by which that paper’s meaning was made clear’.
In 1898, two brothers named George and Clayton Hart became interested in the pamphlet’s cipher, and began poring over it to try to find a solution. As well as trying a variety of texts as keys to the cipher, the Wards approached a psychic, who claimed to contact Beale’s spirit, in order for Beale himself to narrate his burial of the treasure. The psychic also described seeing Beale consult a large Bible, which has also been a popular choice for cryptographers looking for keys to this and other ciphers. Beale’s ghost didn’t bother to reveal the cipher key, or anything about the contents of the two untranslated papers.
Clayton Hart also met the publisher, James Beverly Ward, and his son in 1903. Hart particularly wanted to ask whether Ward had written the pamphlet himself, but Ward and his son insisted that this was not the case. Neighbours of the Wards gave character references, reassuring the Harts that Ward was respectable, not a liar. The Wards also confirmed that Morriss had been the owner of the Washington Hotel in Lynchburg from 1819 to 1862.
Nothing came of the brothers’ researches, and Clayton gave up interest in the Beale treasure in 1912. George, however, continued the search for answers until age and infirmity got the better of him 40 years later. He came to the conclusion that the hoard was buried in the vicinity of Goose Creek, a few miles east of Roanoke, Virginia. In 1964, George published the story of their study of the cipher, in a 67-page booklet. This brought the story of the treasure to a new generation of treasure hunters, and also gave the modern age its first look at the pamphlet, all the originals of which were thought at the time to have disappeared and been forgotten. In fact, the Harts’ booklet says most of them were destroyed in a fire at the printers, Job Printworks, in 1883.
In 1934, the Library of Congress made a study, but decided that the pamphlet was simply a hoax, and that there was no true cipher, nor any evidence that any of the story had ever happened.
In the 1960s, the Director of Computer Sciences at Sperry-RAND, the builders of UNIVAC machines, was one Carl Hammer, another Beale Cipher fan. Hammer was convinced the story was true, and that history will not record the name of the firs
t person to crack the code – ‘We will learn only the name of the second person to crack it – the one who follows directions to Beale’s underground vault, and finds it empty,’ Hammer once said. He spent the next couple of decades having UNIVAC computers try to crack the code, and formed a study group to examine the text in 1968.
This became The Beale Cypher Association a few years later, and membership cost $25, which entitled members – mainly academics, and amateur cryptographers – to a quarterly newsletter, access to seminars, and the chance to publish articles and theories on the matter. The Association eventually folded in 1996.
By 1979, Hammer’s computers came to the conclusion that the cipher was genuinely encoded, not created by coin-flipping or random number tables, and not just a random jumble of numbers. Hammer felt the person who encoded paper B2 was sloppy, not a professional, ‘learned by doing’, and hadn’t bothered to evolve his technique. Crude or not, the cipher still hadn’t given up any English translation.
In the late 1970s, however, cryptographers such as Jim Gillogly used the Declaration of Independence to confirm that the first and third ciphers were, at least, not random gibberish. Several strings of letters appeared when the Declaration was used as the key, which the cryptographers assure us would not happen if the cipher was random.
The ciphers were even made part of the training programme for the US Signal Intelligence Service, because its then boss deemed them to be of ‘diabolical ingenuity, specifically designed to lure the unwary reader’.
Some treasure hunters dispensed with the task of deciphering the papers altogether, and resorted to more speculative action. Groups of people routinely get arrested in Bedford County for unauthorized digging on private property. One woman even dug up the cemetery of a local church in 1983, convinced that Beale had hidden the treasure there.
This was at the top of Porter’s Mountain, which is exactly 4 miles from Buford’s Tavern. The landowners in this area are now painfully aware of treasure hunters and anybody wishing to dig here must apply for permission.
Surprisingly, the Beale treasure wasn’t a plot point in either of the Nicolas Cage National Treasure movies, nor in Dan Brown’s similar The Lost Symbol novel. It wasn’t even in Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson’s novel centring on codes and ciphers. In fact, although people have been trying to dig it up for 150 years or so, it has made relatively little appearance in novels, comics, games, or movies.
There have been plenty of documentaries mentioning the ciphers and the supposed treasure, particularly over the past decade or so, in TV shows such as Mysteries and Brad Meltzer’s Decoded, but fiction has stayed strangely away from the legend.
The Beale story has influenced treasure-hunting media and stories in general, though. Ciphers leading to the locations of lost treasure have actually been fairly common plot elements, but these tend to have been – in franchises such as Assassin’s Creed, and novels by the likes of Dan Brown – couched in terms of Freemasons and Masonic codes and conspiracies, rather than the Beale papers.
That said, the trope of the ‘Lost Dutchman’s Mine’ may itself be a folkloric evolution of at least part of the Beale story; the part about men having found rich seams of precious metals and kept the location a secret. This is a folktale that grew up in the US around 1891–92, after the death of Jacob Waltz, a German immigrant (the term ‘Dutch’ is a corruption of ‘Deutsch’) who had claimed to have found a rich seam of gold in the American south-west, and opened a mine, but kept the location a secret, as did Beale and his men.
Waltz in fact was a farmer, whose business was ruined when his land was flooded, and he became ill. He then lived off tales of this lost mine, which he had told to his nurse. She sold pamphlets and maps to the location for $7 each. Nobody seemed to mind that no-one had ever come back with the loot. This story probably would have been forgotten in favour of the Beale story if not for the death of Adolph Ruth in 1931. Ruth had gone off into the wilds to search for Waltz’s mine, and when his body turned up six months later with two bullets in the skull, people assumed he’d been murdered for the discovery. Thus a new, more popular, legend was born. By the 1970s, there were several times as many books and pamphlets about the Lost Dutchman’s Mine than there were about Captain Kidd’s treasure.
It’s not so surprising that something like the Beale papers, which required mental investment on the part of the reader, were largely forgotten.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
First off, the original pamphlet is out there to read for free. You can find it online at the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/TheBealePapers.
Although James Ward and Son assured the Hart brothers that Morriss had been proprietor of the Washington Inn from 1819, they lied. In fact Morriss took the hotel over in 1823, according to documents at the time.
Another theory, championed by a researcher called Robert Ward (no relation), is that the papers given to Morriss were written by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was known as an amateur cryptographer, and had in fact first popularized the idea of using coded clues to treasure in his 1843 story The Gold Bug (which also involves a literal gold insect, whose bite compels the treasure hunt). His only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838, also had the characters decode some mysterious hieroglyphs. Poe also left a number of ciphers – the Edgar Allan Poe Cryptographic Challenge – for later generations to attempt to decode. So he certainly has the form for it. Some Beale treasure hunters think that he left the Beale papers to his sister, Rosalie, who sold off bits and pieces of his memorabilia before she died in 1874. The theory goes that she sold the original Beale letters and ciphers to James Ward sometime around 1862.
So, an analysis of writing – ‘stylometry’ – was applied to a Poe story, The Journal of Julius Rodman, which is about an expedition across the Rockies, to the William Morriss parts of The Beale Papers pamphlet, and to the Beale papers. According to this test, the writing in all three samples was the product of the same person, i.e. Edgar Allan Poe.
There’s a bit of a problem with this, as inimical to the theory as spring-loaded spikes are to adventurers, and that is the fact that the text of the pamphlet refers to the Civil War, which didn’t start until a dozen years after Poe died. This means that either Poe was amazingly prescient; somebody else wrote the Rodman story; or this ‘stylography’ thing is a load of rubbish.
Interestingly, even the guy who invented this stylography process warns that it’s problematic for author identification, and that it needs a lot of samples to work – neither the Poe story nor the pamphlet are large enough samples, and you’d have to compare Poe’s entire output to an equivalent amount of Beale to get a significant result.
The letters also refer to ‘stampeding’, and many skeptics point out that the word stampede didn’t originate until around the 1840s. (Prior to that, there was only the Spanish word ‘estampedo’, meaning a commotion.) The skeptics are only half right, though; the noun ‘stampede’ wasn’t coined in print until 1844, but the intransitive verb ‘to’ stampede appears as early as 1823, and this is the sense in which the word is used in the letter from Beale, so it isn’t actually really a point against it having been written in 1822. The other word seized upon by skeptics is ‘improvise’, supposedly not coined officially until 1826. However, ‘improvising’ had been a musical term for an unpredicted turn since the end of the 18th century, and ‘improvisation’ had been a fancy word for an unforeseen occurrence since the late 15th century. Again, it’s far from impossible that the reverse-engineered verb ‘improvise’ could have been around five years before its first ‘official’ appearance.
Another, more practical, problem is that the third cipher, purporting to give the details and addresses of 30 men, only runs to 618 characters – that’s a fraction under 22 characters for each man’s details. Clearly this isn’t enough to contain the information it’s supposed to.
As with so many conspiracy theories, it didn’t take long for people to start pointing
their fingers at the Freemasons, who are always a popular choice for the shadowy figures behind Americacentric historical mysteries, especially when codes and symbols are involved. There are some Masonic connections to the story. Firstly, there’s the description of the treasure being located in a vault of stone, which is part of a Masonic legend about the Biblical character Enoch. Also, the Freemasons are known for using codes and coded tales as lessons. Thirdly, James B. Ward was a Mason from 1862 to around 1867 (after which he was kicked out for spending too much time with those other code-loving robe-wearers, the Ku Klux Klan). Notice that 1862, when Ward became a Mason, is also when the pamphlet claims Morriss suddenly started hinting to people that he had secret knowledge.
All of the people named in the story historically existed in more or less the roles they have in the pamphlet, with one fairly major and obvious exception: Thomas Jefferson Beale himself.
No census record of a Thomas Jefferson Beale exists from the period, although records for some areas are missing or incomplete. That said, his forenames are obviously taken from the founding father of the same name, though these were presumably popular names for boys in the late 18th century, when he would have had to have been born.
Another problem with the story is that gold and silver ores do not look to the naked eye like what we’d recognize as gold and silver. They have to be refined and processed, unless they’re found as nuggets in sediment – in which case, because of their differing geological origins, they are never found together. Such a find would have also been one of the biggest in US history – certainly the biggest in what would later become Colorado – and would have sparked a huge gold rush.
Assuming The Beale Papers is a work of fiction, then the name Beale probably derives from the sailor, explorer, Presidential surveyor, and (eventually) US Ambassador to Austro-Hungary, Edward Fitzgerald Beale. This Beale had been born in 1822 – the year when Thomas Beale supposedly brought the box with the ciphers to Morriss – and had led all manner of expeditions across the continent. He had even carried genuine treasure, smuggling proof of gold deposits in California across what was then still part of Mexico, in 1848, so as to deliver it to the Federal government.
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