On a winter’s day in January of 1820, three fine gentlemen, one of whom was named Thomas
Jefferson Beale, sought shelter from the cold at the popular Washington Hotel in Lynchburg,
Virginia.
Though his traveling companions left around a week later, Thomas stayed at the hotel for
the rest of the winter, becoming casual friends with the innkeeper Robert Moriss and hopefully
getting a discount on the presidential suite for having the name Thomas Jefferson.
Two year later in January 1822, Thomas returned to the hotel for the winter and again stayed
several weeks.
This time before he left to go west, he asked Robert to keep a locked iron box of important
papers for him.
Later that spring, Robert received a letter from Thomas stating that the box contained
important papers regarding a fortune belonging to him and some friends.
Robert wasn’t to open the box unless Thomas or his friends didn’t return to retrieve
the box within 10 years.
If no one came to retrieve the box, in June of 1832 Robert would be sent a letter which
would contain a cipher key for the documents in the box.
Thomas did not return to the hotel; Robert never saw him again.
The letter with the decoding key never arrived.
Robert forgot about the box for 23 years until 1845.
When he finally opened it, it contained a letter for him, some old receipts and three
coded documents consisting of a series of numbers.
The letter explained that in 1817 Thomas had been the leader of an expedition of 30 gentlemen
to the Southwest to hunt buffalo and grizzly bears.
Near what is now the Colorado/New Mexico border they stumbled upon gold and silver deposits.
Agreeing to keep it a secret, the expedition spent close to two years quietly mining the
precious metals.
For safekeeping, they transported their treasure to Virginia by wagon.
Two shipments of riches were then buried in a vault near Buford's tavern, in the county
of Bedford, between 1819 and 1821.
The three coded papers, which were each encrypted using a different text explained where the
treasure was, what the treasure was, and the names of the explorers and their relatives
who would be entitled to shares of the treasure.
Thomas was tasked with finding a worthy person to entrust the papers with incase of emergency,
which is how he came to ask Robert to look after the box.
Unfortunately, Robert couldn’t make heads or tails of the encrypted documents.
For the next 17 years, Robert attempted to decipher them to no avail.
When he was dying he gave the mysterious documents and box to an unnamed friend.
The friend spent 20 years also attempting to decode the mysterious papers.
Using the US Declaration of Independence as a modified cipher key he was able to successfully
decipher the second paper which gave a description of the buried treasure.
The cipher works in this fashion: Each number corresponds to a word in the Declaration of
Independence.
For example, the first number in the sequence is 115 – the 115th word of the Declaration
is ‘instituted’, which begins with the letter ‘I’.
So the first number, 115, represents the letter I and so on.
Excitingly, the second document detailed a plethora of riches, to quote it...“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 document also claimed that the treasure was buried in a vault 6 feet below ground
within 4 miles of Buford’s tavern.
From the description, the treasure weighs close to 3 tons and in today’s money is
worth upwards of $43 million.
In 1885, the unnamed friend handed off all the documents off to another friend, James
B. Ward, who published a pamphlet called "The Beale Papers."
The pamphlet contained the story of the box, Thomas’ letters, the decoded second document
and the two yet to be deciphered documents.
The pamphlet was sold for $.50 or just under $14 in today’s money.
The pamphlet created a small frenzy and would have sold well, but there was a supply issue.
The majority of copies of the Beale Papers pamphlet burned in a warehouse fire.
There was little money for reprinting and James died a pauper.
The fact that originals of the pamphlet were hard to get and it was easier to come by second
generation and handmade copies of the coded documents added to the allure of the legend.
Over the years, people have spent countless hours using a wide variety of significant
texts to try to break the two remaining encoded documents, from the Bible to the Magna Carta
to Shakespearean plays and everything in between.
Others have focused on delving into the background of those mentioned in the pamphlet, hoping
that obscure details of their lives will provide some heretofore unknown clue.
Fortune hunters from near and far have gone digging both legally and illegally around
Bedford.
Many people have been arrested for trespassing, fined, sacrificed their lives and gone broke
trying to find the Beale treasure.
Famously, in 1898 the Hart brothers Clayton and George hired a medium to help them find
the treasure.
The medium claimed to see Thomas and the treasure during a trance.
However when put to the test, the vision was phony.
The Harts spent hours digging the spot pointed out to them by the medium, but found nothing.
They even came back a few days later with dynamite, but still found nothing.
Interestingly, this failure actually didn’t make the Hart brothers give up their search
for the riches, they persevered for well over ten years.
Finally Clayton gave up hunting for the treasure in 1912.
However, it wasn’t until 1952 that George abandoned hope.
Cryptology pioneers Herbert O’ Yardley, who founded the US Cipher Bureau at the end
of World War I and Colonel William Friedman, a prominent figure in American code breaking
during the first half of the 20th century, were fascinated by the Beale Papers.
Colonel William actually incorporated the ciphers into the training program while head
of the U.S. Army's Signals Intelligence Service.
In 1983, Marilyn Parsons was caught using a backhoe to dig up the cemetery beside Mountain
View Baptist Church in Montvale.
She claimed to have decoded the Beale Papers and she said she thought the grave markers
were 'an illusion to mark where the gold was.'
She ended up spending two months in jail and paying a $500 fine for trespassing.
Luckily for her, a judge dismissed the grave-tampering charge.
In the late 1980’s, a large dig at the top of Porter's Mountain was undertaken with the
land owner's permission for a 50/50 split on any treasure found.
Nothing Beale related was discovered, but the treasure hunters found Civil War artifacts.
The value of these artifacts paid for their time and equipment rental, so the expedition
broke even.
Today there are several online forums dedicated to solving the encrypted papers.
Historians and cryptographers have written books on the subject.
In recent years, several TV documentaries and reality shows have discussed theories
and hunted for the treasure.
As of yet, no one is known to have succeeded in deciphering documents one and three or
finding the treasure.
Of course there a lot of dissenters who consider the whole thing to be a big hoax.
Many people were very interested in the pamphlet and it was just a poor trick of fate that
the majority of the pamphlets were destroyed, otherwise James likely would have sold them
all and made a fortune.
It’s pretty convenient that the one decoded document details the huge, amazing treasure.
Many people have pointed out holes and inconsistencies in Thomas’ story.
Would it be possible for a large group of men to mine precious metals for months on
end, traveling to the nearest town for supplies, yet no one seemed to catch wind of the fact
that they had found gold?
Would it be possible into town and purchase 50 pounds of flour and 30 pickaxes without
anyone being curious?
Then the expedition somehow twice managed to transport several wagon loads of treasure
across the central US without anyone noticing?
Granted there were less people then, but there were also Native Americans, trappers, hunters,
explorers, and other miners roaming the territory.
Even when the expedition reached quote unquote more civilized areas, it’s unlikely that
a large group could ride into various towns for the night with several covered wagons
and no one discover their secret.
Why haul the treasure all the way to central Virginia?
There had to be safer and easier to travel hiding places in Kansas, Missouri, etc.
Linguists and investigators have analyzed the writing style of the pamphlet and Thomas’
letters.
Many claim that James and Thomas Beale were the same person because of the similar writing
styles.
It’s also been noticed that some of the words used in Thomas’ letters are anachronistic.
For example Thomas’ letter written in 1822 mentions ‘stampeding’ buffalo.
‘Stampede’ is a Spanish word and didn’t come into widespread use by English speakers
until the 1840’s.
Delving into historical records, a Robert Moriss did indeed run the Washington Hotel,
but he didn’t start that job until 1823.
The 1820 US census records two Thomas Beales, one in Louisiana and a Thomas K. Beale in
Virginia.
However, records are spotty and the population schedules are missing for three states and
one territory.
Also, before 1850, the US census recorded the names of only the heads of households;
so if Thomas was living in someone else's household, he may not have been counted.
Several times since the late 1960’s supercomputers have been used to analyze the ciphers.
Analysis has found that the ciphers were poorly encoded and the two undeciphered documents
did not show the patterns expected of randomly chosen numbers, therefore it probably contains
an intelligible text.
Cryptographers agree with the assessment saying that the documents have statistical characteristics
which suggest that they are not actually encryptions of English plain text so either another language
is encoded or the text is gibberish.
Furthermore, the third cipher appears to be too short to list the names of thirty individuals
and their next of kin.
One interesting theory is that popular mystery and horror writer Edgar Allan Poe wrote the
Beale Papers.
He was known to have an interest in cryptography and also used a cryptogram as a plot device
in one of his stories.
However Poe died in 1849, 36 years before the Beale Papers were published.
Linguistic study has determined that Poe’s prose is very grammatically different from
the author’s of the Beale Papers.
Other theories abound: Though not much else is known about him, records show that James
was a Master Mason--some people believe the pamphlet is a fictional Freemason allegory
written by him.
Other fortune hunters claimed to have cracked the code, but the treasure is buried on well
guarded private property and they cannot get permission to dig.
There are some who believe that the treasure was actually found by fortune hunters a long
time ago, possibly in the late 1880’s, not long after the pamphlet was published.
Or in the 20th century the US government or a cabal of wealthy men secretly cracked the
code, found the treasure and removed it.
It’s also possible that Thomas may have became paranoid, circumvented Robert and moved
the treasure himself.
However, many people still believe that an astounding fortune in gold and jewels awaits
them if they could just figure out the code.
What do you think?
Is there really an amazing treasure or was the Beale papers an elaborate hoax?
Tell us your theories in the comments!
Then go watch “How Did A Whole Village Disappear?
The Lost Colony of Roanoke Mystery”!
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