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Beale's Treasure

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Case File: Beale's Treasure
Location: Bedford County, Virginia
Date: 1821
Description: Beale's treasure consists of millions of dollars worth of gold and silver stuffed in iron pots, hidden in a stone-lined vault somewhere in Bedford County, Virginia.

Case[]

History: In 1821, Thomas Jefferson Beale wrote of an enormous fortune he buried in the hills of Bedford County, Virginia. According to legend, it contained gold, silver, and jewels worth millions. For over 100 years, treasure hunters have been combing the countryside looking for his buried hoard. No one has found it.
Beale was a member of a wealthy family from Botetourt County, Virginia, and liked to explore the United States and its territories. In April 1817, he led a team of thirty men on a two-year journey across the country. They left Virginia and headed to the Spanish province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México (now New Mexico) to hunt buffalo.
One night in March 1818, while preparing dinner in an area north of Santa Fe (near the current Colorado border), one of Beale's men discovered gold in the cleft of a nearby rock. Over the next eighteen months, they mined the site, collecting gold and silver worth millions.
Agreeing that the treasure should be moved to a secure place, Beale and his men brought it back to Bedford County in two wagons. To reduce the weight, Beale traded some of the gold and silver for jewels when they stopped in St. Louis, Missouri.
In November 1819, Beale went to an area near Goose Creek, about four miles from Buford's Tavern in Montvale, Virginia, and buried some of the gold and silver in a grave-sized plot.
In January 1820, Beale checked into the Washington Hotel in Lynchburg, Virginia, and met the hotel's owner, Robert Morriss. He spent the rest of the winter there. However, he never spoke of his background, family, or the purpose of his visit. He left at the end of March and rejoined his men.
In December 1821, Beale returned to Bedford County and buried the rest of the treasure. In January 1822, he wrote instructions for its location in the form of three secret codes, or ciphers. In late March, he locked the ciphers and two letters in an iron box and gave them to Morriss. He and his men then made plans to go back to New Mexico.
A few months later, in May 1822, Beale sent a letter to Morriss from St. Louis. He told Morriss not to open the box unless he or his men failed to return from their journey in ten years. He promised that a friend in St. Louis would mail the key to the ciphers to Morriss. However, the key never arrived, and Beale was never heard from again.
In 1845, Morriss finally opened the box. He tried, without success, to solve the ciphers. In 1862, he gave them to a wealthy family friend, James B. Ward, also of Lynchburg. Morriss died a year later, at the age of eighty-five.
Ward spent the next few years trying to solve the ciphers. In 1869, he solved one of them using a modified version of the United States Declaration of Independence as the key. He numbered the first letter of every word in the Declaration of Independence. Then, for each number in the cipher, he substituted the corresponding letter. For example, the first number in the cipher is 115. The 115th word in the Declaration of Independence is "instituted". The first letter in that word is "I." So, "I" is substituted for 115 in the cipher.
Decoded, the message gave a detailed description of the treasure. It read: I have deposited in the county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford's, in an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground, the following articles, belonging jointly to the parties whose names are given in number three, herewith:
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 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. Paper number one describes the exact locality of the vault, so that no difficulty will be had in finding it.
Despite an extensive effort, Ward was unable to solve the other two ciphers. In 1885, he published the ciphers and the story of the treasure in a pamphlet called "The Beale Papers." He warned: Devote only such time as can be spared from your legitimate business to the task, and if you cannot spare the time, let the matter alone.
For over 100 years, the other two ciphers have remained unsolved. One lists the names of Beale's men and their heirs. The other pinpoints the exact location of the treasure.
Many treasure hunters have searched for Beale's fortune. Some even claim to have broken the cipher. They are convinced that sooner or later, someone will strike it rich. However, others, including several Bedford County residents, believe the story is a hoax.
Despite all the computer programs, historical research, digging, and searching, Beale's secret vault, if it exists, remains intact.
Background: Little information is available about Thomas Beale, and his existence is in dispute. Using U.S. Census records from 1790 and other documents, a Virginia historian identified several "Thomas Beales" who were born in Virginia and whose backgrounds fit the known facts about Beale.
The 1810 Census records have two people named "Thomas Beale": one in Connecticut and one in New Hampshire. However, records from this period are incomplete. The postmaster in Fredericksburg, Virginia, listed a letter being held for delivery to "Thomas Beal" in March and April 1817.
The 1820 Census records have two people named "Thomas Beale": one was in Louisiana but was originally from Botetourt County, Virginia (where Beale was from), while the other was in Tennessee. Also, a "Thomas K. Beale" was in Virginia. Once again, records from this period are incomplete.
One "Thomas Beale" dueled a Lynchburg man named James Risque. Coincidentally (or not), one of Risque's grandsons was James Ward, publisher of "The Beale Papers."
A man named "Thomas Beall" appears on customer lists from the St. Louis Post Department in 1820. Beale sent a letter from St. Louis in 1822.
Robert Morriss described Beale as about 6'0" tall, with jet-black eyes and hair (worn longer than the style at the time). His form was "symmetrical and gave evidence of unusual strength and activity." He had a dark and swarthy complexion.
Jacob Fowler, who explored the American southwest in 1821 and 1822, wrote in his journal that the Pawnee and Crowe tribes had told him about thirty-five white men who visited them (which was about the size of Beale's group). There is also a Cheyenne legend from around 1820 about gold and silver being taken from the west and buried in mountains in the east.
In August 1832, a St. Louis newspaper noted that a letter was being held at the post office for a "Robert Morriss". It has been speculated that this letter was for Morriss and that it was sent by a friend of Beale's to let him know that he could open the cipher box.
Tax documents found in Montross, Virginia, state that a "Thomas Beale" lived and paid taxes there in 1851. According to the documents, he died later that year – unemployed, homeless, and broke.
James Ward was recorded as a Master Mason in 1863. Local records show that he owned the house where Morriss' wife died.
Investigations: Since the publication of "The Beale Papers" in 1885, hundreds of people from across the United States have tried to solve the ciphers and find the treasure. Many have been arrested for trespassing and unauthorized digging. Some have even gone broke after spending all their money trying to locate the treasure.
Treasure hunters have tried to use other historical texts as keys for the ciphers, such as the Magna Carta, books of the Bible, Shakespeare's plays, the Star-Spangled Banner, the U.S. Constitution, the Louisiana Purchase, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Virginia Royal Charter. However, none have been successful.
Brothers George and Clayton Hart searched for the treasure for several years. In 1898, they met a psychic who claimed he could see where it was buried. They went to the area and dug for several hours. However, nothing was found.
After that, George and Clayton decided to examine the ciphers in hopes of finding the treasure that way. In 1903, they met with James Ward and his son to discuss the ciphers. Clayton gave up the search in 1912, but George continued until 1952.
Professional cryptologists have also tried to solve the ciphers. Colonel William Friedman, a dominant figure in codebreaking during the early 20th century and leader of the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service, even made the ciphers part of the service's training program.
Robert Caldwell, president of the Beale Cipher Association, has been trying to solve the ciphers for decades. He notes that the remaining ciphers are much shorter and have less repetition than the second cipher, which makes them more difficult to solve. He believes the treasure was once in a Lynchburg cemetery but that someone else removed it.
In 1969, the Beale Cipher Association hosted a symposium to try and solve the ciphers. Several members of the intelligence and data processing communities attended. The association met again in 1972 and 1979. However, they were unable to solve the ciphers.
In June 1980, a nineteen-year-old Indiana man claimed he had solved the ciphers and found the treasure in a grave at an old church in Bedford County. However, his story quickly fell apart; the sheriff found no graveyard at the church, nor was there evidence of recent digging.
In February 1983, a Pennsylvania woman was arrested and charged with disturbing graves. She had dug up a graveyard with a backhoe while searching for the treasure. She claimed she had solved the ciphers, which told her to dig there. However, no treasure was found.
Several digs have occurred on top of Porter's Mountain. One occurred in the late 1980s with the landowner's permission. However, only Civil War artifacts were found.
Two brothers, Eddie and Joe Toney, and their father-in-law, Earl Boggs, have been searching for the treasure since 1979. They claim they have solved the first cipher. According to them, the message tells of five geographical points where Beale left clues, which, one by one, will lead to the treasure.
Eddie and Joe are currently looking for the fifth and final point. According to Eddie, at each of the other geographical points, they found something that Beale had left behind. Everything matched up perfectly. He says that if they cannot find the fifth point, then they did something wrong. But he is confident that they will find it.
Eddie and Joe believe that a 19th-century carriage rod they found is the fifth clue in their search. They think it was purposefully buried by Beale, pointing in the direction of his secret vault. Earl was excited when they found the carriage rod. He and Eddie feel that the treasure is nearby. However, during their search in 1988, they had to return home after running out of money. But they plan to come back.
Meanwhile, miles away, in a different section of Bedford County, Wilbur Swift is also searching. He is a computer programmer from Garden Grove, California. He believes that he, too, has solved the first cipher. He has spent a year and $20,000 trying to find the treasure.
Swift decided to use his personal computer to try and solve the ciphers. After about eight months, he was able to break the code. It told him to look for a specific type of rock with a face and a head on it. He went to Bedford County and located the rock. He believed that the treasure was underneath it.
Swift hired a local contractor, Ken Dooley, to help excavate under the rock. Over the past twenty-five years, Dooley has dug for the treasure for at least twenty people. Most were certain they knew exactly where it was. According to him, no matter how deep he dug, they always said he was "two feet" away from it.
According to Swift, the target was premeasured at twenty-six feet below the ground. As of early 1988, they were about twenty-four feet deep. After finding the rock and doing extensive testing, he is certain he will find the treasure.
Even though he has lost his job and is now living in a nearby motel room, Swift is still digging at the bottom of the shaft. So far, he has found nothing. But, he notes, "He who laughs last laughs best." He believes that one day he might get the last laugh and find the treasure.
Bedford County's residents have seen treasure hunters come and go, empty-handed. They are not convinced that there is a treasure. Leslie Dooley, who has lived in the area his entire life, has seen many people search, but no one has come up with anything. He does not believe the treasure exists. E.A. Overstreet, Jr., thinks there may be a treasure out there, but he does not believe in it enough to go out and dig for it.
Could the ciphers be a hoax? Dr. Carl Hammer, Director of Computer Sciences at Sperry Univac and founding member of the Beale Cipher Association, has spent thirty years studying the ciphers to determine if there is a coded message. As part of his investigation, he attempted to recreate the conditions under which Beale wrote the ciphers in his computer lab.
Dr. Hammer notes that if the ciphers are a hoax, they would be made of random numbers. Using supercomputers, he analyzed the ciphers' numbers. He discovered some distinguishable, intelligent patterns.
Dr. Hammer determined that the ciphers contain a legitimate set of cryptographic numbers and have information of some sort. He does not know what the information is. But he is certain that the ciphers are not a hoax and are not made of random numbers.
Others, however, believe that the ciphers are a hoax. In 1980, cryptographer Jim Gillogly, president of the American Cryptogram Association, wrote the article "A Dissenting Opinion" about this case.
Gillogly used a version of the Declaration of Independence as a key for the first cipher. Most of the result was unintelligible. However, he found various alphabetical sequences (such as "ABFDE FGHII JKLMM NOHPP") in the middle of the code. According to him, it is unlikely that these sequences would appear randomly.
Gillogly theorizes that either the cipher's message is buried under a second level of encryption or the alphabetical sequences are the "intelligent patterns" Dr. Hammer's computer detected. He believes the ciphers are a hoax and that whoever created them chose most of the numbers at random but then chose some using the Declaration of Independence as the key.
In 1982, skeptic Joe Nickell did a scholarly analysis of this case. He believes that the ciphers are a hoax. Using historical records, he cast doubt on Beale's existence. He could not find anyone with Beale's full name and age living in Virginia during the 1800s. He also discovered that Robert Morriss did not become the proprietor of the Washington Hotel until 1823; the story claims that Beale first met Morriss at the hotel in 1820.
Nickell notes that the words "stampeding" and "improvised", both used in Beale's letters, did not exist in the 1820s (when the letters were allegedly written). Nickell and linguist Dr. Jean Pival compared the language used by James Ward in "The Beale Papers" to the language used in Beale's letters. They found similarities in punctuation, grammar, and vocabulary. This led them to believe that Ward wrote Beale's letters.
Cryptologist Louis Kruh points out another issue: Ward claimed he arranged the ciphers in order of their length and then numbered them. However, the cipher he numbered second (the one that was solved) was longer than the third one. Coincidentally (or not), the numbers Ward assigned to the ciphers matched the ones that Beale used for them in the second cipher. Kruh also wonders how Beale could have known that his second cipher would be solved first (since he mentioned the first and third ciphers and their contents in the second one).
Skeptics have identified several other issues with the ciphers. There seems to be no reason for Beale to create three separate ciphers for one message. The third cipher appears too short to list the next of kin and addresses of thirty people. There are several errors in the second cipher. It seems unlikely that Ward could have solved the second cipher without knowing what key to use (especially since there are multiple versions of the Declaration of Independence).
Skeptics have also found multiple issues with the story of the treasure's alleged discovery. Beale and his men allegedly discovered gold more than thirty years before anyone else discovered it in that region. It seems unlikely that they would have recognized gold and silver ore. It also seems unlikely that they could have kept their discovery a secret, especially since they had to transport it across the United States.
Many skeptics believe the name "Thomas Jefferson Beale" is an inside joke. Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence (the document used to decode the second cipher), and a man named Edward Beale was famous for crossing Mexican territory to transport gold from California to the East Coast.
Overall, most skeptics believe that Ward created the ciphers either as a joke or to make money off the pamphlets. They believe he "solved" the second cipher to encourage interest in deciphering the other two. They also believe that he used Morriss in the story so that it would have a "grain of truth" to it (and because Morriss had long since passed away and would not be able to refute the account).
Extra Notes:

  • This case first aired on the May 18, 1988 Special #7 episode of Unsolved Mysteries.
  • It was later re-profiled in the Dennis Farina hosted series on the April 19, 2010 episode.
  • Several books have been written about the treasure. It has also been featured on "Brad Meltzer's Decoded", "The Numbers Game", and "Expedition Unknown".
  • A short film based on the case, "The Thomas Beale Cipher", was released in 2011.
  • The treasure, if it exists, would be worth $43 million (as of 2018).
  • The full title of the pamphlet is "The Beale Papers: Containing Authenticated Statements Regarding the Treasure Buried in 1819 and 1821, Near Bufords, in Bedford County, Virginia, and Which Has Never Been Recovered".
  • Some sources state: Beale was a ladies' man who often got in trouble with the law; he fled west to avoid prosecution after he shot a neighbor; the treasure was buried in 1817; he was killed in Mexico; Morriss gave the ciphers to an unidentified friend; and Morriss died in 1865.

Results: Unsolved - In the fall of 1989, famed treasure hunter Mel Fisher and his team went to Bedford County to search for Beale's treasure. He believed he located it in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He and his team dug up portions of Goose Creek near Montvale, Virginia. However, nothing was found. He later insisted that he had dug in the right place but that the treasure had been moved.
In 1992, Elwood Chaney began searching for the treasure. He believed that it was buried somewhere above ground in Hagerstown, Maryland. Instead of trying to break the ciphers, he decided to look for clues in the letters between Beale and Morriss.
Chaney believed Beale's "hunting party" was, in reality, a group of Quakers who traveled to Africa in the mid-1800s to help liberate slaves. According to his theory, the group found the treasure in Africa and used it to help the slaves. They also kept some for themselves. They then asked a reporter to create a fictitious story about the ciphers and the trip to New Mexico.
Chaney believed that authors Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain helped create the story and ciphers. He believed their works had clues that led to the treasure. However, he was unable to locate it.
In 1999, the Beale Cipher Association dissolved. Many of its members, including Dr. Carl Hammer, have since passed away. Earl Boggs, Eddie Toney, and Joe Toney have also passed away. However, computer programmer Nick Pelling is still trying to solve the ciphers.
In May 2020, mathematician Viktor Wase completed a statistical analysis of the ciphers. It indicated that the numbers used in the solved cipher are much different than the ones used in the unsolved ciphers. Wase believes that the unsolved ciphers are a hoax and do not contain an actual message.
In 2014, James Simpson, a cryptographer and research specialist, made a breakthrough in the discovery of the Gold Mines that were harvested during the Beale Hunting Party's expedition, confirming their existence with authentic maps predating the expedition and correlating to the codes found on the Peralta Stone Maps. In 2023, the ciphers of the Beale Papers were broken using a specific Key, comprised of a series of 111 whole alphabets and a partial alphabet, climbing in number to 2906. The ciphers delivered a communique from James Reavis, ringleader of the Peralta Land Grab, to his financier, JP Morgan, through their agent JB Ward, who contrived the story line in the Beale Papers and published it in 1885. The ciphers detail the operations of the members of the CSA that were organized into a group called the Knights of the Golden Circle, who planned to monopolize the mines of Gold-rich areas surrounding Phoenix, to harness tons of ore for their investment racket in New York City. A Popular Mechanics article was published in November 2024, by Dave Howard detailing the use of the Key to break the ciphers and locate the Gold Mines in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona, exposing the location of the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine, as the richest of the series of mines that were discovered.
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