Somewhere in the hills of Virginia, the United States, according to an enduring legend, there remains buried a vast fortune in gold, silver, and jewels. The location of this treasure is obfuscated by a cipher first made public some 140 years ago. Whether the treasure is real or an elaborate hoax, the Beale Ciphers have fascinated treasure hunters, cryptographers, and historians alike.
The story first became public in 1885 through a pamphlet titled The Beale Papers. According to the pamphlet, a man named Thomas J. Beale led a group of about thirty adventurers from Virginia on a buffalo-hunting expedition to the American West in 1817. During their travels, they allegedly discovered a rich deposit of gold and silver somewhere near present-day Colorado or New Mexico.
A plaque at the Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, Virginia, where a dig was officially authorized. Credit: Virginia Hill
After extracting enormous quantities of precious metals, the group decided to transport the treasure back east. In 1819 and again in 1821, Beale supposedly carried shipments of gold, silver, and jewels to Bedford County, Virginia, where they were hidden in a secret underground vault.
To ensure that the treasure would eventually reach the rightful heirs if the expedition members never returned, Beale created three encrypted messages containing crucial information about the cache. He then entrusted these documents to a Lynchburg innkeeper named Robert Morriss. Beale instructed Morriss to safeguard a locked iron box and promised that a key to the ciphers would arrive later. The key never arrived, nor did Beale and his party.
Twenty-three years later, Morriss cracked open the box. Inside it, he found two plaintext letters from Beale, and several pages of ciphertext separated into papers "1", "2", and "3". The first cipher allegedly describes the exact location of the buried treasure. The second describes the treasure's contents. The third supposedly lists the names of the treasure's owners and their next of kin.
Solving the ciphers was beyond Morriss, so he held on to the box and its precious contents for many more years before giving it away to an unnamed friend. The friend managed to decipher the second ciphertext using an edition of the United States Declaration of Independence as the key. This cipher employed a type of book code in which numbers corresponded to words in a text, and the first letters of those words revealed the hidden message.
The decrypted second message reads as follows:
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 clay 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.
According to the text, the vault contained thousands of pounds of gold and silver, along with precious jewels acquired in the expedition. Modern estimates place the treasure's value at tens of millions of dollars.
The successful decoding of Cipher No. 2 convinced many people that the other two ciphers might also contain genuine information. If the first cipher could be solved, the exact location of the treasure might finally be revealed. Unfortunately, the 1st and the 2nd cipher have refused to yield despite hundreds of attempts to break it. Most attempts have tried other historical texts as keys, such as Magna Carta, various books of the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, and the Virginia Royal Charter, but none have been recognized as successful to date.
Cipher 2 which hides the location of the treasure.
Despite its popularity, many researchers doubt the authenticity of the Beale story. One major problem is the lack of historical evidence for Thomas J. Beale himself. Investigators have struggled to find records that conclusively prove he existed. In fact, everything known about the mystery originates from the 1885 pamphlet The Beale Papers, published by James B. Ward.
Ward claimed he received the story from an unnamed friend who supposedly solved one of the ciphers. There are no independent contemporary accounts confirming the treasure, the expedition, the vault, or the transfer of the cipher box to Robert Morriss. It has been suggested that the mystery was created as a marketing scheme. A treasure story with unsolved ciphers would naturally attract readers, puzzle enthusiasts, and treasure hunters. Ward invented the story and sold the pamphlet for 50 cents each, a no small sum at that time. He clearly benefited financially from public interest in it.
The fact that only the second message, describing the treasure, was deciphered, but not the others raises doubt. If someone were inventing a treasure story, revealing the existence of a treasure while withholding its location would be an effective way to sustain public interest.
There are also problems with the cipher itself. For instance, if the modified Declaration of Independence is used as a key for the first cipher, it yields alphabetical sequences such as abcdefghiijklmmnohpp and many others. According to the American Cryptogram Association, the chances of such sequences appearing multiple times in the one ciphertext by chance are less than one in a hundred million million. Later cryptographers have claimed that the two remaining ciphertexts have statistical characteristics which suggest that they are not actually encryptions of an English plaintext.
Others have also questioned why Beale would have bothered writing three different ciphertexts (with at least two keys, if not ciphers) for what is essentially a single message in the first place, particularly if he wanted to ensure that the next of kin received their share (as it is, with the treasure described, there is no incentive to decode the third cipher).
Several researchers have noted that portions of The Beale Papers seem more consistent with late 19th-century writing than with the language of the 1820s. While not conclusive proof of fraud, this raises the possibility that the narrative was composed much later than claimed.
Also, the third cipher is too short (only 618 numbers and hence characters) to list the names, next of kin and the addresses of 30 individuals.
Statistical analysis of the last digits in the Beale ciphers. The solved cipher (2) differs significantly from the uniform distribution in all bases, but this is only true for the unsolved ones (1 and 3) in base 10. This strongly suggests that the unsolved ciphers are fraudulent. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Statistical analysis has suggested that the numerical patterns do not behave like normal encrypted English text. In particular, certain distributions of numbers appear unusual and may indicate that the messages were artificially constructed rather than encoding meaningful information.
While the possibility of an elaborate hoax is quite high, the other possibility that a fortune could still be buried beneath Virginia soil continues to inspire dreamers and codebreakers around the world. Since the publication of The Beale Papers, countless treasure hunters have searched the hills and valleys of Bedford County, Virginia, as late as the 1990s. But nothing remotely resembling a treasure have ever been unearthed.
One popular conspiracy theory is that the true author of the Beale papers was the famous writer Edgar Allan Poe. Poe had an interest in cryptography and placed notices of his deciphering abilities in the Philadelphia paper Alexander's Weekly (Express) Messenger that invited submissions of ciphers for him to solve. In 1843, he used a cryptogram as a plot device in his short story "The Gold-Bug". From 1820, he was also living in Richmond, Virginia, at the time of Beale's alleged encounters with Morriss. One theory is that he left the Beale papers with his sister Rosalie Mackenzie Poe, who gave out pieces of it along with other memorabilia related to her brother until her death in 1874.
However, this theory has been conclusively debunked. Poe died in 1849, well before The Beale Papers were first published in 1885. The Beale Papers also mention the American Civil War, which started in 1861. An analysis of the writing style of Poe also suggests that the writer’s prose is significantly different from the grammatical structure used by the author who wrote The Beale Papers.
There is good evidence that the pamphlet was written by James B. Ward, a real person, because his name appears on the pamphlet’s copyright registration. The pamphlet itself states that it was entered according to the Act of Congress in 1885 by "J. B. Ward."
However, the mystery begins when researchers try to learn more about him. We do not know who Ward really was, what relationship he had to the alleged anonymous decoder, or how he acquired the manuscript. What is also uncertain is how much of the story he personally invented, and whether he was simply a publisher or the architect of one of America's most famous treasure hoaxes.
Interestingly, some researchers consider Ward's existence better documented than Thomas J. Beale's. While Ward is at least tied to a verifiable publication and copyright record, the supposed treasure hunter Thomas J. Beale remains much more elusive in the historical record.
References:
# Beale Ciphers. Wikipedia
# The Beale Papers (1885). Wikisource
# A cipher’s the key to the treasure in them thar hills. NSA
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