B5F34I1

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GARY MANGIACOPA ARCHIVE
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Title:      B5F34I1
Slug:       b5f34i1
Categories: Lost Treasure
Source:     https://garymangiacopraarchive.com/b5f34i1
Pages:      8 scanned, 8 extracted
OCR:        Google Vision API (document_text_detection)
Processed:  2026-06-06
============================================================

NEW YORK HERALD, NY. NY.
SUNDAY
24 May 1896 page 10 6th section column 1-3

[PAGE BREAK]

If
Vool r
45
CIPHER
Lid of Bos - Outerde.
Fans Apso Sep 3
Oct. 430 431 DC230
Worke
Juno B 29 Agus Myky
0 2 0 3 004
737
69 6101),- (172 49.03 474 4
[AD] 5676 077 018 01920 927
22 23
29
30
NO. 1, FOUND
[AD] 24 25 (6) 26 (1) 27286 1582
37 (19) 0157 0
UPON THE LID OF AN OLD SPANISH
BOX.
BRASS
and which contain secret information as to
the whereabouts of the treasure, have been
evolved from the imagination of the author.
Has not Mr. Rider Haggard told us how the
chart of the wonderful "King Solomon's
Mines," which formed the frontispiece of the
book, was manufactured by his sister-in-
law? Indeed, I know of no instance where a
romance dealing with burled treasure. from
"Monte Cristo" to the present day, has con-
tained a real chart or a real secret cipher of a
real treasure hidden by pirates or by ad-
venturers of past time. The foregoing is
from a writer in the Strand Magazine, who
Koes on to say:-
It is by a strange turn of fortune's wheel
that to me, a matter of fact writer, and whose
fictional activities" can be counted on the
fingers of one hand-has come the opportuni-
ty of showing to my readers an actual in-
stance of carefully disguised instructions an
to the whereabouts of a burled treasure.
Moreover, the circumstances of the case al-
low me to directly enlist the interest of the
public by offering to the person who may
succeed In reading the meaning of the hiero-
glyphics I will show a substantial share in
the treasure to be found. Here are the facts
of the case:-
Early this year I contributed a serial article
on methods of cipher writing. from ancient
times up to the present day, to an English
magazine that
United States.
ticle ended with
cipher to which
circulates widely in the
Each part of this serial ar
a sentence written in a
historic Interest was at-
owner of the box wrote in a later letter tha.
that quoted above:-"The drawings watch I
send you are correct fac-similem of those ap-
pearing upon the box, and, while they ar
not no artistic as they might be, will answer
the purpose in view--that of solving the mya-
Botton
Lad
Box.
(it lach18 centimetres long.
dicated by the diagram in No. 2, and the
course to which lies "Right ahead, is, of
course, mainly conjecture.
No. 4 also contains a ship under sall. Bee
the circle at the extreme right. The two
horizontal rows of numerals may possibly be
a record of various sums of money, and the
line of oval drawings that extends horizon-
tally across No. 4 may be meant to represent
colns. I have no idea as to the meaning of
the female head at the extreme left with
1497" below it.
It is, at the least, probable that diagrams
Non. 1, 2, 3 and 4 are related to each other,
and contain, an n whole, the clew to the solu-
tion to this mystery. Any or who may at-
tempt to read this secret of the box and the
buried treasure must be prepared for the
possibility of losing some hair in the attempt,
even if the trial bring the consolation of an
Increase In head measurement due to an ab-
normal exercise of the brain.
CIPHER NO. 2, ON THE INSIDE
tery-I hope." For our present purpose we
are not concerned in the artistic beauty of
Finally append my offer to any person
who may succeed in bringing to fight the
burled treasure, about which I have now
given as full an account as I myself pos-
Re. The Mysterious Box and the Burled
Trensure.
1. John Holt Schooling, hereby promise to
Kive to any reader of the Strand Magazine
who may succeed in solving the mystery of
this box, and who thereby leads to the dis-
covery of the buried treasure, in the West
Inside.
AWST
Jof
OF THE LID OF THE BOX.
Indles, to which the owner of the box be-
lleves the preceding cipher or hieroglyphics

[PAGE BREAK]

their ingenuity to solve the various cipher
sentences. A good many persons were in-
terested by these old devices, and letters
OUR THUstratioILS
racy.
SO much as in their accu-
WHAT THE CIPHER MEANS.
Let us look at No. 1. the cipher on the out-
Side of Box
CIPHER NO
ON
were sent to me from America Ad elge-
where.
One of the letters I received from America
relating to my cipher articles contained the
rather startling offer that is set out in the
following letter:-
"Sin: I have read your interesting ar-
ticles 'Secret in Cipher,' and wish to submit
to you the drawings of some undecipherable
(to me) 'secrets' which appear upon an old
brass box in my possession. I am of the
opinion that they will reveal some burled
treasure in some of the islands, but have
never been able to find the person that could
decipher their meaning. If it should turn out
that my conjectures are correct. should
you make out this hidden secret, I am quite
willing to share with you whatever may he
found. If you are unwilling to attempt its
solution, you would confer a favor by re-
turning this 'enclosure' to the above."
A WASHINGTON OFFICIAL.
The writer of the letter is a gentleman who
holds an official appointment at Washing-
ton, U. 8. A. I do not now give his name
this information may very well come later
on, if any practical result comes from my
present offer. It suffices to say that the
editor has been informed as to the person-
ality of the gentleman who wrote the above
Jetter, and that both he and I entertain no
doubt as to the entire good faith of the
writer.
Some parsons may be disposed to slight
the idea of any buried treasure existing now-
adays. Of course, one has read of Captain
Marryat's piratea, and of Captain Kidd, who
carried on his piracies two hundred years
ago, and who was executed in England In
1701, and most of us have been properly de-
Recht door Zee A
THE BOX'S SIDE.
side of the lid of the box; The date at the
right hand. 1582. which is below the repre-
sentation of a man in uniform. may possibly
relate to the activities of a leading buccan-
eer. These pirates coininenced their depre
1000
Botto
000
to contain the clew, IL one-half share of
whatever I may receive from the discovery
of the treasure--the share promised to me
being one-half of the whole. This offer
amounts, therefore, to one-quarter of the
whole treasure which may be found.
MAY 1, 1836.
JOHN HOLT SCHOOLING.
NO FRIENDS LIKE THE OLD ONES.
There are no friends like the old friends
We knew so long ago;
They never fail to tell us all
We do not care to know.
They tell us we are getting bald;
They say, "You're very gray,"
Or. "Goodness, but you've changed a lot
Since you were young and gay.'
-Chicago Record,
MISUNDERSTOOD.
"Yes, sir," sald Dukane, who had just re-
turned from a fishing trip, "I caught a trout
which weighed a little over six pounds."
"That was a whopper," replied Gaswell.
5000
300
2000
200
[AD] 2000000000000 00000000001
CIPHER NO. 4, FOUND ON THE
dations on the Spaniards of America Boon
after the latter had taken possession of that
continent and of the West Indies. Their
number was much increased by a twelve
years' truce between the Spaniards and the
20
Botton
BOTTOM OF THE BRASS BOX.
"Yes, indeed, the fish was a whopper, I tell
you-but, er, you alluded to the fish, I pup-
pose?"
"No: to the story."-Pittsburg Chronicle-
Telegraph.
DESIGNS
FOR
up" as to
well nigh
usually p
estimates
other the
The jud
are to be
and the v
nounced 1
No. 27 i
with a full
finishing
with a R
transform
gown int
pleated ru
the front
pleated he
finishes t
little coa
divide the
topa at t
gandie, t
yard, and
forty-eigh
bow at th
ruffle and
of the go
Ten yar
centa y
broidered
ready edg
cents a v
for the F
satin rib
needed fo
[AD] $3.50. The
The waist
lining of
side unde
full puffs
tops. A f
ribbon col
Gown N
yards of
yard and
GRADU

[PAGE BREAK]

Way 24, 1896p10-action
10
TREASURE HID IN.
THE SPANISH MAIN.
lighted with the many tales of piratical 1.
venture and of treasure seekers that always
como fresh to minds that are perhapa a
Little jaded by life in big cities, but which are
usually dismissed as being merely cleverly
written yarna. But, on second thoughts, it
will be evident that no one would take the
trouble to make the carefully devised cipher
or hieroglyphics that are shown in the lus
trations merely to while away time, or with-
out the intention of recording some definite
Here's a Cipher That May Lead to meaning by these secret algns.
Fabulous Fortune Buried in
the West Indies..
OFFER OF FAIR
DIVISION.
One-Quarter of the Concealed Treasure - to
the Man Who Can Explain the
Cipher's Meaning.
HINTS AT AUTHOR'S IDEAS.
HE subject of burled
treasure has always
lad a fascination for
vritera of romance
and for their readers.
The incomparable
Robert Louis Steven-
son, Mr. Rider Hag-
gard, and other mod-
ern writers of ingeni-
ous and vivid tales of adventure have Intro-
duced the attractive color of hidden treasure
their romances, but in all cases, I -
Beyond all doubt there must have been a
lot of treasure, looted or otherwise, piled up
by the buccaneers of the last two centuries,
whose operatious on the "Spanish Main" and
whose vicinity to the West India Islands
caused them to choose these islands as a
convenient harbor of refuge and as a place
of safe bestowal for their plunder. More-
over, after I had received the above letter I
mentioned the subject I am now talking
about to a friend of mine in the navy-the
lleutenant who navigated the Thrush during
her West Indian cruise with Prince George
in command. My naval friend sald:-"Well,
there may be a lot of stuff burled somewhere
In the West Indlea; those fellows had plenty
of plunder to get rid of."
Anyway, I decided not to be "unwilling to
attempt the "solution" of this mystery of
the box and the buried treasure, But after
some study of the drawinga sebt from Wash-
Ington I came to the conclusion that "A bird
in the hand in worth two in the bush." My
time has a marketable value, and I simply
cannot afford to spend an unlimited amount
of time upon an uncertainty-valuable as tho
contingent result may be. Therefore, I decid-
ed to enlist the united Intellecto of the mill-
lon or no persons who read these pages, with
the intention of thereby arriving at a solu-
tion of the mystery of these necret ciphers,
and, consequently. of finding the where-
abouts of the burled treasure.
The result of my own study of these very
curious drawings does not enable me to give
to my readers anything like a definite clew
to their hidden meaning. At the beat, I can
only offer such scanty suggestions or ex-
planations an have occurred to me as being
possible hints toward a complete solution of
the mystery. I am sorry to say that a fairly
close acquaintance with English historical
cipher devices in not of much use to me
now.
the
the
NEW YORK HERALD, SUNDA
Dutch in 1000, when many of the discharged
sallora foined the buccaneers. The first levy
of ship money In England, In, was to de-
fray the expense of capturing these pirates,
and the chief commanders of the first buc
caneers were Mantbar. Lolonols. Basco and
Morgan. Another pirate, Van Horn, of Ost.
end. captured Vera Cruz. in 1003. and they all
gained enormous booty. This West Indian
huccaneer confederacy was broken u In the
year 1697. An. prior to the year 16, just
CLOS
PR
mentioned the In Next
dently made themselves notorious. It may
be that the person represented at the right
hand of No. 1 was one of the early buccan-
cors, who, prior to the truce of 100 between
the Spaniards and the Dutch. had been rald-
Ing the Spaniards in America. The head at
the left of No. 1 has the words "Vool Christ"
and "45" beneath it. I though Vool" a
Dutch word, but on inquiry I find that it is
signer
ing
not. so that the meaning of these words is MORE
obscure.
The other part of No. 1 seems to be a sort
of calendar, the numbers on the five bottom
lines run from 1 to 31 (reading from left to
right), and "5" at the commencement of the
third line from the bottom should evidently
be 15. The four numbers which follow the
"31" on the bottom line make up 1729, which
may refer to A. D. 1720, a date that brings
us up to the pirates who succeeded Cap-
tain Kidd. The three top lines of No. 1 ap-
parently refer to the months in a year, the
number of days in each month, and they
Dainty C
Be
contain a numeral for each month, which at DIFFICU
first sight appears to denote the numerical
order of each month in the year, but this in-
terpretation is considerably weakened by the
fact that several of these numerals do not
agree with the order of each month in the
year.
Coming to No. 2, the inside of the lid, the
lower left hand part of this diagram looks
like a diagonal scale, which is supplemented
by the longer scale across the top of No. 2,
and there is also the minutely written table
at the right of this fac-simile. The whole
thing may be some method of plotting, such
as is used in surveying or in navigation, to
Indiente a particular locality, or the means
of ascertaining Its whereabouts. Perhaps
nautical readers may be able to throw some
light upon the meaning of No. 2. I do not
regard it as a plece of cipher.,
We have now to deal with No. 3. The Dutch
words. "Recht door Zee." mean "Straight
would not
reason to

[PAGE BREAK]

lleve, the documents shown to the reader, various
parts of the mysterious box,
the
H
Vool
45
Lid of Bor - Outude
Fans Ap230 Se
7,830 Jul 30 9630
69
5 76
22
29
Jun30 2829 Aquis My 51
31
0 2 0 3 45 (B) 6 ( 70
40.- (072 49.03 474 €
7 78 979 920 (927 (
[AD] 20252627286 1582
30 (31) 77 (19 7 0 2 (99
23
CIPHER NO. 1, FOUND UPON THE LID OF AN OLD SPANISH
BRASS
and which cofitain secret Information as to
the whereabouts of the treasure, have been
evolved from the imagination of the author.
Has not Mr. Rider Haggard told us how the
chart of the wonderful "King Solomon's
Mines," which formed the frontisplece of the
book, was manufactured by his sister-in-
law? Indeed, I know of no instance where a
romance dealing with burled treasure, from
"Monte Cristo" to the present day, has con-
tained a real chart or a real secret cipher of a
real treasure hidden by pirates or by ad-
venturers of past times. The foregoing is
from a writer in the Strand Magazine, who
goes on to say:-
It is by a strange turn of fortune's wheel
that to me a matter of fact writer, and whose
"nctional activities" can be counted on the
fingers of one hand-has come the opportuni-
ty of shoing to my renders an actual in-
stance of carefully disguised instructions as
to the whereabouts of a buried treasure.
Moreover, the circumstances of the case al-
low me to directly enlist the interest of the
public by offering to the person who may
succeed in reading the meaning of the hiero-
glyphics 1 will show a substantial share in
the treasure to be found. Here are the facts
of the cas
Early this year I contributed a serial article
on methods of cipher writing, from ancient
times up to the present day, to an English
magazine that circulates widely in the
United States
BOX.
owner of the box wrote in a later letter thai.
that quoted above:-"The drawings which I
send you are correct fac-similes of those ap-
pearing upon the box, and, while they are
not so artistic as they might be, will answer
the purpose in view-that of solving the mys-
Botton
Lad of Box
jie lach100 centimetres Long.
through (the) Bea," or, as a Dutch triend
tells me, "Straight forward.". "Right
ahead," and there is a bluft bullt ship sailing
toward the setting sun, 1. c., the west.
Whether the treasure is buried on an Island
"Right in the deep sea," whose position is in-
dicated by the diagram in No. 2, and the
course to which lies "Right ahead," is, of
course, mainly conjecture.
No. 4 also contains a ship under sail. See
the circle at the extreme right. The two
horizontal rows of numerals may possibly be
a record of various sums of money, and the
line of oval drawings that extends horizon-
tally across No. 4 may be meant to represent
colns. I have no idea as to the meaning of
the female head at the extreme left with
"1497" below it.
It is, at the least, probable that diagrams
Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4 are related to each other.
and contain, as a whole, the clew to the solu-
tion to this mystery. Any one who may at-
tempt to read this secret of the box and the
buried treasure must be prepared for the
possibility of losing some hair in the attempt,
even if the trial bring the consolation of an
increase in head measurement due to an ab-
normal exercise of the brain.
Finally I append my offer to any person
who may succeed in bringing to light the
buried treasure, about which I have now
given as full an account as I myself pos-
Fess:-
Re. The Mysterious Box and the Buried
Treasure.
1. John Holt Schooling, hereby promise to
give to any reader of the Strand Magazine
who may succeed in solving the mystery of
this box, and who thereby leads to the dis-
covery of the buried treasure, in the West
Inside
AWS
Jop
CIPHER NO. 2, ON THE INSIDE OF THE LID OF THE BOX.
and Ingen
too difficul
temptation

[PAGE BREAK]

C8
Wednesday, June 20, 2001
History
Central Maine Newspapers
Archaeological looters prey on Indian history
By JULIE CART
Los Angeles Times
BLANDING, Utah - As he raced his
white Ford pickup south from Moab to-
ward the red sandstone canyons here,
Rudy Mauldin kicked himself for not
thinking of it before.
That morning, he and his partner,
fellow Bureau of Land Management
special agent Bart Fitzgerald, had
turned the case over and over with an-
other investigator. What were they
missing?
They knew that priceless artifacts
had been looted from a remote Indian
grave site. They knew that a burial
blanket had been stripped off the re-
mains of an infant and the skull tossed
on a trash heap. They had a suspect but
no link to the crime.
Then they remembered the backfill,
the pile of dirt left by the digger.
They sped back to the crime scene at
Horse Rock Ruin. As sunlight began to
retreat from the remote canyon, they
found their tiny but mighty evidence: a
cigarette butt.
After a crime lab extracted DNA
from the filter tip, Mauldin and Fitzger-
ald got their man- perhaps the most
notorious archaeological thief in Ameri-
can history.
The 1995 prosecution of Earl K.
Shumway was a watershed for the lit-
tle-known Archaeological Resources
Protection Act, a federal law enacted in
1979. His case was the first in which
DNA evidence led to a conviction for
antiquities theft. And it resulted in the
longest sentence ever for such a crime:
five years.
More ARPA crimes are prosecuted
in Utah than anywhere else in the na-
tion. American Indians are fed up with
thieves rooting around in their ances-
tors' graves, and authorities liken the
acts to looting the National Archives.
"You look at what these people do, and
it just makes you sick," said Assistant
U.S. Attorney Wayne Dance, who has
won more felony convictions in ARPA
cases than anyone. "I view this crime to
be highly important to society, because
of the irreplaceable nature of the loss."
Diggers roam rugged areas of the
Southwest in search of prehistoric bas-
kets, pots and even bones to sell. Ex-
perts estimate that more than 80 per-
cent of American Indian archaeological
sites, some dating back 17 centuries,
have been looted.
The bulk of the crimes take place in a
100-mile-long, north-south corridor
stretching from Arches National Park
and Moab in the north, south past the
dusty Utah towns of Monticello and
Blanding and through to Bluff, on the
edge of the Navajo Reservation near
the Arizona border.
It falls to U.S. Park Service and Forest
Service employees and BLM agents to
find the remote crime scenes, cull clues
from sand and rock and track the tes
ATTITUDE A PROBLEM
Any lawman looking for looters in-
evitably crosses paths with Shumway,
now 42, who once bragged to authori-
ties that he had been robbing graves
since he was 3. His father worked the
family's hardscrabble uranium mines,
and little Earl often would tag along,
poking into caves and burial mounds on
public lands. They took what they found
and considered it theirs.
That sense of entitlement, investiga-
tors say, stems from the belief that
there is a surfeit of artifacts here.
Modern archaeologists often catalog
sites but don't immediately excavate
them, which can lead the public to
wrongly conclude that they are not his-
torically important.
There also is the sheer volume of ob-
jects to be found here with little effort
- pot shards, arrowheads, cave walls
crowded with pictograms and petro-
glyphs. In Utah's San Juan County
alone, there are an estimated 20,000
known archaeological sites on BLM
land. More than 90 percent have been
looted. In the Four Corners area, "if you
walk 20 feet and not find something, you
are not looking," BLM archaeologist
Kathy Huppe said.
With the market for Southwest art
and artifacts at an all-time high, the
temptation here is to view Indian ruins
less as scientific and historic treasure
troves than as next month's rent.
And the hunted often are better
equipped than the hunters.
Shumway has hired helicopters to
drop him into some remote sites, while
other looters often employ high-tech
climbing equipment and rappel over
the sides of cliffs to access alcoves and
caves.
THEY MAKE A BIG MESS
The methods diggers employ to re-
trieve the fragile artifacts are not al-
ways subtle. In some cases, sites are
devastated by bulldozers, backhoes and
trenching machines that smash
through material that may be hundreds
of years old to get to the more valuable,
deeply buried, prehistoric layers. Re-
pairing the damage is expensive: The
rule of thumb is that the cost for an ar-
chaeologist to move a meter of dirt is
[AD] $5,000.
The cost of investigating ARPA
crimes, which often can take years to
solve, also is astronomical.
"You get to one of these old caves,
where people have been tramping
around for thousands of years, and
you've got a real dang puzzle on your
hands," Mauldin said. "You find more
evidence at your average murder
scene."
Investigators search for identifying
marks, even taking casts of shovel
holes to look for notches that may come
from the implement of ag Main digger
In crime scenes must cart stretch across
The Associated Press
Kathy Huppe, cultural resource coordinator for the Montecello,
Utah, office of the Bureau of Land Management, points to an an-
cient ancient artifact site near Blanding, Utah, last Aug. 24. The bu-
reau arrests and prosecutes people who steal Indian artifacts and
rock art from public lands.
miles of desert, even the most crafty turned his experiments and stolen his
criminal sometimes leaves a calling notes.
card.
"Earl (Shumway) was known for
drinking Mountain Dew at his sites. We
found the cans all over the place and
could tie him to scenes because of
that," Mauldin explained.
"It could make you crazy if you
thought about it," Huppe said.
Mauldin knows the market is the fi-
nal determinant, regulating archaeo-
logical looting in a way that law en-
forcement cannot. Digging will contin-
ue as long as there is a buyer for the ar-
STOLEN ARTIFACTS, LOST DATA tifacts.
To scientists studying artifacts, loca-
tion is everything. The bowls and bas-
kets and sandals that thieves seek hold
little interest for archaeologists once
they have been moved. Studied in its
historical context, a weapon or tool tells
a scientist a tale of how it was used,
when and why. Once moved, an ancient
bowl is simply a vessel existing in a vac-
uum.
Southwest archaeologists and an-
thropologists have been screaming into
the wind for decades about looting.
Their professional environment is akin
to a scientist who comes to work to find
someone has broken into his lab, over-
"It's the greatest treasure hunt in the
world, that's how they see it," Mauldin
said, gazing out from an alcove high up
a canyon wall. "Look around. It's out
here. And they'll keep looking for it. And
we'll keep looking for them."
Shumway, who did not show up af-
ter agreeing to an interview for this
story, is still out there. After DNA con-
nected him to the cigarette butt,
Shumway pleaded guilty in the Horse
Rock Ruin case to seven felony counts
of stealing Anasazi artifacts and was
sentenced to 6½ years in federal
prison. The sentence was reduced on
appeal to 60 months. He is back living
in the Moab area.
Crimes grounded in greed
(LAT) - A ceremonial mask was
the centerpiece of an unusual ar-
chaeological looting case in which an
art dealer recruited two Hopi men to
help him obtain a "friends" mask
believed to be a living thing and used
in secret male ceremonies. For such
an artifact to be taken out of a cere-
monial kiva would be surprising, as
such religious meeting rooms are sa-
cred. But for a friends mask to turn
up outside of Hopi land was unprece-
dented. The fact that Hopi men aided
in the theft was devastating.
"Ownership is not a Hopi concept,
so we don't understand the selling of
artifacts," said tribal prosecutor Dor-
ma Nevayakiewa, who handles Ar-
chaeological Resources Protection
Act cases in Arizona. The taboo
against tribal members taking part in
looting their own heritage is severe:
One of the Hopi suspects in the mask
case committed suicide within a week
of his arrest.
But financial need often triumphs
over taboo, and diggers overcome
squeamishness to go where the big
money lies the graves.
American Indians buried their
finest objects with the dead; those tex-
tiles that survive through several cen-
turies are highly prized at art auc-
tions. And infants typically were
buried with their toys; such rare and
tiny objects bring high prices on the
open market.
The demand for skulls and bones is
more difficult to gauge, but buying and
selling does take place. "If you think
there is no market for human re-
mains, you would be sadly mistaken,
said John Farley, an Albuquerque,
N.M.-based special investigator for
the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Code books help decipher
rock carvings by Indians
By JIM ROBBINS
New York Times News Service
PORTLAND, Ore. - Throughout the
Great Plains, images of men, horses
and a nomadic way of life have been
scratched into rock walls, a pictograph-
ic record whose precise meaning has
long been a mystery to modern eyes.
But researchers have recently un-
earthed documents that are helping
them pry far more detail from the im-
ages found on rock faces from Writing-
on-Stone Provincial Park in southern
Alberta to the cactus-studded plains of
northern Mexico. They say most of the
images are a form of picture writing, a
cross-tribal code that was widely recog-
nized.
"Indians the length and breadth of
the Plains were doing this stuff," said
Dr. James D. Keyser, a regional ar-
chaeologist for the U.S. Forest Service
in Portland whose three decades of
work have helped crack the code. "Any
American Plains Indian anywhere
could have looked at these pictures and
given you significant detail."
The documents that have emerged
are ledger books containing drawings
by Plains Indians, some from the early
1800s, when the influx of white settlers
and missionaries began pushing Indi-
ans from their territory. In addition to
the ledger books, the new analysis has
also been aided by finer dating tech-
niques and new ethnographic litera-
ture.
The new understanding comes as
rock art faces increasing threats from
vandals and continued weathering.
Representational rock art is classi-
fied as ceremonial, in which the art was
a depiction of a spiritual or shamanic
event, and biographic, which is a narra-
tive, usually about one person.
The biographic imagery includes
both pictograms-symbols like a stick-
figure man- and ideograms, pictures
that represent a concept. As the free-
roaming culture of the Plains Indian
came to an end, they stopped carving
pictures in the rock and instead painted
pictures on buffalo robes and tepees,
and in ledger books in the same picto-
graph language.
Some whites, fascinated by the lan-
guage in the ledger books, annotated
the drawings with explanations of what
the artists were talking about in their
preliterate rock art. These explanations
of the Indian symbology, along with
ethnography, are the heart of the new
lexicon. There are about 100 symbols in
the lexicon and perhaps 50 to 100 more
to decipher.
Speaking of Keyser's work, George
Horse Capture, a member of the Gros
Ventre tribe and a special assistant for
cultural resources at the Smithsonian's
National Museum of the American Indi-
an, said: "It's a great study. He's going
in the direction of specificity, far more
than any of his predecessors were able
to do."
Ledger books are scarce, though
Keyser hopes that more will turn up.
The rock art, too, is at risk. Much of it
has naturally weathered, and some of it
has fallen victim to humans. "When a
museum has jackhammered them out
of a wall or someone has shot them up
with a gun," Horse Capture said, "it
makes you feel like crying"
r

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May 1987 Vol 9#8
CIPHERNAUTS
EXPLORATIONS
By Paul Hoffman
he bait is buried treasure a
[AD] $14 7 million cache of gold silver.
and jewels believed to have
been stashed somewhere in the state of
Virginia more than 150 years ago. The
only clues to its whereabouts three sh
ct paper covered with a hodgepodge
1,901 numbers.
Some say it's a hoax, but the Pia
Cypher Association (BCA) isn't ready
Cve up its quest for the loot. For 26 y
the society, whose members range fro
IBM cryptographers and CIA spooks
to metal detector nobbyists, has strugg's
in vain to decipher the numbers that
could reveal the directions to the cache
One BCA member, convinced that he
had broken the code, rushed to the
prospective treasure site in Bedford
County, Virginia, surrounded it with formi-
dable fences, hired round-the-clock
guards, rented a bulldozer, and
unearthed-lo and behold-a 1930's car
Other enthusiastic members have
sneaked onto private property to dig
under cover of darkness but were seen,
shot at, and arrested for trespassing
These setbacks have not deterred the
BCA "I think it is fair to say that this
effort has engaged a large number of the
best cryptanalytic minds in the country,"
says Carl Hammer, seventy-three, the
former director of computer science at
Sperry Univac and a pioneer in using
computers to analyze the statistical
properties of ciphers "I myself have spent
ten years on these ciphers," says
Hammer, "and I'm not through yet.
The man responsible for this madness
was Thomas Jefferson Beale, a tall,
swarthy, ruggedly handsome adventurer
with jet-black eyes and hair who mined
gold and silver in Santa Fe and hauled it
back to Virginia in the early 1820's.
Because he was in trouble with the law
(rumor had it that he was seen leaving the
room of a woman who was not his wife),
Beale hid the gold and silver and disap-
peared, leaving a locked iron box in
the care of Robert Morriss, the respected
owner of a tavern in Lynchburg. That
summer Morriss received a long letter from
Beale, describing unpleasant encounters
26
OMNI
with buffalo and savage grizzlies and
explaining that the box in Morriss's
possists contained the coded where-
320d treasure Morriss
break the box open if
cam it in len
pist Momise that
cter revealing
se could
alessiv Needless
Enever arrived.
heard from Beale
a
ha! ile was massacred by
indians or mullated by savage animals is
only a matter for speculation
When Morriss pried open the box, he
found the three pieces of paper each
covered with numbers, along with a letter
from Beale claiming that the three papers
encoded the exact location of the treasure,
the precise contents of the stash, and
the names and addresses of the people
who had helped him to mine the gold and
silver For 17 years Morriss tried to break
the ciphers but failed to make any
headway In 1863, the year before he
died, he gave the ciphers to James B
Fortune hunters Crack the cipher and win big
Ward, a bartender and family man who
had accumulated sufficient savings to be
able to spend his days contemplating
numerical gibberish and searching for
elusive treasure
Ward decoded one of the papers after
he discovered that the cipher was a
remarkably simple one based on
numbering the initial letters of the
sequentially numbered words in the
Declaration of Independence. To decipher
the paper. Ward replaced each number
with the corresponding letter in the
Declaration of Independence Thus, 1
stands for W because the first word in the
Declaration is When: and 6 represents
h because the sixth word is human. Once
deciphered, the paper read in part. "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 [paper] number three
herewith The paper also revealed the
contents of the treasure (1.921 pounds of
gold. 5,100 pounds of silver, and, by
today's standards, some $3 35 million
worth of jewels) and ended on the tanta-
lizing note that one of the other two
messages "describes the exact locality of
the vault so that no difficulty will be had
in finding it.
This teaser, combined with the simplicity
of the deciphered code, has spurred on
generations of cryptographers In the
1960's some of the best minds in crypt-
analysis formed the BCA to pool their
knowledge and resources Hammer and
many of the other BCA members are
convinced that the coded message
leading to the treasure must have been
created by numbering a document like the
Declaration of Independence. BCA
members have numbered by hand and
by computer sections of the Bible, the
Magna Carta, the Louisiana Purchase
agreement, the Constitution, Shake-
speare's plays, and dozens of other texts
that Beale might have used. The problem
is not just finding the right text but
numbering it the right way: Perhaps,
they've considered, it's the last letter of a
CONTINUED ON PAGE 87

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MYERS'S
WORLD FAMGL
IMPORT
MYERS