Is Forrest Fenn’s mysterious treasure hunt really over?
Buried for a decade, a £1.5 million trove has been found. Luke Mintz reports
For more than a decade, a collection of centuriesold treasure lay buried in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains. Worth as much as £1.5million, it was hidden there in 2010 by eccentric antiques dealer Forrest Fenn, who first had the idea to start a treasure hunt when he was diagnosed with cancer in 1988.
The only clue as to its whereabouts was a cryptic, 24-line poem published in Fenn’s autobiography, The Thrill of the Chase – and thousands of people from across the world took the bait, roaming the deserts, rivers and rugged mountainsides of western America to find the treasure chest, which is said to contain 265 gold coins, ancient Chinese jade figures, golden jaguar claws, rubies, emeralds, diamonds and sapphires.
But that all ended last week when Fenn, 89, a Vietnam air force veteran who made his fortune as an arts dealer in the New Mexico city of Santa Fe, announced that the treasure had been found “under a canopy of stars in the lush, forested vegetation of the Rocky Mountains, and had not moved from the spot where I hid it”.
So far, he has released only scant detail of the supposed winner – prompting nearly as many theories and rumours as the treasure hunt itself. But the news has put an end to what might have been the world’s largest treasure hunt, one that – despite being criticised by some as a grotesque puppet show orchestrated from a rich man’s living room (five people are thought to have died while treasure-hunting) – was praised for reigniting the buccaneering spirit of the American West.
British filmmaker Tomas Leach spent time with Fenn in 2014 while making The Lure, a film about the controversial race. He remembers being transfixed by Fenn’s mansion, a “museum slash lair” stuffed with American Indian artefacts. “He’s very opinionated and mischievous, but was also very warm, patient, and kind to me,” Leach remembers. “He likes the story that’s wrapped up in things, including himself.”
For Leach, the key to understanding why so many people quit their jobs to find the treasure, bracing the notoriously unforgiving conditions of the Rockies – where seasons are subject to sudden change – is accepting that it has very little to do with cold, hard cash. “It’s not money you’re searching for – it’s gold and jewels. That taps into a romantic, childhood idea of heading out and finding your own riches. It’s timeless, it’s that human thing of wanting to be smarter than the next person. We all think we can solve this – it’s why board games are so good, it’s why we gamble.
“And it’s almost the only part of the world [where] you can believe something like this would still be happening. The American Southwest is full of mythology and breathtaking landscapes and wilderness. It’s very easy to get lost and never be seen again.”
Indeed, Leach very nearly found himself caught up in hype as he was on the plane to Santa Fe to film his documentary, reading Fenn’s poem for clues. The key stanza advises, “Begin it where warm waters halt / And take it in the canyon down / Not far, but too far to walk / Put in below the home of Brown.” Gazing at the clouds, Leach suddenly made a connection. “I got this spark of, ‘Oh, it could be here!’ But I shut myself down. I realised it would be impossible to make a film if I was spending my entire time thinking where the treasure could be. I would be lost in the mountains with a scraggly beard, with no film to show for it.”
Leach met a handful of the people searching for the chest. Some were families who saw it all as a bit of fun; others, professional treasure-hunters (usually middle-aged men) who jetted in from thousands of miles away and took it all terribly seriously. Leach talks with particular fondness about an “incredibly gentle” rancher called David, a major character in his film, who seemed “as kooky and wild as they come” but had spent “a good deal of time thinking about legacy and what it means to be in the American West, and what it is to be a man in this environment”.
As for the person who found the chest last week, all that has been revealed is that it was a man “from back East”; Fenn claims to have a photo of the victor with the unearthed treasures, but has not released it.
That news came as something of a disappointment to Leach. “I hoped it would have been one of the more down-to-earth family-style searchers, getting to places they never would have been before, and understanding things about themselves that perhaps they hadn’t looked at. ‘From back East’ paints a picture of somebody jetting in to do it – it conjures an idea of an Eighties Wall Street guy. But who knows?”
It is clear Fenn’s game has brought joy to thousands; there are whole online communities devoted to sharing clues, for example. But it has delivered its fair share of tragedy, too. In 2016, Randy Bilyeu, a 54-year-old from Colorado, bought a raft and set off along the Rio Grande to find the treasure, armed with a GPS device and wetsuit. But Bilyeu went missing, with his remains discovered six months later. He took his terrier, Leo, along with him – the dog was found alive the day after Bilyeu went missing.
Also among the five thought to have died in the process is Paris Wallace, 52, a pastor whose body was found in the same river in 2017, about seven miles downstream of where his car was parked; and Jeff Murphy, 53, who slipped and fell 500ft in Yellowstone National Park the same year.
Pete Kassetas, New Mexico’s police chief until last year, begged Fenn to call off the hunt “in the interest of public safety”. Fenn has described the deaths as “tragic” and added extra clues to his blog, urging people not to look in unnecessarily dangerous locations. “It is not under water, nor is it near the Rio Grande,” he wrote. “It is not necessary to move large rocks or climb up or down a steep
‘I had hoped the finders would be more of a downto-earth family’
precipice.” But he refused to call off the search altogether.
And there are others, still, who think the whole game is a hoax, and there never was any treasure. This is the view of Linda Bilyeu, the ex-wife of Randy Bilyeu, who said of the latest announcement that she believed Fenn “needed attention and this is how he got it… Randy lost his life searching for nothing”.
Leach’s own view is that the treasure chest is real, but he thinks there may well be another chapter to Fenn’s remarkable game. “Having seen Forrest’s house and his collection of incredible artefacts, and having spent time with him and knowing some of his values, there was definitely a treasure. Now, whether there are tricks or different layers to the hunt that we don’t understand, I can believe that. The poem is so vague, the landscape is almost unimaginably vast, and the treasure is incredibly tiny.
“I want proof. I want to see somebody holding this treasure before I believe there’s not another element of this story.”