In 1883, large chunks of Lynchburg, Virginia, were affected by a fire, and one building that was totally destroyed was the home of both The Virginian newspaper, and the Job Printing Works – the latter of which was run by one James Beverly Ward.
Both the paper and the printing firm suffered financially; their equipment was destroyed, and their workers laid off while repairs were conducted. Some form of income was needed to help get the businesses and their workers back on their feet.
The cipher key was the Declaration of Independence; and the cipher was solved by taking each number from the code, and counting to that number word in the Declaration. The first letter of that word would be a letter of the decoded message. There is an interesting fact about this decoding, however: Whoever encoded it made some mistakes in the count, and so the words the reader is supposed to get to are not always the correct ones. And yet Ward somehow made the exact same mistakes in order to decode it. In other words, the person who encoded, and the person who decoded it, are one and the same. Ward created the whole thing as a puzzle fiction to raise funds for the wrecked business and its workers.
You’d think that if the pamphlet is a fiction, and it was written in 1885, then the answer to the question of where the treasure is now must be ‘nowhere, because it never existed’. There’s logic to that, but there’s also a But…
There were actually local tales of buried treasure in Bedford County that predate the Beale papers. Ward didn’t simply make up the whole thing out of his own imagination. He combined some existing folktales with a dash of Poe’s popular cryptography and a few fashionable elements of puzzle.
Basically, in 1819 a guy called Thomas Read, and some friends, borrowed a wagon with a block and tackle from a man called Sheriff Isaac Otey of Bedford County, according to Bedford County court records, to move pots of silver. In the process, they broke the hoist and damaged the wagon. Read then went off west somewhere when Sherriff Otey tried to claim compensation of $20–$25.
Two years later, Read came back as part of a wagon train, but a mail courier spotted him in route and warned Otey, who put together a posse of friends and family, including several Bufords. There were even armed slaves in the posse, which intercepted Read near Apple Orchard Overlook, on what is now the Blue Ridge Parkway. Sheriff Otey arrested him on charges of damages to his property.
Read and some men in the wagon train decided to resist arrest – it was the Wild West, after all – and several of the men were Native Americans, which meant that the posse were more than happy to slaughter and bury them at the roadside. The posse then looted the wagons and bodies, finding some gold, silver and jewels. They then buried the white bodies in a field owned by one of the posse, named Luck.
Paschal Buford, who was Otey’s brother-in-law as well as a horse farmer, and owner of Buford’s Tavern, later recommended that his grandson William buy Wilkerson’s Mill, on Goose Creek. William in turn was a friend of, yes, James Beverly Ward, and the pair bought the Mill together. Ward was married to Harriet, a grand-niece of Sheriff Otey, who was also a grand-niece of Robert Morriss. Funny how all these familiar names are connected, isn’t it?
The other inspiration for The Beale Papers was a story in The Virginian newspaper in 1879. This retold a story, from a Kentucky newspaper, of a man who had left coded instructions to where he had buried gold, silver and jewellery in a sugar kettle in a cave in the early years of the Civil War. Robert Willis had stashed this loot on his farmland in Kentucky, in 1861, before going on a cattle drive to Nashville. Willis was killed, but his widow kept the secret, living off it for 18 years. Before she died, she owned up to the secret, and left instructions that a large chunk of what was left – $65,000 in gold and silver, and $10,000 in jewellery – be given to charity and to keep her now-aged servants comfortable.
There’s a lot of commonality between this and the Beale story: similar amounts of the same types of treasure, stashed in iron pots in caves, with a single person keeping the secret…
The Beale treasure, then, isn’t quite imaginary, but also isn’t quite real. It’s a confabulation of an exaggeration of the valuables carried by Thomas Read, and the Willis treasure of 1879, which was of a comparable size and value.
Unfortunately this means that, while there is treasure associated with the Beale ciphers, it’s not treasure that can be found by cracking the code. It was simply the inspiration for the Beale story.
WHERE IS IT NOW?
The Willis treasure, obviously, was found in 1879, and returned to the local economy. Likewise, the valuables carried by Read were either stashed in Wilkerson’s Mill – in which case William Buford and James Ward will have dug it up – or else was the capital with which the two men bought the property. Either way, it too was returned into the Bedford County economy nearly 150 years ago.
It’s still a fun challenge to work out where Ward intended the treasure to be located – there have been treasure-hunting games, published as books, which led to prizes, so perhaps Ward might have at least hidden a congratulatory message somewhere, for whoever solved his puzzle.
Any search, sticking to the information known from the pamphlet, needs to be within a 4-mile radius of the site of Buford’s Tavern. This is hard to find nowadays, but is a decrepit house visible from Route 460 (the West Lynchburg–Salem Turnpike), a few miles south-west of the village of Montvale. On rougher maps that don’t show Montvale, it’s about 8 miles west north-west of Bedford and, from the other side, about 11 miles north-east of Roanoke.
The nearby Goose Creek is a good location for a treasure hunt (there’s a nice hiking trail along it) but it doesn’t fall within the 4-mile range from the site of Buford’s Tavern. However, there is also an outcrop of hills called Goose Creek Peaks, which is well within the 4-mile limit.
Mountain View Cemetery, dug up by a woman in 1983, is 4 miles east of the Buford site, and about half a mile south-west of Montvale. That said, over the years, there have been reports of individuals and groups excavating in every cemetery in Bedford County – and a little bit beyond – just on the off-chance.
THE OPPOSITION IN YOUR WAY
Technically, none, since the Beale treasure is fictional, and the two hoards that inspired it were recovered long ago. That said, if you plan to go digging up cemeteries, you ought to be prepared for opposition from the local police and sheriffs’ departments, as well as annoyed local residents.
The area is home to brown bears, so do be careful not to get between an adult bear and her cubs, as that is the best way to get attacked. Making noise when walking through the woods is usually enough to alert the bears to your presence, and will encourage them to stay out of your way. If you have an urge or tendency to move quietly so as not to disturb animals, forget that habit in bear country: the second-best way to get attacked by a bear is to sneak up and surprise it.
Snake-wise, there are northern pine snakes, which are harmless but grow up to 7ft long. They have green/brown patches on a white or cream base colour, and will play dead rather than attack. There are also eastern hognosed snakes, which will hide and sometimes spray musk at you, but are otherwise harmless, and eastern king snakes, which have red markings.
This part of Virginia is also a hotspot for Bigfoot sightings, if that sort of thing worries you.
As for human predators, the Lynchburg area is rated as more crime-ridden than average for the State by the FBI, with a crime rate higher than 86 per cent of the rest of Virginia – but it still has only average crime for the US as a whole.
It’s worth noting, if you are a fan of bourbon, that this Lynchburg is not the home of Jack Daniel’s. That Lynchburg is in Tennessee.
KUSANAGI AND THE HONJO MASAMUNE
WHAT IS IT?
These two treasures are particular kinds of specialist antique: historic swords.
Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, which means Grasscutter-sword, is one of the three pieces (the others are a curved jewel and an eight-sided mirror) of the Japanese Imperial Regalia, which are supposed to be u
sed in imperial coronation ceremonies, but which haven’t been seen in public for centuries. Kusanagi was, according to legend, given to the Twelfth Emperor of Japan by the goddess Amaterasu.
The Honjo Masamune is a more recent sword; a katana made by the swordsmith Gorō Nyūdō Masamune sometime around AD 1300. It actually became known as Honjo Masamune 300 years later, after the 16th century General Honjō Shigenaga took it as a spoil of battle, and it went on to be a physical symbol of the Shogunate throughout the Edo period. It is considered by some historians, and lots of admirers of Japanese culture, to be the finest sword ever made. It was last seen in 1946, being handed over to an American soldier at a police station in the Mejiro district of Tokyo.
HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH TO YOU?
Kusanagi’s worth is difficult to estimate, as it has an essentially mythical origin. That said, there have been actual physical versions of the sword, dating back to around the 8th century. An intact sword of that age – in any culture – would be worth millions.
Likewise, the Honjo Masamune, a katana dating from the 14th century, would be worth around $5-$8 million today, just as an antique – that’s the kind of range in which other swords of similar vintage have been valued. Given its history, and its sacred place in Japanese culture, however, it should actually fetch a lot more.
THE STORY
Kusanagi is a sword from legend, like Excalibur. Rather than a Sword in the Stone, however, it was the Sword in the Snake, having been torn from the body of an eight-headed hydra-like serpent, which had been slain by Susa-no-O-no-Mikoto, the god of storm and sea. (He defeated it by the simple expedient of getting all eight heads drunk on rice wine, and then cutting them off. Unsporting, but effective.) The sword was originally called Ame-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi, and Susa-no-O gave it to his sister, the sun goddess Amaterasu, who in turn gave it to the 1st century warrior Yamato Takeru. Yamato was then lured into a trap by a demonic enemy, who set the grassland around him on fire, intending to burn him alive. Yamato, however, used the sword to cut away the grass and scatter it to the winds, and so the sword acquired its new name – Grass-Cutter sword.
For centuries, the sword has been considered the symbol of valour in the Imperial Regalia, despite having been stolen at least once, lost in a sea battle at least once, and was last seen uncovered in the Edo period (somewhere between the 16th and 19th centuries!)
Since then, it has always been covered up in sacred wrappings, as have the rest of the Imperial Regalia. They’re all said to be housed in the Atsuta Shrine in Nagano Prefecture, though not on public display, and Kusanagi hasn’t been seen in centuries. The Japanese authorities have long kept the world guessing about the reality and ownership status of Kusanagi by this means.
The Honjo Masamune was made around 1326 by the master swordsmith Masamune. According to legend, he had a competition about it with his great rival (and some say prodigal student), Sengo Muramasa. Each smith hung a sword they had made over a stream. The Muramasa cut clean through everything that touched it, including fish, sticks and leaves, while the Masamune only cut the leaves, but deflected the fish aside. Muramasa claimed victory, as his sword had cut more, but a watching monk disagreed. The monk said this test had proved the Masamune’s superiority, because it was as good at deflecting things aside, and didn’t cut things unnecessarily, by which he meant it didn’t slice up innocent bystanding lifeforms like the fish.
This, incidentally, led to another Samurai sword legend – that a blade drawn must taste blood. The tradition became attached specifically to Muramasa blades, after the monk declared Muramasa’s blade as potentially evil, as it was indiscriminately bloodthirsty. Over time, that idea spread to other parts of the culture.
The Honjo Masamune got the ‘Honjo’ appellation from General Honjō Shigenaga, who, at the tender age of 21, won it as booty in the Fourth Battle of Kawanakajima, in 1561. Shigenaga was one of Japan’s most famous historical badasses – the previous owner of the sword that now bears Honjo’s name actually used it in the battle to split Shigenaga’s helmet clean in half. Amazingly, however, it didn’t do the same to Shigenaga’s head, and he was able to kill the guy and take his sword.
The story ensured the sword would always bear his name, but, sadly, Shigenaga wasn’t as good an accountant as he was a badass, and four years later he sold it to the Toyotomi Shogun, ruler of Japan. Five years after that, Tokugawa Ieyasu kicked out the Toyotomi, and founded the legendary Tokugawa Shogunate.
Ieyasu was so impressed with the sword – since by this point Masamune was already long-established as the greatest smith ever in Japanese culture – that he made it a symbol of his dynasty, and it remained so until the shogunate ended in 1868. His descendants still kept it, however, until World War II, when the sword was owned by Tokugawa Iemasu, President of the House of Peers (the Japanese equivalent to the UK’s House of Lords). After the surrender of Japan in 1945, the Allied Occupation Authority decided that swords were all cultural weapons of war that needed to be impounded and destroyed. They were to be given to police stations, who would turn them over to the appropriate Allied officials.
Iemasu, to settle angrier voices, and perhaps thinking that they would be returned as historical artefacts, happily turned over the whole Tokugawa sword collection, including the near-legendary Honjo Masamune, which was then considered the most famous and valuable sword in Japan. He took 15 historical blades to the Mejiro police station in Tokyo, in December 1945. From there, they were handed on to a US 7th Cavalry sergeant named on the station’s paperwork as Coldy Bimore. None of them were ever seen again, and it turns out that no Coldy Bimore has ever served in the US military.
PREVIOUS SEARCHES IN FACT AND FICTION
Kusanagi hasn’t been the subject of much treasure-hunting in real life, as opinion is fairly split between those who feel it isn’t lost (and lives at the Atsuta Shrine), and those who feel it never existed in the first place. Neither of which are good motivators for searching for it.
That said, about a decade ago, a news team from NHK, Japan’s national TV network, did try to gain access to the sword in order to film it and verify its condition. Negotiations broke down, however, and the film crew was turned away when they arrived at the shrine.
Its legendary status, however, means it has been used a lot in fiction, especially in manga, anime and videogames. It’s especially prevalent in the Final Fantasy series of videogames, as well as in the Naruto and Usagi Yojimbo franchises. It appears in Okami, Sailor Moon (in the guise of the Space Sword) and can be acquired in World of Warcraft. It’s also used by one of the villains in The Darkness II. In most of these, it doesn’t remotely resemble the correct type of sword, but is usually depicted as either a katana or some kind of glaive.
In western culture, it’s one of the three holy swords that contain a nail from the crucifixion in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels, and is stolen in the Steve Martin movie The Pink Panther 2 (in which it’s a katana).
It also gave its name to the main protagonist of the Ghost In The Shell franchise, just as its supposed owner, Yamato, gave his name to the world’s biggest battleship in World War II. The sword has also recently given its name to the largest wooden building in Japan, the Kusanagi Sports Complex Gymnasium.
The Honjo Masamune has been the focus of searching for decades, but this has mainly been in the form of online research, sifting through libraries, and so on.
Sword and treasure-hunting Internet forums are occasionally enlivened by people claiming to have found it, and sometimes even showing photos or videos as an attempt at proof. However, the Honjo has, like all handmade swords, individual characteristics and blade markings (you can see the 1945 drawing of the markings here: http://ericwrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/honjo.jpg), and none have yet matched, nor indeed turned out to have Masamune’s signature (which few of his blades do, but the Honjo is one of them).
There is a Masamune that’s known to have come back to the US in March 1946, brought by General Walter Krüger of th
e 6th Army. This one was presented to President Harry S. Truman, on behalf of the Japanese government, and is held in the Truman Library. It’s unsigned but authenticated and so, no, not the Honjo, but it is one of only ten known surviving Masamune blades.
In 2014, the Shimazu Masamune, another signed blade, turned up in Kyoto, having previously disappeared during the war. It wasn’t one of those that Iemasu had turned over in 1945, as his family had gifted it to Princess Kazu in 1862.
The Honjo, like Kusanagi, makes frequent appearances, with appropriate special powers, in manga, anime and videogames. It is the focus of an episode of Warehouse 13, in which it has the power to make the wielder invisible because it is so sharp that it actually cuts light.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
While Kusanagi’s origin is obviously mythical, sword development in Japan does go back a long way, centuries before the first katana and tachi style swords – what Westerners tend to think of as Japanese swords – came about.
It’s known from finds at places such as Misasagi, the old imperial mausolea, and various other ancient burial sites, that swords of the form matching Kusanagi’s description have been made from the 2nd century BC, through to the 8th century AD. Prior to the 8th century, there was no standard cultural sword design in Japan. By the 6th century Chinese, Korean and Japanese smiths were producing swords with blades running from 2ft to 4ft, with different types of hilt. They were all straight-bladed, whether single- or double-edged, and the tip curved inwards on both sides to a point – pretty much like Bronze-Age swords from other parts of the world. This type of sword was known as Tsurugi in Japanese, and later as Ken – the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese ideogram, which remains as the root for the words kendo and kenjutsu, Japanese sword-fighting arts.
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