“I’ve had to dial 911 three times,” he told People last year. He’s been sent death threats and bribes on occasion, strangers appear at his front gate unannounced, to dig around his property for information. Now 86 years old and in poor health, Fenn receives hundreds of emails a day from people looking for an advantage in finding the chest - mostly older men. In conjunction with the poem, the clues provide just enough context to rile up the confidence of treasure hunters.
Forrest fenn thrill of the chase poem plus#
Within a decade, he was running an art gallery with $6 million in annual sales, catering to clients like Steven Spielberg and Gerald Ford.įacing his grim prognosis, Fenn says he stuffed a 10-by-10-by-6-inch Romanesque chest with some of the finest treasures he’d acquired over the years - pre-Columbian jewelry, gold nuggets the size of chicken eggs, ancient jade carvings, emeralds, diamonds - plus a copy of his autobiography. In his controversial exploits throughout the American Southwest (including a purchase of the entire San Lazaro pueblo), Fenn amassed a collection of ancient artifacts ranging from handwoven Paiute baskets to Sitting Bull’s original peace pipe. He’d arrived in the early ’70s - a mysterious, square-jawed Air Force veteran with a small savings and a high school diploma - and quickly earned a reputation as a treasure hunter. In 1988, Forrest Fenn was diagnosed with cancer.īy then, he was already a local legend in his hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico. You begin to ignore contradictory facts.Īnd before you know it, you’re in the middle of a rainstorm in Wyoming, wondering how you got there. Then we headed out West to stake our fortune.īut a funny thing happens when you convince yourself you’re right: Logic cedes to psychological trickery. We interviewed half a dozen people who’d gone on the quest, and crafted three infallible theories that we were sure would lead to the chest. Last fall, my colleague Estelle and I joined the hunt. They all convince themselves they know exactly where it is, but they end up failing. Hundreds of people from across the country and around the world - a middle-aged steamboat operator in Mississippi, a tenacious Floridian housewife, a Scottish poet - have tried to locate the chest. We came here to find a chest filled with $2 million worth of treasure, hidden by an eccentric, wealthy 80-year-old man. We flew across the country to get here, spent 24 hours on the road, hiked for miles through pinyon forests and over granite peaks. Strewn across our laps is a mess of maps, field guides, and notes - months of research. We’re in the middle of Yellowstone National Park, listening to the rain pound against the hood of our rental Jeep.