I think that the ciphers exist, but I don’t think Thomas Beale wrote them. I know the treasure didn’t originate in New Mexico, unless it was stolen, and I can’t imagine that much being stolen from Conquistadors. New Mexico was a territory, but the Adams-Onis Treaty had just been signed. This treaty ceded New Mexico, California and the territories of Utah, Arizona and Nevada to Spain. There was never gold found in New Mexico. Onate, Cordova, and later, the US colonizers from the east spent years looking for it, but gold was never found.
I think that Edgar Allen Poe made up the whole thing to promote his writings. At the time that the ciphers surfaced, his career was tanking. He was broke and he needed the boost. He loved ciphers and would challenge others to crack them. Since only one has been solved and that was solved by James Ward, those ciphers may not even be real. With all the technology we have now, someone should have been able to crack them, but no one has. There were only 20,000 literary works in creation then and Beale may have had access to about 5,000, so when you think about it that way, Poe, or someone could have just written a bunch of numbers down on paper and they don’t mean anything.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-2289

#buriedtreasure #ciphers #ThomasBeale #EdgarAllenPoe