Student Finds Elusive Treasure of Gold, Gemstones and Pre-Columbian Artifacts Stashed in Rocky Mountains
The identity of a medical school student from Michigan who found a treasure chest in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming this past summer was made public earlier this month.
Jack Stuef’s find ended a decade-long contest launched by the late antiquities dealer Forrest Fenn.
In the treasure chest was about $2 million in gold nuggets, coins, sapphires, diamonds and pre-Columbian artifacts, The New York Times reported.
Fenn hid the trove in the Rocky Mountains in 2010, and shortly thereafter he published a memoir titled “The Thrill of the Chase.”
In it, he included “a mysterious 24-line poem that, if solved, would lead searchers to the treasure,” according to Outside magazine’s Daniel Barbarisi.
“Fenn had suggested that the loot was secreted away at the place where he had envisioned lying down to die, back when he’d believed a 1988 cancer diagnosis was terminal. Since the hunt began in 2010, many thousands of searchers had gone out in pursuit — at least five of them losing their lives in the process — and the chase became an international story,” recounted Barbarisi, who has a book coming out next summer about Fenn’s hunt called “Chasing the Thrill.”
Stuef, 32, learned about the treasure in 2018 and became obsessed with it. The former journalist set out to learn as much as he could about Fenn.
A decorated Air Force combat pilot from the Vietnam War, Fenn did at least limit the treasure search field to the Rocky Mountains, somewhere north of Sante Fe, New Mexico.
Stuef wrote in a September post on Medium, “I figured out the location where he wished to die (and thus, where his treasure was) back in 2018, but it took me many months to figure out the exact spot.”
After succeeding in his quest in early June, Stuef drove from Wyoming to New Mexico, where Fenn was living, to show the writer his find.
Fenn then told the world the treasure had been found, but he kept Stuef’s identity private at Stuef’s request.
The student feared he would face harassment or physical violence if people knew he had the treasure.
I found the Fenn Treasure https://t.co/wFlt3oT8Ow
— Jack Stuef (@stuef) December 7, 2020
Fenn died in September at the age of 90, but his family sought to honor Stuef’s wish to remain anonymous; however, a lawsuit forced their hand.
On June 8, a Chicago lawyer filed suit in U.S. District Court in Santa Fe against Fenn and the then-unknown treasure finder, The New York Times reported.
“The lawyer, Barbara Andersen, said that after she had spent several years painstakingly deciphering Mr. Fenn’s poem and scouting out the general location of the treasure, someone hacked her cellphone and stole proprietary information that led them to the trove.”
In a Dec. 7 post, Stuef explained that he went public as a result of the suit.
“The U.S. District Court for New Mexico has ruled that Forrest’s estate must provide some of my personal information to a woman I do not know and with whom I have never communicated who has brought a meritless lawsuit against me. This would make my name a matter of public record, so I chose to come forward,” he wrote.
Fenn’s family confirmed in another statement that Stuef was the finder.
“Jack found the treasure chest as a result of years of careful searching, without any help from my grandfather, myself, or any other member of our family,” wrote Fenn’s grandson, Shiloh Forrest Old.
“We congratulate Jack on finding and retrieving the treasure chest, and we hope that this confirmation will help to dispel the conjecture, conspiratorial nonsense, and refusals to accept the truth,” he added.
Stuef has not sold the treasure yet, but he said he does anticipate using it to pay off student loans and has decided not to become a practicing doctor.
“I was kind of in this sunk-cost-fallacy dead end with that, where I didn’t want to quit, because I didn’t know what else to do,” he told Outside. “I didn’t know how to pay off my loans if I didn’t become a doctor. [The chest] was kind of my lifeline.”
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