Expert To Examine Battered Chest If Authentic, Lost Forty-Niners’ Loot Will Be True Treasure

Uncertain whether a battered chest found by a Pearblossom archaeologist was really left by a Gold Rush expedition in 1849, National Park Service officials are calling in an expert to determine whether the treasure is authentic and not a hoax.

An expert from the National Park Service’s Western Archeological and Conservation Center in Tucson, Ariz., is scheduled to arrive today to examine the chest, which Jerry Freeman said he found hidden in a rocky alcove high on Pinto Peak at Death Valley’s western rim.

“If this is authentic, the real treasure here isn’t the objects,” said Terry Baldino, supervisory ranger at Death Valley’s main visitor center. “They can probably be found in any city in an antique shop. The treasure is who they belonged to and the context where they were found - the story they can tell us about the folks who went across here in 1849.”

The chest is in Park Service custody, turned over Jan. 5 by Freeman, who found it while exploring possible routes taken by the lost forty-niners, the first white people to stumble into the lowest, hottest, driest spot in North America.

Park Service employees are photographing and documenting the objects, which include $52.75 in pre1849 gold and silver coins, a flintlock pistol, bowls, a shawl, a locket, a hymnal, law books and a letter signed with the name of William Robinson, one of the lost fortyniners, who died 200 miles away and 26 days after the date on the letter.

Freeman said an attorney has estimated that the chest and its contents could be worth $500,000.

A Death Valley park staffer checked Internet listings on the coin prices. They would be worth only several hundred dollars if there was no historic connection, Baldino said.

“We personally would all like this to be the real thing,” Baldino said. “It really would be a fabulous find. There is so little left behind by the forty-niners when they trekked through here that particular month. This would be a treasure.”

One of the factors that make park officials wary is that the chest, if authentic, went undiscovered for 149 years. The Panamint Mountains west of Death Valley are rugged, unpopulated and unforgiving, but they were crisscrossed for decades by hundreds of prospectors and treasure hunters.

Within months after lost forty-niners found their way out of Death Valley, treasure seekers showed up in hope of finding silver deposits in the Lost Gunsight Lode, so named because one miner picked up a nugget that he later turned into a rifle sight.

They also were looking for $2,500 in coins rumored to have been buried under a blanket, beneath a creosote bush in the Panamints, when the exhausted forty-niners were out of water and no longer could carry anything.

“When you think about all the folks and look at all the holes poked in the hills, you start to wonder,” Baldino said.

Baldino said there was a resurgence of interest in the lost forty-niners during the 1940s as the centennial of Death Valley’s discovery approached. A group interest culminated in the organization of a group called the Death Valley ‘49ers, who meet every November in the area and for years have explored the lost miners’ possible routes.