A novel inspired by a real-life treasure hunt illuminates the American West
The story reads like something out of an adventure movie: a charismatic, self-mythologizing millionaire living out his dotage in Santa Fe, New Mexico, buries a bronze chest full of gold nuggets, gemstones and other valuables in a secret location. In 2010, the millionaire – whose very name, Forrest Fenn, evokes the great outdoors – self-publishes a memoir that includes a poem containing nine clues to the treasure’s location in the Rocky Mountains. For a decade, treasure hunters scale peaks and search canyons in New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. At least five men die in their quests. Then, in June 2020, Fenn announces that the chest has been found in Wyoming; he dies soon after at age 90, his legacy secure.
Fenn made his fortune selling black-market Native American artifacts, forged paintings and other artworks in Santa Fe. He was a huckster with a taste for fantastical yarns, well-suited to sparking a mission that rested on the romanticization of the Wild West. In “Scavengers,” debut novelist Kathleen Boland, inspired by the real story of Fenn, punctures that romance and offers a more complicated, compelling view of the frontier’s allure. In the novel, Christy and Bea, a mother and daughter whose relationship has long been clouded by regrets, hurts and misapprehensions, hunt for a treasure broadly based on Fenn’s. While searching for a lode worth $1 million in the rugged desert landscape of southern Utah, Christy and Bea begin to see each other – and the American West – more clearly.
In “Scavengers,” it’s Christy who is drawn in by the promise of “gold in them hills!,” as she enthusiastically tells her daughter. Christy, a bankrupt bohemian high school dropout who has always struggled to take debt seriously, shells out for artisanal artificial houseplants and shoplifts presliced cantaloupe for thrills. Crucially, though, Boland draws her as more than a flighty joke of a woman. While Christy has recently dedicated her life to a dubious buried treasure, she has a “quiet confidence” in her ability to think critically, even if no one around her appreciates her opinions. Her ex-husband, a traveling HVAC salesman who absconded to live with a younger woman in Montreal when Bea was in middle school, always underestimated her. Bea – whom she named Beautiful – would come to underestimate her, too, not least because Christy abandoned Bea during her teenage years. Christy tracked down her husband in Montreal to ask for a divorce and ended up staying in the city for three years, working as a nanny and sending money to her mother, Gertie, who cared for Bea and whittled away her fortune on online poker.
When “Scavengers” opens, Gertie has recently died and Christy has moved to the outskirts of Salt Lake City, where she spends her days down the rabbit hole of an old-school web forum dedicated to deciphering the clues to the treasure hunt. Bea, now in her 30s, pays Christy’s rent. Bea is the only woman in her family to take money seriously – perhaps too seriously. As Boland writes, “A person does not become a high school valedictorian, go to an Ivy League school on scholarship, and take the first job they’re offered without a profound fear of the unknown.” As an agricultural commodities analyst at a Wall Street bank, Bea spent a decade attempting to control the unknown by using math and logic to predict how the weather would affect markets. From the start, Boland shows the flaws in Bea’s cut-and-dried worldview – her mother may be caught up in “the myth of some romantic bohemian dream,” but Bea, too, is caught up in a myth: that it is possible to correctly predict the future with the right inputs, to find a “quantifiable reality.”
In the aftermath of Gertie’s death, Bea pushes her luck in a way that leads to dishonor and a pink slip. After uncharacteristically burning through her savings, she sublets her Brooklyn apartment and finds herself on a plane to Utah to stay with the one person she has never trusted – her mother.
In Utah, when Christy reveals her bespoke treasure map, made by taping together “printouts of Wikipedia entries, hand-drawn outlines of family trees, grayscale topographic maps, sticky notes” and more, Bea finds it ridiculous and “exhausting” – more of the same from her erratic mother, who makes her feel “caged and mean.”
Scrambling for control as her money runs out, refusing to tell her mother the truth about why she’s turned up in Utah, Bea finds herself joining Christy’s improbable quest into the desert. Bea doesn’t believe that the treasure is real – she holds out hope that she can restore her role as a steady provider who relies on no one. Instead, she’s on a mission to protect her mother from another treasure hunter, a gruff, stocky man who goes by “OnlyBob” on the forum and has an interest in Christy’s map, if not Christy herself.
The resulting foolhardy, stuttering romp through a newly declared national monument, which Boland modeled on Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, brings both hilarity and opportunities for mother and daughter to reflect on each other’s motives. Christy’s map, which Bea had initially seen as “warlike and endless,” reveals itself as a precise blueprint, each scribble “a sliver of her mother’s brain” as she searched for her next steps after Gertie’s death. Christy, meanwhile, gradually sees through Bea’s facade of competence.
Boland weaves into these desert escapades omniscient interstitial passages that offer insight into the deep history of the appeal of the Wild West – and settlers’ disastrous attempts to control it and claim it for themselves. The enigmatic figure who buried the treasure is just one in a long line of White men who have believed they can own and tame the place. But as one forum participant writes, there is “no room for ego in the desert.” By highlighting the illusion of human dominion over the natural world, “Scavengers” reminds us that humility opens us to the possibility of awe. And as Bea loosens her grip on the story she has always told herself about her mother, she and Christy begin to see each other anew.
Kristen Martin is a cultural critic based in Philadelphia and the author of “The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood.”