Ten years later the chest of gold and jewels was finally found in the United States.
Now Netflix has made a three-part documentary series about the decade-long quest Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure, which premieres on the streaming service on Thursday 27 March.
Author and art dealer Forrest Fenn hid the treasure in 2010 (Photo: Netflix)
Forrest Fenn was born on 22 August, 1930 and grew up in Temple, Texas with an older brother and a younger sister.
While at high school, he met his wife-to-be Peggy Proctor.
He married Peggy in December 1953, after he had completed his training and she had finished her degree. The couple had two daughters Kelly and Zoe.
After retiring from the air force, he decided to pursue an entirely different career entering the world of art and sculpture. He collected Native American artifacts and began forging bronze sculptures and trading them.
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They made millions from the business but in 1988 he was diagnosed with lymphoma. This was to trigger a new phase in his life.
Within the self-published book were short stories about his life, his experiences, his memories and crucially a 24-line poem, which gave nine clues to the location of a treasure chest he had hidden in the Rocky Mountains north of Santa Fe.
Forrest Fenn’s book The Thrill of the Chase contained clues to a treasure (Photo: Netflix)
What was Fenn’s treasure?
Fenn had hidden the treasure in a bronze, square chest, lined with wood and with a locking front clasp.
It weighed about 10kg and was 25cm by 25cm in size and 13cm deep.
The treasure hidden within the chest (Photo: Netflix)
For a decade, tens of thousands searched for the treasure chest across Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Montana, Utah and Wyoming.
Five people are known to have lost their lives in their quest to locate the loot.
Jeff Murphy, from Batavia, Illinois, went searching for the treasure in Yellowstone National Park the following year. The 53-year-old was found dead on June 2017, after falling off a cliff. His wife told authorities he had been looking for the treasure when he was reported missing.
Following Wallace’s death, the New Mexico State Police chief asked Forrest Fenn to call off the hunt. Fenn refused but urged searchers not to go anywhere an 80-year-old man could not go.
Michael Wayne Sexson, from Deer Trail, Colorado, went searching for the treasure near Dinosaur National Monument along the Utah-Colorado border. The 53-year-old had rented snowmobiles with his friend Steven Inlow in March 2020. The pair were found by rescuers on 21 March. Sexson had died from hypothermia, Inlow survived by drinking his own urine.
Ten days later he posted photos on his blog site of him examining the contents of the chest and one of it apparently on or near the site where it was found
At first neither the identity of the finder nor anything about the location were revealed. But an impending lawsuit in relation to the treasure hunt forced him to reveal his identity in December.
The quest for the treasure took hunters along rivers and into forests and national parks (Photo: Netflix)
What happened to Fenn’s treasure?
Fenn died in September 2020 at the age of 90, three months after the chest had been found.
And the new owners put most of the items up for auction in November the same year, including: more than 476 pieces of gold (gold coins, gold dust and golden nuggets), a Sinu Indian necklace and other jewellery and Forrest Fenn’s Small Glass Jar “purportedly containing a 20,000-word autobiography”.
The auction raised $1.26m in total from all the bids, the largest being $55,200 for a gold nugget which weighed of 549g.
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