It is one of the largest and most costly treasure hunts in U.S. history, baffling the finest mathematical minds in the country and defeating their computers. 

Like the search for the Lost Dutchman mine in Arizona,
or the stories of the $3 million in Confederate treasury
gold buried along the James River just before the Union soldiers entered Richmond in 1865, or wealthy
plantation owners' fortunes hidden from the Union soldiers and never recovered, the Beale treasure tantalizes
its seekers with fantasies of untold riches while inducing frustration, despair and bankruptcy.

Numerous articles in magazines and trade journals and several books have explored the Beale mystery.

Thomas Jefferson Beale, the man responsible for trying 20th-century brains and technology, was a devious Virginia gentleman believed to have been born around 1792.

That was the year George Washington was elected President for the second time; Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were feuding over policies which would -culminate in a two-party political system; and General Anthony Wayne was commissioned commander of the American army to fight Indians who were making pioneer existence in the Northwest Territory impossible.

Beale came from a distinguished family. In 1668 King Charles II of England recommended one of his ancestors for appointment as commander of Point Comfort, at the entrance of Norfolk Harbor.

Though one contemporary described Beale as "a gentleman well educated, evidently of good family, and with popular manners," recent research reveals him to have been a no-good, gun-slinging 'genius who was constantly bailed out of scrapes by his more respectable brothers.

Still, women loved him-he was a broad shouldered six-footer with swarthy complexion and jet black hair worn slightly longer than was fashionable. He was said to be a "model of manly beauty, favored by ladies and envied by men."

Indeed, the Beale treasure hunt may have started with trouble over the opposite sex-. There are several stories-some documented, some not. One story holds that in the spring of 1817 Beale got into a pistol fight with a Fincastle, Virginia, neighbor over a woman.

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