Editing Beale ciphers (section)

==Background==
{{more citations needed section|date=April 2024}}
A pamphlet published in 1885, entitled ''The Beale Papers'', is the source of this story. The treasure was said to have been obtained by an American named Thomas J. Beale in the early 1800s, from a mine to the north of Nuevo México (New Mexico), at that time in the Spanish province of [[Santa Fe de Nuevo México]] (an area that today would most likely be part of [[Colorado]]). According to the pamphlet, Beale was the leader of a group of 30&nbsp;gentlemen adventurers from [[Virginia]] who stumbled upon the rich mine of gold and silver while hunting buffalo. They spent 18&nbsp;months mining thousands of pounds of precious metals, which they then charged Beale with transporting to Virginia and burying in a secure location. After Beale made multiple trips to stock the hiding place, he then encrypted three messages: the location, a description of the treasure, and the names of its owners and their relatives. The treasure location is traditionally linked to [[Montvale, Virginia|Montvale]] in [[Bedford County, Virginia]].{{citation needed|date=April 2024}}

Beale placed the ciphertexts and some other papers in an iron box. In 1822 he entrusted the box to a [[Lynchburg, Virginia|Lynchburg]] innkeeper named Robert Morriss. Beale told Morriss not to open the box unless he or one of his men failed to return from their journey within 10 years.{{citation needed|date=April 2024}} Sending a letter from St.&nbsp;Louis a few months later, Beale promised Morriss that a friend in St.&nbsp;Louis would mail the [[key (cryptography)|key]] to the cryptograms; however, it never arrived. It was not until 1845 that Morriss opened the box. Inside he found two plaintext letters from Beale, and several pages of ciphertext separated into Papers "1", "2", and "3". Morriss had no luck in solving the ciphers, and decades later left the box and its contents to an unnamed friend.{{citation needed|date=April 2024}}

The friend, then using an edition of the [[United States Declaration of Independence]] as the key for a modified [[book cipher]], successfully deciphered the second ciphertext which gave a description of the buried treasure.{{citation needed|date=April 2024}} Unable to solve the other two ciphertexts, the friend ultimately made the letters and ciphertexts public in a pamphlet entitled ''The Beale Papers'', which was published by yet another friend, James B. Ward, in 1885.

Ward is thus not "the friend". Ward himself is almost untraceable in local records, except that a man with that name owned the home in which a Sarah Morriss, identified as the spouse of Robert Morriss, died at age 77, in 1863.<ref>{{cite news |newspaper=Lynchburg Virginian |date=21 May 1865 |title=Sarah Morriss |department=obituary}}</ref> He also is recorded as becoming a Master Mason in 1863.<ref name=nickell />

The images below, transcribed from the pamphlet, show the original line-breaks for easy comparison. In the second cryptogram, the original cipher errors are highlighted in red.

<gallery>
Beale 1.svg|Beale's first cryptogram
Beale 2.svg|Beale's second cryptogram (the deciphered one)
Beale 3.svg|Beale's third cryptogram.
</gallery>