He describes a string of such places in the book. That’s important, because Fenn is a sentimental guy, and he told me he hid the treasure in a place he has known for years. It covers the childhood through college years, the era when Fenn became Fenn. Read the first half of The Thrill of the Chase closely. What makes this treasure scheme so exciting-and so unnerving for some-is the figure of Fenn himself: a man who may be America’s last great collector, an amateur digger and self-taught everything, smarter than the average archeologist, savvier than a rude tomb-raider, and more aggressive than both. One imagines him dropping the pages on the way to the printer, losing a few in the wind, and binding the rest in whatever order he picked them up. His memoir is a drifty, disorganized thing. The pleasure is in separating Fenn fact from Fenn fiction.
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It seemed to set him free to create himself, which he does in The Thrill of the Chase. In our conversations, he seemed to like his lack of history. “It’s Irish or Scottish or something,” he said, waving away the question. How hard? His wife of more than half a century says not even she knows him, not really, and Fenn says heck “I don’t know myself.” He was born in central Texas, but he doesn’t know how his father ended up in Texas, or who the first Fenn in America was, or even where the name Fenn comes from. I’ve been dying to shake out my notebook since last summer, and what follows is the start of an annotated guide to The Thrill of the Chase, and to Forrest Fenn, a man every hopeful hunter will need to know to decode the poem and find the gold.įirst, the disclaimer: Fenn is a hard man to know. So as book orders are filled over the next few days, I thought I’d re-read along with everybody, and tell you what I know. Fenn himself has gone back for a new printing. As of this writing, Amazon listed one copy left for sale, $45, and other sites advertised “used” volumes for three times as much.
The appearance set off a Fenn frenzy, crashing his personal website and creating a run on his book, which until now had been a marginalized curiosity, sold through a single independent book store in Santa Fe. This week Fenn appeared on The Today Show, and NBC Nightly News touting the treasure hunt, and reigniting the search for his gold. After my piece was published-dubbing Fenn “The Real Indiana Jones”-the cagey collector says he turned down a string of broadcast hits, and soon enough his book faded. They raided his house in 2009, and the case remains open today, according to the FBI and the U.S. Yes, Uncle Sam was on the story as well, pursuing Fenn as a person of interest in a multi-state investigation into grave-robbing and artifact theft in the Southwest. I buttressed all this with more than a dozen of interviews of my own, tracking down some of Fenn’s old friends and business partners, former members of law enforcement, and churning through hundreds of far-flung documents: press clips, old books, and federal records. He also introduced me to his family, toured me around his gallery, and taught me to dig at the historic pueblo he owns outside of town.
Last summer, I profiled Forrest Fenn, the quixotic author of The Thrill of the Chase, who walked me through his decision to secret a chest of gold, jewels, and precious artifacts into the mountains “north of Santa Fe.” He peppered his memoir with clues to the location-including coded directions in a 24-line poem that ends: “So hear me all and listen good,/Your effort will be worth the cold./If you are brave and in the wood/I give you title to the gold.”īut in our days of conversation, he inevitably shared a few more, passing along unpublished autobiographical writings, old newspaper clippings, and copies of prior self-published books, all of which contain personal elements. What gives? Oh, nothing … just a million-dollar marketing gambit, involving an amazing race for hidden treasure and the biggest grave-robbing case of all time. It peaked at number 15 on Tuesday night, trading places with Fifty Shades of Grey and The Perks of Being a Wall Flower, among other hits of the nightstand.
Yet The Thrill of the Chase-a silm, episodic memoir self-published by a white-haired retiree in Santa Fe-is now in the upper third of the Amazon 100 List, surpassing books by George Saunders, Laura Hillenbrand, and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. One of the best selling books in America right now is old, expensive, and as recently as Monday couldn’t outsell a history of library subject headings.