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What journalist didn’t after the stories about extremists among the seekers — five died while searching, others threatened Fenn and his family, untold vacation hours and budgets were devoted to it.
And some haven’t stopped — even though the bronze chest was found in 2020. The location hadn’t been revealed and people who’d spent years looking for the location are willing to spend more years searching for where it was.
Especially since Fenn didn’t reveal where it was found before he died and the finder says he never will.
And then some believe it still hasn’t been found, so they’re still looking.
“Those people,” he said with disgust. “That whole thing was a Disney event.”
Tell that to the families of the five who died.
“The real pursuit isn’t Disney. It takes intellect. It takes research. It takes imagination. It takes all of them together and more or you get nowhere.
“If you simply do basic research, you are treading over the same ground others have trampled before you. That’s what I discovered with the Butch Cassidy treasures. People crossing and re-crossing the same territory. Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Nevada — that’s a lot of territory but they’ve still trampled all over it.”
“What makes you think Butch Cassidy buried treasure in the first place?”
“What do you mean?”
“If he had money from a previous robbery buried somewhere and he needed money, why not go there and dig it up, instead of leaving the money from a previous robbery buried and robbing another train or bank or whatever and increasing his chances of getting caught?”
For a second he stared at me like I had two heads and the best he could do was try not to look at either one. Then he blinked, sat up, and he was another man. Much more the one I’d met previously. “That’s it exactly! It’s far more likely they spent what they stole — high living, all the horses they needed for getaways — and they couldn’t steal all of them, keeping their remote hideaways operating, probably bribing ranchers if not lawmen. And then they had to steal again. Or they had something else that made it worthwhile robbing again. That’s why I’m searching for Oscar’s treasure.”
I wasn’t going to call the man a liar to his face, but it sure seemed like he’d only just recognized that angle. I suspect his transfer from Butch Cassidy to Oscar Virtanen stemmed from a realization of all those other people before and beside him on the search.
“Had you worked with other searchers?”
“No.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Not Keefer?”
He examined my face for how much I knew, then looked away. “We talked a little, that’s all.”
“With his local knowledge, he must have been helpful,” I suggested mildly.
“He’d done some research, sure. But he hadn’t employed a detailed, organized approach. He seemed to think that if he just sat among the information long enough everything would be revealed to him. That might be okay for yoga—” Clearly not a fan. “—or letting woodland creatures come up to him, but to find new information about historic figures who weren’t well known in their day and haven’t been researched since, you have to be aggressive. Go after every lead. Pursue every possibility.” He looked up at me. “You know about that.”
“Yes, I do. I can imagine that might cause conflict with someone like Keefer Dobey. Including over access to resources.”
He frowned. “We weren’t rivals, if that’s what you’re thinking. He did things his way. I did things my way. We had a few things in common, but we didn’t share a lot — we were interested in different things.”
“For example?”
I deliberately left that a choose-your-topic question. He could answer about the few things they had in common or their different interests.
“I am focused on the treasure.”
“You said treasure — singular. Aren’t there several?”
“More than several. You can get lost forever in chasing this tidbit or that if you don’t keep laser focused. That’s why I’ve narrowed focus. It’s natural to start with the better-known robberies, because there’s more material. You train yourself on how to research before you advance to the lesser-known events.”
The way he said it, combined with a glance around the bookcases, told me he’d given Serena the same explanation. Possibly when more deliveries arrived.
“So I started with a lot of material on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Although, actually, they didn’t team up until late. Elzy Lay was Cassidy’s closest friend in the gang for a decade. Only when Elzy was arrested in 1899 did Cassidy team up with Sundance. At first, I thought that tracing some of the other members of the gang — ones not as well-known now — would be the key. But the more I read, the more I thought most of the others were far less likely to have stashed their shares of robberies. They were arrested spending the money or found with a lot of it on them and, in general, didn’t show the sort of forethought and organization Cassidy did.
“You know it’s accepted by many that he planned the successful robberies, even ones he might not have participated in. He set up the system of fresh horses waiting along the escape routes, so they could outpace the posses. Outpace and outsmart. He didn’t need to resort to violence.” He chuckled. “Except against vaults, of course. But he said he never killed anyone.”
