A Piece of Blue-Penciled Fabric
The object is a strip of tracing cloth, 6 inches (15.2 cm) tall and 18 inches (45.7 cm) wide, covered in blunt block capitals written in blue pencil. Under the lettering runs a rough sketch in blue and yellow ink: a port, a building with a spire, a barn, and two short slashes that later readers took for grave markers. Over all of it, in black ink, are the word MONEY and two sums of $3,000 each.
The map itself carries no plain burial date. The February 14, 1862, date attached to the story is an inference, built from the map’s lettering and the fact that Portland’s daily paper, the Oregonian, reported nothing unusual that day: no robbery, no fire, no notable departure. Portland was then Oregon’s largest city, with a population near 3,000 and a working port. In a town that size, with one newspaper reading every column, $6,000 going into the ground should have left some trace, if the date is right at all.
Six Thousand Dollars and Two Names
Six thousand 1862 dollars was a sum an ordinary Oregon laborer might not see in several years of work. The map hangs its whole story on two names. One is “Pike Road,” described as two miles from Portland, leading to a barn with graves to the north and east near a stump and an orchard; no road by that name has ever turned up in Portland’s records. The other is “Sims,” sometimes “Simes,” the man the money is said to have belonged to.
No civilian record ties a Sims or Simes to Portland. The one fact that lines up at all: a man of that surname died serving in the Union Army in 1864, two years after the supposed burial. Whether he was the same man has never been established. An unverifiable name and an unfindable road are the entire evidentiary foundation the story rests on.
From an Indigent Man’s Estate to a Judge’s Desk
The map’s documented history begins decades later, when it surfaces among the papers of an indigent man whose estate had passed through the Seattle court of Judge Everett Smith. After Smith’s death, his son Irving found it among his father’s effects. In 1940, Irving told the Oregon Historical Quarterly that his father had never mentioned the map and left no note about it. Years later, speaking to the Oregonian, he told a different story, tying it to the indigent man’s estate and admitting he had already searched for the treasure himself.
That 1940 note in the Oregon Historical Quarterly was the map’s first appearance in print. It stayed a minor curiosity until 1957, when Ruby El Hult retold it in her book, Lost Mines and Treasures of the Pacific Northwest. Her account turned a filed document into a story people went looking for with shovels.
The Searchers
By 1966, renewed digging around Portland was active enough that the Oregonian tracked down Irving Smith, by then old and living in Oklahoma City, to ask what he knew. Several independent searches were already underway, none coordinated with any other.
Ruth Burgess, searching with her husband and four children, read “fromrom” as “from Roman” and worked east from the site of a former Portland Catholic church toward Mount Tabor, chasing a “peaked hill” she took Pike to mean. Another woman decided the map had to be read rotated ninety degrees counterclockwise; that reading put her at a construction site for the city’s new zoo. Irving Smith himself once believed the money lay near the old Montgomery Ward building, on ground that had hosted the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition. One man’s search stopped when he was called up for the Vietnam War; by the time he was free to return, a freeway had been planned over the ground he meant to dig.
What the Search Cost
No one is recorded as hurt or ruined by any of this. What it cost was ordinary: days of digging, letters to archives, trips to sites that turned out to be zoos and freeways. Even Ruby El Hult, who did more than anyone to spread the story, could not get near the original. In 1966, she wrote to the Oregon Historical Society asking to see it. The Society wrote back that it could not be located.
That same year the Society moved to its current building at 1200 SW Park Avenue in downtown Portland. By its own later account, the map had simply been packed away in the move, not lost. For a stretch of time, even its keeper could not put a hand on the document driving the search.
Manuscript 2039
The map is cataloged now as Manuscript 2039 and kept in a climate-controlled vault at the Oregon Historical Society Research Library in Portland. Scott Daniels, the library’s research services manager, brings it out on request. Over the 15 years leading up to 2022, he estimated meeting 10 to 12 people who came specifically to see it as a treasure map.
That is the map’s public life now: a request slip, gloves, a few minutes under reading-room light. The barn, the orchard, the graves, and the $6,000 said to sit beneath them have not moved since anyone last searched for them with a shovel.
What Nobody Can Answer
Nothing here has ever been settled. No one has confirmed the map is authentic rather than a later invention. No record explains who Sims or Simes was, and Hult herself could not decide whether the misspellings were errors or a deliberate code. Even the 1966 disappearance is a guess: Daniels believes the map was packed away, not lost, but that is his reading of the record, not a documented fact. And even the date at the center of the whole story, February 14, 1862, is only what the lettering and a quiet newspaper page suggest, not what either one actually states.
The most basic question sits under all the others. No one has ever shown that $6,000 was buried near Portland in 1862, and no one has ever dug it up. A dozen or so searchers, across six decades, have gone looking anyway, working from a piece of cloth that has outlasted every theory built on it.