“How did we miss this?!”
Richmond author Dean King sent this email query to friend and fellow nonfiction writer James Campbell. King came across a small Associated Press article about the finding in the Rocky Mountains of a chest filled with valuable antique objects, gold coins and precious stones.
Forrest Fenn, a Santa Fe art dealer, hid the box a decade earlier and published a clue-strewn poem to entice seekers.
Campbell responded, “Thought the exact same thing when I read this, this a.m. Wonder if there is some kind of cast[ed] series we could create out of this.”
Within a half hour of this exchange, Campbell’s daughter, who is with HBO Max, emailed him about the treasure’s find. Campbell and King founded Gum Street Productions — the name derived from one of King’s favorite novels, “The Dog of the South,” by Charles Portis — with an eye toward developing true stories for the screen.
The result of their five-year effort is a three-part limited documentary series “Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure,” debuting on Netflix Thursday, March 27.
So Much Story
Campbell and King turn compelling stories of both history and exploits into acclaimed nonfiction articles in national publications and bestselling books, including King’s account of the ordeal of a dozen shipwrecked sailors in the deserts of North Africa, “Skeletons on the Zahara.” That became a History Channel program. Campbell’s “The Final Frontiersman” led to the Discovery Channel’s four-season reality documentary series “The Last Alaskans.”
Gum Street sought reality TV concepts, but Fenn’s treasure seemed a straight-up documentary. “We went headfirst,” King says. “We were a fledgling company; it just took on a life of its own very quickly.”
Campbell reflects, “Forrest Fenn is this enigmatic character — we’re really writers first, TV guys second — he immediately captured our imagination. The more we learned about him, the more excited we got and more fascinated we became [with him] and this astonishing treasure hunt.”
King credits Richmond entertainment and arts attorney Kirk Schroder with making Gum Street a legal entity and negotiating contracts. “He was with us every step of the way,” he says.
Meanwhile, both King and Campbell were working on separate books — in King’s case, his massive “Guardians of the Valley,” about wilderness preservationist John Muir and editor Robert Underwood Johnson.
The duo also needed a man in the field to establish the production company, and King knew the right person.
He called upon Sam Williamson, a native Richmonder and friend going back to their days at St. Christopher’s School and the University of North Carolina. He’d traveled the world as a senior executive for IBM. And, as luck would have it, he’d taken early retirement. King contacted him in Idaho.
“We’re starting this company,” King told Williamson. “You’re going to be our intern slash CEO. You don’t know anything about it,” King recounts with a laugh, “but we’ll get you up to speed.”
Williamson recalls, “Dean told me, ‘Go dig into this thing. We can figure out an angle.’ And that’s exactly what we did; and basically that meant, number one, getting deeply familiar with the story — and there is so much story.” Williamson’s mission became to establish a connection with some of the searchers for Fenn’s treasure.
This pursuit became a race to secure signed agreements from subjects to share their stories with Gum Street ahead of true-story podcasters, Ron Howard’s production company and the Vox Media-owned New York magazine.
Man With a Plan
Fenn, a Vietnam air combat veteran and eccentric collector of art and antiquities based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, around 2009 received a cancer diagnosis. His father also contracted the disease and took his own life. Fenn approved of that decision because his father went out on his own terms. Fenn, then in his 70s, didn’t expect to recover. In what he thought were his last days, he wanted to arouse within the public their atrophied desires for exploration. Fenn felt people wasted too much time looking at various screens rather than purple mountains majesty.
“Like John Muir, Fenn wanted people to go into the wilderness and engage with nature,” King explains. “If they got out there and encountered the splendor of the natural world, they’d appreciate and want to preserve it.”
But Fenn had a dark side, too. Years prior, a controversy arose from the retrieval and sale of artifacts from an unprotected Indigenous site. “The whole operation got busted, and two of his partners committed suicide,” King says.
Fenn contemplated an enticement to get people out of their sedentary lives and one sure way, he thought, involved a hidden treasure. But he didn’t quite know whether he should proceed. Then he received advice from an acquaintance, the clothing icon Ralph Lauren, to go ahead and hide the valuables and get people hunting for them. If he was dying, what did he have to lose? You can’t take it with you.
Fenn wrote his memoir, “The Thrill of the Chase,” and placed within it the 24-line poem to guide potential treasure hunters to the chest that he’d jammed full of artifacts and valuables from his personal collection. He didn’t expect to see the chest found and, in his clue-laden verse he implied he’d be laid to rest near the site.
King says, “He hid it, he dreamed up the whole thing — and then found out he wasn’t going to die.”
Fenn instead became a near-mythical figure in the treasure hunting subculture, and he thoroughly enjoyed his position. He’d hidden the treasure, but Fenn maintained a public profile.
“Fennborees” convened. “They’d party all weekend just talking about their solves and their clues, and Fenn would [attend],” King describes. “He loved it. It became a cult of personality. They tried everything they could to get him to tell them.”
And things turned weird. One hunter thought of Fenn’s granddaughter as a connection to the treasure and tried to break into the house where she lived. The privacy of the Fenn family became threatened.
“And Forrest thrived on it,” King says. “He loved people and being in the thick of it. And there were conspiracy theories and podcasts, and websites; some of them are still going on.”
The Seekers
The significant part of the story is the people — some 300,000 of them — from as far away as China and Tasmania — who joined the 10-year search. Their backgrounds and situations ran the gamut. Participating in the search were those with extensive outdoor experience and seasoned treasure hunters to neophytes, young couples and whole families. For many of them, the hunt for Fenn’s treasure evolved into a romantic journey.
Until it turned ugly.
Several died in their pursuit, through snow mobile accident, falls and drowning. One man, who survived his hunt, went into Yellowstone National Park during the offseason. He so much believed his solve to Fenn’s poem of clues that he rapelled from an observation deck into a canyon — but ran out of rope. “He stumbled down the last 50 yards or so,” King relates, “and somehow along the way disturbed a hibernating bear. Park rangers had to send a helicopter to rescue him.” He was arrested and sent to a federal prison in Minnesota. The would-be treasure finder expressed to King his certainty that Fenn tipped off rangers, who moved the treasure.
“He thought they were holding it for him until he got out,” King muses. “He goes to jail, he comes out, and on the phone he tells me, ‘I know that they know I have the solution because the commandant of the prison had me in for dinner and he let me go a day early.’ Everything was proving, in his own mind, that he was right. That’s how these guys work.”
Williamson in the role of field producer tracked down searchers and while accompanying some of the film shoots encountered some adventure of his own.
“I assisted our partners on six different shoots,” Williamson explains. “We went all over the country conducting interviews and putting things together.”
He climbed mountain crags, and during one of the shoots while carrying cameras back through rough Montana backcountry, he maintained wariness, since this is the domain of grizzly bears. “I had a pack on, and, well, my bear spray’s safety lid popped off, and I bear sprayed myself,” he says.
He encountered no bears.
The Last 5 Years
Besides natural hazards, the Gum Streeters encountered the chutes and ladders game of development. Through Campbell, they made an immediate connection to director Jared McGilliard of the Seattle-based Nomadica Films. He’d been involved with the first two seasons of “The Last Alaskans.”
It turned out that McGilliard wanted to find a way into the Fenn story, and now Gum Street offered one. His expertise is in the rough and tumble. He’s lensed reality documentaries about the Alaskan frontier, heavy armor jousting and combat rescue units in Afghanistan.
“We began developing this concept with Gum Street the day that Forrest Fenn announced that his treasure had been found, June 6, 2020,” McGilliard wrote in an email. “From that date until it airs late this month will be just shy of 5 years. This isn’t rare in the business for projects to take this long to develop — get a commission, produce, edit, air. It’s a high bar to get a network to come on board and fund a project ... the one project they'll ever have on this story. It’s a long process, but this one was well worth it, a dream project to be back in the director’s chair indeed ... although I never actually had a chair.”
Amid Gum Street’s preparations, Vox Media put their reporter Benjamin Wallace on the trail of those pursuing Fenn’s treasure. He discovered, however, that sources he wanted were signed with something called Gum Street and Nomadica.
King tells, “So, finally, Vox calls us up, says, ‘We have a guy reporting this, we really like this story, and we have a pipeline deal with Netflix. Do you want to partner with us?”
The Gum Streeters then considered their options. As their first project, this would get their names into the world, and a way for the company to begin building its project portfolio. Vox then wanted another director for the project, which didn’t work out, nor did a second. The firm then returned to McGilliard, and as King says, “We got the first guy we wanted, who already knew about the story, and then he lived with it, ate, slept, 24/7 with it, for probably about two years.”
‘This Is How It Works’
The Gum Street men will receive executive producer credit on the project. But what exactly is the job of an executive producer?
“Anything and everything,” Campbell explains. “We do have creative input. We developed the idea and had some involvement in the production, but not nearly as much as the show runner, or for that matter, the editors. None of us are editors. It was a great experience. We’re still at it, maybe we’ll move into the scripted fictional world, we’ll see.”
Meanwhile, Campbell’s next book concerns the late zoologist Alan Rabinowitz, “A kind of Indiana Jones of wildlife ecology,” he describes. Rabinowitz’s mission through his Panthera organization involved the protection of big cats, like jaguars.
Along with the Fenn’s treasure story, in 2023 King and Campbell executive produced “The Real Hatfields and McCoys: Forever Feuding,” which was based on King’s history novel, “The Feud.”
They’ve seen portions of “Gold & Greed” and how editing rearranged the introduction of subjects. But the Gum Street fellows are pleased with how the program looks and are eager to see the final product.
King reflects, “This is how it works: The big one eats the smaller one, and you get pushed further back. So, the New York magazine writer is the narrator and gets credit for the story, but we were working on it two years before.”
“Gold & Greed,” isn’t receiving a big Klieg light and red carpet theater premiere. King chuckles, “We may just pull up chairs and watch it in my backyard.”
Which, after all, is outdoors.
“Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure” begins streaming on Netflix Thursday, March 27.
