89, 263, 201: A set of three encrypted notes from the nineteenth century (2015)
damninteresting.com
damninteresting.com
It's not like the pharaohs where they'd murder all the slaves that built their pyramids.
The world production of gold at that time was something like 7 tons a year.
That seems... implausible.
It's also just barely at the edge of possible you could trade silver for $13,000 in St Louis in 1819. The population was somewhere between 1600 (1910 pop) and 5000 (1930 pop) [by 1880, nearer when the pamphlet was written, St Louis was the 6th largest in the US].
3000 people in a frontier city isn't a lot to find jewels worth ten years of a skilled Craftsman's wages, but two of those people were the sons of the fur trader who founded St Louis, whose estates were worth > $100,000 a few years later. I'm not sure they'd have $13,000 worth of jewels lying around, but hey, not completely impossible.
Yet in the very same article it says:
> attempting to use the Declaration of Independence again on the first note yielded several sequences along the lines of ‘abfdefghiijklmmnohpp’.
Surely this is the plaintext itself, or something close to it.
To cover all possible plaintexts, you'd need 576 word indexes, representing each pair of letters AA, AB, ..., ZZ. It might be hard to find a number i such that the i'th word of the Declaration of Independence begins with Z and the i'th word of the document you are using as the other key begins with Q, etc. But with some license to tweak both plaintexts, this seems within the capabilities of a motivated 19th century prankster.
That said, I can't think of any legitimate reason to use this encoding, so it still points to a hoax or prank.
If the two un-decyphered noted use the same approach as the decrypted one, a couple of idle thoughts:
I wonder if anyone has tried the same text but with positive/negative word index offsets?
It would presumably be hard to extract a plaintext unless they are based on different texts that have a canonical form. Many books differ slightly between printinga due to errors and/or corrections.