EXPERT TO EXAMINE TREASURE; PARK OFFICIALS HOPE TO LEARN WHETHER '49ER REALLY LEFT CHEST.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Daily News Staff Writer

Uncertain whether a battered chest found by a Pearblossom archeologist was really left by a Gold Rush expedition in 1849, National Park Service officials are calling in an expert to determine if the treasure is authentic and not a hoax.

An expert from the National Park Service's Western Archeological and Conservation Center in Tucson, Ariz., is scheduled to arrive Thursday to examine the chest, which Jerry Freeman said he found hidden in a rocky alcove high on Pinto Peak at Death Valley's western rim.

``If this is authentic, the real treasure here isn't the objects,'' said Terry Baldino, supervisory ranger at Death Valley's main visitor center. ``They can probably be found in any city in an antique shop. The treasure is who they belonged to and the context where they were found - the story they can tell us about the folks who went across here in 1849.''

The chest is in Park Service custody, turned over Jan. 5 by Freeman, who found it while exploring possible routes taken by the lost forty-niners, the first white people to stumble into the lowest, hottest, driest spot in North America.

Park Service employees are photographing and documenting the objects, which include $52.75 in pre-1849 gold and silver coins, a flintlock pistol, bowls, a shawl, a locket, a hymnal, law books and a letter signed with the name of William Robinson, one of the lost forty-niners, who died 200 miles away and 26 days after the date on the letter.

Freeman said an attorney has estimated that the chest and its contents could be worth $500,000.

A Death Valley park staffer checked Internet listings on the coin prices. They would be worth only several hundred dollars if there was no historic connection, Baldino said.

``We personally would all like this to be the real thing,'' Baldino said. ``It really would be a fabulous find. There is so little left behind by the forty-niners when they trekked through here that particular month. This would be a treasure.''

One of the factors that make park officials wary is that the chest, if authentic, went undiscovered for 149 years. The Panamint Mountains west of Death Valley are rugged, unpopulated and unforgiving, but they were crisscrossed for decades by hundreds of prospectors and treasure hunters.

Within months after lost forty-niners found their way out of Death Valley, treasure seekers showed up in hope of finding silver deposits in the Lost Gunsight Lode, so named because one miner picked up a nugget that he later turned into a rifle sight.

They also were looking for $2,500 in coins rumored to have been buried under a blanket, beneath a creosote bush in the Panamints, when the exhausted forty-niners were out of water and no longer could carry anything.

``When you think about all the folks and look at all the holes poked in the hills, you start to wonder,'' Baldino said.

Baldino said there was a resurgence of interest in the lost forty-niners during the 1940s as the centennial of Death Valley's discovery approached. A group interest culminated in the organization of a group called the Death Valley 49ers, who meet every November in the area, and for years have explored the lost miners' possible routes.

``Could it have been done in the 1940s as a hoax and nobody found it?'' Baldino asked.

Freeman, who returned to Pearblossom on Monday morning after a limousine ride to Los Angeles for a live interview on ``Good Morning America,'' said he doubts that the chest is a hoax.

Somebody might bury some old relics, but not valuable gold and silver coins, he said, and they wouldn't drag a 40-pound chest up a mountain.

``What's the logic, the reason?'' he asked.

If somebody wanted to pull off a hoax - say, in order to sell the objects to a collector at an inflated value - better to plant them outside the park boundaries, Freeman said. Federal law forbids taking archeological artifacts from a national park.

Freeman said that he believes the chest went undiscovered because it was two miles from the route that everybody thought the lost forty-niners took. Escaping from Death Valley, the men didn't travel as a single group, but straggled widely as they climbed the Panamints.

Michael Fox, assistant curator of the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, said the chest, if authenticated, would be a ``very, very important find'' - mainly because of the letter in which Robinson tells how his last ox has died, he's abandoning the chest and ``ifen I don't raturn by end of fifty I wont never come.''

``We occasionally find artifacts related to historical events - such as artifacts found on a Civil War battlefield - but to have an authenticating letter . . ., that's what's extremely rare,'' said Fox, who is project manager from the museum's Gold Fever exhibit on the California Gold Rush.

The trunk is to be examined Thursday by Gretchen Voeks, Western Archeological and Conservation Center conservator, who is flying in from Tucson.

Voeks said she is going to examine the trunk and its contents mainly to make recommendations to Death Valley officials on how they can best be preserved. If tests are done on the objects, they could be shipped to the Tucson center for samples to be taken and sent to laboratories elsewhere, she said.

``I'm not really going to know until I get there,'' Voeks said.

Baldino noted that they are lots of accounts from the lost forty-niners, who wrote them down or talked to newspaper reporters decades later. But the chest, if authentic, would be physical evidence of where they went and what they did.

It would also make a fine addition to the park's commemoration of the 1849 trekkers.

``If it turns out to be authentic, it's going to be a real find for us,'' Baldino said. ``Some of us are just hoping that it's real.''

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos, Map

PHOTO (1--Color in AV Edition only) (Ran in SAC and AV Editions only) Holly Freeman hands a chest of gold, silver and other items to her father, archeologist Jerry Freeman, in Death Valley.

(2) (Ran in SAC and AV Edition only) Holly Freeman examines a chest found last year after it sat in a Death Valley cave since 1850.

Clay Campbell/Associated Press

MAP: (Ran in SAC and AV Editions only) Chest dating back to 1850, discovered in cave in Panamint Mountains