The plaintext of Paper #2 reads:

I have deposited in the county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford's, i
n an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground, the followin
g articles, belonging jointly to the parties whose names are given in number thr
ee, herewith:
The first deposit consisted of ten hundred and fourteen pounds of gold, and
thirty-eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver, deposited Nov. eighteen ninete
en. The second was made Dec. eighteen twenty-one, and consisted of nineteen hund
red and seven pounds of gold, and twelve hundred and eighty-eight of silver; als
o jewels, obtained in St. Louis in exchange for silver to save transportation, a
nd valued at thirteen thousand dollars.
The above is securely packed in iron pots, with iron covers. The vault is ro
ughly lined with stone, and the vessels rest on solid stone, and are covered wit
h others. Paper number one describes the exact locality of the vault, so that no
difficulty will be had in finding it.
how solved
The second cipher can be decrypted fairly easily using any copy of the United St
ates Declaration of Independence, but some editing for spelling is necessary. To
decrypt it, one finds the word corresponding to the number (e.g., the first num
ber is 115, and the 115th word in the Declaration of Independence is "instituted
"), and takes the first letter of that word (in the case of the example, "I").
Beale used a version of United States Declaration of Independence different from
the original. To extract the hidden message, the following 5 modifications must
be applied to the original DOI text:
after word 154 ('institute') and before word 157 ('laying') one word must be
added (probably "a")
after word 240 ('invariably') and before word 246 ('design') one word must b
e removed
after word 467 ('houses') and before word 495 ('be') ten words must be remov
ed
after word 630 ('eat') and before word 654 ('to') one word must be removed
after word 677 ('foreign') and before word 819 ('valuable') one word must be
removed
Furthermore:
The
always
The
used by

first letter of the 811th word of the modified text ('fundamentally') is

used by Beale as a 'y'
first letter of the 1005th word of the modified text ('have') is always
Beale as an 'x'

Finally, in the decoded text there are 4 errors, probably due to wrong transcrip
tion of the original paper:
84 (should be 85)
53 (should be 54)
... 84 (should be
... 96 (should be

63 43 131 29 ... consistcd ('consisted')

20 125 371 38 ... rhousand ('thousand')
85) 575 1005 150 200 ... thc ('the')
95) 405 41 600 136 ... varlt ('vault')