A Winner!

We have a winner! The “dukeofearl” has solved the coded message and won absolutely nothing!

The message reads;

Outlaws liked to carve symbols in rock so that they wouldn’t have to carry around a map that might get lost or stolen.

For those of you that are wondering, this cipher was a monaphabetic substitution cipher. The numbers in the cipher message have no meaning other than to separate the words in the message. The letters in the words in the message are one letter forward in the alphabet of the letter used in the plaintext message. An “a” in plaintext becomes a “b” an “f” becomes a “g” and so on in the coded message.

A hand written message using this cipher method was found in the margins of an 1864 issue of “Colburn’s United Service Magazine”. The coded message was part of an allegorical poem talking about “when Abraham should die”. There were additional coded messages in this magazine using a second type of cipher. One of those coded messages said in part “there were at least eleven members of Congress involved in the plot”.

If you liked the idea of solving a coded message then please let us know either by e-mailing Okie or myself or leaving a comment. If this is something everyone likes we will work on putting together another coded message for everyone to try to decipher.