Stuff of Dreams
Some dream of roaming the Earth to hunt buried treasure. One Sierra Nevada couple didn't have to go that far. They dug it up in their backyard - about $10 million worth, in 19th century U.S. gold coins stuffed into rusty cans.
It's believed to the biggest hoard of gold coins ever unearthed in the United States. And it's going on sale soon.
The bonanza emerged last year as the man and woman were walking their dog on their property in the Gold Country and noticed the top of a decaying canister poking out of the ground.
They dug it out with a stick, took it to their house and opened it up. Inside was what looked like a batch of discs covered in dirt from holes rotted through the can.
They weren't just discs.
A little brushing revealed nearly perfectly preserved $20 gold coins with liberty head designs on the front, dated from the 1890s. They ran back to the same spot, and when they were done digging, they'd found a total of eight cans containing 1,427 coins - with a face value of $27,980.
A total of 1,373 were $20 coins, 50 were $10 coins and four were $5 coins. They were dated from 1847 to 1894, and after sprucing up they shone like, well, gold - which fortunately never corrodes. About a third of the coins were in pristine condition, having never been circulated for spending. Most were minted in San Francisco.
"It was a very surreal moment. It was very hard to believe at first," the man said in an interview taped by the rare-coin dealer he eventually consulted to make sense of the find. "I thought any second an old miner with a mule was going to appear."
Staying secret
The couple are keeping their identities and location secret for many reasons, the main one being to prevent treasure hunters from ripping up their land with backhoes. But they've allowed coin dealer Don Kagin of Tiburon, who helped evaluate some of the biggest sunken treasure finds in history, to offer the collection up for sale.
It's dubbed the Saddle Ridge Hoard, after the spot on the couple's property where it was found. The collection is expected to sell for at least $10 million, either as a whole or in pieces, based on the evaluated condition of the coins.