In 2013, a couple living in California were walking their dog on a trail within their property lines until the husband spotted a rusty metal can sticking out of the ground. He pulled the can off the floor. When she picked it up, he discovered that it was extremely heavy. They soon found out why when the lid opened and he exposed a gold coin. The couple became emotional and eagerly took the can home. As they explored the boat, they brought out many more gold coins. They quickly returned to the site and excavated the area for more cans. To his astonishment, they excavated another seven containers of different sizes, filled with more gold coins. The entire stash totaled 1427 gold coins. Most of them were $20 Double Eagle pieces. The $10 and $5 gold coins were much less numerous. The face value of the Treasury was approximately $28,000.

So why were these valuable coins buried there? Two theories come to light. First of all, people who don’t trust banks often hide their money in a hidden place, like a mattress or an underground vault in the backyard. But, they die before they get their stored cash back, and someone else finds it years later. Second, money-stealing bandits, chased by the authorities, bury their loot until they come back to retrieve it, but they never do.

According to an article on the “Mashable” website, The Crazy True Story of the Saddle Ridge Gold Coin, Author Lance Ulanoff and other website staff uncovered likely information about the treasure’s origin. In the August 10, 1901 copy of the Bulletin of the American Iron and Steel Association, $30,000 face value in gold coins were stolen from the San Francisco Mint and never recovered. Further investigation revealed that an employee, Walter Dimmick, who worked at the Mint between 1898 and 1901, was accused of stealing $30,000 in $20 gold coins. Dimmick was caught but the money was never recovered. Interestingly, the Treasury produced almost the same amount; If the $30,000 that was stolen turned out to be the Treasury, amounting to $28,000, what happened to $2,000? Maybe the thief took it.

Although many believe that the treasure was hidden after the coins were stolen, another theory suggests that the treasure may have been hidden by a particular secret society of Confederates known as the Knights of the Golden Circle who hid gold coins in many states to finance a second civil war. This theory is likely, but little is known about these Knights. Few stories have surfaced about them.

The California Gold Rush began in the early months of 1848. James Wilson Marshall, a sawmill operator, discovered gold nuggets while building a water-powered sawmill along a river in the northern part of the state. Soon, word spread that a man had struck gold in Sacramento, California. The rest of the world reads about the news. For eight months, thousands of Americans left their homes and moved to California in search of gold. In 1849, more than 100,000 people moved to California and became gold miners. They were commonly known as “forty-nine”. In 1855, more than 600,000 people from around the world made California their home to pan for gold. At that time, billions of dollars worth of gold had been discovered by miners and prospectors. There is little doubt that the Saddle Ridge coins were minted from the gold collected by Gold Rush miners. It is therefore not surprising that the Saddle Ridge Hoard was discovered in the “golden country” of California and that most of the coins were minted between 1847 and 1894 at the San Francisco Mint.

The discovery of the Saddle Ridge Hoard is intertwined with the California Gold Rush. If the miners had not come to California and worked diligently to find so much gold, the Saddle Ridge Treasure would never have existed. Those gold coins reflect the success of so much gold discovered between 1849 and 1855. Months after the Treasure’s discovery, the couple allowed a highly reputable coin firm to handle and sell most of the gold coins. In 2014 they had been auctioned to the public for more than $10 million dollars. This shows that to this day, after so many years, the gold rush continues to affect individual wealth.