The Saddle Ridge Hoard (found 2014)

Saddle Ridge Hoard, February 2014, fully documented

In February 2013 a couple known only as John and Mary were walking their dog on the trail across their roughly 200-acre property in California's Gold Country, a path they had hiked many times, when Mary noticed a rust-covered metal can poking out of the dirt. John tried to pick it up, found it stuck, and pried it loose with a piece of wood. It was so heavy they guessed it held old lead paint. On the walk home the lid cracked open and showed the edge of a gold coin.

They went back with hand tools and found a second can about a foot away, half rotted with rust and full of coins, and over the following visits, digging and finally sweeping with a metal detector, they turned up eight cans in all. Inside were 1,427 United States gold coins dated 1847 to 1894, most of them $20 Liberty double eagles struck at the San Francisco Mint, with a face value of $27,980. Only afterwards did they make sense of things they had seen for years: an old can hanging from a tree so long that the trunk had grown around it, and a jagged rock on the hill they had nicknamed Saddle Ridge. The hoard lay ten steps from that rock in the direction of the North Star. Someone had marked the spot.

They hid the coins in an old ice chest under a woodpile and went to the numismatic firm Kagin's in Tiburon, whose senior numismatist David McCarthy made the first inventory. When the Professional Coin Grading Service certified the coins, many proved to be in uncirculated, mint condition, more than a dozen the finest or tied for finest known, and one 1866-S double eagle without the motto was valued at around a million dollars. The whole hoard was assessed at about $10 million, making it the largest find of buried gold coins ever recovered in the United States, far beyond the previous record, a $4,500 face-value cache found in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1985.

Who buried it is unknown. Speculation fastened on Walter Dimmick, who stole $30,000 from the San Francisco Mint in 1901, but the mix of dates, values and wear made that unlikely, and the U.S. Mint said it had nothing linking the coins to any theft. Jesse James, Black Bart and the Knights of the Golden Circle have all been suggested. The likeliest answer is someone who trusted the ground more than the banks. The first coins went on show at a money show in Atlanta in 2014, the hoard was sold through Amazon, and John and Mary, to keep treasure hunters off their land, have never revealed who or where they are.