Mystery Treasure

It is the largest known discovery of buried gold coins ever recovered in the United States. Known as the “Saddle Ridge Hoard,” it is 1,427 individual gold coins, with a combined face value of $27,980, that has collectively been assessed at ten million dollars.

The buried treasure was found in February 2013, by a couple walking their dog on their own private property in northern Trinity County. The coins, in five-dollar, ten-dollar, and twenty-dollar denominations, date from 1847 to 1894. Some of the pieces are so rare that they could be worth one million apiece. The exact location of the Saddle Ridge Hoard has never been disclosed for obvious security reasons, and to protect individual privacy and property rights.

The couple had owned the land for several years—200 acres of challenging natural landscape—and had often hiked its winding trails. They were quite familiar with a certain oddly-shaped rock on a hillside; a feature they had whimsically named Saddle Ridge. One day, while walking their dog past that same hillside, they happened to spot a rust-covered metal can poking out of the ground. Curious, they used a stick to pry it from the earth, and were carrying it back to their house when the lid cracked open, revealing the edge of what looked like a gold coin.

Returning to the site with some hand tools, they ultimately unearthed eight rusty tin cans filled with gold coins. They do not know who buried the stash, or when, or where the money came from. No one does . . .  although there has been plenty of speculation.

Might the Saddle Ridge Hoard be the six bags of gold coin an employee stole from the San Francisco Mint in 1901? After extensive research, the U.S. Mint and other numismatic experts have, for a long list of reasons, ruled this out.

Other notorious outlaws were suggested; for example, Black Bart, who robbed stagecoaches, some of them in Trinity’s neighboring counties. One by one, however, he and several other bandits were disqualified when their lifelines, or timelines of criminal activity, didn’t mesh with the fact that the Saddle Ridge coins have dates up to, but not after, 1894. At present, the popular theory is that some ordinary person who legitimately (or perhaps not entirely legitimately) earned the money over an extended period of time, but distrusted nineteenth century banks. That being so, he buried his wealth in tin cans on land he thought was safe, never told anyone else he had done this; possibly left the area intending a temporary absence, and then died before he could return to the cache.  

In any case, the treasure’s origin remains the secret of someone who lived a century ago. But then, Trinity County probably still has secrets and mysteries in lots of hiding places, given it has an almost entirely mountainous topography filled with rocky alpine regions, towering peaks, gullies, treacherous gorges, and steep, densely-forested slopes. In 1894 the Trinity Journal reported that Trinity County’s area was greater than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, a claim verified by modern census data, which opines that if the county’s terrain could only be ironed out flat, it would be the size of Texas. 

In 1848, gold was discovered on the Trinity River, drawing thousands of miners who established gold towns up and down today’s Highway 299.

As one of California’s initial 27 counties founded in 1850, Trinity originally fronted on the Pacific Ocean, encompassing the early settlements of Trinidad and Arcata. Its area extended from the Oregon border south to the Mendocino County line, then east 150 miles inland past present-day Yreka; then slanted southwest back to the Mendocino boundary. Over time, portions of it were re-apportioned to Humboldt, Del Norte, and Siskiyou Counties. Since the late 1870s, all of Trinity County is inland.

Still. According to legend, in 1842 English pirates found gold on the Trinity River—a stream miles inland from the Pacific Ocean—when California belonged to Mexico. True, or another mystery?

By 1862 Weaverville, a gold town founded in 1850 in the upper Trinity River Valley, had 28 saloons and was reputed to be a place where gambling and fighting were the favorite pastimes. Yet it was described by one writer as “A strange and wonderful somewhere which is not a place, but a state of mind.”

Must have been plenty of secrets and mysteries there, in the days of old . . .