California couple finds $10 million in buried treasure while walking dog

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Dan Whitcomb


http://i.imgur.com/KmrjHia.jpg

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A trove of rare Gold Rush-era coins unearthed in California last year by a couple as they walked their dog may be the greatest buried treasure ever found in the United States, worth more than $10 million, a currency firm representing the pair said on Tuesday.

The 1,400 gold pieces, dating to the mid- to late 1800s and still in nearly mint condition, were discovered buried in eight decaying metal cans on the couple's land last April, said coin expert David McCarthy of currency firm Kagin's.

"We've seen shipwrecks in the past where thousands of gold coins were found in very high grade, but a buried treasure of this sort is unheard of," McCarthy said. "I've never seen this face value in North America and you never see coins in the condition we have here."

Kagin's has declined to identify the couple, who according to the firm want to remain anonymous for fear treasure hunters will descend on their property in Northern California's so-called Gold Country, named after the state's 1849 Gold Rush.

The couple had been walking their dog when they came across a rusty metal can sticking out of the ground and dug it out. After finding gold coins inside they searched further and found the rest of the cache.

Also unclear is who hid the gold pieces, which were minted between 1847 and 1894, in a variety of 19th-century metal cans on land that eventually became part of the couple's yard.

McCarthy said it was curious that the containers were discovered scattered across one section of the property at different depths, suggesting that they were not all put there at the same time.

The $20 gold pieces appeared to have been new when they went into the ground and had suffered little damage from being in the soil for so long.

McCarthy said the couple wisely refrained from cleaning the coins themselves and brought a sampling of them to him in little baggies, still covered in soil.

"I picked up one of bags. It was an 1890 $20 gold piece. It was covered in dirt," McCarthy said, recalling when he first saw one of the gold pieces. "An area of the coin was exposed and the metal looked as if it had just been struck yesterday."

His company took what became known as the "Saddle Ridge Hoard" to an independent coin-grading service, which found that it was comprised of nearly 1,400 $20 gold pieces, 50 $10 gold pieces and four $5 gold pieces. One of the coins, a so-called 1866-S No Motto Double Eagle, is said to be valued at $1 million on its own.

"The Saddle Ridge Hoard discovery is one of the most amazing numismatic stories I've ever heard," said Don Willis, president of Professional Coin Grading Service. "This will be regarded as one of the best stories in the history of our hobby."

McCarthy said Kagin's will sell most of the coins on Amazon for the couple and that a sampling will be displayed at the upcoming American Numismatic Association show in Atlanta later this month.

[PorkChopSandwiches]

:shock: So how will someone else lay claim to their fortune, somehow they wont be able to keep it

[Hal-9000]

there will be a group of unsavory old dudes with a map that has a huge red X on it lurking around their property :lol:

[Acid Trip]

:shock: So how will someone else lay claim to their fortune, somehow they wont be able to keep it

I'm sure previous owners of the house will try to claim it.

[PorkChopSandwiches]

You know there will be all kinds of people trying to lay claim

[Hal-9000]

if a person could prove that they were related to one of the former home/land owners....

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By DINA ABOU SALEM and BILL MCGUIRE | Good Morning America


A California couple who found a stash of buried gold coins valued at $10 million may not be so lucky after all. The coins may have been stolen from the US Mint in 1900 and thus be the property of the government, according to a published report.

The San Francisco Chronicle's website reported that a search of the Haithi Trust Digital Library provided by Northern California fishing guide Jack Trout, who is also a historian and collector of rare coins, turned up the news of the theft.

The California couple, who have not been identified, spotted the edge of an old can on a path they had hiked many times before several months ago. Poking at the can was the first step in uncovering a buried treasure of rare coins estimated to be worth $10 million.

"It was like finding a hot potato," the couple told coin expert Don Kagin from Kagin's, Inc. The couple hired the president of Kagin's, Inc. and Holabird-Kagin Americana, a western Americana dealer and auctioneer, to represent them.

The coins are mostly uncirculated and in mint condition, and they add up in face value to $27,000. "Those two facts are a match of the gold heist in 1900 from the San Francisco Mint," the newspaper reported.

Jack Trout told the paper that an 1866 Liberty $20 gold piece without the words “In God We Trust” was part of the buried stash, and the coin may fetch over $1 million at auction because it's so rare.

“This was someone’s private coin, created by the mint manager or someone with access to the inner workings of the Old Granite Lady (San Francisco Mint),” Trout told the newspaper. “It was likely created in revenge for the assassination of Lincoln the previous year (April 14, 1865). I don’t believe that coin ever left The Mint until the robbery. For it to show up as part of the treasure find links it directly to that inside job at the turn of the century at the San Francisco Mint.”

If the coins were stolen from the government, the couple may be entitled to a finder's fee but they may not be able to keep the stash. The Mint has not yet commented on the situation.

Last week, when news of the stash first broke, coin dealer Kagin spoke about the rarity of such a find.

"Since 1981, people have been coming to us with one or two coins they find worth a few thousand dollars, but this is the first time we get someone with a whole cache of buried coins... It is a million to one chance, even harder than winning the lottery," Kagin told ABCNews.com.

The couple is trying to remain anonymous after finding the five cans of coins last spring on their Tiburon property in northern California and conducted an interview with Kagin.

"I never would have thought we would have found something like this. However, in a weird way I feel like I have been preparing my whole life for it," the couple said.

"I saw an old can sticking out of the ground on a trail that we had walked almost every day for many, many years. I was looking down in the right spot and saw the side of the can. I bent over to scrape some moss off and noticed that it had both ends on it," they said.

It was the first of five cans to be unearthed, each packed with gold coins.

"Nearly all of the 1,427 coins, dating from 1847 to 1894, are in uncirculated, mint condition," said Kagin told ABCNews.com.

He said that the couple plan to sell most of the coins, but before they do, they are "loaning some to the American Numismatic Association for its National Money Show, which opens Thursday in Atlanta."

"Some of the rarest coins could fetch as much as $1 million apiece," said Kagin. He also said that they wish to sell 90 percent of the collection through Amazon.com and on the company's website.

"We'd like to help other people with some of this money. There are people in our community who are hungry and don't have enough to eat. We'll also donate to the arts and other overlooked causes. In a way it has been good to have time between finding the coins and being able to sell them in order to prepare and adjust. It's given us an opportunity to think about how to give back," said the couple.

Kagin and his colleague David McCarthy, senior numismatist and researcher at Kagin's, met with the couple last April, two months after the hoard was found.

When McCarthy and Kagin told the couple that their bonanza will be in the annals of numismatic stories for quite some time, the couple said, "It would have been quite a pity not to share the magnitude of our find. We want to keep the story of these coins intact for posterity."

[PorkChopSandwiches]

I fucking knew it

[DemonGeminiX]

There's always a catch.

[PorkChopSandwiches]

They should have shut their whore mouths

[Hal-9000]

"Nearly all of the 1,427 coins, dating from 1847 to 1894, are in uncirculated, mint condition"



how can the mint say it was stolen.....old news, been forgotten and give those people the buried treasure ffs..

[DemonGeminiX]

They should have shut their whore mouths

That goes without saying. Keep it on the down low. Maybe get a single coin exchanged every year.

:lol:

[Hal-9000]

and give that puppy a new doghouse, fur coat and heated swimming pool :lol:


Seriously....ok if the coins were stolen back in 1850-1875 let's say, one would think DaMint probably has minted a few million more coins since then and reconciled the loss economically. Hell that was back when George Bush the first was president wasn't it? :lol:

[FBD]

of course the government wants to get their greedy mitts on everything they possibly can.

I cant believe how absolutely freakin stupid these people were to have said anything to anyone about this.

[deebakes]

no shit :+1:

[PorkChopSandwiches]

California gold coin find spurs no credible claims, expert says

A senior expert at the firm representing a Northern California couple who discovered buried gold coins worth $10 million says he has not received any credible claims to the huge find and does not expect to.

Numerous theories have cropped up since the discovery of the Saddle Ridge Hoard was announced last week. One of them, that the coins were tied to a 1901 U.S. Mint theft in San Francisco, appeared to be debunked Tuesday by the U.S. Mint itself.

“We do not have any information linking the Saddle Ridge Hoard coins to any thefts at any United States Mint facility,” U.S. Mint spokesman Adam Stump said in a statement, adding that lawyers have looked into the matter.

The Northern California couple, only identified as John and Mary by Kagin's, had walked the path on their gold country property for years before they spotted the edge of a rusty can peeking out of the moss in February 2013. When the lid cracked off, they found dirt-encrusted coins, some in better condition than those on display in museums.

The Saddle Ridge Hoard, named for the space on their property, may be the most valuable cache ever found in North America, with an estimated value of more than $10 million. If you melted the coins, the gold alone would be worth $2 million, said David Hall, co-founder of Professional Coin Grading Services in Newport Beach, who recently authenticated them.

Thirteen of the coins are the finest of their kind. One "miraculous coin," an 1866 $20 piece made in San Francisco and missing "In God We Trust," could bring $1 million on its own, Hall said. When the motto was added to the coin in 1866, some were still minted without the phrase, he said.

Kagin's Inc., which evaluated the Saddle Ridge Hoard and is representing the couple who found it, did extensive research to determine whether the coins were ill-gotten, said David McCarthy, senior numismatist for the firm.
McCarthy said he was aware of the U.S. Mint theft story before the cache was discovered, but never suspected these were those coins because he knew what that lot would have looked like.

In 1901, six bags of double eagle gold coins -- 250 $20 coins in each -- went missing from the San Francisco Mint. Chief Clerk Walter Dimmick was convicted of stealing the $30,000 and served time in San Quentin prison for what was later called the Dimmick Defalcation.

The coins were never recovered.

Each bag of coins in Dimmick’s cache would have contained coins with the same date and mint mark, said David McCarthy, senior numismatist for Kagin's Inc., which evaluated the Saddle Ridge Hoard.
The cache discovered last year contains a mix of coins with 72 distinct date and mint mark combinations, he said. The 1,427 coins, most of them $20 pieces, are dated between 1847 and 1894.

"That’s 12 times as many permutations as we should have if it was the group that Dimmick defalcated with,” McCarthy said, adding that it's doubtful the mint would have coins made more than 50 years earlier still in its stocks.

[DemonGeminiX]

It appears that they've dodged a bullet.

[PorkChopSandwiches]

We'll see. Thats a lot of money at stake, I bet they end up fighting over it for a while

[Hal-9000]

"...with an estimated value of more than $10 million. If you melted the coins, the gold alone would be worth $2 million"



wtf, hal-math?

:lol:

[Teh One Who Knocks]

"...with an estimated value of more than $10 million. If you melted the coins, the gold alone would be worth $2 million"



wtf, hal-math?

:lol:

Collector value on old coins (especially silver and gold) is almost always substantially higher than the straight bullion value

[Hal-9000]

Collector value on old coins (especially silver and gold) is almost always substantially higher than the straight bullion value

I know that! :x

I have a mint 1987 American quarter and it's worth in excess of 26 cents



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