General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Couple takes dog for walk, finds $10-million in buried coins [View all]Xithras
(16,191 posts)A lot of the 49ers didn't trust banks (no FDIC in those days), and since most miners lived in crappy little tent-houses, only an idiot left their gold sitting out where anyone could find it. Most would dig a hole somewhere under their tent-cabin and just bury it.
Then, like now, people died unexpectedly. A sudden disease, a shooting in a saloon, a mine collapse, a heart attack...people died without digging their hoards back up. After a few decades the tent cabins wore away to a few rotten boards, and more than a century later there's nothing left at all. Nothing except the gold buried under the ground.
From time to time someone will turn up a stash of old coins or a small jar of gold from these sites. The scale of this particular discovery is mindboggling and is probably the biggest in history, but it's not the first of the type, and probably won't be the last (just a few years ago a landowner was leveling a bit of land near Columbia in the Gold Country and turned up some rusty cans of gold dust that ended up being worth about a hundred grand).