Cans of buried treasure found by California couple as they walked dog on their own property in 1800s gold rush region

A California couple out walking their dog have stumbled across a buried hoard of rare mint-condition gold coins said to be worth up to US$10m.

Nearly all of the 1,427 coins dating from 1847 to 1894 were in uncirculated mint condition, said David Hall, co-founder of Professional Coin Grading Service of Santa Ana, which authenticated them.

The face value of the gold pieces adds up to about $27,000 but some of them are so rare that coin experts say they could fetch nearly $1m each.

“I don’t like to say once in a lifetime for anything but you don’t get an opportunity to handle this kind of material, a treasure like this, ever,” said numismatist Don Kagin, who is representing the finders. “It’s like they found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

Kagin and McCarthy would say little about the couple’s property or its ownership history, other than it is in a sprawling hilly area of Gold Country, as the region that was the site of the 1849 Gold Rush is known. The coins were found along a path the couple had walked for years. On the day they found them the woman had bent over to examine an old rusty can revealed by erosion under a tree.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Coin grader David Hall shows a sample from the 'Saddle Ridge Hoard'. Photograph: Reed Saxon/AP

The coins, in $5, $10 and $20 denominations, were stored more or less in chronological order, McCarthy said, with the 1840s and 1850s pieces going into one canister until it was filed, then new coins going into the next one, and the next one after that. This made it unlikely they were salted away in the ground progressively rather than swooped up all at once in a robbery.

The find was made on a section of the property the couple nicknamed Saddle Ridge, with Kagin dubbing the find the Saddle Ridge Hoard. Most of the coins were minted in San Francisco but one $5 gold piece came from as far away as Georgia.

One of the largest previous finds of gold coins was $1m worth uncovered by construction workers in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1985. More than 400,000 silver dollars were found in the home of a Reno, Nevada, man who died in 1974. They were later sold intact for $7.3m.



Gold coins and ingots said to be worth as much as $130m were recovered in the 1980s from the wreck of the SS Central America. But historians knew roughly where that gold was because the ship went down off the coast of North Carolina during a hurricane in 1857.

Kagin said the pair were remaining anonymous but would be loaning some coins to the American Numismatic Association for its annual show in Atlanta on Thursday before putting most of them up for sale.