Couple Finds $10M worth of Gold Coins on a Dog Walk

Some dream of finding buried treasures. One Sierra Nevada couple were lucky enough to dug it up in their own backyard.

According to preliminary estimates, they got about $10 million worth, in 19th century U.S. gold coins stuffed into rusty cans.

The finding is believed to the biggest hoard of gold coins in the history of the United States. And it’s going on sale in time.

Nearly all of the (1,427 coins), dating from 1847-1894, were obtained by the Californian couple said David Hall, co-founder of (Professional Coin Grading Service) of Santa Ana, which recently authenticated them.

And despite the face value of the gold pieces only adds up to about ($27,000), some of them are extremely rare that coin experts says they could fetch nearly $1 million apiece.

“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 veteran numismatist Don Kagin, who represents the finders.

“It’s like they luckily found a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.” Brushing unveiled practivally perfectly preserved $20 gold coins with liberty head designs on the front face, dated from the 1890s.

“They ran back to the same spot, and when they were done digging, they’d found a total of eight cans containing 1,427 coins, with a face value of $27,980,” writes SF Gate.

“It was a very dreamlike moment. It was very hard to believe at first,” the man said in an interview taped by the rare coin dealer he eventually consulted to make sense of the find. “I thought any second an old miner with a mule was going to appear at that moment.”

The happy owners of the whole fortune are keeping their identities and location in secret for many reasons, to prevent treasure hunters. However, they called coin dealer "Don Kagin of Tiburon", who helped evaluate some of the biggest sunken treasures finds in history, to offer the collections up for sale.

“You hear all those Wild West stories of buried treasure, and you think they’re fantasies – well here, this one really did happen,” Kagin said the other day as he and his senior numismatist, David McCarthy, laid out dozens of the coins and cans for inspection at their office. “And what is almost unbelievable about this collection is what pristine condition so many of them are in.”

As claims “American Coin Treasures and Hoards,” the bible of buried treasure finds, the most significant hoard of gold coins dug up before Saddle Ridge was a collection found by construction workers in Jackson, Tenn., in 1985.

It had a face value of $4,500 and sold for $1 million. Kagin and McCarthy met with the couple in April, two months after the hoard was dug up and the inevitable attorneys had gotten involved.

“The first thing the family did after finding all the cans was rebury them in a cooler under their woodpile,” McCarthy said. “They were terrified and had to think about what to do.”