Here are a few fun stories of lost gold during the California Gold Rush of 1849 – 1870s. In these stories, no one ever found the gold. The cans or trunk or sacks are most likely still buried along an old road in the California gold country. Maybe someday you will find a piece of California’s lost gold!
Sailor Jack’s Gold
A young sailor from Finland came to gold company when he heard about the gold rush in the Golden State. He settled in El Dorado County. Without any mining or prospecting experience, he easily fell prey to a group of miners who played a practical joke on him. The experienced miners talked Jack into filing a claim on a piece of land that they thought was completely useless (not a very nice prank). You can imagine those mean miners’ surprise when they found out that Sailor Jack had struck it rich with his gold mining. His mine, the “Sailor Jack Mine,” became the richest mine in all of El Dorado County. He hired miners and went all out. The Sailor Jack was a placer mine, which means they mined above ground and scooped up all of the surface gold. Meanwhile . . .
One of Jack’s miners discovered several large gold nuggets just above the actual mine, in a place called Goose Neck Ravine. He thought the nuggets might be a hint of where the source of the Sailor Jack Mine might be. He marked the place, but even though the miners went back and forth, scouring the site and looking for the gold nuggets the miner had told them about, no one ever found the nuggets or the source. (Those ravines and draws and rocks and ridges all look alike in the gold country.) The site became known as the Lost Goose Egg Mine, and many believe it is still brimming with undiscovered gold.
Mammoth Mountain
In 1857, a couple of Germans traveling near Mammoth Mountain stopped to rest beside a stream. They looked up and saw what they believed might be massive chunks of gold stuck together under a rock ledge. It looked like so much gold that one of the Germans did not believe it could possibly be real. The other man disagreed and chipped away about ten pounds of the golden rocks. He marked the spot on a crude map (but not very well, as we will find out in a bit) and hauled his ten pounds of “gold” away with him. The other fellow, the one who had doubted that the ledge was gold, died shortly after their discovery. The man with the ten pounds of gold fell ill with tuberculosis, a lung disease. He went to San Francisco for treatment and paid for his care with not only some of the gold he’d broken off from the ledge but also with the map!
Much later (1861), the doctor found a few friends and set off to find this gold-encrusted ledge. There are two endings to this lost gold tale. One ending insists that the doctor and his friends found the ledge and took out thousands of dollars’ worth of gold, only to be killed by angry Paiute Indians, who were angry at so many miners crawling all over their land. The other ending to this tale claim that the doctor and his party never found the site of the gold. Which ending do you believe?
Humbug Mountain
A miner working for a big outfit near Humbug Creek fell ill one day, so he started into the town of Yreka (way up in northern California) to seek medical attention. When he got to the Deadwood Trail, he felt even sicker and stopped to rest under a tree. While he was resting, he happened to see a promising quartz outcropping (gold can often be found in quartz ore). Amazingly, he began to feel much better. He went back to his cabin about three miles away, grabbed his gold pan, a pick, a shovel, and his sack and returned to the place where he’d been resting. He took out a sack full of gold ore (mixed with quartz) worth about $5,000 – $7,000. Then he set off over the hill to Hawkinsville, where his family lived. He took out more gold later on, but fell sick again (maybe working too hard?). He covered his special site with lots of brush, but left his pick and shovel behind. He found the County Hospital, but it was too late. He died a week later. Clearly, he did not tell his family about his gold site’s location, as it has been lost ever since. All anyone knows that the site was somewhere on the west side of Humbug Mountain, Now, that is a lot of wilderness to cover!
McGee Creek
An old man much like Strike-it-rich Sam found a rich gold strike on McGee Creek, east of the town of Redding, California. He filled two whole sacks with gold ore and hightailed it into Redding to sell it. He got enough money to buy another gold stake and tools and headed back to his claim on McGee Creek. To his horror, he could not find his claim again! He looked and looked for it, but he never returned to Redding. Eventually, men from the town went looking for this miner. They found his two donkeys, but they never found the old man. Nor did they find his rich gold strike.
Scott Valley
One time, a man went hunting near Kelsey and Kidder Creek in Scott Valley. Suddenly, he encountered a bad storm (like Jem and Ellie did when they ducked into the hollow tree to get out of the rain). He spent the night on a hillside, sheltering next to a big White Pine log. The next morning at dawn, the hunter noticed what looked like a two-foot ledge of rich rock at one end of the huge log. Excited, he marked the place with three notches in a nearby fir tree sapling (a young tree). He then buried his hatchet in the sapling to really mark the spot. But alas! He was never able to find the spot again.
Modern Day Gold Discovery
In 2014, a couple in Northern California were walking their dog on their property. They spied the edge of an old, beat-up tin can along a trail they had often walked before. They poked at the can, and it fell apart.. What do you think fell out? Gold coins from the the gold-rush years! All in all, they dug up five old cans, each packed full of newly minted gold coins! I wonder who buried them? Miners and prospectors, as mentioned before, did not trust banks and often hid their gold and gold coins that were made from their gold. This is probably what the fellow did in this northern California gold country. The cans held 1,427 coins worth over $10 million dollars from 1847-1894. One coin in itself, a rare one, is worth $1 million dollars.