California Faith Healer

When it comes to states with the most lost treasure stories California has to be one of the biggest out there. There are literally thousands of stories and I’m sure there are even thousands more of unknown treasures too.

This article is for a friend of mine in California who seems to need something to do with his metal detector. If he ever gets time away from playing music and chasing the women he might go take a look at this!

Sometime around the turn of the century, 1900 that is, a faith healer appeared near Placerville, California and began selling his wares. Apparently he was pretty good at what he did or the people around Placerville at the time weren’t too bright because the faith healer amassed a huge fortune in paper money, gold coins and silver coins which he buried all around his property. The faith healer kept a herd of goats on his property and because of this he became known as the “Goat Doctor of El Dorado County”.

The goat doctor stayed busy for many years and it is estimated that he buried a minimum of $750,000 on his property. This estimate I might add is the FACE VALUE of what was buried. The gold and silver coins that are buried on the property are known to have dates on them starting in the 1800’s and going into the 1930’s.

How do they know what the dates on the coins are? You’re going to love this.

In 1979 the new owner of the property was doing some demolition work with a bulldozer and uncovered a “huge hoard of silver coins and bills”. When he started collecting the coins off of the ground there were so many that he filled three 5 gallon gas cans with coins!

Other construction workers that were there stopped working and began searching the old home that was being torn down. Three more caches were found, all in small pots. One was in what was left of the fire place and the other two were in the ground around the outside of the home. They also found $1,700 dollars of silver coins just scattered across the top of the ground from another cache they had hit with the dozer and didn’t see until they stopped working.

Some “professional treasure hunters” came along in 1980 and received permission to search the property for other caches. These men located an old rotted cloth sack buried at the base of a lone pine tree. The sack contained $7,000 face value of coins ranging from Indian head pennies to silver dollars. The dates on the coins were from the 1800’s on into the 1930’s.

In 1981 ten thousand dollars in silver coins was found buried in several coffee cans on the property and in that same year a metal boxed was discovered buried that contained $5,000 in paper money. I guess this is a silly question but how did the “professional treasure hunters” miss several coffee cans filled with coins and a metal box?

In 1982 the construction workers that had found the first treasures in 1979 came forward and said a couple of other construction workers had located a small man made “vault” that was approximately 4 feet by 4 feet in size. The vault contained an additional $20,000 in gold coins. This again is the face value and not the numismatic value.

It is thought that several other small caches may have secretly been removed by people sneaking onto the property after a story about the treasures being found hit the papers in the 1980’s.

How’s that for verification that treasure is there! If the estimates of how much was buried on the property are true, then there is a lot more out there just waiting for somebody with a metal detector to come along and recover it. The last information I had indicated the land owner will still let people treasure hunt on the property providing the get permission first.

So put down that guitar and get to swinging a detector! You can bring the girl with you. :-)