It's a really great story. In brief, it was a stage coach robery between Old Shasta and Redding along middle creek. There was more gold than could be carried away and most of it was buried. There seems to be several different versions of what was actually in the strong box, but the lowest estimate indicates 200 ozs of dust.
Here are some more facts for a longer version...
Two brothers held up the stage, one stopped the stage while the other covered him from across the road. The lookout was inside the coach because the one passenger wanted to ride up top. The lookout inside the coach shot the only robber he knew of with a shot gun. The shot brothers shotgun went off as he fell, wounding both the driver and the passenger beside him.
The other brother fired several shots into the coach and the stage bolted. The man inside eventually died a couple of hours later.
The brother who wasn't shot thought his brother was dead, so he stripped him of ID and left him. A posse found him the next day, still alive but unwilling to talk.
Agents finally figgered out who he was, and assumed the other robber was his older brother. The older brother was captured a few weeks later.
While the courts were trying to get thew two brothers healthy enuff to stand trial-the older one also being shot as he was being arrested-the good upstanding citizens broke into the jail and lynched them.
The older brother offered to tell the lynch mob where the gold was if they'd let his brother go, but since it was gold belonging to Wells Fargo, nobody cared that much about it.
There is a lot more to the story, but this is the nutz and bolts of who-what-where-why.
The location of the robbery is public knowledge, so all that remains is deciding how far he could have carried the gold before he decided to bury it, and in what direction. The terrain is pretty ruff around there, so even with a metal detector it's gonna be a job finding it. But hey, the fun is in the search
