CHIEF SMITKIN'S GOLD (PART ONE)

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CHIEF SMITKIN’S GOLD©

$18,000 in Gold Coins, A Dying Chief’s Secret,

and the Mission He Loved Too Much to Leave

Omak, Okanogan County, Washington • 1918

GPS Coordinates • 22 Sources • Full Treasure Analysis

By T. R. Lewis​

THE LAND AND THE MAN

The Okanogan Highlands of north-central Washington occupy a landscape defined by geological patience and climatic severity. Long ridgelines of ponderosa pine and bunchgrass stretch across the terrain, bisected by the deeply incised drainages of the Okanogan, Methow, and Sanpoil rivers as they descend southwestward toward the Columbia. Winters are prolonged and unforgiving; summers bleach the basalt benches above the rivers to a dry, ochre gold. The Okanogan people inhabited this country for millennia before European contact, and it is precisely this country where, in 1918, an elderly and prominent tribal chief interred his life savings in the earth and died without disclosing the location to a single living person.

That chief’s name was Smitkin — documented variously in historical records as Smithen, Smitken, and Smithkin — and within the Colville Confederated Tribes he occupied a position of genuine political and spiritual authority. The historical marker erected near Omak by the Okanogan County Historical Society identifies him as the chief who formally invited Father Etienne DeRouge, S.J. to establish St. Mary’s Mission on the Colville Indian Reservation in 1886. His stature was sufficient that in 1890 he led a Colville delegation to Washington, D.C., with James Bernard serving as his interpreter, to negotiate directly with federal officials over reservation boundaries. Men who do not command the confidence of their peers do not receive that assignment.

Smitkin possessed that confidence. He also possessed gold.

The treasure accounts are consistent on the material facts: Chief Smitkin interred $18,000 in gold coins near St. Mary’s Mission in 1918 and died the same year without revealing the location. His neighbors, who had observed him making solitary late-night visits to the mission church — walking quietly to the building, standing outside it for extended periods, and departing without explanation — drew a conclusion that has not been seriously challenged in the century since. The gold was buried somewhere near that church, and the old man’s nocturnal visits were the acts of someone maintaining a private vigil over something irreplaceable.

No one has recovered it. Or if someone has, the discovery has been maintained in absolute silence for more than a hundred years.

WHO WAS CHIEF SMITKIN?

Smitkin’s name enters the documentary record in the 1880s, and the most historically significant fact associated with him is precisely the one memorialized on stone near Omak: he was the tribal leader whose invitation brought St. Mary’s Mission into existence. Father Etienne DeRouge — a French nobleman of aristocratic lineage who had taken Jesuit orders and traveled to the American Northwest — arrived at the Okanogan River in autumn 1885, established a small residential chapel near what is now Ellisford, Washington, and in 1886 formally constituted the mission on tribal land that Smitkin donated at the head of Omak Lake, east of the Okanogan River on the Colville Reservation.

The voluntary cession of that land is not a minor biographical footnote. A chief who recruits a Jesuit priest, provides the ground on which an institution will be built, and facilitates the establishment of a school and hospital for his people is exercising sovereign judgment in the most consequential way available to him. Archival records preserved in the Social Networks and Archival Context database, drawing on mission documents held at Graham Public Library, confirm that the land was “donated by Chief Smitkin near present Omak.” Father DeRouge immediately returned to Europe to conduct a personal fundraising campaign, securing sufficient capital to transform a single log cabin into what the county historical marker describes as a junior college with “dormitories, hospital, band, museum, and baseball team” — an institution that served as “a cultural and religious center for this entire area.”

Smitkin was present throughout that institutional development, watching a single donated plot of ground become the central educational and spiritual apparatus of the Okanogan Valley. In 1890 he carried that same sense of responsibility to the federal capital, negotiating directly with government officials to protect what remained of the reservation land. He lived through the passage of the 1905 Colville Agreement, under which the Confederated Tribes ceded reservation lands to the United States for a promised $1.5 million — a payment the federal government delayed for fourteen years. Through allotment negotiations, per-capita distributions, cattle trading, and the financial transactions that naturally accrued to a man of his standing, Smitkin accumulated wealth that he kept in his own custody rather than entrust to institutions he had watched behave unreliably.

By 1918, Father DeRouge had been dead two years — he died in 1916 after three decades of service, succeeded by Father Celestine Caldi. Smitkin was elderly by any calculation; his prominence in 1886 and his 1890 delegation role together suggest a birth date no later than the early 1850s, placing him past seventy in 1918. He had outlived the priest who had been his partner in the mission’s creation. He had seen the reservation diminished by congressional action. He died in 1918, one year before a fire would destroy the mission’s main college building — a catastrophe he did not live to witness, and one that would in any case have been irrelevant to what he had placed underground.

$18,000 IN GOLD — ITS MEANING IN 1918

The monetary context of 1918 is essential to understanding the physical form Smitkin’s wealth most likely took. The United States was still formally operating under the gold standard, and gold coins — legal tender struck by the United States Mint in specified weights and fineness — circulated alongside Federal Reserve notes in daily commerce. For individuals of substantial means who harbored distrust of banking institutions, physical gold coin was the rational instrument of wealth preservation.

The predominant large-denomination coin in circulation in 1918 was the $20 Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle, struck continuously from 1907 through 1933. Commissioned by President Theodore Roosevelt from sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and widely regarded as the most aesthetically distinguished coin in American numismatic history, the Double Eagle contained precisely 0.9675 troy ounces of pure gold in a 90% gold, 10% copper alloy, measured 34.1 millimeters in diameter and 2.41 millimeters in thickness, and weighed 33.44 grams. It was the instrument by which large commercial obligations were settled and, among those outside the formal banking system, the standard vehicle for the private accumulation and storage of capital.

At a face value of $20 per coin, $18,000 resolves to exactly 900 Double Eagles. Nine hundred coins containing an aggregate 870.75 troy ounces of pure gold, with a combined mass of approximately 30,096 grams — roughly 66.4 pounds. That weight, while substantial, is entirely consistent with transport by a single mounted individual. It fits in standard saddlebags with considerable margin. A man who knew where he was going and had prepared the site in advance could manage the operation alone, at night, without assistance.

The purchasing-power context reinforces how extraordinary this sum was for a reservation-based individual in 1918. Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data for that year places average annual American worker earnings at $800 to $1,000. Eighteen thousand dollars therefore represented fifteen to twenty years of ordinary wages. On the Colville Reservation, where the economic base consisted of subsistence agriculture, cattle ranching, fishing, and the gradual receipt of per-capita distributions from the 1905 Agreement, that magnitude of personal wealth was exceptional. Its accumulation over decades — through allotment payments, land-agreement proceeds, livestock trading, and the financial stewardship functions that a chief of Smitkin’s standing would have exercised on behalf of his band — is historically plausible. Its physical concealment, rather than institutional deposit, is psychologically consistent with a man whose experience of federal institutions had been a prolonged lesson in the unreliability of promises.

THE NOCTURNAL VIGILS

The most analytically significant element of the Smitkin account is not the sum buried but the behavioral pattern that preceded and followed the burial. In the years immediately before his death, Chief Smitkin established a practice of solitary nocturnal visits to the St. Mary’s Mission church. He walked to the building alone, after dark, and remained outside it for extended periods before departing without explanation. The frequency and consistency of these visits were sufficient to draw the sustained attention of his neighbors, who noted the pattern but received no account of it from Smitkin himself.

After his death in 1918, those neighbors applied the most parsimonious interpretation available to them. The Treasure Valley Metal Detecting Club’s Washington State account preserves their reasoning with notable directness: “Smitkin always went to church at Saint Mary’s Indian Mission at Omak. He would come alone at night and look at the church building. After he died in 1918, his neighbors theorized that Smitkin visited the church so much because he had his money buried nearby. Perhaps the chief thought the white man’s god would protect his cache.”

The behavioral logic of this interpretation is cross-culturally robust. Men who inter wealth near structures they regard as sacred or personally significant do so for two distinct but complementary motivations. The instrumental motivation is navigational: a permanent, structurally durable landmark provides an unambiguous spatial reference that can be reliably located in darkness by someone who has internalized the site’s geometry. A stone-and-timber church, built to last across generations, represents exactly that kind of anchor. The affective motivation runs deeper: Smitkin had donated the ground on which that church stood. The mission was not merely a convenient landmark; it was a material expression of his own agency and legacy. Interring his most portable wealth in proximity to that structure carried the weight of a deliberate statement about what he valued and what he trusted.

What he withheld from everyone was the specific location. Not from his family. Not from his neighbors. Not from Father Caldi, who had succeeded DeRouge and under whose ministry Smitkin’s final years played out. The TVMDC account is unambiguous: the $20,000 — a figure that differs slightly from the more frequently cited $18,000, possibly reflecting additional assets or a different estimating source — “was not found after Chief Smitkin died.” Not a single coin was recovered. Whatever he buried remained in the earth of Okanogan County exactly where he left it.

ST. MARY’S MISSION — THE INSTITUTIONAL ANCHOR

St. Mary’s Mission is not a historical artifact. It is a continuously operating institution that has functioned without interruption since its founding in 1886, and it operates today as the Paschal Sherman Indian School — the sole remaining Indian boarding school in the state of Washington. The present church structure dates from 1910 and remains an active Catholic place of worship. The mission is located on Washington Route 155, east of US Highway 97, approximately four miles east of Omak and then 1.5 miles south on Mission Road, at the address 25 Mission Road, Omak, Washington 98841.

The Okanogan County Historical Society’s marker, positioned near the intersection of WA-155 and the mission access road at confirmed GPS coordinates of 48° 23.532′ N, 119° 27.474′ W, carries the following text: “A French nobleman turned priest, Etienne DeRouge, S.J. established Saint Mary’s Mission at the invitation of Chief Smitkin in 1886. From a single log cabin, St. Mary’s grew into a junior college — complete with dormitories, hospital, band, museum, and baseball team — which served as a cultural and religious center for this entire area.” The marker was erected by the Okanogan County Historical Society and constitutes the official public historical record of Smitkin’s foundational role.

The 1919 fire that destroyed the mission’s main college building warrants careful attention in any treasure analysis. The conflagration consumed the primary academic structure, a loss of considerable institutional consequence. It did not, however, affect the 1910 church, which was separately sited and survived intact. It is the 1910 church — still standing today — that Smitkin visited in his nocturnal vigils. More critically for the treasure question: whatever Smitkin interred in 1918 was below grade. A surface fire consuming above-ground wooden structures in 1919 would have had no thermal or mechanical effect on metal coins sealed in the earth a year earlier. The 1919 fire altered the surface archaeology of the mission. It did not alter whatever lies beneath it.

The physical geography of the mission grounds in 1918 encompassed the church, dormitories, hospital facilities, school buildings, kitchen gardens, and the open sloping terrain between the institutional complex and the head of Omak Lake. The lake surface sits at 958 feet elevation; the mission occupies higher ground to the north and west. The terrain between the mission’s-built perimeter and the lake shore descends gently through grassland and scattered timber — soft, seasonally moist ground that would have accepted a shovel without resistance and closed over a modest excavation without leaving evidence visible by daylight.

THE VALUATION — WHAT THE GOLD IS WORTH TODAY

The Case for $5,000 per Troy Ounce

The valuation framework employed in this analysis rests on a $5,000 per troy ounce gold price, which as of mid-2026 represents the conservative end of the institutional consensus among major financial analysts. Goldman Sachs reaffirmed a year-end 2026 gold price target of $5,000 per troy ounce following gold’s March 2026 pullback, citing persistent structural demand from central bank accumulation, Federal Reserve policy accommodation, and geopolitical safe-haven flows. J.P. Morgan’s Global Research division raised its own forecast to $6,000 per ounce for the fourth quarter of 2026, with Greg Shearer, the bank’s Head of Base and Precious Metals, referencing the same demand drivers. Wells Fargo set a year-end 2026 target of $6,100 to $6,300 per ounce. The BullionVault survey of 1,532 precious-metals investors conducted in December 2025 produced a median prediction of $5,136 per ounce for December 2026. Citigroup designated $5,000 as a near-term ceiling in their Q1 2026 institutional client communications.

Gold’s macroeconomic position entering 2026 is structurally unlike any prior environment. Central banks globally purchased record quantities in both 2024 and 2025, removing significant supply from the investable float. The Federal Reserve’s sustained accommodation posture has depressed real yields, historically the primary determinant of gold price movement. Concurrent geopolitical instability across multiple theaters has driven institutional and sovereign safe-haven demand to levels not observed since the late 1970s. Every major analytical house that has revised its gold forecast in the past eighteen months has revised it upward. $5,000 per troy ounce represents the floor of credible institutional projections for 2026, and it is the price applied throughout this analysis.

Metal Valuation of the Cache

At $5,000 per troy ounce, the pure gold content of 900 Saint-Gaudens Double Eagles — 870.75 troy ounces aggregate — carries a melt valuation of $4,353,750. That figure represents the absolute floor: the minimum recoverable value if every coin were melted regardless of numismatic condition. It is the price of the metal, nothing more.

Numismatic Premium Analysis

The Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle series is among the most avidly collected in American numismatics, and the 1918 dates present a particularly compelling profile for a buried cache. The 1918-P — struck at the Philadelphia Mint — carried a production run of 74,950 pieces, a figure that establishes it as a genuinely scarce date within the series. In circulated grades (VF-30 through AU-58), 1918-P examples command $2,200 to $2,800 per coin in the current market. Uncirculated specimens graded MS-62 through MS-63 by PCGS or NGC trade at $2,500 to $3,500 and above.

The 1918-S, produced at the San Francisco Mint, occupies a categorically different position. Its mintage of 3,890 pieces makes it one of the rarest Saint-Gaudens Double Eagles ever struck for general circulation. In circulated grades, 1918-S specimens routinely bring $3,000 to $5,000 and frequently more, depending on the specific grade and the competitive dynamics of the sale. In meaningful uncirculated grades — MS-62 and above — the 1918-S has realized $8,000 to $20,000 per coin and beyond. A cache containing any meaningful proportion of 1918-S pieces would carry a numismatic value substantially exceeding the metal floor.

The condition prospects for this cache are not unfavorable. Coins interred in 1918 had been in circulation for, at most, a matter of months following their Mint production. The volcanic loess soils of the Okanogan Highlands are relatively alkaline and low in the organic acids that accelerate surface corrosion on gold alloys. Gold itself is chemically inert to the sulfur compounds and moisture that damage silver and copper; the primary conservation risk is mechanical abrasion from soil movement, which is negligible in undisturbed ground. A century of burial in Okanogan County soil does not, on the available evidence, preclude the recovery of coins in grades substantially above circulated.

Melt value (870.75 troy oz at $5,000): $4,353,750

All 1918-P, circulated average ($2,300): $2,070,000

Mixed 1918-P and 1918-S, circulated ($4,000 avg): $3,600,000 – $4,500,000

1918-S specimens in uncirculated grades: $8,000 – $20,000+ per coin

Maximum scenario (high-grade 1918-S throughout): Exceeds $13,500,000

SITE ANALYSIS AND PROBABLE LOCATION

The received account situates the cache “near St. Mary’s Mission,” a geographic designation capacious enough to encompass several acres of varied terrain. Smitkin’s behavioral record, however, significantly narrows the analytical field. His nocturnal visits were not generalized perambulations of the property; they were directed at the church building specifically. He walked to it, stood outside it, and departed from it. The church was not incidentally present in his visits — it was their terminus. Whatever he buried was in a spatial relationship to that structure that he could reconstruct reliably in the dark, from memory, without external reference.

The literature on treasure burial proximate to permanent structures yields consistent patterns across time and geography. The burial site is typically close enough to the anchor structure to be relocatable without daylight or surveying instruments — generally within 50 to 200 feet — but sufficiently removed from the immediate foundation perimeter to avoid disturbance by the footings, drainage works, or construction activities that accumulate around any occupied building over time. The soil characteristics favor speed and concealment: garden plots with regularly turned earth, sheltered corners where soil accumulates to depth, low-lying areas where drainage has softened the ground.

The 1910 church structure — the building Smitkin visited and the building that stands on the site today — is oriented relative to the mission’s other facilities in a way that creates a natural asymmetry of exposure. The north and west aspects of the church faced the dormitories, school buildings, and the more heavily trafficked internal circulation of the mission. The south and east aspects faced Omak Lake and the open ground below the institutional complex — terrain that in 1918 was less inhabited, less observed, and more accessible to a man approaching alone from the direction of the lake at night. A person arriving under those conditions and seeking the greatest practical privacy would instinctively have chosen the south or east side of the church as his working ground.

The mission’s kitchen gardens and cultivated plots present a secondary high-probability zone. Every Jesuit mission of this period maintained kitchen gardens as a matter of institutional necessity, and the soil of a regularly worked garden — turned annually, friable to depth, visually indistinguishable after forty-eight hours of weather from ground that has not been recently disturbed — is precisely the kind of medium a prudent man would choose for a rapid, clean burial. A spade into garden soil works in minutes. The surface closes cleanly. Nothing shows by morning.

The access road corridor from WA-155 is the least probable zone. It is the most trafficked, most observed, and most structurally altered segment of the mission grounds. A gully, tree line, or rock feature visible from the church and accessible on foot could serve as a secondary spatial anchor — but the church itself, given the behavioral evidence, remains the primary reference structure in any credible search framework.

The mission property is held in trust for the Colville Confederated Tribes and administered jointly with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Spokane. Any excavation on tribal trust land without prior written authorization from the Colville Business Council constitutes a federal criminal offense under 25 U.S.C. § 1302 and, if the activity qualifies as archaeological in nature, under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 (16 U.S.C. §§ 470aa–470mm). The Diocese of Spokane holds a concurrent institutional interest in the mission property and must be party to any authorizing agreement. Unauthorized entry with metal detection equipment would not merely jeopardize the individual search; it would permanently foreclose legitimate access to the site for any subsequent investigator.

KEY LOCATIONS AND GPS COORDINATES

All coordinates below are confirmed from publicly available sources. The primary investigation zone is the St. Mary’s Mission campus on the Colville Indian Reservation, Okanogan County, Washington.



1. St. Mary’s Mission Historical Marker

GPS: 48° 23.532′ N, 119° 27.474′ W | 7674 WA-155, Omak, WA 98841

The Okanogan County Historical Society marker on Washington Route 155. Its text names Chief Smitkin as the individual who invited Father DeRouge to establish the mission in 1886 and constitutes the official public documentary record of Smitkin’s foundational role in the institution. Source: HMDB.org marker no. 270171.

2. St. Mary’s Mission / Paschal Sherman Indian School — Primary Investigation Zone

GPS: 48°23.2′ N, 119°27.5′ W (approx.) | 25 Mission Rd, Omak, WA 98841

The mission campus, including the 1910 church (extant), school buildings, and surrounding grounds. Ground within 200 feet of the 1910 church on its south and east aspects, facing Omak Lake, represents the highest-probability search zone based on the behavioral record. All investigative activity requires prior written authorization from the Colville Business Council (509-634-2200) and the Diocese of Spokane (509-358-7300). Access: east on WA-155 approximately four miles from US 97, then south on Mission Road 1.5 miles.

3. Omak Lake — Eastern Spatial Reference

GPS: 48°16’19.55″ N, 119°23’38.16″ W (lake center) | Colville Indian Reservation, WA

Washington’s largest saline lake, covering 3,244 acres at 958 feet elevation. St. Mary’s Mission was established at the head of Omak Lake in 1886 on land donated by Chief Smitkin. The gently sloping open terrain between the mission’s built perimeter and the lake shore is within the broader investigation corridor.