Did Outlaws Really Bury Treasure?

[RKW]

One of the most common themes in Old West treasure stories goes something like this:

A stagecoach is robbed... a posse is closing in... the outlaw buries a saddlebag full of gold beneath a lonely cottonwood tree... then he's killed or arrested before he can return.

It's a great story.

But did it really happen?

After reading about dozens of famous Western outlaws, I think the answer is yes—but probably not the way Hollywood tells it.

Outlaws Didn't Use Banks​

A successful train or stagecoach robber might suddenly find himself carrying several thousand dollars in gold coins, silver dollars, currency, jewelry, or negotiable securities.

In the 1880s, there weren't many safe places to keep stolen money.

You couldn't exactly walk into the local bank and open a savings account.

That meant outlaws often carried their wealth with them—or hid it.

Temporary Caches Made Sense​

Imagine you've just robbed a stagecoach.

A posse is forming.

Your horse is exhausted.

You're carrying forty or fifty pounds of gold coins.

Would you keep riding with all that weight?

Or would you bury it under a distinctive rock, mark the location in your memory, and return after things quieted down?

To me, the second option seems entirely reasonable.

In fact, frontier scouts, trappers, soldiers, and miners all cached supplies when circumstances required it. Why wouldn't outlaws do the same?

The Difference Between a Cache and a Treasure​

This is where many legends begin to drift away from reality.

A cache is temporary.

A treasure is permanent.

Most outlaws probably intended to recover whatever they buried within days or weeks.

Only when something unexpected happened—death, imprisonment, or a bullet from a posse—would a temporary cache become a lost treasure.

That seems far more believable than someone intentionally burying a fortune and simply forgetting about it.

What About Famous Outlaws?​

Legends of buried treasure follow nearly every famous outlaw:

• Jesse James
• Butch Cassidy
• Black Jack Ketchum
• Billy the Kid

Yet surprisingly little contemporary evidence supports enormous hidden fortunes.

The robberies are well documented.

The treasure usually isn't.

The Problem with Gold​

Hollywood loves scenes where someone buries a chest overflowing with gold coins.

Reality is less glamorous.

Gold is heavy.

Very heavy.

A thousand $20 gold coins weighed roughly 120 pounds.

That isn't something you casually carry through rough country while outrunning a posse.

Smaller caches? Absolutely.

Massive pirate-style chests? Much harder to believe.

What Probably Happened​

If I had to guess, I'd say the West is still hiding a few genuine outlaw caches.

Not millions of dollars.

Not wagonloads of gold bars.

More likely:

• A saddlebag of gold coins.
• A Wells Fargo strongbox.
• A roll of currency.
• A hidden rifle or ammunition cache.
• Maybe a payroll that no one ever recovered.

Those are exactly the kinds of items an outlaw might hide with every intention of coming back.

My Conclusion​

The real question isn't:

"Did outlaws bury treasure?"

I think they almost certainly did.

The better question is:

"How many of those temporary hiding places became permanent because the outlaw never returned?"

That's the mystery that keeps treasure hunters searching more than a century later.

What do you think?

Are there any documented cases where you believe an outlaw's cache is still out there? I'd enjoy hearing about the evidence behind your favorite story.

Happy Hunting,

RKW

 

[AU Seeker]

I sorta agree with you on most everything...except one fact, 1000 $20 gold coins only weights just under 74 lbs., not 120 lbs., still to much weight to be carrying around trying to escape!!

But not many times did one outlaw get away with $20,000 that often, now divide that between 4 outlaws not to bad to carry, but they still didn't get that much but on rare occasions!

Google Search

 

[russau]

I agree with you & AU Seeker on your assessments ! I think robberies were done with the min. of 2+ people and one carring the loot and it would be burried to assisst the get a way untill a quite time they could get back to retreive the loot ! BUT if one of them got shot (.45 cal. ) that left a mighty big hole and they probly bleed out and died soon afterwards ! This would lead the other robbers to want to get out of town quick and split the loot and go their seperate ways even if the one that did get shot was still alive. They thought he probly would die soon and they didn't want to hang around and get caught ! NO HONOR AMOUNG THEIVES so they say! Theae robberies weren't that much money and it was spent on partys /drinks/women and hiding out till that pass's over ! I can only imagine that some loot is still buried somewhere and not retrieved because they got caught qickly and or shot ! I only wish that I could find a couple of them and at 79 I would have to party real quick before I met my maker and had to explain how / where /when and why I did such a dumb thing again !

 

[k0bgalan]

Most outlaws drank and caroused far more than the average frontiersman. And we need to remember, in frontier cities, prostitution was legal. Oh! Sin always pays more than honesty!

 

[jewelerguy]

I would imagine there are some still out there. I also wouldn't doubt that some may have been covered over by modern construction of parking lots, shopping malls, or other buildings.

 

[jeff of pa]

it depends how much was The take? Will it it in a Pocket ?
How many were Involved. did they trust each other ? how close is the Possie

YES OUTLAWS DID BURY CACHES

occasionally some were never redug,
due to memory, death or jail

 

[Bocaj]

I sorta agree with you on most everything...except one fact, 1000 $20 gold coins only weights just under 74 lbs., not 120 lbs., still to much weight to be carrying around trying to escape!!

But not many times did one outlaw get away with $20,000 that often, now divide that between 4 outlaws not to bad to carry, but they still didn't get that much but on rare occasions!

Google Search

I do not think that the usual haul was that big. Probably much less. And similar to pirates those bandits were usually on the run with little chance to return to a place that they needed to leave in a hurry. Best to carry it with your horse.

This isn't saying it never happens and if you got a documented lead then its good to follow it up. On the other hand I would get my hopes up and most of those myths are just that: myths.

 

[ToddsPoint]

 

[Gare]

A saddle bag full of gold would be awfully heavy for a horse

 

[AU Seeker]

A saddle bag full of gold would be awfully heavy for a horse

I agree, hard to pin down the exact size of an 1880ish saddle bags since they varied in size, but it seems that a good guess, one could put 2000 to 5000 gold double eagles in a saddle bag, that would weight 150 to 370 lbs., add the weight of the rider and his guns/gear and a horse would not be happy!

 

[Crow]

The average wage in the United States in 1890 was roughly $500 to $1,000 per year for working-class families, which breaks down to an average of about 13 cents per hour or roughly $1.50 to $2.00 per day for common laborers. The average annual wage for a worker in the United States was roughly $300 to $400 in 1850 and rose to about $400 to $500 in 1900, with specific earnings varying widely by job type, region, and gender.

The average haul from a traditional Old West stagecoach robbery typically ranged between $150 and several hundred dollars in cash and valuables, whereas a successful train robbery yielded a much higher mean loss of around $21,550 due to targeting safe-boxes and express company shipments

So for someone seen with large sums of money back then from a robbery, it would be easy to be outed as a robber. So, the necessity to avoid being caught was to plant or hide money. Much, no doubt, was retrieved, but much was lost due to death or forgotten where it was buried.

Traditional bank robberies in the American frontier were extremely rare, with fewer than 10 to 15 documented across the 15 western states between 1859 and 1900, whereas stagecoach robberies were far more common, totaling over 450 documented incidents from the 1850s through the early 1900s

There is no single official tally for every single holdup, but historians have documented over 450 stagecoach robberies across the American West from the 1850s through the early 1900s. Remote Targets: Stagecoaches traveled through isolated areas with little protection, making them easy targets for outlaws.

Carrying Valuables: Outlaws primarily targeted coaches carrying gold shipments, mining payrolls, and U.S. mail. Shift to Trains: The expansion of the transcontinental railroad after 1869 reduced stagecoach use, leading bandits to target trains instead

There were roughly several hundred to a thousand attempted and completed train robberies in the United States between the first moving train heist in 1866 and 1900, with historical estimates pointing to around 500 to 800 incidents during that specific time frame. First Heist: The trend began on October 6, 1866, when the Reno gang stopped a moving Ohio and Mississippi train in Jackson County, Indiana.

Peak Era: Train robberies surged significantly during the expansion of the American West, hitting a high-frequency peak during the early 1890s.

Geographic Spread: Incidents were most heavily concentrated in western and southern states like California, Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma where precious metals and large payrolls were shipped.

Countermeasures: Railroads fought back by deploying heavily armed guards, reinforced express cars, and specialized riding posses.

Modernization: Improved telegraph communications and faster law enforcement coordination made escapes harder around the turn of the 20th century.

If we took the lowest possible conservative estimate of unrecovered money being buried from such robberies 1% of about 100 robberies with buried money specie. That is from both stage coaches and trains. Still, there is at this very low estimate 100 possible locations of buried caches, possibly more.

There is no precise or official global percentage for how many historical buried treasure or resource caches have been recovered, though treasure-hunting historians estimate that less than 10% of historically hidden or lost caches are ever successfully found. That would still leave us with 90 locations that could still yield buried caches from the approximately 1000 events.

Then we have to look at urbanization in the equation.
1850: About 15% of the U.S. population lived in urban areas as industrialization and railroads began to expand.
1900: Urban share reached approximately 40% driven by factory growth and massive waves of immigration.
1910s: The U.S. officially became a majority-urban nation as city populations surpassed rural areas.
1950: Urban population climbed to nearly 64% following post-WWII economic shifts.
Present Day: Approximately 83.5% of the total U.S. population resides in urban and metropolitan settings.


So at the rate of urbanisation, what was once a field could now be a six lane highway or housing estate or a Walmart of Mc Donalds. But of course it varies from region to region and in the details where these crimes took place.

Any chance of finding caches is getting as much information as possible about each robbery and breaking down the facts to create the best possible chance of stumbling on a lost cache. All you are doing is lowering the odds against you a little in your favor.

Personally, the best chances of finding caches are private savings buried by rural farmers and landholders not trusting banks, dying and not disclosing where their hidden cache of money was. Especially the period between 1880 and 1945. Drivers of the banking crisis: recession in the 1890s, WW1 Great depression, WWII.



Crow