The Taylor's Creek Gold

Trlewis48 · Jun 27, 2026

The Taylor's Creek Gold©

St. Francis County, Arkansas • August 3, 1890

By T. R. Lewis

The man who robbed the Colt stage on August 3, 1890, planned the job down to the last detail. He positioned his horse for a clean break. He took out the only armed man before anyone could react. He collected the weapons and dropped them in the creek. None of it mattered. A shaking stage driver with a spare rifle put a bullet in his back from fifty yards, and everything the robber planned came apart in the bottom land forest east of Taylor's Creek. The $7,500 in gold coin he took is still there. No one has found it in 135 years.

The Ground

St. Francis County sits in the Arkansas Delta on the flat, dark-soiled plain west of the Mississippi River. Crowley's Ridge — a narrow spine of elevated terrain formed by ancient windblown loess deposits — runs north to south through the county’s center. On both sides of the ridge, the land drops back into bottom land forest: oak, cypress, sweetgum, and cottonwood growing in soil that floods every few years and stays swampy long after the water recedes. This is not scenic country. It is productive and hostile in equal measure, and in 1890 it was far enough from anywhere that a crime committed in the bottom lands between Colt and the L'Anguille River might stay hidden a very long time.

The Military Road from Memphis to Little Rock had crossed this ground since 1826. William Mitchell Taylor settled near the creek in that same year, building a log house on the western edge of Crowley's Ridge. The Taylor home became a stagecoach stop and mail relay almost immediately, and the community that grew around it took his name — Taylor's Creek. By the time Arkansas Highway 1 was paved in the twentieth century, it followed the same north-south corridor the stage road had always used. The creek crossing three miles north of what became Colt Station was old road by 1890 — a place every driver on that route knew where the horses needed water and the passengers needed to step down and stretch.

Taylor's Creek had seen violence before. On May 11, 1863, during the Civil War, Confederate cavalry under Colonels Colton Green and George W. Carter met a Union force at the same crossing — a skirmish that Federal troops barely escaped by withdrawing in the dark. Twenty-seven years later, the creek crossing was still isolated enough for another ambush.

August 3, 1890

The northbound stage out of Colt left before the worst of the heat, but not by much. August in the Arkansas Delta is an endurance contest that starts losing by mid-morning. The driver had a guard riding beside him. Two passengers were inside. Under the driver’s seat, secured in a reinforced wooden box, was $7,500 in U.S. gold coin — Double Eagles, Eagles, and Half Eagles minted through the 1880s, bound for a land transaction up the county. At $20.67 per troy ounce — the U.S. standard rate in 1890 — that box held approximately 363 troy ounces of gold. It weighed close to twenty-five pounds.

At the Taylor's Creek crossing, the driver pulled the team up at the bank. The horses wanted water. The passengers wanted air. It was the routine stop drivers made at every water crossing on a summer run, and everyone on that stage had done it before. Nobody was watching the tree line.

One rifle shot broke the quiet. Just one, clean and deliberate. The guard pitched backward off the seat and hit the ground dead.

A man stepped out from behind an oak on the creek bank with his rifle already up. He didn’t raise his voice. He told the driver and the passengers to put their weapons on the ground. They did. He collected the guns, walked to the creek, and threw them in one by one — methodical, unhurried, as though he had rehearsed this part too. Then he went for the strongbox. It was heavy, and it took him a moment to wrestle it off the stage. He tied it to a horse waiting in the trees, mounted, and rode east into the bottom land.

The whole thing ran for about ninety seconds.

He had thought of almost everything. The only problem was the spare rifle under the driver’s seat.

The driver found it. He stood up against the stage rail and took a shot at the man disappearing between the trees. It was a long shot at a moving target, and the driver was running on adrenaline and grief. The round went somewhere into the timber.

The driver turned the stage around and drove hard back to Colt.

The Posse

The St. Francis County sheriff, a deputy, and the stage company’s manager reached the Taylor's Creek crossing within the hour. The guard was still on the ground where he had fallen. The hoof prints where the robber had tied his horse were clear in the soft soil near the bank. The trail led east.

They followed it through the bottom land forest as the afternoon went long. The ground east of the creek is low and heavily wooded — tupelo and water oak, thick underbrush, game trails that look like roads from horseback and dead-end in swamp. Moving fast through that country on a summer afternoon, reading tracks, is slow work even when you know what you’re doing.

About a mile east, they found a horse standing still in the trees with no one on it. Fifty feet away, they found the robber. Dead.

The driver’s shot had caught him in the back. From the distance the body had traveled, and from the blood on the trail, the wound had been serious from the start but not immediately fatal. The man had made it nearly a mile before his body quit. Somehow he had managed to get off the horse before he fell — or been thrown or slid down — and crawled or staggered into the trees where they found him.

The posse searched everything. The saddlebags. The ground around the horse. The man’s clothing. They searched in the fading light until darkness made further movement in those woods too dangerous to continue.

They found nothing. And then they looked at his hands.

Fresh dirt was packed under every fingernail. His palms were caked with it. A dying man had dug a hole somewhere in those fifty feet or that last mile of timber, dropped the strongbox in, and covered it over. The posse had been searching in the wrong direction from the wrong starting point.

Newspaper accounts from August and September 1890 record at least two follow-up searches in the weeks afterward. Neither turned up the box. The robber’s identity was never established in any surviving record. The gold was never recovered.

The Calculation He Made

The robber rode east with a serious bullet wound. Internal damage, almost certainly. He knew it within minutes of clearing the tree line — the kind of pain that tells a man the truth about his situation whether he wants to hear it or not.

A choice presented itself between riding toward help or making certain the authorities never recovered the money. He chose the second. This was not a panicked decision. Digging a hole deep enough to hide a twenty-five-pound strongbox, in bottom land soil, while bleeding from a gunshot wound, takes real effort and takes time. He spent that time and that effort on purpose.

He picked a location. He dug the hole — two or three feet, as deep as a dying man working alone could get in clay-heavy bottom land soil. He dropped the box in and covered it. He may have marked the location in his mind with a tree or a feature he planned to return to, though by then he must have understood what return meant for a man in his condition.

Then he moved away from the burial spot. Whether this was deliberate misdirection or simply staggering from blood loss, the gap between where he died and where he buried the box is what defeated every search that followed. The posse found the man and searched from there. The box was somewhere else.

Why It's Still There

Finding $7,500 in gold coin in 1890 rural Arkansas would have changed a sharecropper’s life permanently — converted him from a tenant into a landowner overnight. That kind of sudden, unexplained wealth is impossible to conceal in a county where everyone knows everyone else’s business. No account of a windfall matching that description appears in the county historical record. The treasure literature on this robbery, compiled across multiple independent sources, is consistent: the box was never found.

The wooden box has long since rotted away. But the hardware — the iron hinges, the brass hasp, the corner brackets, the lock mechanism — is still in the ground. Iron from the 1880s in Arkansas bottomland soil does not vanish. It oxidizes to a state that a metal detector reads clearly from three to four feet of depth. The co ins are gold. Gold does not corrode. After 135 years in the ground, those Double Eagles are in the same condition they were when the robber dropped them in the hole. That is what gold does.

Search Zones

Two independent sources place the robbery site at the Taylor's Creek road crossing, three miles north of Colt on what is now Arkansas Highway 1. Both sources agree the robber was found dead approximately one mile east of the robbery. The burial location is somewhere between those two points, or within a short distance of where the body lay.

Robbery site. The Taylor's Creek crossing where the stage was stopped: approximately 35.2100° N, 90.5200° W, elevation 218 feet. Highway 1 follows the original stage road north from Colt (35.1306° N, 90.5089° W), and Taylor's Creek still crosses the highway in this corridor, though modern drainage work has shifted the exact channel. Note: the GPS coordinate for the robbery site places it roughly five to six miles north of Colt by straight-line measure, while the narrative sources consistently describe it as three miles. Searchers should treat the coordinate as approximate and search the Taylor's Creek crossing wherever it intersects the Highway 1 corridor north of town.

Death site. Approximately 35.2100° N, 90.5050° W, elevation 222 feet — one mile east of the robbery, in the bottom land timber between the creek and the higher ground toward the L'Anguille River. Accounts say, “about one mile east.” The phrase is approximate. Begin the search from this center point.

Primary cache zone. A quarter-mile radius centered on the death site at 35.2100° N, 90.5050° W. North boundary: 35.2136° N. South boundary: 35.2064° N. East boundary: 35.2100° N, 90.5007° W. West boundary: 35.2100° N, 90.5093° W. This is the area a man moving on foot in his final hour, already wounded and weakening, would have been able to reach from the robbery site. That’s the ground that matters.

Secondary zone. The line of escape east from the robbery — midpoint at 35.2100° N, 90.5125° W, running east to 35.2100° N, 90.5000° W. A man strong enough when he buried the box might have covered more ground before the wound caught up with him. Don’t stop at the primary zone if the detector hasn’t found anything.

The L'Anguille River (approximately 35.2500° N, 90.4500° W, two miles northeast of the death site) marks the eastern boundary of any realistic search area. A man dying from a gunshot wound was not crossing that river. Madison, Arkansas (35.2161° N, 90.4839° W, 1.5 miles northeast) is the nearest population center for reference. Forrest City, the county seat, sits 22 miles to the southwest at 35.0079° N, 90.7898° W.

What It's Worth

The $7,500 face value of the 1890 gold coin translates to approximately 363 troy ounces of gold at the period standard of $20.67 per troy ounce. At the house valuation rate of $5,000 per troy ounce, the metal value of the recovered coins is approximately $1,815,000.

That number is the floor, not the ceiling. Late nineteenth-century U.S. gold coins trade above their melt value when they are in good condition. Double Eagles from the 1880s in Fine grade bring $1,200 to $2,500 per coin; AU or Un-circulated specimens bring $3,000 to $8,000 or more. The coins from this cache were buried in a wooden box in bottom land soil. If the box hardware sealed the interior against moisture — and a reinforced strongbox with a proper hasp and lock mechanism is designed to do exactly that — the coins could be in exceptional condition. Well-drained bottom land soil above the water table does not corrode gold. The numismatic premium on 135-year-old gold coins in good condition could push the total value of this cache to $3.5 million or beyond, depending on which denominations are present and what grade the coins come out at.

Realistic total value range: $1.8 million to $3.5 million. Every dollar of that is at metal-detector depth.

The Law

The search zone is private agricultural land in St. Francis County. Delta farmland in this part of Arkansas runs to row crops, timber stands, and cattle pasture, and every acre of it belongs to someone. Trespassing on private land in Arkansas is a criminal offense, not just a civil matter. Before putting any equipment in the ground, get written landowner permission. Verbal agreements are unenforceable.

Contact the St. Francis County Assessor’s Office in Forrest City at (870) 633-2251, office located at approximately 35.0074° N, 90.7905° W, to identify current property owners for any parcels in the search zone.

Under Arkansas law, treasure found on private land belongs to the landowner absent a written agreement to the contrary. Finder’s agreements are standard in this situation. The split is negotiable, but fifty-fifty is the most common arrangement. Get it in writing before the first sweep, not after a find. Courts do not look favorably on verbal treasure agreements, and the landowner holds the stronger legal position from the start.

Any significant find is taxable as ordinary income in the year of recovery, at the fair market value on the date of discovery. The IRS does not provide exemptions for creativity about when recovery actually occurred. Consult a tax attorney before taking physical possession of anything.

Terrain and Safety

The search zone is Mississippi River Delta bottom land — flat, heavily vegetated, subject to seasonal flooding, and extremely hot from May through September. The best months to work this ground are November through March, when the vegetation is dormant, temperatures are tolerable, and the flood risk from the L'Anguille system is lower. Avoid the site for at least a week after any significant rainfall; the creek drainage's in this part of St. Francis County can put two feet of standing water on low ground inside an afternoon.

Cottonmouth moccasins are common anywhere near water in the Arkansas Delta and are not shy about their position. Timber rattlesnakes work the wooded upland areas and are harder to spot. Feral hogs have established themselves across much of bottom land Arkansas; they are not consistently dangerous, but they are large, fast, and unpredictable when cornered. Boots and long pants are not optional.

The nearest full-service hospital is in Forrest City, approximately twenty-two miles southwest. Cell service in rural St. Francis County is inconsistent. Carry a means of summoning help that does not depend on a cell signal, and leave a trip plan with someone who knows your exact location and a specific time to worry if you haven’t checked in.

135 Years

The robber buried that box knowing exactly what he was doing and why. He was buying a certainty: the law would not get it. He bought it with what was left of his life, digging in Arkansas clay until the strength ran out.

He was right for 135 years. The posse didn’t find it in the dark. The follow-up searches did not find it in the weeks after. No one in St. Francis County appears to have stumbled across it in the century and a third since. The history of this robbery is short on details — no name for the robber, no physical description that survived, no deathbed confession, no map — but the one fact the record repeats without variation is that the strongbox was never recovered.

Three feet of bottom land soil is not a vault, but it is close enough. The hardware from that strongbox is still sending a signal. The coins are sitting on top of it, preserved in the same cold dark they have been in since the summer of 1890, waiting for a metal detector run by someone who bothered to get the right permissions and take the time to work the grid.

GPS Reference — Complete

Colt, AR (stage departure): 35.1306° N, 90.5089° W — Elevation 216 ft

Robbery site (Taylor's Creek / Hwy 1): 35.2100° N, 90.5200° W — Elevation 218 ft — see note in Search Zones

Death site (robber found): 35.2100° N, 90.5050° W — Elevation 222 ft — primary search center

Cache zone north boundary: 35.2136° N, 90.5050° W

Cache zone south boundary: 35.2064° N, 90.5050° W

Cache zone east boundary: 35.2100° N, 90.5007° W

Cache zone west boundary: 35.2100° N, 90.5093° W

Secondary zone midpoint: 35.2100° N, 90.5125° W — Elevation 220 ft

Secondary zone east extent: 35.2100° N, 90.5000° W — Elevation 224 ft

L'Anguille River (eastern boundary): 35.2500° N, 90.4500° W — approx. 2 miles northeast of death site

Madison, AR (reference): 35.2161° N, 90.4839° W — approx. 1.5 miles NE

Forrest City (county seat): 35.0079° N, 90.7898° W — Elevation 243 ft — 22 miles SW

St. Francis County Assessor: 35.0074° N, 90.7905° W — (870) 633-2251

Estimated value: $1.8 million to $3.5 million (2026) at $5,000/troy oz gold, condition-dependent.

Burial depth: 2–3 feet. Within standard metal detector range.

Status: Unrecovered.

Author's Note:

The Taylor's Creek stage robbery of August 3, 1890, is documented in two independent treasure literature sources: the Arkansas listing at LostTreasureUSA.com, and the Okie Treasure Hunter blog (February 2008), both drawn from St. Francis County historical records and contemporary newspaper accounts. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas confirms the deep historical context: the Taylor family settled at this creek crossing in 1826; the stagecoach stop at Taylor’s Creek predates the robbery by decades; the same creek crossing was the site of a Civil War skirmish on May 11, 1863 (Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Skirmishes at Taylor’s Creek and Mount Vernon”). Highway 1 route confirmed as following the original Military Road corridor through Colt and north into Cross County (Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Arkansas Highway 1; Arkansas Highway 1 Wikipedia article). Colt’s location in St. Francis County confirmed by Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Colt (St. Francis County) entry. L'Anguille River proximity to Colt confirmed by USGS monitoring station USGS-07047942, “L'Anguille River near Colt, AR.”

GPS coordinate note: Sources describe the robbery as three miles north of Colt. The coordinate 35.2100° N places the site approximately 5.5 miles north of Colt at 35.1306° N by straight-line measure. Searchers should identify where Taylor's Creek actually crosses the Highway 1 corridor north of Colt and treat the stated coordinate as an approximation subject to field verification.

Gold valuation: $5,000 per troy ounce; silver $100 per troy ounce per series house standard. $7,500 face value at 1890 rate of $20.67/troy oz = approximately 363 troy ounces. At $5,000/troy oz = $1,815,000 metal value. Numismatic range estimated at $1.8M–$3.5M depending on coin denominations, grade, and market conditions at time of recovery. Treasure finds are taxable as ordinary income. Written landowner permission is required before any search activity on private land. Contact St. Francis County Assessor at (870) 633-2251 for property ownership records. Arkansas trespass law is enforced. Watch for cottonmouths. (10% to the author if found.)