If you’ve got a little time on your hands and a taste for adventure, you could find yourself a fortune if you head to Wyoming.
Back during the mining boom, three men pulled loads of gold out of a mine near the Bighorn River but didn’t get to enjoy their fortune. The story is the stuff of Old West legends including Indian raids, finding treasure, and losing it. As far as anyone knows, the miners’ stash is still in them thar mountains along the Bighorn River today, just waiting to be found.
In 1863, Allen Hurlbert and a couple of friends set out to see if they could make a go of mining in Wyoming. The area near the Bighorn River in Washakie County proved to be an excellent place for the three friends to mine for gold.
Since the early 1840s, The Cowboy State had been rumored to be rich in gold, and some people flocking west during the California Gold Rush stopped to try their luck at mining in Wyoming.
Up in the mountains along a creek that fed into the Bighorn, Hurlbert and his buddies struck it rich.The three friends stumbled onto an especially rich deposit. “Just how rich,” you ask? Hurlbert reported that they pulled out about $90,000 in gold from their mine in less than a year.
It’s estimated that Hurlbert’s stash would be worth $6.7 million today.
The miners wanted to continue to work throughout the winter to mine as much gold as possible so, for convenience and comfort, they built a cabin near the creek. Besides a place to live, they used it as a safe of sorts, burying the gold they mined in the floor of their little homestead.Unfortunately for Mr. Hurlbert and company, they had set up their mining camp right in Indian territory. The natives weren’t happy when they discovered the three friends and their little enterprise.Sometime during the winter, the Indians attacked, killing Hurlbert’s two partners, and setting fire to the cabin.Allen Hurlbert was the only one to survive the attack. He escaped but spent the next few months wandering through the Wyoming wilderness. He was found somewhere along the Platte River, miles and miles southeast of where his cabin had been.
For years, fear kept Hurlbert away from the site of the cabin and the mine. Finally, he decided to go back to at least get the gold that he and his friends had already mined and hidden in the floor of the cabin. To his dismay, he couldn’t remember exactly where it was.
To this day, the treasure remains hidden in the mountains close to the Bighorn River. It’s likely that there’s even less remaining of the destroyed cabin than what existed over a century ago, but it’s possible that someone could come across the exact spot and stumble into a fortune.
It’s speculated that there could still be remnants from the miners living in the cabin, such as tin cans or other discarded items that could be located with a metal detector. Anyone finding evidence like that could very well be in the right place.
Are you up for the challenge? Fire up your metal detector!
What other Wyoming-based lost treasure legends have you heard of?
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