There is a story in my family that at the end of the nineteenth century, one of our relatives was tasked by church leaders on a top secret mission, to hide away money in an isolated part of Northern California. I guess the SLC bosses knew their time might be short, and Washington was about to crush polygamy. Some of our family say that the church wanted to create a second Civil War to draw fire away from our polygamous communities. Others say that they just wanted to run off to Mexico with the money, and live in the Mormon colonies down there.

Who knows? I guess every family has crazy stories, and I'm not sure I believe this one. Why would church leaders hide gold up in the hills? How would they find it?

Seer stones and diving rods.

I can't verify your specific story but I do know that the church did put a large portion of its assets into private hands to keep them from being seized by the government due to polygamy. The most prominent being John Windor who was the presiding bishop and later part of the first presidency.

Well, there's that giant cave that the Mormons blasted out of solid granite, at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon. You can see a big, locked iron gate, and a heavy stone and iron fence, on either side of a winding road that leads up to it. It's like a James Bond set.

How about the labyrinthe of catacombs under the SLC Mormon Vatican at Temple Square. BYU has a subterranean campus, also--strictly forbidden to students, so, of course, we broke in and explored some of the tunnels. One led to the basement of the old science building, where they kept some taxadermied animals. I recognized some of those animals, when they were put into the new museum of natural history. It was like seeing our old, secret friends in the daylight, at last.

So, no, your story of Mormon treasures hidden underground somewhere in Northern California fits in with the way Mormons do things. I wonder where....? It would be fun to extensively research this story, and find the gold. (Hopefully, it wouldn't be confederate money, or JS's personally printed currency.)

I'll bet the Mormon treasure is hidden in the church property near Camp Liahona, in the Northern California Sierra foothills. Camp Oljado, the Boy Scout camp, is there, too, and a lake and a river, among the pines. The camp counselors would get really upset when we would go exploring around the area, and they would punish us by making us clean the bathrooms. (Even 40 years ago, Mormons were into making people clean bathrooms, as part of their quest to control people.). Maybe this weekend, I'll try to find that land on the map. We girls rode up there on a bus, and were too busy socializing to pay attention to where we were going, but I know some people who drove up there in cars. It would be interesting to see if the church still owns that land, and what they have done to it. It's in the heart of California gold country, so we're pretty sure that's why they bought it in the first place.

The name for the "labyrinth of catacombs" and the BYU "subterranean campus". is "steam tunnels". It is quite common for collections of large buildings (campuses, downtowns) to have a central steam heating plant rather than individual furnaces in each building. At the University of Manitoba, which I visited a number of times, they made some of the steam tunnels large enough and safe enough (signage, no exposed steam valves, video cameras, etc) to be used by students to walk between buildings. Manitoba can get seriously cold.

I think modern buildings are insulated well enough and generate enough heat internally (computers, lights, etc) that they generally don't need steam heat anymore.

https://www.cpr.org/2019/12/06/downtown-denver-has-warmed-itself-with-steam-since-1880-could-that-history-soon-end/

The tunnels are not sacred. They're not even secret. They just aren't suitable for general pedestrian traffic for safety (of pedestrians and the pipes) reasons.

On a very cold day, you can still see steam escaping through scattered pavement cracks where these 19th-century conduits still function. It's piped from the large electrical plants and sold to older buildings. I know of a few properties where it's dispersed underneath abutting sidewalks to melt snow and ice.

My not-so-secret northeastern private university also had steam tunnels to get steam from the heating plant to the undergraduate dormitory radiators.

It was best not to go down there because they were cramped and you could scald yourself on a pipe. That didn't stop students, including myself, from doing it at least once, but I think generally once you saw that it was nothing but utility passages, the luster was lost.

Tyson

I think it's urban legend. A million dollars in silver dollars would be 34 tons. (troy ounces are about 10% heavier than "regular" ounces, if you are checking the math. :) Even back in the late 1800s, a million dollars was not all that much for an institutional value.

The price of gold in the US through the entire 19th century was $20 a troy ounce, so a million dollars would be about 1.7 tons of gold (in the 1800s).

Even back then, people did not move large quantities of gold or silver around. They put it in a vault and passed around paper certificates of some sort. Coinage is just too big and heavy and hard to protect, when you are talking serious money.

As Milton Friedman noted, the use of stationary gold in a vault over which ownership is transferred without change of actual possession is not historically unusual. There are some islands in Micronesia where massive stone wheels, often weighing several tons each, are used as currency.

The stones are almost never moved. All that changes is the oral record of who owns them. Tradition might say that your family has owned such and such a stone for generations, and if you orally transfer ownership the transaction is legitimate. There is no record, only the oral construction; but by social convention the system worked (and to some extent still does). This really isn't much different from gold in Fort Knox. The "modern" world documents the transfer of ownership with a piece of paper, or some electrons, that are only as good as the social conventions they represent; the "pre-modern" world of Micronesia uses communal memory the same way.

Imagine the scandal that would erupt if Germany demanded the delivery of its stones from the South Pacific! The Micronesians might say, "we don't have any means of delivering it." After a few years' argument, the islanders might arrange for transport via cargo ship, but conspiracy theorists would then allege that the original stones never existed and were hewn and fashioned fraudulently in the interim.

But the truth is the rocks were always rocks; the gold was always an ore with little industrial value. All financial systems ultimately depend on social convention. Period.

....Rehypothcration

Can Mark Hofmann write a book about this, someone gets the royalties?

This reminded me of the story about the 4,000# good bar found in Mexico a few years ago.

Gold treasure melted down for easier transport. Can't get my mind around the story.

https://villaricanews.com/2020/01/15/4000-pound-gold-bar-found-decades-ago-identified-as-stolen-aztec-treasure/

"Each 400 troy ounce London Good Delivery Bar has a minimum purity of 0.995 and is normally 0.999 pure or even 0.9999 pure. These bars contain exactly 400 troy ounces of gold."

...left the E out of Rehypothecation...Lot's Wife will kill me!! Dear Jesus!!!....

Not at all.

I'm not sure what the relevance is to what I wrote, since hypothecation and rehypothecation would work the same way for rocks in the Pacific as they do for gold or the equities in anyone's Schwab account.

Explain if you want.

There are a couple of threads on the San Bernardino colony. I wonder if this is something to do with that.