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HathiTrust A Gold Mine for Researchers

March 6, 2014 Author: Ellen MeltzerCategories: Tags:

Heist from the San Francisco Mint?  An inside job?  Whatever the solution to this mystery, a crafty researcher used the HathiTrust Digital Library to try to track down the answer.  A couple in California’s Mother Lode country in the Sierra Nevada foothills found six steel cans with $10 million worth of gold coins buried in their back yard.  Northern California fishing guide, historian, and collector of rare coins Jack Trout searched the HathiTrust to find an article in the Bulletin of the American Iron and Steel Association,  v.34-36 1900-1902, describing $30,000 in gold coins stolen from the San Francisco Mint.

Learn more about this fascinating mystery at http://blog.sfgate.com/stienstra/2014/03/03/sf-heist-in-1900-may-explain-buried-gold-treasure/

We always knew it, but HathiTrust is not limited to scholarly research!  Mystery buffs, there’s rich fodder for your imaginations here.
(HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, including the University of California Libraries, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.)