The legendary lost gold
of Neahkahnie Mountain

By Finn J.D. John
July 6, 2025

OREGON IS A state with more than its share of buried-treasure legends. But the one that gets the most attention, and until fairly recently attracted by far the most treasure hunters, is the lost Spanish gold of Neahkahnie Mountain.

Like most buried-treasure stories, it’s a near certainty that nothing is there. But unlike most treasure stories, it seems likely that something real once was.

The story of the lost Spanish gold has been passed down and around through Natives and fur traders and later augmented for maximum drama by professional storytellers at Ben Holladay’s Seaside House resort. It’s even been riffed on (sort of) to create one of the most beloved blockbuster movies of all time — I am, of course, referring to “The Goonies.”

Today, there really isn’t an official version of the story. But, this is as close as I can come to summarizing the most common version:

Sometime in the 1700s, a sailing ship put into Nehalem Bay. Most versions of the story have the ship dropping anchor there and sending a crew ashore in a rowboat; others say the ship was wrecked, but these are most likely getting it confused with the “beeswax wreck” of the Santo Cristo de Burgos at the same location, in the mid-1690s. (Here is a link to that story.)

(The ship we’re interested in today can’t have been the beeswax ship, because there would have been no Native witnesses left to pass down this legend; all those coastal communities were wiped out in the Cascadia Subduction tsunami of 1700.)

The men then beached their rowboat and walked straight inland, up onto the side of Neahkahnie Mountain, carrying a heavy chest. All this time, curious local Native watchers followed their progress, wondering what they were up to.

When they got partway up the mountain, they set the chest down and set to digging. After they got a nice deep hole, they lowered the chest into it.

Then, apparently knowing the Indians would not disturb a man’s grave, one of the men drew his cutlass and plunged it into one of the others. In some versions of the story, the men drew straws to see who would die; in others, the dead man was an enslaved Black servant. (Both versions are probably apocryphal; this isn’t the kind of detail that would be remembered after three or four generations of Native oral telling and retelling.)

In any case, this unfortunate man’s body was then thrown into the pit on top of the chest, and the men then filled it back in. Man and chest were buried together. And this is actually the only part of this story that all versions agree on.

After that, one version says the men rowed back to the ship and sailed off like it was just another day’s work. Another version claims several sailors were left behind, but soon made themselves obnoxious to the Native men by moving in on the local women and got killed in the ensuing fights.

Possibly the least plausible version is the one in which the captain of the ship goes on a murdering spree, killing all his crew members except those who can fit in a lifeboat, and setting out on the open sea in that, rowing to California.

SO, TIME PASSED. The story of the buried treasure was passed down from parents to children in the local Indian communities.

And then, starting around 1810, British and American expeditions of fur traders began to arrive in the Oregon country: first the Astorian party, then the Hudson’s Bay Company and later Nathaniel Wyeth’s crew, along with several other smaller fur-trading outfits. All of them wanted to trade with Indians for otter furs, so they immediately set out talking with them. And soon, of course, the story of the weird bearded murderers in the “winged canoe” burying a box and corpse on Neahkahnie Mountain came up.

Neahkahnie Mountain hasn’t been left alone since.

Of course, if the treasure was real, nobody wanted to share it; so most expeditions were made as secretly as possible. This was obviously easier to do earlier, when the area was less populated.

One visitor after another tried his luck digging hopeful holes in the side of the mountain, in quest of the Spanish gold. People have spent years, decades, whole lifetimes doing this.

In the 1870s, treasure hunter Pat Smith found some stones marked with arrows, crosses, and letters. But nobody could figure out what, if anything, they meant. The best guess is currently that they were part of a survey made by either Sir Francis Drake or one of several Spanish galleon captains that might have put into the bay.

Of course, as the population increased toward the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, interest in the treasure story grew and word spread. In the early 1870s, stagecoach king Ben Holladay built the spectacular Seaside House resort hotel in what would later be the town of Seaside, and hired Native storytellers to entertain his guests. These storytellers, of course, milked the Spanish Gold story for all they could.

In 1907, another wealthy inlander, Samuel G. Reed of Portland, tried to run the Seaside House play on a smaller scale at the foot of Neahkahnie Mountain; he called his hotel the Neahkahnie Tavern. He found it considerably harder to keep his hotel booked with guests than Holladay had, and he resorted to promoting the place to prospective treasure hunters, even providing guests with picks and shovels.

In 1931 the mountain drew first blood when father-son treasure-hunting team Charles and Lynn Wood dug a hole 30 feet into the mountain without timbering it. It collapsed, burying both men alive.

(One other treasure hunter was drowned in 1990 looking for treasure on the rocky rim using an inflatable rubber raft to scout from the water.)

When power equipment became available, things started to get serious. Treasure hunters brought bulldozers, backhoes, and other heavy equipment out on the beach and up on the side of the mountain, most of which was by now part of Oswald West State Park.

As the treasure story’s fame grew, crackpots started coming to the scene with dowsing rods and marked-up Bibles that they claimed predicted the treasure’s location. One convinced himself, and never stopped trying to convince others, that the Ark of the Covenant was buried there.

Meanwhile, by the late 1960s the state of Oregon was getting worried about environmental damage and potential impacts on other park visitors, who didn’t come to the beach to play around bulldozers and open pits.

Clearly some control was needed. So in 1967 the state passed the Treasure Trove Law to allow people to dig for treasure on public land if they applied for a permit first.

Unfortunately, the law didn’t define a “treasure trove,” so it basically turned a treasure-trove permit into a license, similar to a mining claim, allowing a treasure hunter to dig for almost anything while keeping other park visitors out.

Even worse, the law claimed half of whatever a treasure hunter found for the state. This, of course, made the state look like it was just another claim jumper horning in, calling dibs from the sidelines in hopes of reaping where it had not sown.

Essentially, the state lost the moral high ground, and when state agencies tried to limit what treasure hunters could do, they reacted as if the state were an untrustworthy business partner reneging on their deal.

But the law was really unworkable, especially as it became increasingly clear to academics and state agencies alike that giving treasure hunters carte blanche to loot Indian burial sites and other archaeologically important places in the name of “hunting for a treasure trove” was a really bad idea.

To make matters worse, the more serious treasure hunters — the ones with Ditch Witches and backhoes and bulldozers — tended to have aggressive and entitled attitudes about their supposed rights. They behaved like gold miners responding to claim jumpers. It became very clear that many, possibly even most, of them did not consider the state to have any moral authority to interfere with their operations, and would only follow the law when forced to do so by constant enforcement.

BUT THESE LATTER-DAY treasure hunters may be barking up an empty tree. There is some reason to believe the treasure was real, but was found long ago. The evidence is anecdotal and very circumstantial, but it’s there.

It seems that back in 1811 a fur trapper named Thomas McKay — father of Indian scout Donald McKay, of Oregon Indian Medicine Co. fame — arrived in Astoria on the Astorian Party’s ill-fated sailing ship Tonquin.

According to the story related by Samuel Clarke, several years later, after the Hudson’s Bay Co. had bought out Astor’s operations and taken over as McKay’s employer, McKay was out trapping and trading one day when he met an old Indian woman who told him she, as a little girl, had been one of those Natives peering through the bushes at those strange bearded Spaniards. When he asked her to, she took him right to the spot and pointed it out.

A few weeks or months later, back at Hudson’s Bay headquarters at Fort George, a rumor started getting around that McKay had found the by-now-famous Neakahnie treasure. How the cat got out of the bag is unclear; perhaps McKay was spending a suspicious amount of time on the mountain.

“He must have dug for it, as the Hudson’s Bay Company people heard that he did so, so sent for him and placed him under rigid examination,” Clarke writes. “It seems that the company claimed that all their people discovered or found when in their service was the Company’s property. Tom couldn’t be blamed if he did not think so.”

Then one day he walked away from the mountain, quit his job and disappeared. Years later, when he settled at French Prairie by the Willamette River, he seemed oddly flush with cash.

“He was a generous fellow and always had money to spend and to give away,” Clarke writes. “So much so that when he afterward settled on French Prairie, he lived so well and was so liberal to all in need, that people believed that he had surely found that treasure and gloried that he made such good use of it.”

And remember, this was before the 1848 gold rush, when other residents of the Willamette Valley were using bushels of wheat and “Abernethy rocks” as currency.

Could it be that Thomas McKay found that chest, secretly slipped away with it, quit his job and went somewhere else to enjoy it, free of the notoriety and envy that always seem to accompany found money? In fact, isn’t that that what any of us would do?

(Sources: “The Mountain of a Thousand Holes,” an article by Cameron La Follette et al published in the Summer 2018 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly; Pioneer Days of Oregon History, a book by Samuel Clarke published in 1905 by J.K. Gill)