Montezuma's Gold

When the Spanish conquistadors led by Hernan Cortes arrived in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, they were greeted as returning gods because they were pale and had beards. If only it was that easy to impress people these days.

This guy would be king.

Despite their impeccable references, the Spanish turned out to not actually be gods at all. They installed themselves in the palace, forced their religion on the natives, led a brutal slaughter of 700 noblemen in the streets of Tenochtitlan and melted down all their golden statues to be transported back to Spain. Then they killed Montezuma, the king of the Aztec Empire, at which point the Aztec people decided they'd had entirely enough of these strange new douchebags, beards be damned.
The Spanish realized pretty quickly they needed to fight their way out of the city, so they could only pause to grab whatever they absolutely needed to survive, which roughly translated to "all the fucking gold we can possibly carry."

"My only regret is that there are so few pockets on our armor."

Gold weighs a shitload, and these soldiers who were already weighed down by armor took as much as 50-pounds of it each as they tried to flee. Did we mention Tenochtitlan was an island in the middle of a swamp? And that all bridges to get out had been removed?
In one night over half of Cortes's men were killed, mostly due to drowning in the swamp under the weight of all the bullshit they were carrying. It is a night known in Spanish as "Noche Triste," which in English means "just leave the fucking gold behind, you dick brained asstards."

"Just leave it!"

"Awesome! So how do I get it?"
These days, trained archeologists do find some of that gold from time to time, but all the real authorities know that the rest of the stolen Aztec treasure wound up in southern Utah. That's where the gold is actually buried, according to Freddy Crystal, a "miner and amateur treasure hunter" who believed that an old map he found proved the Aztec priests removed most of their gold--before Cortes arrived--and took it to Utah for reasons best described as "making the opposite of sense,"

Notice the lack of Utah on this map.

Freddy managed to round up hundreds of volunteers in the 1920s and worked for three years, digging into the side of a mountain in the desert heat. While several artifacts and other relics were recovered, Freddy didn't find one goddamn piece of gold, not even the chocolate kind 70-year-old ladies pass out on Halloween.