That is all depending upon what you are interested in. Of course, if you want to find gold flakes, southern Arizona and Nevada are good places for gold to be found. I have never done any of that, but there is a large group of people who do that. Minnesota is not a gold producing state, but people have found traces of gold in a river near there. They may hunt for 6-8 hours and come up with five or six tiny, tiny little flakes of gold. It may only be $10 worth of gold, which is not a very good return. Most treasure hunters are looking for coins and incidentally jewelry and anything else of interest that might have been lost over the years and lying just under the surface of the soil. The best place most of us think to find that is in the yards of older residential properties. If there is a house that's been occupied for 150 or 200 years by families with kids and activities, there's going to be things there to be found. There has to be human activity, there have to be situations where people would lose things. Kids lose everything. So when I hunt an older yard, I invariably find coins, both modern and old. I often find a piece of jewelry; sometimes it's just cheap junk or broken jewelry. I almost always find kids toys, little tiny guns and toy cars and sometimes pieces of silverware. Somebody sets up a little sandbox and mom gives the kids a good spoon from the kitchen to dig with. The kid buries it and it's never found again until somebody comes along with a metal detector. The oldest American coin that I have found is from 1801. The first legal settlers came into Minnesota in the spring of 1853 and in a small town south east of here I found an 1801 cent. I talked to the owner of an old mansion built in about 1879. The mansion has a bed-and-breakfast. The manager of the bed-and-breakfast said that there used to be a log cabin there. So he took me out and showed me the rough outline of the base of the log cabin in the side yard. You could just see a faint difference in the color of the grass and so we tried to figure out where the door was. We took a guess and I went to that location and I got a good signal and dug up an 1801 penny. I had read somewhere that many of the settlers building their first log cabins would bury the coin under the front step for good luck and that's what that was. If you want to find really old coins, you go to England, sign up with a professional treasure hunter over there and he will take you to places where the Roman legends lived in the first, second and third century. I have taken one of those trips and came back with about 30 first, second and third century Roman coins.
