The Confederate Gold

Item from The Dollars Trilogy by Sergio Leone / United Artists

Two hundred thousand dollars in Confederate gold buried in Sad Hill Cemetery — a treasure that belongs to no living person, which makes everyone who knows about it feel entitled to it.

The Confederate gold is the MacGuffin of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — the thing everyone wants, the thing no one has earned, the thing that organizes three men who would otherwise have nothing to do with each other into a civil war subplot. It was stolen from a Union patrol by a dying Confederate soldier named Bill Carson, who told Tuco the cemetery and told Blondie the grave before dying. Neither man's information works without the other. This is the logic that keeps them together through the entire film despite every reason to separate. At the end, Blondie gets the gold. Tuco gets left in a noose — and then cut down, because that is apparently also what happens.

Appearance

Two hundred thousand dollars in gold coins, packed into saddlebags and buried beneath a grave marker in Sad Hill Cemetery. The grave has a name on it. The name is the key. Without both pieces of information — the cemetery and the specific grave — the gold is unfindable.

Also known as: The Confederate Gold, The Buried Gold, Bill Carson's Gold

What They Know

• Buried under a specific grave in Sad Hill Cemetery — Blondie knows the name, Tuco knows the cemetery
• Was stolen from a Union patrol by Confederate soldier Bill Carson, who died shortly after hiding it
• Worth two hundred thousand dollars — enough to explain everything everyone does in the film
• Neither Tuco's half of the information nor Blondie's half is sufficient alone — which is the entire plot

Connections

• located_in — sad_hill_cemetery

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