Would the mere detail of the easy acquisition of $50,000 for the loss of a paltry $50 heirloom interest you?
Would it?
Then get out that little box of coins your grandfather left and look them over.  For somewhere, some place, in these wide United States there must still be one of two of these flattened lumps of two and a half once octagon shaped pieces of California gold, those octagon pieces that he miners called "slugs."
Now, don't worry about these $50 slugs in that broker's widow down on Montgomery street.  These are not the $50,000 kind.  When one of the latter is found it will be most likely in the possession of some private family.  No public or private coin collector has one, or at least  none has so advertised the fact.  Even the main mint at Philadelphia hasn't a single specimen of the slug.  But there should be one or more left that may be resting in some old attic, possibly in yours.
When you take into consideration that between one and two millions of dollars worth of gold was melted down and made into $50 slugs during three months of 1851, the chances of finding a few ought to be very good especially as those and more were made after that date.
Now the chance of finding these slugs should but as a matter of fact, they are not. The reasons are various.
While millions of dollars worth of gold  was used in making those $50 slugs, still but comparatively little is known about their history. One of our greatest coin experts, Charles H Shankle, of Pittsburgh, Pa., who has examined scores of them, says that he has not found one of these priceless pieces that are almost mythical in their mystery.
Even the appearance of this early slug is unknown, the date of its first issue is likewise unknown. Who engraved the die, who hammered out the gold, who "struck the first coin, who was the first man to spend it, all is unknown.
It is one of California's great mysteries, is this "the first mint in California."
I have talked with scores of old miners along the Other Lode and most of them knew of it, many had seen it, but none knew anything positively anything about it or its coinage. I have talked with old mine superintendents , old mine foremen who have lived in the vicinity for years.  I have discussed it with old stage drivers, storekeepers, with geologists, mining engineers and with old Bill Harden.  All had heard of the place, most had been there or past there, all were sure that the mint was at Mount Ophir, that it was the first mint in California, but--------. And right here each stopped, for none could offer any tangible proof that what they believed was true.
Another thing about it all is that absolutely no mention is made of in in any of the book devoted to the subject of early California coinage, though the statement that such a mint did operate at Mount Ophir has been current for over seventy years.  But then, everything doesn't get in books that happened in California in the early days. Up to the present, including this year's issue of the latest (four or five words here are unreadable) which has been in current use in this state and throughout the mining world since 1848, has not yet been honored with a place in its pages.  It was a  "Chispa" of gold that Marshall found, not a nugget, but you would never discover what a "chispa" was from any standard dictionary.
(transcribers note- gold in a flatten "rolled-oat" formation or chispa, such as Marshall had found in pellets like pumpkin seed, flax seed, and wheat. . page 29 ,  

Of all the counties in the State, probably non contains as little authentic record of its early history as does that of Mariposa.  Even Thompson & West, those prolific producers of county histories from one end of the State to the other, never attempted one of Mariposa county; yet that could had one of the most interesting histories of any on the Mother Lode.
The cause of its lack of written record is due primarily to the fact that Colonel  Fremont had it so completely tied up and under his thumb for so many years that it never became sufficiently settled to tempt a producer of county histories to write one of that county.
Those early county histories, at one time considered as more or less of a joke by historians, are now most eagerly pressed by these same students of California history, for in many cases all that is known of many local events is chronicled in these old books, books made possible  by the paid "puffs" of various subscribers.
Neither Mariposa nor Calaveras County had the necessary population willing to finance a county book, and in many cases there does not exist a file of the earliest papers. Calaveras' sole hope lies in a certain editor in its county seat carrying out his much promised plant to write a history of that county. (San Andreas papers please copy),
Leaving the Yosemite road at Mariposa and turning north, one passes through Mount Bullion, now called Princeton.  A few miles further on one goes down a long winding road through a ravine, to come suddenly upon great masses of stone masonry at the bottom of the grade, masonry that was placed there three quarters of a century ago.  These heavy foundations, almost monolithe in their solidity, extend in all directions. A road to the left across the creek leads you past all that remains  of the chute through which has passed probably two or three tons of gold.  A bend in the road discloses the remains of what had once been a truly beautiful stone building, with a very large, triple-flued chimney.  The original roof has long since disappeared; the present one being of shakes.
Out near the edge of the creek lies an immense flat stone. It has been broken in two or three pieces, and they now lie separated by several feet. The upper side looks as though it had ben once held in gigantic lathe and its face turned smooth and true.  This stone, on which, so the story goes, was ground to powder the gold quartz ore from which the first fifty dollar slugs were made, is now the property of the State, but its weight precluded its removal to Sacramento at the time it was given.
Just across a small ravine stand the walls of the one building that holds a fascinating interest for us; for in this building was coined the first gold coin  of California if all the stories current along the Mother Lode be half true.
A thorough search of the old papers on file at the State Library shows no mention of the operations of this first mint, though we do get a reference to the early mine there.
Edgar Holmes Adams, author of by far the best work on California coinage, who spent much time both at the Bancroft Library and the State Library, apparently found not a single item in reference to the Mount Ophir Mint.  On the other hand I am indebted to him for the first tangible evidence that possibly this mint did exist just as has been claimed these many years.
That reference, on page 59, states that Colonel J. D. Stevenson, commander of the First New York Volunteers in the Mexican war, in 1849,..........told Kohler that a number of Englishmen, among them being skilled assayers, had a consultation with him about starting an assaying plant and coining gold pieces that should pass in lieu of gold dust.
That was in April of 1849.
From the various stores told me I have culled the following data which may sometime aid in solving the problem.
Jim Ridgeway at Mariposa, the dean of old timers in this district, told me that Christova Ortega discovered the Mount Ophir mine, that he dug out millions from it.  Ortega did discover the Oso mine further up towards Bear Valley, it is true, but aside from Ridgeways statement there is no record that he discovered the Mount Ophir mine and took millions form it. It is quite possible that Ortega did first locate that lead, but if so, then he sold it out before developing it to any extent.
Tying in with the statement that Colonel Stevenson made to Kohler in '49 that an English company had arrived with the intention of  producing coin here is the fact that an English company that  __ ___ _  ______ description of Stevenson's arrived in Mariposa county at that time with just that kind of a personnel, having expert assayers, mill men and high class machinery with them.
Mariposa county, and particularly that section around Hornitos and Mount Bullion was more of a Mexican settlement in the beginning of the gold rush, and about the only attention they paid to anything was the gold placers.
Consequently, the arrival of an English company that was interested in quartz mining should have been an outstanding item in the history of that district.
That they must have had ample capital is proven by the fact that by 1852 they had erected a mill and were running ten stamps to capacity, the ore running in value from $14 per ton up.
They had the first steam engine in that part of the mines, an old marine engine and boiler salvaged from a small steamer that went on the rock near San Francisco. They bought the machinery cheap, got it out at a low tide, loaded it on a Stockton boat; at Stockton they loaded it onto ox teams and by this slow freight finally got it up in the mountains to Mount Ophir.
They had  from eighteen to twenty men working all the time, and sometimes many more. In order to facilitate milling, they had a furnace in which they burned the quartz before they milled it.
They put up building after building, nearly all made from the flat stone so plentiful in that district.  The architecture was very artistic, some being very much of the Italian, some of the English type, as both nationalities were represented among the workmen and designers, and apparently each  ______with the other in making good looking structures.
The old office building, which still remains, give  a faint idea of how really good the the others must have looked.
The original English company, who first opened up the  works went under the name of Hale & Company. Their  headquarters  was in Edenburgh,  Scotland, and they were all  business.
They came for but one purpose and that was to get as much gold out as possible and ship it home.
There was a great shortage of gold coins here in '48 and '49.  The government required that all custom  dealers be paid in gold coin.  There wasn't enough gold coin here at that time to half go around.  Those who had it used it to advantage when the United State, in order to allow merchants and miners to get their good through the Custom house, permitted them to deposit gold dust as security for the payment of the duty in coin later. The custom house men most graciously allowed the gold dust to be valued at $10 per ounce, though much of it had an intrinsic value of nearly $20.  As  there was little opportunity of getting gold coin with which to redeem their gold dust, the merchants and miners were compelled to stand by and watch it sold at auction thirty days later, the gold dust going to speculators who had gold coin to pay for it at the rate of from $6 to $8 an ounce.
The so-called "Forty-thieves" of the modern "old hoss" sale have nothing on those early speculators for keeping the other fellow out.
The cry for a local mint was loud and incessant, but with profits of from ten to fourteen dollars an ounce on gold dust, these speculators, and so its often claimed, the custom officials, did everything possible to delay the establishment of a branch mint.
Individuals began to make gold coins. Some were beautiful specimens of the coin maker's art, others were very crude in their appearance.  All circulated for a time as coin.
Tales of the scarcity soon reached the east and other places. From Oregon came a large shipment of five and ten dollar pieces, and from Salt Lake City the Mormons sent thousands of twenty-dollar pieces.  These started out with a rush, and soon started back again, for the merchants found that the wily Mormon had put only seventeen dollars worth of gold in each $20 piece.  This made them suspicious of all Mormans coinage so they refused to take it Eventually most, if not all of it, was gathered in and melted up for bullion.
Many mining companies, organized in the East, thinking that the operation of a private mint in California would prove a bonanza, started west with complete minting machinery of various degrees of efficiency.
Minting machinery is notoriously heavy, loose sand is notoriously difficult to get through with heavy loads, which explains why the Plains Route was strewn from end to end with minting machinery in '49 and '50.
Some men, however, brought out just the simplest of coinage devices, a sledge hammer being the power used to strike the dies with.  In the spring of '49 a five dollar piece was struck at Benicia by Norris, Gregg & Norris.  It had a San Francisco imprint, and evidently when the die was made they had intended making the coins in San Francisco. but the owners had moved to Benicia, or at least were stopping over there when they struck their first coin.  Specimens of it are very rare today.
In the mines the miner wanted gold coin.  The reason was manifest every time he went to a saloon or gambling  house.  If he put dust down on a bet, or let the bartender take a pinch for a drink, the miner was always certain that he was getting cheated, and he always was;  but if he laid down a coin he felt that he wasn't, but he was, just the same.
So the miner demanded gold coin.  We are now getting back to Mount Ophir.
Under the Constitution it was unlawful to make private coinage, but at that time the law was pretty much of a ded letter. They were allowed to make it  if of proper intrinsic value and did not too closely resemble the  regular United States coni.
Mount Ophir was a long way from San Francisco. Gold coin seldom filtered down that far.  The English company, having artisans along, having machinery for doing the work, and having their own assay offices, decided to relieve the situation by making up their own coins and paying their men off in it.
Quite a little town sprang up around the mine .  A fellow named Miller ran a litte store on what is now the main county road.
A state station was established, a postoffice added, and a boarding  house put up.  According to all reports, the personnel of the entire English company was of the very best.
Now comes the most difficult part of the problem, that of deciding just when those first coins were minted.  All those who claim to have any  knowledge of it concede that these coins antedated any  other $50 slugs produced in teh State, which, if true, puts them as being made before the summer of 1850.  This is quite possible, for the ENglish company was supposed to have been in active operation long before that time, using the arastra method of grinding their gold ore in order to extract the gold from the rock.
If they had their die maker with them the owrk of preparing and making a pattern and die would have been a matter of detail, while for  the actual coining all that was needed was one husky man to swing a ten pound sledge hammer while another man held the dies steady on the striking anvil.  Then a file, a pair of scales, a little find sand paper, a brisk rubbing over a piece of felt and the coin was ready for circulation.
The first cry that goes up from the average person is "Well, if they made all those coins, where are they now?"  That's the question most of us would like to  be able to answer.
Some years ago, so it's said, a man dug up three $50 slugs at the foot of  a tree at mount Ophir, which explains why so many trees there have since had the appearance of being so well cultivated around their roots.  No one seems to have noticed what these three slugs look like.  No one seems to know just who found them.
If those three slugs could be located and they should happen to bear the authenticated mark of the Mount Ophir Mining Company, the owner would have little cause to worry over the future.
Everything points to the fact that the slug was issued at Mount Ophir, and the chances are even  that they made the first $50 ones, and there is a chance that some are still in existance.  If one is found it will be practically pricelss. The finder can command his own price.
As to the why of the scarcity  of early $50 slug: In order to meet all criticism from private and governmental sources the coiners made their slugs to contain not only to containa full $50 worth of gold, but in most cases a little bit more.  The result was that when government coinage of gold came into force, it was very profitable to gather in these slugs and melt them down into bullion.
I'll anticipate the question, "But how could they afford to put more than $50 worth of gold into a coin that was only worth $50?"  The answer is easy, the private mints paid but $16 to $18 per ounce for gold dust that assayed $20 per ounce in real value.  They put a little more than two and one half ounces into a fifty dollar slug, but they paid probably only $41 for the gold dust that went into a $50 piece.  It was the intrinsic value of most of the early California coinage that caused it to be sent ____ later to the melting pot, hense scarcity today.
In 1860 the Mount Ophir mint passed into the hands of the Merced Mining Company, and from them to Colonel Fremont.  It had at one time twenty-four stamps, with a forty-six horse ower engine.
Now nothing but the memory remains, and even that is indistict.
Copyright)
transcribed by C Feroben
8/08

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