1849 $10 California Gold Eagle - Cincinnati Mining & Trading PCGS AU53

1849 Cincinnati Mining & Trading Company. $10. Reeded edge. Very pale yellow gold in color with some faint traces of original mint lustre in some of the protected areas. No important marks requiring specific mention. Not overstruck. Struck from a perfect obverse die but a fatally broken reverse, the die with five different breaks running into the center from the rim. It is clear that one reason why these are so rare is that the reverse could not have struck very many before it broke apart. An extraordinary rarity. Ex. John Ford sale, 2004. At that time, the cataloguer stated they could trace just four examples: this; Garrett:885 (257.6 gns.); Brand II:1539 (overstruck on a J.S. Ormsby $10, 256.7 gns.); two pieces in the Smithsonian, one ex Mint, the other ex Lilly, both with reeded edges (there is no plain edge specimen in the Smithsonian and so Breen 7774 and Kagin 2 should both be delisted). Edgar H. Adams knew of three specimens in 1909 but by 1912 he could list four: one in the Mint cabinet, the piece Brand owned that was struck over a JSO, Garrett's which he knew was ex Zabriskie, and another one Brand had exhibited at the June, 1908 meeting of the Chicago Numismatic Society. Virgil Brand owned three specimens in 1920 (the presently offered Jacob Fishel piece, the JSO overstrike, and a third). Unaccountably, Breen listed only three known in 1988 although the Brand II cataloguer noted he knew of five in 1984. The Cincinnati Mining & Trading Company $10 is the only gold issue of this maker that is at all collectable, since the $5 is unique. There could not have been very many made to begin with since this firm was very short lived. It is believed that the firm's coins were actually struck by Broderick & Kohler in San Francisco between August and December, 1849. The fineness of the pieces was subpar, however, and the majority of those struck were probably melted during the course of their circulation lives. The ones we know of, today, were most likely saved as souvenirs. Breen wrote, correctly, that "Survivors are so rare that grade is irrelevant.'' As if to underline this statement, we note that when the Mint received a Cincinnati Mining & Trading Company $5 in 1851 it was decided not to assay the coin 'on account of their rarity.'' This coin has an unbroken pedigree back to the very firm that made it. When Brand bought the presently offered coin from Jacob Fishel in 1908, he paid $1,750 for it, the highest price he had paid for any coin up to then. Fishel told Brand that he was actually a descendant of one of the members of the Cincinnati Mining & Trading Company. Struck from the broken state of the reverse, in about the same degree as the Garrett and Brand II coins. The ex Mint Collection piece is severely broken into six distinct segments.