1851 $50 California Gold - Augustus Humbert 880 Thous. RE PCGS AU50

Collectors Universe Price: $57,500.

Here’s a great opportunity to add one of the most sought-after U.S. gold coins to your numismatic portfolio. Their massive weight, iconic octagonal shape, and distinctive design make them instantly recognizable. These $50 slugs, as they came to be known, rank among the 100 Greatest U.S. Coins, per Jeff Garrett and Ron Guth. This is an example of the K-5 variety (Reeded Edge, 880 Thous., 1851 date on obverse). Well-detailed greenish-golden surfaces exhibit typical unevenness around the borders. Nonetheless, the color and eye appeal on this piece are outstanding.

PCGS has graded only 128 of this 1851 880 Thous. RE variety. From among those, there are 8 that carry the grade of AU50 with 29 finer. Collectors Universe gives this variety a price of $57,500.00 in AU50.

Miners during the California Gold Rush. This rarity was struck with Gold Rush gold.

A report from 1911, published in the American Journal of Numismatics, discusses their rarity even then:

"The comparative scarcity of the fifty-dollar slugs at the present time, notwithstanding the enormous number originally struck, may be ascribed to the fact that as the ungainly pieces were worth much above their face value, a considerable profit was derived from remelting them. Foreign bankers, it is said, preferred the octagonal ingots to regular American coin, and they were exported in huge quantities, some direct from California, others from New York City. An item appeared in one of the papers on Jan. 13, 1853, to the effect that the steamer Asia, from New York to Liverpool, took $200,000 in fifty-dollar gold pieces."