1851 $50 California Gold Quintuple Eagle - Augustus Humbert 887 Thous. RE PCGS XF45

This is a truly great rarity from the heady days of the California Gold Rush.

The year 1851 saw the United States Assay Office of Gold in San Francisco struck $50 slugs marked '887 THOUS' (referring to the fineness of the gold). There have been 180 in total  of the 1851 '877 THOUS' graded by PCGS. There are 18 that carry the grade of XF45, with 41 finer.

The year 1851 saw Augustus Humbert appointed to the job of United States Assayer in California, and that same year he created a provisional government mint, the United States Assay Office of Gold, in order to fulfill the monetary needs of the people of the new state of California. In 1851 and 1852 Humbert minted $50 gold slugs that were accepted at par with legal tender Federal-issued coinage.

Ron Guth writes, "The $50 gold pieces issued by the United States Assay Office of Gold in San Francisco in the early 1850's were not actually coins per se. Rather, they were called 'ingots' at the time; today, we know them as 'Slugs.' Their real value, besides that stated on their face, was in standardizing the jumble of over-valued, underweight, and off-purity private issues prevalent at the time. Nowadays, the $50 slugs are among the most popular of all California gold pieces."

The only known image of the Assay Office in San Francisco in 1851-1852, where this piece was struck.

A report from 1911, published in the American Journal of Numismatics, discusses this 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.