1851 $50 California Gold Quintuple Eagle - Augustus Humbert 880 Thous. RE NGC XF45

The year 1851 saw the United States Assay Office of Gold in San Francisco struck $50 slugs marked '880 THOUS' (referring to the fineness of the gold). There have been 106 in total  of the 1851 '880 THOUS' graded by NGC. There are 17 that carry the grade of XF45, with 65 finer.

It was in 1851 that Augustus Humbert was appointed to the job of United States Assayer in California. 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.

Gold miners during the California Gold Rush. Gold from the gold fields of 1851 were used to produce this dramatic offering from AUCM.

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.