California Fractional Gold (1852-1882)

Gold was plentiful in California after 1849, but coins small enough to make change were not. The United States Assay Office in San Francisco was at first allowed to strike only octagonal fifty-dollar pieces, and shopkeepers took almost any foreign silver coin of about the right size as a quarter or half dollar. In 1852 San Francisco jewelers began striking tiny gold pieces of 25 cents, 50 cents and one dollar to fill the gap. A New Orleans paper reported receiving a California gold half dollar in June 1852, and letters from the next few years show miners spending them and tucking them into envelopes for family back East.

The makers were mostly French jewelers. Pierre Frontier and Eugene Deviercy signed some of their dies FD; Antoine Louis Nouizillet signed with N; the engraver M. Deriberpie signed DERI or DERIB; and Gaime, Guillemot & Co. used GG. The Joseph Brothers were among the earliest producers. The trade had its rough edges: Dan Owens found that Deriberpie, Nouizillet and Isadore Routhier were arrested in April 1853 on a charge of counterfeiting the ten-dollar pieces of Wass, Molitor & Co., and all three went back to making small gold afterwards. When the steamer Winfield Scott was wrecked off Anacapa Island in December 1853, divers later recovered 51 fractional pieces from the passengers' luggage, among them six octagonal dollars of 1853 signed by Deriberpie.

None of these pieces held as much gold as its face value called for. Mike Locke works out that a full-weight California gold dollar would weigh about 1.71 grams, and no Period One dollar reaches three-quarters of that. Once the San Francisco Mint was striking quarters and half dollars in quantity in 1855 and 1856, the need for private change disappeared, and the French jewelers stopped. Collectors call these early pieces Period One; the first edition of Breen-Gillio ended the period in 1856, and the second edition carries it to 1857.

From the end of the 1850s jewelers took up the little coins again, this time for visitors who wanted a piece of California gold to take home. These Period Two pieces, which Breen-Gillio's second edition dates 1858 to 1882 (1859 to 1882 in the first), carry dates into the early 1880s, are lighter still, and were not meant to circulate; Locke reports a Mint assay that found that 1859-dated pieces held gold for only about a quarter of their stated value. Frontier, Deviercy & Co. carried on into the new period; Robert B. Gray & Co., which took over Nouizillet's business around 1859-1860, marked some pieces G; Frontier & Bellemere struck quarters with a head of Washington in 1872; the Levison Brothers' pieces carry an L; and Christopher Ferdinand Mohrig made many of the Indian-head pieces. Away from San Francisco, Reuben N. Hershfield and Noah Mitchell of Leavenworth, Kansas, put an H on their pieces of 1871. Some Period Two pieces were backdated, such as the Indian-head quarters and halves dated 1852 that were made decades later.

An act of Congress approved June 8, 1864 made it a crime to make or pass any private coin intended for use as money. The souvenir trade went on anyway. According to Wikipedia the law was enforced in a Boston case in 1869 and at Fort Leavenworth in 1871; a dealer note citing Robert Leonard says federal agents stopped the Hershfield and Mitchell pieces that August. At some point a Secret Service man paid face value to a jeweler for one quarter and one half to hold as evidence, and a Secret Service visit in 1883, which brought no charges, ended the denominated pieces: from then on the makers left the value off, producing tokens rather than fractional gold. Later still came copies of the old pieces, including those of Herman Kroll in the early 1900s.

The standard catalogue is Walter Breen and Ronald J. Gillio's California Pioneer Fractional Gold (1983), revised by Robert D. Leonard Jr. in 2003. Its BG numbers are the ones used on every page of this series.

Check for a denomination. A genuine piece states its value on the reverse: 1/4 DOLLAR, 25 CENTS, 1/2 DOLLAR, FIFTY CENTS, ONE DOL. or 1 DOLLAR, usually with CALIFORNIA GOLD and often a date inside a wreath or beaded circle. Pieces with no value are souvenir tokens, and so are the pieces with a small bear on the reverse, which Locke dates from about 1900 on; they belong with the California gold tokens, not here.

Note the shape and size. Each denomination was made in a round and an octagonal shape, and Breen-Gillio number them separately: Period One octagonal and round quarters, halves and dollars are the BG-100s to BG-600s (octagonal dollars BG-501 to 534, round dollars BG-601 to 607); Period Two pieces are the BG-700s to BG-1200s (octagonal dollars, round dollars).

Read the obverse. Most pieces show a small Liberty head surrounded by stars. From the late 1860s many Period Two pieces show an Indian head instead, and a few quarters of 1872 show George Washington. On Period One pieces the maker's initials are often worked into the design: FD by the bust, GG at the truncation, or N., N.R. or DERI in the reverse legend.

Look at the edge. Many Period One dollars have reeded edges, some crudely or unevenly reeded. A great many survivors were mounted in jewelry, and Locke warns that repaired solder marks and filled holes can be hard to see; a piece whose octagon has bent sides, or whose reeding is missing in one stretch, deserves a close look.

Weigh it. Genuine pieces are gold but light for their face value. Locke's full-weight figures, at 0.88 fine, are about 1.71 grams for a dollar, 0.855 grams for a half and 0.438 grams for a quarter, and nearly every genuine piece falls below them.

Period One dollars. The octagonal dollars open with a group whose reverse shows a small eagle with shield and branch, copied from the eagle on Augustus Humbert's fifty-dollar slugs: BG-501, which has no date, and the dated BG-502, BG-503 (legend reading COLD for GOLD), BG-504 and BG-534. Locke attributes the eagle pieces to Frontier & Deviercy; Humbert had no hand in them. The largest family is the Deriberpie dollars of 1853 and 1854, BG-514 to BG-529, with DERI or DERIB in the reverse legend, such as BG-514 and BG-525. BG-526a, a pairing of the BG-526 obverse with the BG-529 reverse, was reported as a new find with one piece known. Nouizillet's N. dollars include BG-530, and BG-533 carries N.R. The round dollars are few: BG-604 has GG on the obverse and an eagle standing on a rock on the reverse.

Period One quarters and halves. The first quarters, such as BG-101, are octagonal pieces of the Joseph Brothers, and overdates such as the 1855/4 BG-106 appear early. Locke counts eight basic Period One types: octagonal and round Liberty quarters, a round quarter with a defiant eagle and 25 CENTS, octagonal and round Liberty halves, a round half with the Arms of California, and octagonal and round Liberty dollars. The defiant eagle quarter, BG-220, is the one quarter that comes close to full weight, and the Arms of California half is BG-435. CoinWeek notes that the Arms of California half is first recorded only in 1878, so its 1853 date is questioned. Among the octagonal halves, BG-301 has an eagle reverse and BG-302 a little eagle with spread rays that collectors nickname the peacock; BG-302 pieces were found with the Winfield Scott. Deriberpie and Nouizillet each made round halves, such as BG-417 and BG-430, and Deriberpie's BG-424 and BG-425 of 1854 have fourteen stars, more than any other Period One piece.

Period Two quarters and halves. The second period opens with pieces dated 1859, such as the quarter BG-701 and the half BG-901, both by Frontier, Deviercy & Co. Makers' letters mark a few: G for Gray on BG-1017, H for Hershfield and Mitchell on BG-857 and BG-1046. The Washington-head quarter BG-722 is by Frontier & Bellemere, and Mohrig's Indian heads include BG-799. Overdates are frequent, among them 1872/1, 1873/2, 1876/5 and 1878/6, and backdated pieces include the 1852-dated quarter BG-891 and half BG-962. The 1864 dies of some halves were also struck as die trials in silver and copper, such as BG-917a.

Period Two dollars. The octagonal dollars run from BG-1101 of 1859 to 1876, with Liberty heads through the series and Indian heads from 1872; the dates include the overdates 1873/2 (BG-1121) and 1876/5 (BG-1128). The round dollars are dated 1870 to 1872; BG-1208, an Indian head of 1872, was struck by C. F. Mohrig.

Restrikes and copies. A few Period One designs were struck again around 1860, and Breen-Gillio number these pieces with Period Two: Locke identifies the 1856-dated half BG-915A as a restrike of BG-311 with a plain edge on a plated planchet, and the 1856-dated round quarter BG-818A as a restrike from the dies of the octagonal BG-111. The BG-1300 numbers, grouped on the later copies page, are copies made after the period: the Kroll copies such as BG-1301, which imitates BG-111 with a different date, their later restrikes such as BG-1301A, and copies of unknown origin, some struck in lead, white metal or brass.

The pieces were struck in gold of no fixed standard. Locke bases his full-weight figures on native California gold of about 0.88 fine and finds every Period One dollar well short of the weight that a full dollar in such gold would need. Wikipedia, drawing on the revised Breen-Gillio, puts the earliest pieces at roughly 80 to 90 percent of full weight and says the weights fell steadily over the years of issue. Locke observes that Frontier & Deviercy pieces appear to be plated with better gold over a lower-grade core, a plating that can peel, and that some later souvenir pieces are gold-plated silver or brass.

No piece in this series was struck by the United States Mint, so none carries a mint mark, and no record of how many were made survives. The later Kroll pieces vary as well: PCGS describes the originals as reddish, low-grade gold and the restrikes as brighter yellow gold, while some other copies in the BG-1300 range are base metal.