Chapter 01 · 0:00Why The 1849 Double Eagle Matters
There's three words that I kept reading over and over. The story of the 1849 Double Eagle. It's all about gold and the discovery of gold. And what to do with all this gold.
One of the wildest, craziest events in US history created maybe the most valuable gold coin of all time, the 1849 Double Eagle. The gold rush.
"Word soon spread."
These three words popped up over and over. Listen to this.
"Word soon spread, and before long, other workers at the sawmill were spending every available moment of spare time during daylight hours poking in crevices and searching the American River stream bed for yellow flakes and nuggets. Sutter urged them to keep the matter confidential, fearing that the sawmill, then only partially completed, would be abandoned. Favoring the certainty of wages to the unknown possibility of finding gold, the workers agreed to stay with the project, limiting gold exploration to their extra hours."
So that's right out of a book that I'm going to tell you about in a second.
Chapter 02 · 1:09Word Soon Spread And Everything Changed
What just happened in that passage was the very beginning of the California gold rush. And the big phrase that says it all was word soon spread. We'll look at this a little bit more. What happened when the word started spreading? This is an amazing time to look back on, and luckily for coin collectors, we have a great coin that marks all of these amazing events.
So, like I said, it's the 1849 Double Eagle. And the passage that I just read was when the very first workers at Sutter's Mill realized there might be a fortunate gold in the nearby river. The passage said, Sutter tried to keep the workers focused on the mill, the project that they were building. But after hours, the workers explored for more gold.
So you know what happens next. Just like the first phrase from that passage says, word soon spread. The workers went from poking around this river after hours because they had a job to do at the mill. But then very quickly, word would spread, and it was an all-out gold rush.
I can't possibly try to tell you all about one of the most famous rare coins in the world without first reading a couple of great books on this topic. I need to read an entire book when I do these episodes. I just want the full story from an expert, a human. It's just so much more fun to take the time and read the story from a real book and somebody who might have spent a couple of years researching and digging and interviewing for this story.
And this is all back in the day before you could just punch up a quick report in two seconds. So I like to have the actual old physical book. It's just more fun to do that. So this book that I have right here was published in 1982, written by maybe the top coin expert of all time, David Bowers. The book's titled 'United States Gold Coins: an Illustrated History.'
There's two main ideas in this story.
First, it's the gold rush, word spreading. And suddenly thousands of people are pulling tons of gold out of California. You need to do something with all this gold. So they created the first double eagle coins because of this gold rush.
Second, there's only one known 1849 double eagle coin to exist that we know about. And that one coin is resting safe and sound in the Smithsonian. This one single coin produced in 1849, it's actually a pattern coin. It was never in circulation.
There's a pretty strong argument that this could be easily be the most valuable coin in the world if it was to ever sell publicly, which it won't. It's going to stay in the Smithsonian. So the current value, it's priceless. Nobody can buy this coin.
Chapter 04 · 4:40The Case For A $20 Gold Coin
There's a great debate here. It's like for all of you baseball fans, there's always this debate like who's your all-time starting lineup of baseball legends out of all the eras. Who would you put in each position? And then this debate rages on about who you included and who you left off of this all-time lineup.
There's the same great debate for coin collectors. It's the greatest coins of all time list. And coin collectors, they'll debate over like maybe 10 or 15 coins that are extremely rare and historic. And they'll rank them in order of importance and value. And then they'll debate why someone ranked one coin over the other.
Well, this is one of those coins right here. It's at the very top of the list for many of the most well-known coin experts and collectors. Many of them rank this coin right at the very top of the list. So we got to learn a little bit about this coin before we go any further. Gold's just been discovered at Sutter's Mill in California, 1848. And the gold that was discovered would eventually get shipped back to the East Coast, to the Philadelphia Mint.
Like I said, it would soon be used to create the very first double eagle gold coins, just one year later. The double eagle coin was first proposed by lawmakers before the gold rush, but it wouldn't be until the discovery at Sutter's Mill over 10 years later that the Double Eagle would actually go into production. Up to that point, the highest denomination gold coin in the US was the Eagle Coin, which was worth $10. Along with this gold discovery, the double eagle, which was now worth twice the Eagle coin, so it's worth $20. Now the double eagle was ready to hit the scene right here.
There's some debate by politicians that there's no need to create a double eagle coin. The critics in Washington, D.C., they said the Eagle coin was being doubled into a ponderous and unparalleled size. But with the discovery of gold out west, nobody's going to win this argument anymore. The government needs to make a bigger gold coin because now there's just so much more supply of gold. The mint could process more of this gold into coins with the least amount of effort by the presses. So they're minting like four times the value of a $5 half eagle and twice as much as the $10 eagle coin with that same effort. So the chief engraver at the mint, it's James B. Longacre. But there right now there's a power struggle going on at the U.S. Mint between Longacre and the Mint Director, this guy Robert Patterson.
Patterson and a few others nearly get Longacre fired, but he's able to survive this conflict at the mint. Somehow he keeps his job. Then he proceeds to create the design for the new double eagle. So there's a side note here on Longacre. He would go on to design several other historic coins. He would do the shield nickel, the Indian head scent, the three cent piece, the two cent piece, and the flying eagle scent.
So a lot of coin collectors know this name, James B. Longacre from some of these other coins. When Longacre passed away suddenly in 1869, the guy who would replace him as chief engraver was William Barber. Ten years later, William Barber passes away, his son succeeds him as chief engraver at the mint, a guy named Charles Barber. If you listened to my episode on the Saint Gaudens Double Eagle, you know Charles Barber. He would soon go head to head with Augustus Saint Gaudens in this classic coin creator story that I love.
It's the epic mint showdown of 1907. I guess I can say this. It was Barber who was almost like this villain in the creator story about these St. Gottens Double Eagles. And that's a great story if you haven't listened to that yet. And my favorite character of all time, I guess you could say it's President Theodore Roosevelt, was right there battling and fighting his way through the politics of Washington, D.C., and Charles Barber at the Mint trying to get these coins redesigned. Anyway, back to the 1949 Double Eagles.
Chapter 05 · 8:29Patterns, Proofs, And The Smithsonian
So Longacre's at the mint. He designs the coin, and the first patterns are made in late 1849. This is where things get really interesting. It's a key part of the story. I read David Bauer's line in his book about this a few times just to be sure I was reading this correctly. There's a handful of brand new double eagle coins, which were proof coins or patterns, and they made a few pattern coins in late 1849. Now we just talked about the one single known coin that's in the Smithsonian. It's the only 1849 double eagle to exist, making it possibly the most valuable coin ever created. But let me just read this right here, this passage from Bauer's book, and you can hear it for yourself. He says,
"By the end of 1849, at least two gold impressions of the 1849 dated double eagle dies had been preserved, one of which was sent to the Secretary of the Treasury, W. M. Meredith, and the other of which was placed in the mint collection. Today the Meredith specimen is untraced. The mint collection piece is a featured exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution."
Okay, hold on right here. We need to talk about this right here. Bowers' book, written in 1982. He's one of the most knowledgeable coin experts, maybe ever. David Bowers just said that at least two gold coins were minted. One was preserved, the other was sent to Secretary of the Treasury W. M. Meredith. And that coin is untraced.
The other's now in the Smithsonian, but where did the other coin go?
Now it gets even better.
The book goes on to say that on December 25th, 1849, so on Christmas Day, 1849, the director of the mint, Robert Patterson, that same guy who was trying to get Longacre fired, that guy right there, the book says Director Patterson quote, informed Meredith that a number of 1849 double eagles have been coined by the ordinary steam press, and the unhappy result has been reported to me. So this is what Patterson's reporting to Secretary of the Treasury Meredith.
Then this is David Bower's book that has this quote. It says, Patterson informed Meredith, quote, it is presumed that these specimens were destroyed. Okay, so if you've listened to a few of my other episodes on the greatest coins of all time, you're now familiar with a few of the great coin collectors, the legends. I'm talking about Stickney, Eliasberg, Brand, Eckfeld. There's a bunch of them. These collectors go way back almost to the very beginning of the U.S. Mint. They were busy collecting coins and they were also very, very smart. These collectors spent a lot of time on their craft, studying, researching, locating the most rare coins ever made.
Even though this is way back in 1849, it's still after the mint cabinet was created to store the country's official coin collection. So rare coins are already a thing right here. And we know how crafty some of these original U.S. coin collectors were because of the 1804 silver dollar story. In that episode, we talked about how a few coin collectors who also worked at the mint started re-striking coins of earlier dates because they found out they were rare. There was a market for these rare coins, and they actually restruck a handful of 1804 silver dollars all the way back in 1834 because they realized they were in demand by collectors.
The point that I'm trying to make here is I'm skeptical. I guess after hearing some of these other coin stories, there's some insider trading going on, you could say, at the U.S. Mint, even way before this double eagle story. It's not out of the question that when you hear a mint official say that certain coins were produced and then destroyed, it's just hard to believe that as an absolute fact for me. That's my gut reaction after hearing that line right there. So
Chapter 06 · 12:35Did A Second Specimen Survive?
I did a little more digging on the possibility that there's another 1849 double eagle coin out there somewhere. Even though officially there's only one known coin at the Smithsonian. Here's what I found. Because this book by David Bowers, it's now over 40 years old.
So what's the latest? I go on to the PCGS website. It's one of the top coin grading companies. On their website, I found the page covering this 1849 Double Eagle. And it says this it says proof coin, population one, image courtesy of the Smithsonian. And it has a picture of the coin right on the website.
Then it says estimated value, $25 million. Then down below, it also has some commentary on the coin. It has a few well-known coin experts adding their thoughts on this coin.
So David Hall, he comments, and he's one of the founders of PCGS, I believe, but here's what David Hall writes. He says, quote,
"Walter Breen has written of the 1849 20 that at least two proofs were coined on December 22nd. One of those is in the Smithsonian Institute. The other went to Treasury Secretary William M. Meredith. This statement seems to indicate that there may be another 1849 20 floating around somewhere. But I agree with Dave Bowers when he warned that Breen's statement must be taken with a grain of salt. And I personally feel the existence of a second 1849 20 is beyond improbable."
Okay, so there you have it. Coin expert David Hall. He says it's beyond improbable that there's another second 1849 double eagle coin out there somewhere. Now on the same page on this PCGS website, there's another coin legend, David Akers. He chimes in on the 1849 Double Eagle. But check this out. David Akers says about the second coin that was given to Secretary of the Treasury William Meredith. He says that coin is, quote,
"Thought to be in the possession of Stephen K. Nagy, the famous Philadelphia coin dealer, since there's a photograph of it in his estate."
And then he says the late James Kelly, another well-known coin dealer, had firsthand knowledge of, quote, the existence and whereabouts of a second specimen. So then David Akers, he goes on to say, if there's a second coin, it's unknown to the numismatic community. And then he says this he goes, its very existence must be considered a matter of conjecture. So there we go, right there. Two very respected coin experts.
One says it's beyond probable. And the other says it's a matter of conjecture. So now I know there's people out there who might be listening to this right now, who might actually know the real story of possibly another 1849 double eagle out there somewhere. And I know after learning all about the great coin collectors, I can bet there's collectors out there who have been searching for the other 1849 double eagle for probably 40 or 50 years now. And I so I know you're out there. I've read enough of these coin stories now. These coin collectors are very smart and they're relentless.
Let me know if you have the full story on another 1849 double eagle. I won't tell anybody about it. So this is still just the proof coin that we're talking about here, 1849. Now the gold rush in California is fully underway, 1850. That next year, gold starts pouring back into the system. The United States mint begins production of the 1850 double eagles by the millions. There's just over a million double eagles struck in 1850. Then over two million double eagles were struck in 1851, and another two million in 1852. But there's several other rare double eagle coins produced in the 1850s, and these coins are extremely valuable today. There's a 1854-0 from the New Orleans Mint.
There was only about 3,000 of those originally produced. Now there's about 20 out there that are remaining in collections. Another double eagle from the New Orleans Mint, the 1856. There's only 15 known pieces from that mintage. So it's another reason to love coin collecting and why collectors spend entire lifetimes tracking down and collecting rare coins.
There's some intrigue and mystery, and there's a chance there could be another 1849 double eagle proof coin out there. How crazy would that be to have that 1849 coin surface at some point? Back to the gold. I said there was two parts to the story. The super rare proof coin that just may or may not be a one of one coin. That's in the Smithsonian.
The gold rush is what created these coins. Double eagle production is underway and rolling off the mint presses in the 1850s.
Chapter 07 · 17:39Sutter’s Secret Turns Into Chaos
Gold is absolutely just pouring in from California. So David Bowers in his book, he has a ton of great stories about the beginning of Sutter's Mill and just how fast the gold rush took off. Here's what started it all right here. The very first discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill is pretty wild. That's what a lot of collectors dream of right there, just stumbling on a treasure or a super rare coin. It sounds so exciting. You would think it'd be such a thrill to discover a river packed full of gold on your property.
And I'm sure it was a thrill initially. But when you start reading into the details about the gold rush and how fast it took off, what a craze it became, you can see the realization set in pretty quickly. After that initial excitement of the discovery, there's quickly this realization that discovering gold on your property, it might not be the best thing to ever happen. Here's David Bower's introduction to the gold rush in his book.
I like how he starts this off because it really sounded like a dream come true in the beginning. Listen to this, he says,
"Of all events in United States history, the California Gold Rush is one of the most significant and romantic. The discovery of gold in the race of Sutter's Mill in January 1848 set the stage for the westward expansion, which ultimately was to define the boundaries of the United States as we know them today."
Okay, so like we were talking about. This is called the gold rush for a reason. It's a race for gold. It's more like a craze almost. The gold craze. And why do people go crazy for gold? Well, some gold miners out there, they were not just looking for a few nuggets. Bauer's book says it right here. It says, there was this thought that the mother load is what they called it. The mother load was out there somewhere, and that this might be it. Here's what I'm talking about. He says in his book, he goes,
"In California, as in Georgia, North Carolina, and other locations in the United States, gold was discovered in the form of alluvial deposits, flakes, nuggets, dust, and lumps mixed with sand in stream beds or in loose sand or soil. It is presumed that the gold was once part of a rock formation or lode, which in earlier times had broken away or had become eroded. Hence, following the vast gold discoveries in Northern California in 1848, miners working streambeds always dreamed of finding the so-called mother load, where gold was believed to exist in nearly pure form in large quantities in the earth."
There you go, right there. The search was not just for a few gold pieces. Some were looking for that giant rock formation of pure gold, like this unlimited treasure underground. They thought that was out there somewhere. And they thought maybe this was it. So this is what I'm talking about. When I was reading about the discovery at Sutter's mill, it was an exciting discovery. Then as you keep reading, you see why they called it the gold rush.
There were suddenly over 10,000 people on both sides of this river searching for gold. There were so many people that they really couldn't even keep track of how many were out there. Check this out. When Sutter discovers gold, he brings it to get it tested. There was just no possible way to keep this a secret.
He tried. He really tried to keep it quiet. But this is the quote that I read earlier at the beginning of the episode. Word started to spread. Anyone he talked to, Sutter urged them to keep the matter confidential. Like the quote said in the book, there, but there was no possible way to stop what would become this rush. And then here it is. Even though Sutter was pleading just to keep his gold discovery a secret, he couldn't even stay quiet about it.
Not even Sutter himself could stop talking about this gold. He actually wrote a letter to a friend and he said, This is from the book right here. He wrote, I have made the discovery of a gold mine, which according to experiments we have made, is extraordinarily rich. So not only is he telling people about his rich discovery, but it turns out Sutter didn't even officially own the land. Get this. He tried to, as quickly as he could, confirm ownership of the land. Sutter reaches out to Colonel R. R. B. Mason through a trusted messenger.
That's what the book calls this guy. So this guy, Mason, was the chief representative of the U.S. government in California. The trusted messenger that Sutter sent, a guy named Charles Bennett, was specifically told to not say anything about the gold. Sutter instructed Bennett to secure the land of all the rights for lumber milling, pasture use, and mineral privileges. And then so Sutter had this plan ready that if they asked why he wanted mineral privileges, his messenger Bennett was supposed to tell him that it was for lead and silver that might be in the soil. So do not mention gold. That's the plan right here.
But Sutter's secret plan is totally fumbled by his messenger. When Bennett was on his way to do all this, the messenger, he stopped at a store on his way to secure the land rights. He had a buckskin bag with six ounces of gold inside. He pulls into the store, as the story goes, that Bennett the Messenger quote, dazzled several listeners with stories of the gold discovery, showing them the physical evidence.
Bennett blew it.
The messenger spilled the beans, along with everyone else.
There's no way this discovery can remain a secret. It took just a few months from the discovery to then a few dozen people showing up. And then numbers grew to like 800, then 2,000. Not long after that, word would spread, like I've been saying, over 10,000 people, then 100,000 people are in the river near Sutter's Mill. And so it would get wild. As you can imagine, the dream of discovering a fortune turns into a nightmare for Sutter.
This is a party that anyone's invited to. Any and all types of people are showing up. And lots of people are finding gold, which is making things even more intense. The book describes the amount of inflation that's going on in the area because people are walking around with pockets full of gold. So it's plentiful in the area.
There's plenty of gold, but pretty much no other goods and services that you might need. Things that are in high demand start to get really, really expensive, like food, supplies, shovels, horses, doctors, guns, bullets. There's a story about a shop nearby. They're selling lunch. It costs $43 for two people to eat lunch in night in 1850. It turns into really tough conditions, and it's also super dangerous, as you can imagine. Certain people are showing up out west, they call them ruffians. The book says they were from Indiana and Missouri. And there's a quote in there. There's a historian who says,
"After the Missourians began to come, insecurity increased. In 1850, things had reached such a path that male agents were afraid to carry gold, lest they should be murdered."
David Bowers, he says in his book again, he goes, just being in the area of this gold, it was not for the faint of heart. For a lot of reasons. Here's his quote.
"It was literally each man for himself. It has been estimated that by 1854 there had been 4,200 murders, 1,400 suicides, and 10,000 other unfortunate deaths in the mining fields."
So it's just brutal things going on around this gold rush. It's remote, there's no law enforcement, people are finding a lot of gold, and then they're trying to survive at the same time. You can imagine the chaos that could break out at the drop of a hat. But they did find a lot of gold, there's no doubt about it. Not everyone got rich from the rush, but they did extract an enormous amount of gold. Remember, much of that gold would be sent back to the U.S. mints in exchange for coins.
Now the book went through some of the estimates on how much gold was discovered around this time. Nobody really knows for sure, but in the year 1848, about 500,000 ounces of gold were extracted. The next year the figure quadrupled to about 2 million ounces. By 1952, 3 million ounces of gold, roughly that same amount would continue to be discovered for the next four years.
But just to put it in perspective, there's one double eagle gold coin is made from almost exactly one ounce of gold, just short of one ounce. It's 0.09675 ounces in one double eagle. So this is really the equivalent of millions of double eagle gold coins extracted every year for several years from this California gold rush.
Chapter 08 · 27:00Vault Gold, Paper Money, Gold Standard
Now millions of ounces of gold are pouring into the U.S. mint buildings and into the banks. They use that gold to produce millions of double eagle coins. Some of those coins would be distributed into circulation, but $20 back then's a lot of money. So much of those newly minted double eagle coins, they just remain at the treasury or in the bank vaults. Now with all that gold sitting in bank vaults, they could be used for large currency settlements with foreign governments. It was really nice to have all this gold in the vaults. Then what happens as we get closer to the turn of the century, around 1900.
The fear of paper money was subsiding, it says. The book called it a widespread fear of paper money that people had in the mid-1800s was easing. Now citizens no longer demanded physical gold coins to make transactions. People began to come around to the idea of paper money right here for one big reason. It was just easier to carry it around. You didn't have to carry a big bag of heavy coins everywhere you went. You could just leave the coins in the bank and then use the paper money, knowing that the paper was proof that you own the gold coins in the bank vault.
Which leads me directly to another big idea in all of this. And I haven't mentioned this yet or this phrase yet, but it always comes up, and I gotta say it, it's the gold standard. This is one of the main themes with all gold coins you end up reading about the gold standard. David Bowers talks about it too. He says there's just no way around it. He talks about how all this gold saved in the treasury vaults was used for payment settlements. So then he adds this quote right here. He says,
"This concept was furthered by the so-called gold standard system, which the United States adopted in 1900, being one of the last developed nations to do so."
So learning all about history through the creation of these amazing rare coins, there's always talk about the gold standard. Almost all roads lead back to the gold standard. Check this out. My episode on the 1933 Double Eagles was all about the crazy economic events during the Great Depression. Leading right into March of 1933, when FDR was sworn into office, then FDR, along with his pal, the steady-handed Will Wooden, they saved the entire financial system from the brink of collapse.
Then almost immediately, the U.S. government begins to recall all the gold back into the banks and the Treasury to shore up what would really end up being the entire world economic system that they're trying to save here. The driver of this huge effort to turn around the banking panic and to get out of the Great Depression.
One of the keys behind all of this was recalling all the gold back into the banks and stockpiling it back into the vaults. They'd melt it all down and then they would store it in bars with what would become Fort Knox. They just started building Fort Knox right there after that crisis. So by 1936, Fort Knox is completed and all these gold bars now are stored there to boost the confidence of the people. Knowing that their paper money is now trusted, because now there's an entire building full of gold bars sitting in the middle of Kentucky. Bower's book goes into the history of the gold standard all the way back to the beginning.
So he explains how this idea was a way to avoid hauling around gold just because it was heavy and it wasn't safe to carry around a lot of gold. So banks and goldsmiths, way back in the day, would keep gold for customers, and then they just issue receipts as proof of your gold. And then you could always come in and redeem the receipt for the gold if you needed it because you knew somebody was safely holding it for you.
Then naturally, banks always push the limits. Over time, they start going one step further, and they realize they could issue more receipts than there was gold kept in their vaults. And this was great. Nobody would know the difference or care either way, just as long as everybody didn't try to redeem all the receipts for gold all at one time. Sounds like a great idea, right? I like the super simple description right here, David Bowers gives on how the gold standard was created.
You can easily see the problem here. What started out as a convenient way to not have to carry around gold everywhere. You can see how when people didn't have their gold and they just had a note in their hand, all it took was just a tiny little doubt to creep into your head. Just one little thought telling you, maybe my gold locked in the vault is getting passed out to somebody else, leaving me with nothing when I go redeem my receipt.
That's exactly why they call them financial panics. These panics would break out because everybody got fearful or they had these doubts in their minds all at the same time. They panicked. And once in a while, through history, certain banks they didn't actually have all the gold that they issued the notes for, which was a bad deal. And there's hundreds of years of financial panics, the same basic idea just playing out over and over. So countries and governments actually, over time, they would try to prevent this from happening.
So they started to make legal restrictions. They put them in place where banks couldn't issue any more paper money than they had the gold to back it up on hand. So through the entire 1800s, countries were getting on board with this gold standard system. And then the U.S. officially joins the gold standard system in 1900.
So, like Bowers said earlier in his book, countries could make big trade deals with each other. And if everyone had lots of gold stored in their own vaults, then you didn't have to move the gold. You could leave it and you could just pass certificates back and forth. Sweet deal. But then World War I breaks out in Europe and all sorts of craziness starts. So I'm not going to get into the financial history of World War I right now because it's wild.
But there's actually hyperinflation. There's stories of how in Germany people were using wheelbarrows to haul their paper money to the store just to buy a loaf of bread. All the way through the early 1900s, it was wild. Then there was the roaring twenties in the US and this big stock market crash at the end of the decade, and then that kind of sparked the Great Depression. This is why these coins are so cool, though. There's a lot of reasons people love to collect coins. This is one of my favorite reasons right here. You can go through almost entire world history by studying rare coins.
Check it out.
We started the episode with the discovery of a gold nugget at Sutter's Mill in California that sparked the gold rush in 1849. The very next year the U.S. Mint creates this first $20 double eagle gold coin. The very first one of what would be millions of double eagles that would spread all around the world and sit in vaults to back paper money. That people and governments were beginning to figure out it was just as good as gold, but it was much lighter. We could just carry this paper money around and it was easier to make deals with. We didn't have to move the gold if we knew it was in the vault already.
We just needed some proof that it was there. So we'll just put it down on paper. So with all this new gold into the system, more paper notes and certificates could be created to make investments and to grow the economy. Great concept. These very first double eagles, the Liberty Head Double Eagles, they rolled off the mint presses for over 50 years, beginning in 1849. And this just happens to be 50 fascinating years in American history. And these coins are right in the middle of it. That's why I love learning about coins. It's almost an infinite amount of history, all beginning with one single coin, the 1849 Double Eagle. So let me just give you an example of how far you can go.
Because this just happened to me. I was thinking about this story and the great book that I have by David Bowers. So I look up at my bookshelves right in front of me. I have a couple hundred books in front of me right here. To prove my point, I just walked up to my bookshelf and I realized that there's dozens of these books I could just pull off the shelf right now that are from this exact 50-year period from 1849 to the early 1900s. All of my biographies on the big tycoons and the titans.
There's Andrew Carnegie, he's doing his thing right during all of this. Rockefeller. I pulled a book from Niall Ferguson that I have. It's called Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. There's another one, The House of Rothschild. There's a great book that I have, The History of Money by Jack Weatherford. So I flipped to the index in the back all these books just for fun. And I went to the term gold standard. And these books have dozens of pages referencing the gold standard. It seems like sometimes half of my library is tied together by these coin stories as I learn about each new valuable rare coin.
One more quick example right here. If you're not already sold on the thrill of coin collecting, I'm pulling my books off my shelf now, looking at these this 50-year period of time when these Liberty Head double eagles were struck, books that might deal with the gold standard and how gold was handled back in the economy, back in the day. So I have a stack of books here that I'm looking through. And I had a thought in the back of my mind as I'm reading about these Liberty Head double eagles.
It's the Civil War, which broke out right in the middle of when these double eagle coins were created. From 1861 to 1865, the Civil War was raging on. So I started flipping through a bunch of my other books on my shelf. And guess what? These double eagle coins and gold mining and the gold standard, these were all important events during the Civil War.
So I grabbed my copy of Grant by Ron Chernow. It's an incredible biography on Ulysses S. Grant. I flip to the index, I go to the G's, and what's there? Gold, gold rush, gold standard. All these things that we've been talking about, probably 30 or 40 pages of information on everything we just talked about, right in the middle of this amazing book on Ulysses S. Grant.
Chapter 09 · 37:31Shipwreck Gold And The Closing Mystery
Another thing that I learned doing this story, they dig up all this gold in California. Right when the gold rush started, all this gold has to get shipped back to the banks on Wall Street, to the East Coast. It's way too dangerous to haul the gold over land across the entire country. So all the gold is loaded onto ships and it's sailed around through the Panama Canal, or else they have to go all the way down around South America and then back up to the East Coast.
Months at sea with tons of gold on these ships. In 1857, the SS Central America ship, loaded with 10 tons of gold, sails directly into a hurricane. It sinks. 400 passengers are lost. There's a financial crisis already in motion when that ship sinks. This crisis is just starting that that summer of 1857. There's a lot of stuff going on, and the banks in New York need that gold to arrive on that ship. The gold was a big deal back then and they were waiting for it. It backed the economy.
The ship sinks, the gold doesn't reach the banks. When news spread, there's that phrase again, word started to spread. When they got that news of that ship going down with the gold, it just added fuel to this fire for this financial panic of 1857. The banks were waiting for that gold to arrive on that ship, and it never made it. Like I said, this is a lot of fun for me. Tying these stories together, seeing the same historical events from all different perspectives, right out of the old school physical books. The wild and crazy story of the Liberty Head Double Eagles. It all started with that very first pattern coin, the 1849 Double Eagle. If you're ever in Washington, DC, this coin is sitting in the Smithsonian, so go check it out.
Remember, if you're just getting into rare coins, some of the most respected and knowledgeable coin experts consider this coin to be number one on their list, the most wanted coin. If they could pick any one in the entire world, this is it. Even JP Morgan himself tried to buy this exact coin, this 1849 Double Eagle. Not even one of the most powerful humans on the planet back in the day could figure out a way to purchase this coin. And there's a story that he once offered the mint collection $35,000 for this coin back in 1909, but they wouldn't sell it. Think about that one coin, the one of one sitting in the Smithsonian.
The proof 1849 double eagle. Now think about the chance that there's another proof coin out there somewhere, just like we were talking about earlier. Remember David Akers, he was saying about that second coin. It was given to Secretary of the Treasury William Meredith. He said that coin is, quote, thought to be in the possession of Stephen K. Nagy, the famous Philadelphia coin dealer, since there's a photograph of it in his estate. And then he says the late James Kelly, another well-known coin dealer, had firsthand knowledge of, quote, the existence and whereabouts of a second specimen.
And so then, of course, David Akers, he goes on, he says, if there's a second coin, it's unknown to the numismatic community, he says, its very existence must be considered a matter of conjecture. If there's anyone who I'd want searching for something or trying to solve a mystery, it would be the rare coin collectors. From everything I've read about the greatest rare coins all through history, these coin collectors are relentless when it comes to solving the great coin mysteries.
So even when expert David Akers says another 1849 double eagle out there, it's just a matter of conjecture. I get it, but I would not be surprised if that other proof coin turned up at some point. Because now we know you can keep a secret about a rare gold coin for a while. Maybe, maybe even a few hundred years.
But eventually, it'll happen.
It's just a matter of time.
That word would soon spread.
