EMATiON

Is this worth anything?... I have a Mormon 10 Dollar Gold Coin, I've attached both pictures of both sides of it. One one side it's engraved "To . The . Lord . Holiness" with a weird eye like emblem in the middle. On the other side it says "Pure . Gold. Ten . Dollars" and has hands shaking with 1849 under it. Can someone tell me the value they think it could possibly be worth in this condition?

FRONT PICTURE <---click to view
BACK PICTURE <----click to view

This coin is extremely rare, it is very hard to find even any information on it, but here's what I was able to dig up.


After James Marshall’s discovery of gold in California in 1848, a number of private minters jumped in to supply the ever-escalating need for a circulating coinage in that region. By the end of 1849 there were approximately eighteen of these private operations at work, almost all located in the San Francisco area. Coinage by these minters fell off sharply after the opening of the Assay Office and later, the San Francisco Mint.


[FONT=Georgia]While no gold was discovered in Utah, Mormon prospectors brought large quantities of California gold back to the Salt Lake City area. Brigham Young conceived the idea of a distinctive Mormon coinage, and four denominations of two-and-one-half, five, ten, and twenty-dollar coins were struck in 1849-50. While the ten dollar pieces featured the legend PURE GOLD, the other denominations (which were struck later) displayed the initials G.S.L.C.P.G. These stood for “Great Salt Lake City Pure Gold,” an obvious misnomer as all the gold came from California. A second issue was produced in 1860 from bullion brought from strikes in Colorado. All the Mormon gold coins use religious symbols for the central design motifs, and the 1860 pieces use the Deseret alphabet (now extinct) to spell out the legend HOLINESS TO THE LORD. Mormon coins were the first of the Western territorials to be publicly vilified as lightweight and of low fineness. An assay performed on a group of more than $500 face value in Mormon coins in 1851 found the average ten-dollar piece contained only $8.52 in gold. When these figures became public knowledge, the coins were discounted 20-25% by bankers and merchants. Widespread melting followed, and today Mormon gold pieces are very rare, although circulated fives occasionally appear.

EDITED--No offers to buy/sell/trade