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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kaparthy, post: 655261, member: 57463&quot;]<b>Who owns the dies?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>Thanks for posting the picture of the slab.&nbsp; BG, of course, stands for Breen-Gillio. Ron Gillio updated Walter Breen&#039;s work on these coins. Breen was ideologically pre-sold on their authenticty as a corpus.&nbsp; But other cataloguers of earlier times simply presented a taxonomy -- differences by type -- without strong judgments about their legality or legalisms.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>I had one, also.&nbsp; Attributed it against four catalogues.&nbsp; Finally dumped it.&nbsp; It is not clear to me that these are not all &quot;jeweler&#039;s pieces.&quot;&nbsp; The early date means nothing.&nbsp; In California at the time of the gold rush small silver from Mexico and Philadephia was at a premium, but no one could figure out how to buy enough of it to ship in to make a difference. </p><p><br /></p><p>With gold &quot;everywhere&quot; prices rose astronomically, making such small change nearly useless... or so it is said.</p><p><br /></p><p>There are many stories about these coins and the gold rush.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>When Michael Hodder was defending John Ford, he found interesting first hand accounts ... but if I re-read them with a different accent and cadence, they said something else, entirely...&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>It is most likely to me that the contexts were different in places otherwise &quot;close&quot; together or in the same place in times that were &quot;close&quot; together.&nbsp; Different facts were reported second hand in newspapers and then were interpreted later by numismatists and historians.</p><p><br /></p><p>Donald H. Kagin earned in Ph.D. in numismatics for work in this area.&nbsp; His book is highly recommended.</p><p><a href="http://www.kaginsinc.com" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.kaginsinc.com" rel="nofollow">www.kaginsinc.com</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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