I'll never get around to it, but it would be kinda cool to collect some of the bullion coins that Kahre and company paid their workers as a tax avoidance measure. Not only are they attached to an interesting story, they may also be the only Eagles that ever circulated in commerce. How would you establish a provenance for something like that? How could a future collector or historian be sure that the coin in your collection was really one of the circulated ones from the Kahre case?
Odd that no one attempted to come up with a solution for that. I really have no idea. That is one of the really big problems with anything from the past. A gun, for example, might have been used by Jessie James but unless it was signed by him, how could it be proved. The original Bowie Knife, if real, could be sitting on a flea markets table and no one would know. A coin could have been in the pocket of a president and no one would ever know. Anyone could make a document saying something but that too would be useless unless the item was signed or something. Good question.
Employment records and a written in-period note in the handwriting of the employee would go a long way. It is difficult to prove provenance after the fact, but the above is one example of a pretty good provenance that would be commonly accepted.
There is a program on TV called History Detectives. Recently they were asked if they could find out something about a coin that was in a lined wooden box and bent as if shot from a gun. The story was that it was shot by Annie Oakley at the Wild West shows put on back in those days by famous old West famous people. Naturally as it turned out after much investigations, shot by Annie Oakley or not just couldn't be proved. It was a coin that had been shot by a bullet was sort of authenticated by a gun expert but that could have been by anyone. The box it was in could have been from anyone at any time in the last 150 years and the same with the lining. Without Annie Oakley standing there saying I did that, impossilble to prove. Proving who had what, when and where on anything without a name on it is really a problem.
And here you confront one of scholars' greatest problems with ancient coins in the market - where the hell did it come from! A coin in the ground, or in your case the Kahre & Co office, offers conclusive evidence. Out of its context, the only things you can tell about a coin are the content, method of production, and the circulation.
It just hit me that the problem may already have been solved, but in a totally useless way from a collector's point of view. If the authorities seized any of the coins for the court case(s), then they're in evidence bags with a chain of custody documenting where they came from and where they'd been since.
