Coin Once Believed to Be Fake Is a Million Dollar Find
Authenticators found a New England collector’s Gold Rush-era $5 gold coin is the real McCoy
By Jason Daley
smithsonian.com
April 26, 2018
During the California Gold Rush, the city of San Francisco was flooded with 10 million ounces of the shiny yellow stuff. The problem was it was hard to cash in all that gold for legal tender—in remote California there just weren’t enough gold coins in circulation. Residents were forced to use raw nuggets as currency and later coins minted by private companies. But some six years after James W. Marshall found “gold in them hills†at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, the United States Mint had a branch up and running in San Fran, turning that gold into money. Now, as reports Matt Novak at Gizmodo reports, one of the mint’s extremely rare original gold coins from that first year of operation has been authenticated, making its owner, who believed it was a fake, millions of dollars richer.
Read more:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/coin-once-believed-be-fake-million-dollar-find-180968893/#tgFXFDPl8BpG7B6c.99
