Gold was first found in what is now Denver in 1857 at Cherry Creek; dredging and panning operations commenced in 1858. Despite the Panic of 1857, the gold rush was in full swing by 1859. Clark, Gruber & Co. established assay offices and was minting gold coins by 1860.
The "pinch" of gold dust was used for small daily commerce transactions, but merchants soon grew tired of having to weigh out gold when selling fast-moving items like horseshoes, feed, pickaxes, and lamp oil. Gold dust had a way of wandering off if you didn't keep an eye on it. Clearly, a better solution was needed, and quickly.
It's a little-known bit of numismatic lore that Clark, Gruber & Co. secretly smuggled a pair of discarded, worn-out 1857
Flying Eagle cent dies from Philadelphia and used them to strike the first Denver-mintmarked
Flying Eagle cents. Since the dies were already engraved with the date 1857, all of the cents struck from those dies are dated as such. A "D" mintmark was stealthily placed on the obverse to avoid drawing the suspicions of Treasury officials. Some random base-metal alloys sourced from local farmers and miners were soon hammered into planchets to be used for coinage.
It's estimated that at least a few dozen such examples were produced before the mule team powering the wheel which was used to drive the mint machinery got tuckered out and decided to take the rest of the day off. After a fresh bushel of apples was delivered the following day, production commenced again, but during the first few strikes, the worker who was responsible for feeding the blank planchets into the mint decided to sneak out back to "heed nature's call" and the empty dies clashed into each other. At that point, it was decided to just call the whole thing off and go back to striking gold coins and rounds.
This created one of the greatest mid 19th century numismatic rarities: the Clark, Gruber & Co. 1857-D
Flying Eagle cent. All examples were struck from worn and clashed dies. At least one example is known to survive today in the hands of a private collector; the rest are only known from early cell phone photographs that were taken in the 1870s using technology borrowed from a certain secret government site in the Southwest.
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Edited by paralyse
12/03/2024 12:17 pm
Posted 11/25/2024 08:26 am
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