Half Dollar Vs. Dollar Coins, American West, 1852

Sounds like a lot of the "White Man" merchants tried to cheat the Native Americans using "crooked" math to confuse them on the grand total.

You could buy a lot for a half dollar in 1852 and in California gold was found in 1848. I have read that soldiers and sailors deserted in droves to go mining for gold. People went mad. If rich gold deposits were found in Mississippi today people would flock there to buy up delta swamp and real estate agents would be touting "Beautiful dry ground with gold nuggets laying around in piles" to get suckers to buy land underwater.

I looked for this book and found it can be bought for $30 as a reprint, but the 1st edition can be had for about $100. Worth getting?

Andrew - 99c Kindle book.

Depends if you are interested in US Grant or not. It's an older style autobiography, so it's a bit dry in places. I've always had a 'car' book for reading when I had a few minutes to kill waiting for my wife, etc. - the requirements are that it not be something I would get so into I would read it more than casually, had to be a large book and have many short chapters. I think it took me five years to read the biography of Peter the Great.

thq- Grant doesn't really discuss money much (so far I'm about 22% through it), except occasionally in terms of prices such as what I quoted where he was indicating how much more expensive it was in the West vs. New Orleans. He talks about Horse prices in the context of what a "$5 horse" was worth back when he was in Mexico. I don't recall ever seeing him say what his salary was. So I'm not sure the absence of the fractional gold says they weren't in circulation, BUT it is the kind of local curiosity that he does seem to recall when writing these memoirs in 1885.

When you're in Vancouver be sure drink him a toast at his house.

The comment he made about how well accepted and available the $50 slugs were passes right on to silver coins. The army was using the most legitimate specie. Local barter is mentioned as pelts, not gold dust pinches and private issue small gold coins. I infer that pelts were more highly regarded. At least in Grant's mind.

As early as the 1820's the NWCo tokens became accepted as payment for pelts. They're about the same size as half dollars. Very few survive. They're easy to carry without getting lost (most are holed) and big enough to count.

Grant wrote his autobiography with help from Mark Twain from what I have heard. He was broke and on his death bed. I don't think he was getting an Army pension, nor pension for being president. He had cancer of the jaw and it was killing him painfully. He was dosed on laudanum so I wonder how he could see straight. You know in British America the "Piece of Eight" was widely used since English pounds were hard to come by in 18th century America. I remember reading in "Two Years Before the Mast" that American sailors would sail around the Horn to get to California to trade for animal pelts. It took years to make the voyage if they made it at all before 1848.