$5 Oregon Territory Beaver Brings 6 Figures

Full linkhttp://www.katu.com/news/story.asp?ID=82759
LA GRANDE, Ore. - A rare $5 Oregon gold coin minted in 1849 has fetched $125,000 from a collector who now has a link to a time when people in the Oregon Territory began to end a life of bartering with gold dust, beaver pelts, wheat, salmon and horses.

The gold coin dates back a decade before Oregon became a state, to a time when it could have passed through the hands of mountain man Joe Meek, who later became the Oregon Territory's first U.S. marshal. Or Dr. John D. McLoughlin, head of the powerful Hudson's Bay Co. and Oregon's most prominent figure for decades.

Or maybe it once belonged to flamboyant, big-spending horse thief and gunfighter Hank Vaughan, who raised wheat near Pendleton.

"If this coin could talk, what would it say?" said Rick Gately, a rare-coin dealer in La Grande who made the sale this month between the coin's owner in Rogue River and a buyer from La Grande.

The new owner has asked to remain anonymous, fearing someone might try to steal his extensive coin collection.

Weighing a quarter of an ounce, the coin was authenticated by Numismatic Guaranty Corp. of America in Sarasota, Fla., a top coin-grading service that compares a coin's current condition to when it was minted, Gately said.

At the time the coin was minted, the Oregon Territory's merchants, hunters, trappers, sailors and Indian tribes numbered about 13,000 and needed a better medium of exchange than barter, said Donald H. Kagin of Tiburon, Calif., author of "Private Gold Coins and Patterns of the United States."