Throwing Coins Across Rivers, Streams, Canals, Etc.

A sport I'm not acquainted with..

Is this the commoner's equivalent of lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills?

@jbuck



@Earle42

Every Ike you lose in the creek makes mine more valuable.

I'm reminded of the story of the "lost token hoard" that did the rounds of the numismatic fraternity here in Australia some years ago.

The story goes that some time in the early 20th century, a woman in rural Victoria found a box full of old tokens during a cleanup. On discovering that they were just tokens and therefore "not real money" and that the bank refused to take them, she gave them to her kids to play with. The kids took the box down to the Murray River and spent a lazy afternoon skipping them across the water, trying but failing to reach the opposite bank of the river, until the box was empty.

The tokens in question were, of course, Australian tradesman tokens from the 1850s - the local equivalent of hard times tokens or civil war tokens. They're highly popular collectors items these days, worth several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars - each. Even back when the incident occurred, people collected them and they'd have been worth well above their nominal face value.

Even water-damaged examples might still be valuable, if they are scarce varieties or types. People asked the kids, as adults, where this took place, but they couldn't remember precisely enough for a search to be conducted. The river has of course flooded several times in the intervening years, so the river banks may not even be in the same place any more. Metal detectorists have reportedly searched the area but never found any tokens.

I can't even confirm that this is a true story, or an urban myth.

The Chicago police mentioned to us that the River is polluted enough so stop with the coins.