1849 Beaver Coin $10

To the Forum! Maybe it's the lighting, but it doesn't look gold to me! The 2009 RedBook lists as $63000.00 in Fine, and $125000.00 in VF. If it's real, you got a valuable coin. But like I said, it doesn't look like gold to me in those pics! So I would have to say it's a fake.

It looks too cleanly detailed to be real, and the color is odd. You should be able to tell by weight whether it's real. I'd expect it to weigh around 15 grams. The only real ones I've ever seen were in Washington DC in the national coin collection.

I used to work on the site in Oregon City OR where these coins were made. Over the years it was covered by a lot of industrial buildings. But in a few places you could find bare dirt, and in that, a few shards of old broken glass. I was tempted to bring in a metal detector to search for coins, but never did.

There were also apocryphal stories about people finding these coins at garage sales in the area, but there's no knowing whether they were true.