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SF Mint Gold Bullion Deposit Book

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Mining Start Price:250.00 USD Estimated At:500.00 - 1,500.00 USD
SF Mint Gold Bullion Deposit Book
SOLD
1,400.00USDto m******3+ buyer's premium (315.00)
This item SOLD at 2015 Apr 10 @ 08:14UTC-7 : PDT/MST
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Large ledger of gold bullion deposits at the San Francisco Mint. 11 x 17", 300pp. Important ledger showing the daily records of gold bullion deposits at the mint. This record book is one of many that we've had over the past ten years. Apparently when the old Mint closed, the records were thrown out. It is an incredibly important record of the gold business on the west coast at a crucial time- the Alaska gold rush and the beginning of the post-1900 gold boom in the western states. As a daily record, each two page spread records the deposit number, name, place of origin, weight, nature of the gold (bars, grains of placer, nuggets, amalgam, etc), and depositor. Often with the deposit is listed the name of the mine, such as "YA" for Yellow Aster, out of Randsburg Cal. The books shows deposits from Idaho and Oregon placer gold, California gold in all forms, and huge deposits coming from internal transfer from Seattle, which means gold from Alaska coming in through the USAO in Seattle. There are a number of deposits from Chinese miners. Ingot sizes submitted range from a few ounces to over 1000 ozs. Selby submitted huge bars on the nature of 1300 ozs that were refined from their operations. These bars would easily weigh over 100 pounds each and be very difficult to move by one person. Almost every major western bank submitted gold daily. Some prominent merchants on the west coast also submitted gold, as it was still used as a method of payment, even though the gold rush had been over for 40 years. The record includes two terms which I have not seen before and do not yet understand, "King" bars and "Jew" bars. Bars sent in to the Philadelphia Mint composed of gold from the West also appear to have been sent to San Francisco, noted as submitted by Frank Leach, who was the Mint Superintendent at the time. One of the interesting merchants submitting his gold was W. Loaiza, a major fur trader, who took in gold in all forms for payment - from Mexican gold coins to Australian gold coins. Some of the mines submitting bullion were the Quartette Mine at Quartette, Nevada near Searchlight; The Octave mine in Arizona, placer gold from the Lovelock commercial Co., which would likely have been placer from American Canyon. Purities ranged from the 300's fine to over 997 fine. There are also notations of "dirty", Base (metal), Iron, very dirty, quicksilver, rocky, lead, etc. indicating impurities were present from the time of deposit.

City: San Francisco
State: California,
Date: 1902

FHWAC#: 25919