Assays vs. Presentation

These old Western assay bars are fascinating to study and collect, though there are few enough of them around to render either a considerable challenge. Each is essentially unique due to their hand-made nature and each has its own character. All are fascinating and rare artifacts of the old West. Aside from the few cases that many bars were finished as presentation pieces, it is practically a miracle that any still exist today. Many ingots were intended as an ephemeral form. Fortunately for modern collectors, a few survived and have been passed down through the ages.

In 19th Century ingots there are primarily two classes of bars, and then within that, some sub-categories: Assays (often functional used in commerce, and often monetized) and Presentation Pieces (used to commemorate a person, place, or event).

At the top of the heap are far and away, Assays. These can be government Assays or ones made by private Assayers such as those working for a company or mine.

What’s an “Assay” anyways?

noun: the testing of a metal or ore to determine its ingredients and quality.

verb: determine the content or quality of (a metal or ore).”the man who assayed gold was more than a technician”

Early on miners would gather gold & dust, and use it in exchange for goods and services. A “pinch” was used as payment for a drink at a saloon!

However, this gold dust and nuggets were an awkward means of conducting commercial transactions. It was very unreliable and inconsistent — the fineness varied from one location to another.  It also allowed for cheating – often adulterated with flakes of brass and thus its value varied widely.

Citizens needed a standard they could trust and one that was local – not in a faraway mint where it was difficult, expensive, and dangerous to source. Where there was new commerce and new gold and silver discoveries, US Federal mints were not yet locally available, or lacked in production capacity in the required specie.

Private Mints & Assayers

Paper money was not used in the West and certainly not accepted in foreign exchange. Gold coins and bullion bars were money. The shortage of coins continued throughout the mid-I850s. Several private assayers stepped into the void of government. Private minters and assayers, including Kellogg & Company, Moffat & Company and ED. Kohler, fulfilled the need for the manufacturing of money, transforming the raw gold ore, dust and nuggets into rectangular gold ingots or coins. Much like a bank, the reputation of the coin or ingot’s maker was a guarantee of value. To be successful, an assayer had to have a completely unblemished reputation, his word to be, literally, “as good as gold.”

Assaying was a very difficult process, and because of this, relatively few firms entered the business. Not only was a high degree of scientific expertise needed, but facilities were required for the melting and processing of gold not to speak of the storage of incoming gold as well as for ingots and coins prepared for customers.

As gold poured forth from the rivers, streams and hills of California, it made its way to assayers in San Francisco, Sacramento and Marysville… from there to distant points, most notably New York City and London. While coins were needed for the rapidly expanding western economy, both small and large monetary ingots, which were stamped with the U.S. Dollar value, were used to settle large domestic transactions and for international exchange.

On a related note, an Ingot is a block of steel, gold, silver, or other metal, typically oblong in shape.

After private minting was abolished, we were left with the Assayers’ unofficial ingots from 1860s and beyond.  Some ingots are monetized, some are mixed metal, some are dated.

Local mines often assayed their own metals. The US gold rush warranted an efficient means for miners to convert their hard-earned raw gold into a form that was readily accepted. This caused the advent of the private monetary ingots. Assayer ingots soon became the standard method to deal with the massive flow of newly mined gold.

Assay ingots are typically made of precious metal (gold, silver), often have the actual measured metallic content inscribed, and sometimes present a monetized value in dollars at the time.

Much of the time, Assay ingots would also have a corner “chip” removed from one of the corners – this exact chip could be used to measure the actual metallic content of the ingot in question.

Reliability could best be ascertained by clipping opposing corners of a bar, saving one chip (as they were called at the time) for double checking later and assaying the fineness of the other, whose contents should correspond exactly with the finenesses stamped on the face of the bar.

In the case of a bar made for other than commercial purposes, such as presentation pieces and ingots too small to have been worth troubling with, there was no need to put the ingot’s assay to the test. In the case of the former, the sentiment attached to the bar was probably more important to the giver and recipient than the assay of the bar.

Presentation Ingots

In the realm of Presentation ingots there are perhaps several classes or tiers:

Mine Ingots – often pieces used for investors, or to commemorate a specific mine and the production or some direct tie.

Dated and Historic Ingots – used to remember or commemorate a historic event or location, often with local or national significance.

Personal Ingots – not necessarily geographically significant, but instead celebrating a particular individual or personal event.

Other Types – there are other styles that might not fit into the above but would still be considered presentation ingots such as watch-fobs, plaques, plates, and more!

Manufacturing Styles

Ingots were made in all shapes and sizes and quite often are very unique and distinct from one other. Most of the Assay ingots are poured and punched: melted, poured into a mold and then hand made with punches. Similarly, most of the presentation ingots are engraved, but this is not always the case for either one.

Engraved presentation ingots tend to have more character and variety due to the ability to create designs and extra artwork while Assay ingots tend to be more consistent in style as they capture things such as weight, metallic purity, serial numbers, and other critical elements.

Sometimes Assay ingots will have extra embellishments to such as crenellation to enhance the design at the borders. These additions were often seen on bars from Weigand or Thomas Price — a decorative wavy border around the ingot’s presentation edge.

Crenellation is a feature of defensive architecture, most typically found on the battlements of medieval castles. A battlement is a low, defensive parapet. The act of crenellation is the cutting of crenels into a previously solid and straight parapet wall. Crenels are rectangular gaps or indentations which occur at regular intervals along the parapet, usually measuring 2-3 ft wide.

US Mints and Assay Offices

Assays were done by individuals, mines, and mints over the years. Certain Assayers had better reputations than others and those stood the test of time the longest based on their reputations and business acumen. Private mints and assayers filled the void of government where local mints were not available and local specie was limited.

Over time, there were also many regional Government mints established, many of which people are not even familiar with because so few pieces have survived. Following is a summary of some of those Assay Offices:

Current

• The Philadelphia Mint – 1792 to date
• The Denver Mint – 1862 to date. It served as an assay office until 1906, when coinage operations began.
• The San Francisco Mint – 1852 to date. Coinage operations were suspended in March 1955, but the plant continued to operate as an assay office. In 1962, its official designation was changed from mint to assay office. Coinage operations were again authorized in 1965.
• The West Point, New York Bullion Depository – 1938 to date. It is operated as an adjunct of the New York Assay Office.

Closed

• Charlotte, North Carolina Mint – 1835 to 1861. After the Civil War, the plant was reopened in 1868 as an assay office until 1913, when it was ultimately closed.
• New Orleans, Louisiana Mint – 1835 to 1942.
• Dahlonega, Georgia Mint – 1838-1861
• Carson City, Nevada Mint – 1870-1893
• U.S. Assay Office, St. Louis, Missouri – 1881 to 1911
• U.S. Assay Office, Helena, Montana – 1874 to 1933
• U.S. Assay Office, Salt Lake City, Utah – 1909 to 1933
• U.S. Assay Office, Deadwood, South Dakota – 1898 to 1927
• U.S. Assay Office, Boise, Idaho – 1869 to 1933
• U.S. Assay Office, New York, New York – 1854 to 1982
• U.S. Assay Office, Seattle, Washington – 1898 to 1955

Imagine stumbling on a piece of bullion from Dahlonega Georgia or Deadwood, South Dakota!

Where was the Gold?

North Carolina: In 1799, a young 12 year old boy named Conrad Reed was playing in the local creek on his family’s farm. There he discovered a 16-17 pound yellow rock, but he and his family had no idea what he has stumbled upon. That rock served as a doorstop for 3 years before it was identified as gold in 1802. One year later, a 28 pound nugget was found on the property. With that, the first Gold Rush of the United States was under way. By 1832 over 50 mines and 25,000 people were employed. It would last until the Civil war started in 1861, and resumed quickly after it was finished. Placer and lode mines continued until 1912 when the area was declared exhausted.

Dahlonega, Georgia was the 2nd gold rush for the United States. It started in 1829 and would pull many of the miners from North Carolina due to the 24K purity. It was hit so hard and heavy, that the rush only lasted to the early 1840s when the gold became very difficult to mine. New strikes out west were considered more important, and most packed up and left the mine owners with no workers.

Pike’s Peak, Colorado: In 1859, the Colorado Gold Rush put cities such as Denver and Boulder on the map. Occurring 10 years after the huge California strike in 1849, these miners were known as the 59ers. An estimated 100,000 miners rushed into the freezing cold and difficult terrain of the Rocky Mountains, marking it as one of the largest gold rushes to ever take place. It continued until Colorado became an official territory in 1861. Over 1.25 million ounces were found by 1865, and the Colorado Mint was erected in 1860. It minted gold coins with a picture of Pikes Peak on the back, worth an average of $30,000 by collectors of today.

California: Over 300,000 people arrived in California for the largest gold rush in United States history. It all started when gold was found at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, still Mexican territory at the time. Within a year, word had spread across the county at the massive amount being pulled from the rivers and mines. There were rumors than men were walking along river banks finding fist sized nuggets of gold. It gave a huge boost to the economy, and made California into a state within 1.5 years, without ever becoming an American territory first.

Railroads, steamboats, and trails were constructed with the sole purpose of leading into the gold territory near San Francisco. There were no laws to follow at first, and the thought of staking a claim was introduced here originally. The term claim jumper originated here, and many modern day devices such as dredges and rocker boxes can be attributed to these 49ers.

Millions of pounds were extracted from the California Gold Rush, and a total of 118 million pounds since modern equipment took over, making California the leader of gold rushes to ever hit the USA.

In what was a typical pattern, the gold rush waned as the most workable deposits were exhausted and organized capital and machinery replaced the efforts of individual miner-adventurers with more efficient and businesslike operations. Likewise, the lawless and violent mining camps gave way to permanent settlements with organized government and law enforcement. Those settlements that lacked other viable economic activities when the gold was exhausted soon became ghost towns.

Alaska: An estimated 100,000 people headed towards Alaska in their search for gold. Starting in 1896, and lasting a mere 3 years until 1899, it is one of the largest and fastest gold rushes in the history of the US. It is estimated that 98% of those who made the journey never found gold, and of the remaining 2%, many died or went broke. Not because there was a lack of gold, but because of the hard winters and terrain in front of them. It broke the pocket books and spirits of many men, and sent them back south and east where they had come from. Alaska is still one of the largest gold bearing locations on Earth.

Where was the Silver?

Assay Offices made ingots in gold and silver. Mines particularly notorious for issuing mixed metal ingots. Beyond the Gold rush in the 1830’s (Appalachia), 1850’s (California) and beyond, silver had different “rush” periods particularly with famous Comstock Lode in Nevada.

Some of the most notorious silver strikes across the US were as follows:

• Nevada – Comstock Lode 1858
• Arizona – Tombstone – 1877
• California – Cerro Gordo – 1860
• Colorado – Leadville – 1874
• Idaho – Coeur d’Alene
• Butte, Montana – 1874 (after gold in 1860s exhausted)
• New Hampshire – Madison Silver Lake Mine – 1826
• New Mexico – Silver City – 1866
• North Carolina – Silver Hill – 1838
• Oregon – Baker County – Gold from 1861, silver 1880s
• Pennsylvania – Conestoga / Pequea silver mine
• Texas – Allamoore-Van Horn – 1880
• Utah – Park City – 1868
• Washington – Chewelah