Despite the surge of speculation about the Saddle Ridge Hoard coming from the 1901 theft of $30,000 in gold coins from the old U.S. Mint in San Francisco, leading historians and Mint officials say that explanation doesn’t cut it.
“There is nothing connecting these coins to any theft from the Mint,” said U.S. Mint spokesman Adam Stump. “We’ve done quite a bit of research, and we’ve got a crack team of lawyers, and trust me, if this was U.S. government property we’d be going after it.”
The 1901 theft was uncovered on June 29 of that year. Investigators found six bags of “Double Eagles” – as $20 gold coins were called – missing, and concluded they had been spirited out over the previous few months. The mint’s chief clerk, Walter Dimmick of Oakland, was convicted of the crime, but the booty was never recovered.
Theories about the origins of the Saddle Ridge coins have swirled around the world for more than a week, and many of those center around probably the most valuable coin in the Saddle Ridge collection – the 1866 “No Motto” $20 gold coin minted in San Francisco. It is so-called because the back of the piece does not read “In God We Trust,” and 1866 is year the government started stamping those words on $20 coins made in San Francisco.
Some believe the “No Motto” 1866 Double Eagle (as $20 gold coins were referred to) is a one of a kind, and that one such coin was taken in the 1901 theft — but a couple of facts refute that.
According to the Encyclopedia of U.S. Gold Coins, there were actually 120,000 “No Motto” Double Eagles stamped in San Francisco that year before the changeover. There were then 842,250 Double Eagles created with the motto in 1866, making their predecessor in the same year rare and valuable. Also, according to U.S. Mint officials and Richard Kelly, who wrote the authoritative book “A Mighty Fortress…the Stories Behind the 2nd San Francisco Mint,” all of the coins stolen in 1901 were of recent vintage.
“Nobody has a listing of the exact dates of those stolen coins, but we assume from the times and all the records that they were new coins,” said Kelly, who has researched the San Francisco Mint so thoroughly that national archive officials referred a reporter to him. “Back then, once coins were printed they flew out of the mint.”
The age range of the Saddle Ridge Hoard thus makes them unlikely for that heist, since they range from 1847 to 1894. Only one-third of them appear to have been uncirculated, meaning the rest were spent as money – and the mint did not keep circulated coins in any volume on hand.
Another fact worth noting is that not all of the Saddle Ridge coins are Double Eagles. The hoard consists of 1,427 coins with a face value of $27,980 – and though most are Double Eagles, 50 are $10 coins and four are $5 coins. Most were printed in San Francisco, but others were made in New Orleans and Georgia.
Don Kagin, the Tiburon coin dealer and rare-coins author who is shepherding the sale of the hoard for the couple who discovered it in their Gold Country back yard, said the mint theory is just one of hundreds popping up – from people claiming their great-grandfathers buried it to stories of Black Bart or other bandits hiding their stash. Some say the coins were found in Jackson, among other cities – but Kagin said they are all wrong, and the couple are keeping their identity secret.
“If anybody wants to send us a list of missing coins with some specifics, we’ll be happy to help them out,” Kagin said. “But not a single theory that has come to us indicates this hoard came from anything other than a single person who didn’t trust banks. The attorneys of the owners of the coins thoroughly searched property records and researched this, and the only thing they could determine is that whoever buried the coins might have been in the mining industry.”
–Kevin Fagan, The San Francisco Chronicle