1852 $50 California Gold - Augustus Humbert 887 RE PCGS XF40 (CAC)

This is a truly great rarity from the heady days of the California Gold Rush.

It was in 1852 that the United States Assay Office of Gold in San Francisco struck $50 slugs marked '887 THOUS' (referring to the fineness of the gold). There have been only 71 in total  of the '877 THOUS' graded by PCGS. There are 14 that carry the grade of XF40, with 43 finer. In CAC there are 4 in XF40 with 6 finer.

The year 1851 saw Augustus Humbert appointed to the job of United States Assayer in California, and that same year he created a provisional government mint, the United States Assay Office of Gold, in order to fulfill the monetary needs of the people of the new state of California. In 1851 and 1852 Humbert minted $50 gold slugs that were accepted at par with legal tender Federal-issued coinage.

Miners panning for gold during the California Gold Rush.

A report from 1911, published in the American Journal of Numismatics, discusses their rarity even then:

The comparative scarcity of the fifty-dollar slugs at the present time, notwithstanding the enormous number originally struck, may be ascribed to the fact that as the ungainly pieces were worth much above their face value, a considerable profit was derived from remelting them. Foreign bankers, it is said, preferred the octagonal ingots to regular American coin, and they were exported in huge quantities, some direct from California, others from New York City. An item appeared in one of the papers on Jan. 13, 1853, to the effect that the steamer Asia, from New York to Liverpool, took $200,000 in fifty-dollar gold pieces.