1852 $50 California Gold Quintuple Eagle - U.S. Assay Office 887 NGC AU50

Purchase this piece, and you will hold the California Gold Rush in your hands. This specimen, this great rarity, was produced with gold dust from the Gold Rush. It doesn't get any more real than that.  

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 94 in total  of the '887 THOUS' graded by NGC. There are 9 that carry the grade of AU50, with 53 finer.

In the year 1851 Augustus Humbert was appointed to the job of United States Assayer in California. 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 both 1851 and 1852 Humbert minted $50 gold slugs that were accepted at par with legal tender Federal-issued coinage.

Miners during the California Gold Rush. This rarity was struck with Gold Rush gold.

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."