DR. LAWRENCE LEE INTERVIEW, PART FOUR

GREG BENNICK: Very cool, indeed. So, switching from a famous coin, to a famous name: did you know John J. Ford Jr.? And if so, what connection did you have with him?

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: I grew up in Colorado and that's how I got interested and into the Denver Mint. I got interested in the private gold coin minters of the Gold Rush era: Clark, Clark & Gruber, Dr. John Parsons, J.J. Conway, and Denver City Assay. I wrote an article called "Dr. Mummy, the G-Man and the J.J. Conway Dies." These were the dies that struck the J.J. Conway coins, of which there's maybe a total of 15 known (I will come back to that in a second). These dies were in the Colorado State Historical Society. I went down to the museum, and into the archives. I found the dies and wrote them up and described how they'd gotten discovered in a guy's attic. It was a really great story. I traced the dies all the way back to 1861.

I wrote this up and published it. I sent it in to The Numismatist and amazingly it won an award. I didn't even know I was in the running for it. It was the Olga Raymond Memorial Award, which was sponsored by John J. Ford. It was given by him, and at his direction, mostly to people writing about territorial gold pieces. So here I was writing about something that wasn't entirely new but this aspect of it was original. No one had written this up: how the government tried to seize the dies because they said they were counterfeit.

As a result of all of this, John began corresponding with me. At this point I had not yet met him, but he would send me gifts. He sent me the Henry Clifford catalog of territorial gold pieces. Interestingly (and this is the point I'm still intending to come back to), most of the pieces in there from Colorado were purchased by one man, Frederick Mayer, who I later worked for when I became his private curator. So, all the coins in this particular catalog from Colorado that John had sent me, I was later able to be involved with when I became the curator for Dr. Mayer. We'll get to that story.

I almost felt like Ford was preparing me in a way, to help him with gold ingots and selling them and authenticating them. I became interested in the Conway pieces because there's like only 15 Conway pieces known in denominations of $2½, $5 and $10. There's only three $10's known. Two of them are in Smithsonian. And the third one, that $10 as well as two of the five known $5 gold pieces (as well as a lump of gold, which consisted of two melted $2 ½'s and two melted $5 gold pieces, all found together at Fort Union, New Mexico) were all struck in 1861. John Ford told me a really good story of how they were found. Basically, they were discovered and taken illegally on federal land because Fort Union, was a federal monument.

In 1861, the only time the Civil War broached Colorado was when General Shelby and his troops decided to come up from Texas and attempt to seize the Colorado gold fields since a lot of the gold miners were Southern sympathizers who had mined in Georgia in the Georgia gold strike. When the Colorado strike happened, half of the, all the miners out there were Southern sympathizers.

Gen. Shelby thought he would have a groundswell of help there. They sent a contingent, a fairly large contingent, of Confederate soldiers north to New Mexico. At Glorieta Pass, which is at the border of Colorado and New Mexico, they had a battle in the mountains between the Union forces and the Colorado Volunteers who rushed down in the dead of winter to fight the rebels coming up to seize the gold fields and specifically, the Clark Gruber mint in Denver. The battle was won, and the Union troops settled down at Fort Union and it was at the sutler store in Fort Union where the Conway coins were found: some soldier in the Colorado First Volunteers had carried them all the way from the mining town of Parkville. These Conway coins later found their way into Frederick Mayer's collection, who I'm still intending to talk about.

John Ford gave me the background story. He told me the people who dug the coins up at Ft. Union were a survivalist gang who lived in the mountains of Colorado and were not to be messed with. They were probably guilty of various crimes but I foolishly tried to contact them. I drove up this encampment in Colorado and was told, "No further" and "Go away."

So, I didn't really get to know more about the story of how they actually found the coins. But the story was all the Conway coins were found in the sutler store in Fort Union, New Mexico, as a result of the civil war encroaching in Colorado. That's a pretty good story.

GREG BENNICK: I agree!

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Really cool thing is that John Ford sold these coins to Harry Clifford. Clifford sold them in auction, and they were bought at auction by Frederick Mayer who then later hired me to be his personal curator. So, for three years, I developed an exhibit of his personal Colorado gold, his territorial exhibit collection. It consisted of a complete set of everything. It included a lot of pattern coins from Conway, but he also had Conway's $2 ½, $5, $10. He had Parsons coins, including the $2 ½ and the $5 as well as the Parsons mint over strikes, when they set up the press on a dime and some other coin. He had all the Denver City Assay patterns. There was only one DCA token he didn't own and those are a great story. They've been a subject of the entire book themselves because of Winslow J. Howard, the guy who engraved and struck them.

Anyway, they all ended up in Frederick Mayer's collection. Mayer made his fortune in the oil business and for many years was the richest man in Colorado. He wanted me to make a personal museum exhibit case in his downtown Denver home. He owned the only private home in downtown Denver and he built it for five million dollars. It was multi-story and was really cool. He had one gallery of nothing but Spanish colonial artwork and then on the top floor he'd made this one long hallway and it had five, wall-mounted exhibit cases. Two of the exhibit cases held Clark Gruber pieces. One was Conway, one was Dr Parsons and the other was Denver City Assay.

Now, John Ford told me about Dr. Parsons and I did a lot of research on both Dr. Parsons and the Clark Gruber guys after they sold their coins and what happened to them. That is all unpublished research. I'd love to have time in my life to show that Parsons struck coins in 1862 for sure, not just 1861. No one knows that. He later became even more famous as an explorer in Utah, than he was in Colorado.

But anyway, Ford told me that John Parsons was an abortionist, a medical doctor, and that Parsons had had to flee Quincy, Illinois, because of an abortion he performed. That's how he came to Colorado. I don't know that to be 100% true. But it shows the kind of information that Ford had in his file.

To add to the John Ford story: when I did my last book on the Indian peace medals of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, many of those medals were sold to Francis Crane by John Ford. Crane owned 200 and some Indian peace medals, many sold to him by John Ford who kept all of their correspondence. And so about three years ago, I was able to view all this correspondence between these two gentlemen over Indian peace medals. Evidently, Ford sold Crane a medal that turned out to be fake and Crane sent it back and they argued but Ford always said that Crane was such a gentleman about it that he couldn't hold a grudge. Which was somewhat unlike Ford's general reputation.

All of this is an insight into someone (Ford) who I always thought was wanting me to help him out but, maybe he might have seen what an idiot I was and decided to use me for his own purposes.

GREG BENNICK: I love that the culmination of this brilliant story of historical research, experience and analysis is you declaring yourself to be an idiot. That is very funny.

About the Interviewer
Greg Bennick (www.gregbennick.com) is a keynote speaker and long time coin collector with a focus on major mint error coins and US counterstamps. He is on the board of both CONECA and TAMS and enjoys having in-depth conversations with prominent numismatists from all areas of the hobby. Have ideas for other interviewees? Contact him anytime on the web or via instagram @minterrors.

NOTE: The interview was conducted in parts via phone, so no video exists, and editing together audio would have been choppy sounding at best. This transcript is an accurate representation of the whole interview experience. Thank you for reading! -GB

To read the full transcript on the Newman Numismatic Portal, see:
Lawrence Lee Interview (https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/642577)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
DR. LAWRENCE LEE INTERVIEW, PART ONE (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n46a14.html)
DR. LAWRENCE LEE INTERVIEW, PART TWO (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n47a13.html)
DR. LAWRENCE LEE INTERVIEW, PART THREE (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n48a17.html)

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