1871 CARSON CITY MINT DOCUMENTS

 

A pair of documents appointing the Melter and Refiner to the Carson City Mint from 1871 has surfaced from a prominent Nevada banking family. Every US Mint appointment document is unique. The original Abe Curry appointment document, as first superintendent of the new US Mint at Carson City, exists in a numismatic collection, but it is unknown if any other Carson City Mint appointment documents are extant.

The document pair reflects the original appointment as Melter and Refiner of Moses D. Wheeler prior to June 3, 1871. The second document formally appoints Robert P. Andrews to the position on December 12, 1871.

Everything about the Carson City Mint that most of us know seems all flowery and rosy. A beautiful Mint building and facility were built under the direction of Carson City politician and former mine owner Abe Curry. It opened to great fanfare minting coins immediately in the early days of 1870 and kept going until an internal bullion theft scandal amidst a national "recession" closed the Mint for coin production forever in 1893.

But it wasn't all rosy from the start. In fact, it was anything but. The Mint struggled almost every year, wrought with trouble caused by opposing political forces fighting over revenue, funding and control of the massive amounts of precious metal bullion coming out of the Comstock. The fighting and political maneuvering rarely, if ever, slowed down right up to the formal closure in 1893. It is a plain fact that the Carson City Mint was constantly "under attack" from the onset.

The argument for the existence of a Mint in the Comstock Region was based upon sound financial principals. The production reported from Government sources for Nevada from 1859, the year of the Comstock discovery, to 1867, when the heat got turned up to get the Carson City Mint built and completed, was $89,450,000. The production of precious metals from all western states from 1847 to that point was a whopping $995,944,990. This amount of money dwarfed all other business revenue in the Untied States by far. With the precious metals production of Nevada at almost ten percent of all Western states, the need for a mint was unequivocally clear: it was a necessity to the American public.

Common sense has never been big in politics. Questions such as "Isn't this the exact right place for a Mint, in the center of one of the biggest bullion producing regions in the world?" were completely irrelevant. Politicians were greedy. Did they consider national fiscal and fiduciary responsibility to the Country? Not a chance - only to themselves or their immediate constituency. They wanted all the money for their pet projects. At first it was simply efforts to take away the money to operate the Mint, thus force closure. Then efforts were made to make new laws to prevent production. Then it became an effort to take the bullion, as the pleas "But we need jobs !" took hold. Denver, at the other center of major precious metal production, suffered a similar, yet worse fate, with the Mint there opening in 1863, but never coining a single piece until 1906. The politicians had won. They took the bullion by forcing it to go elsewhere for coinage. The massive amounts of precious metal bullion produced in the American West, enough to change world economics, went to Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans.

The fiduciary responsibility concept is an important issue. It had come up before in 1835 after gold discoveries in the Appalachian foothills from Georgia to North Carolina caused the Government to construct and operate branch mints in Dahlonega and Charlotte, both of which opened in 1838. If the House and Senate were responsible then, why not with Denver and Carson City, each of which had precious metal production in the immediate vicinity more than ten times that of their Southern counterparts?

 

The history of the inner workings and business of the Carson City Mint has never been written. Author Rusty Goe wrote a masterpiece on the coinage of the Mint, published in 2003, and another in 2020; both are "must reads" for Carson City Coin Collectors. Information about the production of coins is easy to find. It is in Federal reports of the Mint, also found in professional journals and newspapers. And some of the accounts even agree! But the history of the business side of the Mint is scant; actual records are few and far between, as Goe noted. As I delved into this paper, I can honestly tell you, the information is, in fact, scant. I had to dig, dig and dig to get where I got, knowing full well there are parts of the puzzle to be found in differing sections of our National Archives (NARA) yet to be discovered that are well beyond the scope of this paper, which is, simply put, an introduction to two unique Carson City Mint Federal office appointments in 1871.

Looking into the inner workings requires more than most researchers are willing to undertake. Within the NARA system, one has to think about all sides or ends of communications – who are the letters, notes and reports going to, when, why, and look for both ends - the sending and receiving ends, and what departments are involved, such as Treasury, Executive branch and other possibilities. There are more moving parts than one can imagine. Trust me, I've been there when working on the US Assay Office in San Francisco in which I found records at four different NARA facilities, each indexed separately, and often in a manner difficult to find because the major focus of the document suite may have been something different than what you're looking for. These tidbits of information are needles in haystacks, but they exist if you know how to find them.

To read the complete lot description, see:
Carson City Mint Melter & Refiner Appointments (2), 1871 [190768] (https://holabirdamericana.liveauctiongroup.com/Carson-City-Mint-Melter-Refiner-Appointments-2-1871-190768_i55402838)

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