HOLABIRD JACK HADDOCK NEVADA TOKENS, PART 2

The authors of the Nevada Token Book each had specific collections: John Schilling, collected Reno. Hal Dunn, Sheriff of Carson City, collected Carson and everything Carson City Mint. Len Hoskins collected Elko and surrounds. Jack Haddock collected towns. Another advanced collector, Bill Wright, collected everything Nevada.

As the years went on, Jack put together five versions and revisions of The Nevada Token Book from 2011 to 2022. Each step of the way, he added new material and recorded as many sales as found in the public record, helping to develop hundreds of new collectors.

No one has ever put together a complete collection of Nevada tokens. There are simply too many unique pieces.

If you are after collecting from some of the big token towns, try this:

• Goldfield: 167 different as of 1990
• Tonopah: 124 different as of 1990
• Reno: 264 different as of 1990
• Nevada Token Populations and Rarity

Rarity of Nevada tokens is very difficult to determine.Individual token "populations" are stated here in this catalog from the 1990 Nevada Token Book. This is an important attribute here. The populations listed in the 1990 Book are a direct result of the cataloging of dozens of collections at the time. Each collector painstakingly listed each piece, kept up to date by John Schilling on index cards. This is important because each collector was piece specific. The group tallied the collections of 75 different people. We cannot do this today. There are too many collectors. There are too many token shows and private treaty deals where tokens are traded or sold back and forth, often several times per year for the same piece. Tracking becomes an impossibility.

The advent of the publishing of the Nevada Token Book caused a rise in collecting. It spurred collectors to go out and find stuff, and they did. So this book is not the "be-all, end-all" guide. It is simply a relative guide of what might be out there. Perhaps in the 36 years since I published the Nevada Token Book, individual token populations have gone upward proportionally. Good luck with that one – it's too tough to call.

For the purpose of this sale, 43% of the tokens listed here have a 1990 rarity of two known specimens or less (102 tokens)! This is thus a remarkable collection of rarities.

Advanced metal detecting techniques have changed the hobby. Collectors are now more apt than ever to go out and look for coins in the old mining camps, where once upon a time, collecting was limited to digging old dumps and finding things in coin collections. In my own case, I first encountered this activity about 1980 when I was assigned the duty of looking at the Mary Mine site, and stumbled upon the old townsite on top of the ridge, which I never expected and did not know about. Here, out in the open, were small piles of sifted material and holes where folks sifted for tokens while digging for old bottles. Somebody or some group had been really thorough. Yet the result is abundantly clear, as Mary Mine tokens are still incredibly rare. They must not have found many.

The new digging and detecting techniques took on a whole new concept when casual diggers and collectors discovered modern machinery. Perhaps fifteen years ago, some of the guys must have seen shaker and sizing screens at commercial aggregate plants. They built small models of these gas-powered screens, hooked them up to a truck, loaded with a bobcat (minibackhoe/excavator) and off to the dumps they went - Goldfield, Tonopah, Leadville, and many more. Thousands of yards were processed. Lots of coins and tokens and a few bottles. The "Nutting Machine" has become the tool of the future. But the end result was that many of these giant dumps had already been hit so hard by diggers from the 1960s-80s, that not much was left.

Over the years, some "hoards" of tokens were found. As part of this collecting and dealing community, as well as constant travels throughout the state's mining camps, I had access to many collectors, old timers, dump diggers and more. Many of the hoards came from slot machine route companies or individuals. Only one of them was a token collector – Jack and Christine Harkey of Carrizozo, New Mexico. They had a slot and vending machine route in New Mexico, and stories to tell! I got to see in person the massive coins and tokens they accumulated over the years, allowed to sell most later. The first "virgin" token hoard I found were the Big Casino tokens from Tonopah. One of the mining guys led me to that, and he also told me about bags of tokens he threw down one of the main mine shafts when he was in charge of a slot route, and threw them all away in the 1930s. I ran into the same thing in several of the Nevada camps, including Virginia City – down the shaft they went!

In modern times, dump diggers found bags full of tokens thrown out in the 1920s or 1930s. One of these was found in Ely and bought by my friend Bob Campbell in Salt lake City and brought to Jack and I in the early 1980s. As I recall, it was a five gallon bucket full of tokens – several thousand tokens, mostly all eastern Nevada. The Utah pieces had probably all been picked out by that point, but I'm sure there were some Modena and a few others still in there. The most common by far were the Dewey Trade Checks from Ely. These are still important tokens because they represent a saloon named after a famous and very collectible today slot machine – the Dewey. Jack got all the killer tokens out of there, and there were quite a few. Some other guys found a giant bag or two out near Tracy, California years later, and after they had picked it clean, sold me the rest, easily a thousand or more pieces. Metal detectorists have found many little bags or cans full of tokens. It can be a dozen or two dozen, sometimes more.

While I probably know of most of them, it isn't necessarily in anyone's best interest to talk about them. A few have found up to a hundred of certain pieces, obviously discarded all at once into a hole nobody thought would ever be found. One of the fun ones from years ago – classic treasure hunting – were the Camp Independence, V. Beaudry, tokens of the 1860s. There were maybe 50 coins in that group. I sold one of each to Ron Lerch, and the others went out over time. There were a number of denominations. There are so many stories!

For more information on the sale, or to bid, see:
Jack Haddock Nevada Town Token Collection Auction(Session 1) (https://holabirdamericana.liveauctiongroup.com/auctionlist.aspx?t=JH1)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
HOLABIRD JACK HADDOCK NEVADA TOKENS, PART 1 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v29/esylum_v29n41a21.html)

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