Michael Hodder’s "Western American Gold and Unparted Bars. A Review of the Evidence", American Journal of Numismatics n.s. 11 1999 85-149, was published as a rebuttal of Buttrey 1997, which had opened to public discussion the question of the authenticity of John J. Ford Jr.'s Western American "assay bars".[1] Hodder’s article has never been critically examined in the AJN since the administration of the American Numismatic Society refused to publish any response to its evasions, inaccuracies and plain falsifications. On that and other peculiarities of the behaviour of the ANS see the adjacent article, "'We are only a Forum'; or, The End of Integrity at the American Numismatic Society".
Before proceeding it is not out of the way to observe that Hodder was the paid assistant to Q. David Bowers, who put many of Ford's bars on the market, in particular those of the Clifford collection (auction of 18 Mar 1982); and has subsequently been consultant and collaborator with Stack's (who also dealt in Ford's bars, particularly in building the collection of forgeries assembled innocently by Josiah Lilly, now in the Smithsonian Institution, property of the nation), and with John J. Ford Jr. himself. Hodder recently has compiled Stack's numismatic auction catalogues of the Ford collection.
It is not irrelevant to the study of the Western American bars that a great deal of money and commercial reputation should hang on it. Hodder's article, whose locus of publication should have guaranteed its objectivity and scholarly reliability, was written to the advantage of certain dealers who have a financial interest in public acceptance of the authenticity of the material.[2]
A structured critique of Hodder’s article as it stands is in fact not possible, as the following examples will show. The problems begin with the opening pages. The authenticity of certain of Ford's bars purporting to have been made by Conrad Wiegand had earlier been questioned. Hodder replies with documentary evidence for Wiegand's career (pp.85-89). This may all be perfectly true, but it is beside the point: no-one has ever doubted that Wiegand produced bars. The question to hand is whether the gold "assay bars" sold by Ford and bearing Wiegand's name were actually made by Wiegand. (As Kleeberg says elsewhere in these essays, it does not follow from the fact that Victoria was a real Queen that every coin portraying Queen Victoria is genuine. To maintain that would be absurd; yet that is what Hodder essentially asks his readers to believe.)
To the same point in a larger vein: "That the firms whose names are found stamped on western bars existed is a documented fact" (p.107). This is a straw man; nobody has denied it. But a real name on a questionable bar does not validate the bar.
The Wiegand discussion is merely the opening of Hodder's article, but it is indicative of much that is to come. So again, 15 pages of the article are taken up with explaining in detail how gold bars were manufactured by both private assayers and the San Francisco Branch Mint (pp.114-128).[3] No-one doubts that the Branch Mint produced bars: there is documentary evidence that it did. But this has nothing to do with the real question, the authenticity of the Ford bars dated 1865 and alleged to have been produced at the San Francisco Branch Mint. That they are false is clear: see the essays, "Gold Bars on the Brother Jonathan?" I and II. Discussion of other bars from the Branch Mint is a diversion.
Or again, Ford's gold bars were put on the market beginning in the 1950's. In countering the argument that they are inauthentic Hodder provides details of no fewer than 29 bars which are, or appear to be, genuine enough, and which came on the market before 1950 (pp.110-13). In fact most of these are either silver or low-grade gold, entirely unlike the Ford bars, and are not to the point.[4] What is striking is that in spite of Hodder’s industry in assembling this mixed collection he has not been able to include a single instance of a pre-1950 appearance of the ingots actually marketed by Ford.
Or again, I argued that if such material had actually been available it ought to have appeared in the pre-1950's auctions, e.g. those of B. Max Mehl, who particularly specialized in U S private gold. He had absolutely more A-grade sales of private gold than any other dealer listed in Adams, and proportionately more B sales.[5] Hodder replied (p.109 and fn 47) that many other dealers held auctions in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. So they did, but which of them sold Ford-like bars?
Hodder: "Buttrey appears not to have examined any of these sources save for Mehl's" (p.109 fn. 47). I had not thought it possible to misunderstand when I wrote: "Mehl is a good example, but you can check the catalogues of any dealer you like and the results will be the same" (p. 102). So, for complete clarity, that sentence means what it says: it represents hours of work in the library of the ANS, searching for the Ford material all the major U. S. dealers' pre-1950's auction catalogues and price lists, and coming up with nothing -- not in Mehl, not anywhere. As I said, you may do the same, and you too will find nothing there. (Dealers' claims that Ford's material was historical have all along been false: go back to e.g. NASCA 14 August 1978 to lot 3167, one of Ford's Spanish Colonial bars: "A[n] ingot of similar period and design exists in the Garrett Collection". Ford provided the bars here on sale; I assume that he also wrote the caption. Whether or not that is correct, the assertion is untrue: there never were such bars in the Garrett collection, but this falsehood helped to sell the bar.)
Hodder's preference is for Elder, "The one auctioneer who really did outsell everyone else in the field of territorials" (p. 108). This sounds promising, and the Reader looks forward to pp. 110-13 where Hodder provides his "not insubstantial listing" of the 29 items. As already mentioned, these are largely irrelevant, most of them being silver or low-grade gold. The list includes only 4 pieces sold by Elder, and only 1 of those was a proper gold "assay bar" (p.110, Kellogg and Hewston, $49.50). After all the fuss about Elder's auctions being so much more numerous and so much better evidence than Mehl's for the earlier appearance of the gold ingots, Hodder was, again, able to provide no new evidence at all -- only 1 gold "assay bar" ingot in Elder and that already known and acknowledged (Buttrey p.99 fn.10).
Or again, in discussing the gold bars alleged to have been made in Spanish Colonial Mexico in the 1740's Hodder brings in a set of silver candlesticks dated 1729 (pp.139-140). These bear several punches including a small columnario punch, several years before the first appearance of that image on the Mexico Mint silver coinage in 1732. "If these candlesticks are accepted as genuine, and there is no reason not to. . ." Indeed, the candlesticks are genuine, but Hodder is actually concerned with the punches, and their authenticity has certainly been questioned.[6]
But what is the point anyway? Our problem has to do with the imprint on some of Ford's 1740's bars of two pillar dollar dies, obverse and reverse.[7] Whatever the reason for the stamps on the candlesticks, they had nothing whatever to do with Ford's gold bars. Anyone with one eye can see that the imprints on the bars are those of the coinage dies, not tiny, private, silversmiths' punches. The problem, as has long been pointed out, is that the pillar dies are varieties introduced too late for bars allegedly produced in the 1740's: the obverse corresponds to the pillar dies of 1754 and following, after the imperial crown was introduced to one of the pillars, the reverse to 1770-71 when F M served as assayer. Here was precisely where the forger of the bars made a mistake.
None of the candlestick affair has anything to do with establishing the authenticity of Ford's Spanish Colonial gold bars.
It is unnecessary to go on in this vein. Hodder characteristically introduces marginal material which has little bearing on the question, implies that it proves something, and ignores the real problem at hand. At the same time he is ready to dismiss the actual work of others on the bars while producing little himself. (On the contradictions in his metallurgical analyses, see Kleeberg's comments in "How the West was Faked".) An early example is to be found in Hodder's response to an article by Martin, who showed that a U.S. Assay Office $20 had to be false.[8] Hodder's reply at that time is reproduced in this article: "I believe that the final word on these pieces will not be written until someone replicates all the research studies done to date" (p.93 fn.17).
This will not do. Martin's work was the research: he publishes no fewer than seven enlarged illustrations of the surface of the piece, showing where it is wrong; indicates that both weight and density are wrong; and, crucially, determines that the reeding is wrong. His study could not have been more damning.
Martin's work stands, until and unless a well-founded study vindicates the coin by showing where or how Martin went wrong. That no such positive study has ever appeared, on a coin that is an important representative of a large body of doubtful Western American gold, the so-called "Franklin hoard", speaks volumes in itself.
This is an important point. Those who support the bars - which is to say, essentially those who have made the market in them -- have been remarkably reticent when it comes to underpinning them with actual evidence and scholarly argument. When the exposure of the Spanish Colonial bars occurred Ford's response was not one of scholarly rebuttal; he threatened libel action against me and anyone who published those results. When the Encyclopaedia Britannica asked Ford for clarification of the Tubac ingot, which the EB had illustrated on his say-so (it is false, as Hodder now admits; see below), they got no reply at all. The auction catalogue entries, usually if not invariably written by Ford, almost never provide checkable references bearing on the authenticity of the bars, and where they are checkable they are invariably false.
Hodder complains that those who doubt the bars have not studied them sufficiently. Thus, regarding the exclusion of Ford's bars from the Guide Book, "[in 1958] the Guide Book dropped its special listing of western assay bars altogether. Not until 1997, some 30 years after the Guide Book unilaterally dropped them, was any paper condemning the western bars published." (p.93 and fn.19) What is rather to the point is that Ford and his associates, like Hodder, should have produced credible studies of these bars which they claimed to be authentic, and they have not done so. Ford, Stack's, Bowers and Hodder are long time professionals who have dealt in and supposedly studied this kind of material for years. They should know it backwards and forwards. All they have to do is to produce something, anything, that shows Ford's bars to have been around before he introduced them to the market in the 1950's, and he is vindicated.
Rather, Hodder puts the burden of proof on the sceptical: "[Buttrey] did not include references from California newspapers of the 1850’s, ... studies of California banking history, ... recollections of pioneer and gold rush era diarists and letterwriters, ... surviving San Francisco archives." No, Dear Reader, neither you nor I nor anyone else has to spend two minutes proving this negative. This is to turn scholarship on its head. The argument from silence can be perfectly valid, in spite of Hodder's denial of it. Ford's bars cannot be found in the obvious pre-1950's dealers' auction catalogues, where they ought to have been. To counter that point Hodder and Ford have only to show us where they were to be found, something which they have never been able to do.
On the other hand there has been some response to negative publicity. In my presentation at the ANS in 1996, and subsequently in the 1997 article, I wondered aloud how it could have been possible for such a quantity and variety of gold bars to have appeared on the scene without anyone noticing (p.103). Some of them were alleged to have come from hoards; yet there were no records of these fabulous finds. The metal detectorists, the collectors, and of course the public press would have been enthralled by these dramatic discoveries. Following my comments, Hey Presto! in a trice the gap was filled: Q. David Bowers' ACTH appeared only a few months later, and included a whole chapter on hoards of the Western American gold bars (pp.265-78).[9] What is striking about that chapter is not only that all of this information had come on so suddenly (rather like the Western American gold bars themselves), but that its author was John J. Ford Jr. (mediated by Bowers and Hodder); and particularly that its account of no fewer than eight separate finds is supported by not a single independent reference. In ACTH the chapters composed by Bowers teem with contemporary documentation, providing the support for his accounts. Yet in Ford's chapter, rich in circumstantial detail, with cross-references to auction catalogues (for which Ford himself would have provided the blurbs) or, tangentially, to mines and mining -- in all this there is not a single bibliographic citation regarding the hoards themselves; and this in a book that purports to provide real historical information. Ford's accounts are a wonderful example of the storyteller's art, but there is no evidence that they have any basis in fact at all.[10]
So far there is nothing in Hodder's article to take seriously. I have given examples of evasion above; actually the whole article is an evasion. His subtitle, "A Review of the Evidence" is quite misleading, since it deals with only half of the task: in an article of 85 pages he is dismissive of every argument against the bars; but in support of the bars he offers no evidence whatever. To repeat, the fundamental problem is the authenticity of Ford's gold bars, and Hodder has skirted the subject throughout.
In any case Hodder's "review of the evidence" gets worse, and seriously worse. The argument against Ford's "assay bars" is based in part on their late appearance -- purported 19th-century bars showing up suddenly, and in quantity, only after the middle of the 20th century. Hodder disputes that argument and here at last gives the Reader something positive: "The San Francisco Mint routinely received private assayer's bars for melting either into coin or its own refined or unparted bars" (p.114). This statement is of fundamental importance: if Ford's material was in fact freely available in the 1850's and 60's, the rejection of his bars as modern fabrications cannot be sustained. Hodder here vindicates the position that Ford's assay bars had a 19th-century origin.
But hold on: what is Hodder's evidence for this bald assertion? He offers none whatever. But it is worse than that here: we are now in the area of actual falsification.
1) Hodder did produce documentary evidence for this claim, but the Reader will not find it in the published article. Hodder visited the archives of the Mint, now in San Bruno, CA, where the records of the 1850's and 60's include the daily lists of individual submissions of gold received by the Branch Mint for conversion to (or payment in) coin. In the manuscript of his article, as submitted for publication in the American Journal of Numismatics, Hodder reported having found several instances of specifically "assay bars" arriving at the Branch Mint. Here was the evidence for his statement cited above, that assay bars were routinely proffered to the Branch Mint at that time. Thus, for example, the manuscript p.36, allegedly citing mint records:
"November 19, 1855. Henry Hentsch deposits a 76.82 oz. assay bar."
That is the nature of Hodder's evidence. However in the final publication in the AJN the text reads:
"November 19, 1855. Henry Hentsch deposits a 76.82 oz. bar."
The word "assay" has disappeared, which is to say that this citation and the others like it -- the evidence for Hodder's claim that assay bars regularly showed up at the San Francisco Branch Mint -- are no longer there to support the claim.
But how did this essential evidence disappear? To explain: inspired by Hodder's claims I too went to California, and worked through the archives, in the course of which I discovered some very interesting facts. Hodder had reported four instances of individuals submitting an "assay bar" to the Branch Mint, evidence for his argument as above. I found that in each instance the original record actually read simply "bar", a common entry in the records as the officials at the Branch Mint recorded the submission of gold in many different forms -- dust, amalgam, buttons, bars, nuggets, lumps of every kind, gold sometimes barely removed from the original ore or only crudely separated. In each of four citations of these records, Hodder altered "bar" to read "assay bar", to support his claim that the material which we now question had regularly been available to the San Francisco Branch Mint in the mid-19th century.
During a debate on the subject at the ANA annual meeting at Rosemont, IL, in August, 1999, I demonstrated what Hodder had done, illustrating on screen a reproduction of one of the original record pages, clearly reading "bar", and then Hodder's manuscript page where he had falsified the same record to read "assay bar".
I also raised hell with the officers of the American Numismatic Society. On the basis of the "assay bar" falsifications alone the manuscript should have been rejected, and nothing of Hodder's work ever accepted for publication by the AJN or any honest and serious scholarly journal. Instead, the article was sanitized by them and published anyway. In final publication the fictitious wording "assay bar" or "assayed bar(s)" was twice altered editorially to "bar", to cover the deception; in another case the entry itself was deleted; and in the fourth a new entry was substituted [11]. That is what the Reader will now find on pp.116-17. How and why this happened is the subject of another chapter on this website, "`We are only a Forum`; or, The End of Integrity at the American Numismatic Society".
2) That is not the only falsification in Hodder’s article. In the manuscript, fn. 50 consisted of just a single sentence such as opens the footnote in final publication. But now the footnote has changed character and been greatly enlarged. Between the preparation of the manuscript and the final publication the Rosemont meeting occurred, in the course of which I pointed out, with respect to the so-called Brother Jonathan bars, that Ford’s claims to have seen records in the Mint archives associating those (false) bars with a Mrs Keenan were themselves a fabrication. I had been through all of the germane archival documents, and there was nothing supporting the presence of Mrs Keenan (or of the Branch Mint's manufacture of the bars, for that matter: on all of which see "Gold Bars on the Brother Jonathan? (I)"). At the Rosemont meeting Hodder responded that the document used by Ford had subsequently been discarded from the archives.[12]
The Disappearing Document is of course one of the oldest wheezes of fabricated historiography, and here we have one to hand. Following the Rosemont meeting, and prior to publication of the article, Hodder accommodated his text to this fiction (which had been stated publicly), enlarging fn. 50 with much peripheral comment on bars and the Branch Mint, but including the following text:
"In 1982, many of the mint's records were destroyed. One of the documents destroyed was the Weigh Clerk's Bullion Ledger, June 1854 to March 1873." (p.116 fn.50)
That is, Ford's visit to the archives in the early 1970's resulted (he claimed) in the discovery of information concerning the Brother Jonathan bars and Mrs. Keenan. The Ledger which covered just that period was -- alas -- subsequently destroyed, and therefore cannot be checked.
This convenient destruction is in fact another of Hodder’s fabrications: the first sentence quoted above is true; but the second is not. There was indeed a disposal; what Hodder does not mention, and the Reader will not know, is that there is a record of it (dated 1 Sept 1982), available to the public. In that report every item disposed of is listed and described individually. There is nothing in it even close to either the subject matter or the dates alleged by Hodder. Ford’s assertion that he saw such a document, with Mrs Keenan’s name in it, is false; and Hodder’s announcement here of its subsequent destruction is likewise false.[13]
3) Another of Hodder's falsifications I include because it bears on me personally: "[Buttrey] did not examine the records of the San Francisco Mint" (p.114). The implication, and it is persuasive, is that proper scholarship requires autopsy of the original sources, such as both he and Ford undertook in their visits to the archives. The Reader who has no opportunity to do this himself will be impressed by their initiative and energy, and concede authority and credibility to them.
What Hodder supresses, for the Reader who was not at Rosemont, is that I too visited the archives, and spent a week going over every page of every document covering the operations of the Branch Mint from its beginnings through 1865 and later. Hodder knew that perfectly well since we discussed the matter publicly at the Rosemont meeting. But the Reader who is limited to reading the subsequent article which stands as Hodder's permanent exposition, will naturally attribute authority and credibility to those who troubled to consult the documents -- Ford and Hodder.
But the Reader needs also to be aware that consulation does not of itself guarantee creditable results: both Ford and Hodder visited the archives, and both lied in reporting what they claimed to have seen there -- Ford on the production of the Brother Jonathan bars and their acquisition by Mrs. Keenan; Hodder on the "assay bars" which he claimed were submitted to the Branch Mint, and on his explanation of the Disappearing Document.
It is pointless to go through Hodder’s article in further detail. When you discover that the author has resorted to cooking his evidence, the rest of the article can go out the window. It is impossible to know how much of it can be trusted at all. Certainly the author is not to be trusted, and there is an end of it.
In one regard, however, Hodder's article is genuinely useful, in his candid admission that Ford dealt in false bars (the Tubac ingot, p.94 fn.21), and that his historical claims about the Spanish colonial gold bars were falsifications intended to increase their market value (pp.90 fn.10, 143).[14] Although Ford has himself never publicly admitted to any dishonesties on his own part, these acknowledgements must indicate their realization that in the cases of the Tubac ingot, and of the history of the Colonial bars, the falsehoods can no longer be maintained.
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NOTES
1. T.V. Buttrey, "False Western American Gold Bars", American Journal of Numismatics n.s. 9 1997 89-112.
2. As to Hodder's objectivity the Reader might have found informative the following laudation in the original manuscript, fn.1: "John Ford, whose name appears in places in the text to follow, was more than generous with his time, expertise, and collection. There is no one alive, today, who knows more about western Americana than he does, and I am proud to call him my friend." For publication the passage was deleted by the editors of the AJN.
3. Wrongly referred to by Hodder throughout as the "San Francisco Mint", rather than "Branch Mint". This is an error of importance for the operation prior to 1873 -- only then did it become an independent Mint -- since the misnomer occurs in the logo of the Brother Jonathan bars, allegedly produced in 1865, and proves them to be false. See "Gold Bars on the Brother Jonathan? (II); or, How to Read a Fake Gold Bar".
4. On Hodder's view of this kind of material, "The bars Mehl exhibited were described as `silver assay bars'. I have interpreted this to mean silver and/or low gold content unparted bars." (p.109 fn.46). When "silver" can be taken arbitrarily to mean "gold" we are in a strange world indeed.
5. John W. Adams, United States Numismatic Literature, vol. II. Twentieth Century Auction Catalogs (Crestline, CA, 1990), pp.55-68.
6. Leona Davis Boylan, Spanish Colonial Silver (Santa Fe, NM, 1974), pp.29-30.
7. Not original dies, of course, but modern dies probably produced by the spark-erosion process.
8. J.P. Martin, "Counterfeit 1853 U.S. Assay Office $20", Numismatist 107.2 1994 290.
9. Q. David Bowers, American Coin Treasures and Hoards (Wolfeboro, NH, 1997), hereafter ACTH
10. On the occasion of Hodder's 1999 address to the ANS, from which his AJN article is derived, John Kleeberg questioned the veracity of one of these hoard accounts. To which Hodder explained that they were intended for the "boobs", a term used regularly by Ford to refer to his clients. (J. Kleeberg, personal communication)
11. Now reporting the only instance, among hundreds and hundreds of entries in the mint records, where an assayed bar does actually appear -- a bar which was rejected by the Branch Mint.
12. I leave aside the fact that Mrs. Keenan's name would have to have appeared in three documents: the Visitors Book, and the Registers both of the gold which she submitted and of her acquisition of the bars (which required her personal signature). These records all survive, and there is no trace of her in any of them.
13. For that matter, the title of the imaginary ledger is wrong too. The only ledger in the archives which approaches it is the Weigh Clerk's Book of Deposits of Gold Bullion, in use only in 1881-1897, and so quite out of the picture here.
14. On the Tubac ingot Hodder writes, curiously, "if the ingot is really dated 1707 as the published caption states it to be. It has been claimed however [by whom?] that the caption as printed in the Encyclopaedia Britannica was a typographical error for 1767." A caption has nothing to do with it. The ingot itself plainly reads "1707" and "Tubac", a historical impossibility.
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