"Any coin, any item that the firm of Stack's has ever handled has always been carefully researched and checked for authenticity"
Harvey Stack, New York Times, March 3, 2001
Among the many ingots provided by John J. Ford jr. to Stack's, who sold them on to Josiah Lilly, was one of unusual interest. It was not only unique in itself, but the largest bar available at the time, the only one said to have survived from the Territory of New Mexico, and the only testimony to the activity of the Duke of Carlisle. In offering the bar to Lilly Stack's described it as follows:-
Obv. CARLISLE MINING Co. No.
TERR. of NEW MEXICO Ozs.13.
MINT VALUE $ 272.23
(Numbered at left "72")
Rev. Numbered "72" each side
"The above described ingot is the only known specimen of the Territory of New Mexico, and is also the largest known private issue ingot, and the only known piece of the Carlisle Mining Co.
"The company was established by the Duke of Carlisle, an English nobleman. He came to America and settled in New Mexico for his health. The company operated in New Mexico during the period of 1870-1874. He left the site late in 1874 after his daughter was killed during an Apache raid.
"The ruins of Carlisle's home and smelting building are still to be found on the mining property. Under the floor boards of the smelting building this ingot was found with the aid of a mine detector in 1953. It is believed that this piece was hurriedly thrown under the floor during the same Apache raid when his daughter was killed. After the raid Carlisle vanished and there has been no trace of his whereabouts since."
As is usual with the assay bars when they appear in auction catalogues, no sources are given for these alleged historical details. None of the information arises from the bar itself. There has to have been an account somewhere to support the story of the Duke of Carlisle, the reasons for and chronology of his presence in the Territory of New Mexico, his activities at the mine, the Apache raid, and the dreadful murder of his daughter. The account cannot have been the Memoirs of the Duke, since he is said to have vanished.
Presumably Mr Lilly, who subsequently bought the bar, took this account on faith from Stack's, whom he trusted so thoroughly as to make the firm his sole supplier of numismatic gold (see below). He cannot have been a very careful reader, since one detail in the story is ludicrously impossible: no-one would build a smelter with a wooden floor. Far from producing any bars the whole operation would have gone up in flames on its opening day.
The catalogue provides no source for any of this, and there are no records anywhere to support a single detail of the account, as far as one can find.
(1) There was indeed a Carlisle Mining Co. in the Territory, at Carlisle, now a ghost town. The town was created only in the 1880's, and is said, on the current website, to have been named after the first child born there. It had nothing to do with the 1870's, nor with a mine where this ingot allegedly was produced, nor with a Duke of Carlisle.
(2) The Apaches, who had been a problem earlier, and were to be later, were not attacking anyone in the early 1870's (a).
(3) Most importantly we must focus on the Duke. No more than a glance at the pages of Debrett's is needed to discover that he did not exist, nor was there ever any Duke of Carlisle (b).
There was indeed at the time an Earl of Carlisle, William George Howard (1808-1889), the 8th Earl, who succeeded to the title in 1864 on the death of his brother. He never went to America at all, and in the early 1870s he was in northern England, leading a blameless life as Rector of Londesborough, Yorkshire (1832-1877).
Our unfortunate Duke of Carlisle of New Mexico is a work of pure fiction, created out of the imagination of Stack's or their supplier. And one knows why: any numismatic object sells better if it has a historical context; if there is not one to hand, one can be created for it, and its value goes up. The purported Brother Jonathan ingot sold by Stack's 11 June 1997 lot 1027 had at that time a melt value of about $6000. Accompanied by a remarkable and fictitious pseudo-historical text it sold for $33,000: the story raised the value of the metal almost five times.
The Duke of Carlisle is a fictional character (once acted by Gregory Peck), who appears in the sort of romantic novel intended to be read by females (the noble falling in love with the shop-girl is a familiar theme) (c). It is precisely because there was never a real Duke of Carlisle that this name/title has been useful to the novelist. British nobility who came out to America for adventure or for their health are also a staple of American and Canadian history and literature (d). The fictitious account provided by Stack's for the ingot fits that pattern precisely.
Finally the bar itself. It reveals nothing of the pseudo-saga claimed by Stack's; indeed it reveals too little of itself. We know from the Central America finds what genuine bars ought to look like: they include minimally the name of the producing firm, the weight, fineness, and equivalent dollar value of the ingot. The forger of the assay bars had great fun playing with shapes and sizes, and with fonts, but in this case he forgot to include fineness, which no professional assayer would have omitted, and without which the bar, had it been genuine, would not have had any credibility. The bar is as false as the story which has been spun around it.
After the death of Josiah Lilly the close and confidential relationship which had obtained between him and Stack's was announced publicly by the firm --
"We're going to let you in on a secret that we've kept for sixteen years...The late Josiah K. Lilly...appointed us as his exclusive agent...We conducted original research, extensive probes into specialized numismatic areas such as Pioneer and Territorial coinage to establish authenticity -- verify historical facts..."(e).
Lilly put his trust in Stack's and its "original research" and "historical facts". Ford's purported ingot of the Duke of Carlisle which they sold him, along with its phoney history, illustrate how Stack's betrayed that trust.
Notes