The Southern Branch Mint proofing piece, dated 1838 or 1839, has a very crude eagle on it - too crude to be Mint work (see NASCA 4/1980:2434). It has a heraldic mistake - the eagle holds the arrows in its dexter claw, the claw of honor. This mistake existed on U.S. silver and gold coins of the heraldic eagle type, but it was corrected when the type was replaced in 1807. On all U.S. coins since 1807, the eagle has the arrows in his sinister claw, the olive branch in his dexter claw. The olive branch must be held in the claw of honor, to indicate that the United States regards peace more highly than war. The heraldic mistake indicates that the proofing piece must be fake.
B. The Phony U.S. Mint Bars with a false provenance to the Brother Jonathan shipwreck.
These eleven U.S. Mint bars clearly were not recovered from the Brother Jonathan shipwreck (Bowers 1999a). Buttrey has discovered that every element of the story that accompanied them was false - such as that the bars were made for a San Francisco Madam, Mrs. Keenan. The bars will be referred to as “pseudo-Brother Jonathan bars.”
The bars themselves indicate that they must be fake. As will be discussed further below, they do not bear the Internal Revenue stamp, as required under the 1864 law, even though they are dated 1865. There does exist a well-pedigreed bar from the United States Branch Mint at Denver, dated 1865, to which we can compare these pseudo-Brother Jonathan bars (now in the collection of the Colorado Historical Society; Adams, Dorsett, and Pulcipher 1984). The Denver bar does have the Internal Revenue tax stamp. It describes its issuer as “the United States Branch Mint” - as opposed to the pseudo-Brother Jonathan bars, which just say “U.S. Mint.” Its emblem of the U.S. Branch Mint is an eagle, as is the case for every other known U.S. Mint bar, except for the pseudo-Brother Jonathan bars.
As Buttrey has shown, each branch mint of the United States was called a “United States Branch Mint” (abbreviated USBM). It was only after the revision of the coinage laws in 1873 that the branch mints became full “U.S. Mints.” This usage is confirmed over and over in the documentation that Owens has published (Owens 2000, 148, 154, 157, 170-74, 276-78, 367).
There are two distinct varieties of pseudo-Brother Jonathan bars. In bar No. 2182, the letters saying “U.S. MINT SAN FRANCISCO” and the date “1865” are incuse, and the words are separated by two “x”s. On all other examples seen, the letters are raised and the words separated by stars (Bowers 1997, 264). At best, either No. 2182 is fake, and all other pseudo-Brother Jonathan bars genuine; or the other bars-are fake, and No. 2182 is genuine; or all are fake. But all these bars cannot be genuine. A sophisticated operator like the U.S. Mint would not fiddle around with different varieties of bars.
Our forgers did not worry much about inconsistency in their products; they could swear their “boobs” to silence, pointing out the danger of seizure by the Office of Domestic Gold and Silver Operations, and thus prevent serious numismatic study and comparison that would expose the forgeries. Their G. W. Bell bars exist with two different punch faces. This is also true of their Eagle Mining Company gold bars. And it is also true with the U.S. Mint bars supposedly from the Brother Jonathan.