After internal strife and the murder of Joseph Smith, Jr. by an angry mob in Illinois in 1844, his successor, Brigham Young, led a group of Latter Day Saints (Mormon) faithful 1,100 miles across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains to establish a settlement on the Great Salt Lake.
When Young and his band set out for the Salt Lake, it was part of Mexico known as Alta California, a huge territory that stretched from just west of the Rockies and south of present-day Idaho to the Pacific coast. But the area was occupied by US troops in 1846 during the Mexican-American War.
The Young expedition arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, and the entirety of Alta California was ceded to the US by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the war’s end in 1848. Young’s settlement drew thousands of Mormons to the desert sanctuary, and the need to import goods and machinery from the east to supply the settlement grew. But merchants had to be paid, and the supply of official currency was low in the largely trade-based local economy.
Because of the rapid expansion of the US and long distances from government mints in the east, it was common for private mints to produce gold and silver coins of their own. As long as they were from trustworthy sources, these bullion coins were acceptable for trade. But even private coins were scarce in isolated areas like Deseret, the name chosen for territory around Salt Lake.
To solve the problem, Young and the LDS church established a church mint in 1848 to make coins from the gold brought back to the city from California by Mormon prospectors. In November 1848 Brigham Young, John Taylor, and John Kay designed the first coins. One side carried the phrase “Holiness to the Lord” encircling a Phrygian crown atop the eye of Jehovah. The other side had the words “Pure Gold” at the top, the denomination below, and two hands shaking above the year of minting, 1849. Coins were minted that year in denominations of $2.50, $5.00, $10.00, and $20.00.
About 118 of the $5.00 coins are known and have sold from a few thousand dollars for lower-quality coins to a record $92,000 for an Almost Uncirculated-55 sample in 2006. The much rarer (36 known survivors) $2.50 coin brought a record $235,000 at auction in 2014 for an MS63 example.
A $20 coin (16 survivors) graded MS62 brought $558,125, also at auction in 2014. It has the distinction of being the first “official” US coin of that denomination, beating the $20 Double Eagle by a year. But the church mint’s dies broke after striking only 46 $10.00 gold pieces, making it the rarest (5 known), most valuable of all so-called Mormon Gold. The highest-graded coin, at AU58, sold for $705,000 in the April 23, 2014 Heritage Signature Auction.
After new dies arrived from the Midwest, coinage worth about $70,000 in various denominations resumed bearing the date 1850 before the church’s supply of gold dust for minting ran out. The dies and presses were sold and used briefly to make Nevada coins before being destroyed in the early 1850s. Of 10,00 or so coins made, 67 $5.00 pieces survive today and command as much as $129,000 in mint condition.
The last Mormon gold coins were made from a new design featuring a lion of Judah on its face and an eagle behind a beehive on the reverse. The $5 coins had a legend stating they were Deseret Assay Office Pure Gold, but that wasn’t quite true since they were made of gold from Colorado that was less than 24-karat. Only 472 coins were reported to have been made (some sources say as few as 200 were actually struck), and 46 are known survivors in grades from Very Fine-30 to MS62. That coin sold for $155,250 in a 2012 auction.
In 1861, territorial governor Alfred Cumming issued an order stopping further coinage by the church, and Congress passed an act in 1864 that prohibited coining private gold in the US.
Mormon gold coins are important to collectors of “Territorial” and “Pioneer” coins, and the few that are outside museum collections remain in high demand.
