(There is little more enthralling or evocative than a huge gold ingot of assayers gold, and little assayers gold more intriguing that that of Justh & Hunter, two names numismatists will recognize instantly from its intimate connection to the most famous lost treasure shipwreck of all, the S.S. Central America. Read on for John Dale’s entertaining history lesson. – Noah)
Lots of people have heard about the Forty-Niners, at least in the United States, those fortune-seekers who set out for California in the days of that state’s Gold Rush and gave their name to San Francisco’s American football team.
Less well-known are the “Forty-Eighters,” a term that has been used to describe the earliest California Gold Rushers, but sees more widespread use describing the participants in the European revolutions that sprang up in 1848 in France, Austria-Hungary, the pre-unification German and Italian states and elsewhere.
What do Forty-Eighters have to do with Forty-Niners?
Plenty, it turns out.
The Revolutions of 1848 didn’t go well, and many revolutionaries chose exile over the likely imprisonment or death that awaited them if they stayed in their native lands. Those capable of leaving generally were among their countries’ educated or trained elite, and they took important skills to their new homes.
While almost anyone could pick up a pan and sift through gravel for gold, those with training in assaying and metallurgy could make their fortunes plying their trade instead.
Among the many assayers whose products have become highly collectible, three Hungarian Forty-Eighters come to my mind:
Two of them, exiled nobleman Samuel C. Wass and the untitled-but-talented Agoston P. Molitor, formed the eponymous Wass, Molitor & Co. They made gold coins with designs similar to U.S. Mint coinage but with the company’s name in place of the word “Liberty” on the symbolic figure’s coronet.
Heritage has sold a variety of Wass, Molitor coins, from a well-worn ten dollar piece that brought $2,300 to $212,750 for a massive fifty dollar gold coin with completely unworn surfaces.
The third Hungarian Forty-Eighter is Emanuel Justh, better known as “Emil.”
Originally a lithographer who took up common cause with famed revolutionary Kossuth Lajos, Justh went to the United States and was an assistant assayer at the newly opened San Francisco Mint, later leaving government work for a private partnership called Justh & Hunter.
The partnership lasted only a few years but became famous more than a century later when the wreckage of the S.S. Central America was recovered.
The Central America, a steamship that sank running the Panama-to-New York route in 1857, had $2 million in gold onboard when it was lost – that is, $2 million in 1857 terms, when gold was valued at $20.67 per troy ounce.
Among the many gold items were assayer’s bars from Justh & Hunter, including a hefty 185-ounce ingot Heritage sold for $322,000 in January 2010.
The Forty-Eighters who became Forty-Niners already had at least one devastating life experience, and for some life continued to present hardships; even the relatively successful Emil Justh, who left California for New York to become a stockbroker, got tangled up in a nasty divorce case that reached its nadir when Justh aimed a revolver at the head of a police sergeant who had come to arrest him. Somehow, nobody died.
Many never saw their homelands again.
Even so, the United States offered an opportunity to start again, and through the many Forty-Eighters who took it, continental Europe’s loss turned out to be America’s enduring gain.
By John Dale Beety