1860 $5 Mormon Five Dollar AU50 NGC. K-6, High R.5

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1860 $5 Mormon Five Dollar AU50 NGC. K-6, High R.5. The Mormon half eagles of 1860 are dated a full decade after the last previous issues in the series, the 1850 half eagles struck at the Mint in Great Salt Lake City. The earlier issues had been overseen by Brigham Young, spiritual leader of the Mormons and (from 1850 to 1858) governor of the Utah Territory. By 1860, however, conflict between the residents of Utah Territory and the federal government had ended with a non-Mormon governor, Alfred Cumming, in power. For this reason, the 1860 issue has something of an "underground" character to it. The 1860 Mormon half eagles bear different designs from their predecessors, with a recumbent lion surrounded by HOLINESS TO THE LORD on the obverse and an eagle-and-beehive motif on the reverse. (The obverse motto is in the phonetic Deseret alphabet, which was promoted by Brigham Young but saw only limited adoption and fell out of use after Young's death.) The pieces were made in the "Deseret Assay Office," actually a jeweler's office, instead of an official mint, and when the (temporal) authorities learned of the half eagles' production, they quashed the project. Today, the 1860 Mormon half eagles are rare regardless of grade. This is the Clapp-Eliasberg example of the 1860 Mormon five dollar, described as "VF-30" in the Eliasberg catalog; read more

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