TOKEN AND MEDAL SOCIETY
So, What's the Big Deal About Tokens Anyway? An Essay by Fred Holabird
The Nevada collection offered by Holabird Americana was put together by one of the first of the very serious collectors starting back in the early 1970s, Jack Haddock. As a banker for First National Bank of Nevada, you might think these little trinkets showed up in the cash drawers at the bank. But you’d get it wrong. Jack worked the business end of the banking business, dealing with real estate and other duties. Back in the 1950s-1970, everybody wanted to get into the tills of Nevada banks, since old silver dollars still flowed like pennies. Nevada was the last frontier for the real silver dollar.
So, where do they come from?
Trade tokens were an early form of money. It’s a pretty easy concept, if you look at the big picture. Mining camps, lumber camps, agricultural centers all needed banking. But in ultra-rural Nevada, some of these camps only lasted a few months – not nearly enough time for a formal business, let alone banking – infrastructure to develop. When miners were producing gold, silver and copper, they may get paid in metal, or check or cash. But where do you “cash” your check? How do you break down a ten dollar bill without a bank?
This requires us to look a bit deeper into the monetary system. The US Mint system cranked out millions of small change coinage and larger denominations since its inception in 1795. But demand for coinage changed through time. In the early days of our country, the “west” was in reference to parts of the South and the Mid-West, particularly east of the Mississippi River. Coinage was made in, and distributed from Philadelphia. Population growth and attendant financial demand through time dictated where coinage was sent.
What does that mean? Simple. If you look at it as a form of standard triangular distribution, just like those fun triangular marble games of the past, it becomes infinitely more visible.
Drop a series of marbles in the top, and see where they fall. By the time they hit the bottom, they should be evenly distributed, relative to the laws of probability. But here, each dot represents a city, each perhaps with its own “vacuum” that directly affects demand and thus alters the probability of an even distribution at the bottom.
As an example, the top is Philadelphia, the Mother Mint. The second row could be, perhaps, New York and Boston. The third row, perhaps, Baltimore, Washington DC, Richmond. The fourth row perhaps: Raleigh, Augusta, Pittsburgh, Albany, and so forth. As you might surmise, as the marbles are dropped at the very top, each succeeding layer gets less and less marbles, until finally there are not enough for the lower portions. By the time you get to the fifth and succeeding rows, there is very little left for distribution, so that the outlier towns get little to nothing. That is exactly what happened with our coinage.
When America’s first gold rush hit in 1828, a change was forced upon the monetary system. Ultra-rural Georgia and North Carolina suddenly became hot spots for immigration with the onset of gold mining. The demographics changed, and two US branch Mints were built in Charlotte (NC) and Dahlonega (GA), each in production by 1838.
This should have greatly improved distribution of money – only hard coinage at the time – but it was difficult for the Mint system to keep up with demand, and the decision makers in Washington and Philadelphia were not always in good contact with the rest of the country – think about it – no mass media of any kind, only the simple transportation of letters and reports by mail, often taking weeks for delivery, with an attendant great difficulty in gathering information from far rural and developing areas. Thus the outlier towns had little chance of developing a banking infrastructure. The end result was that two outlier communities within the gold region had individuals that produced their own coinage or money – Bechtler in North Carolina and Georgia, and Reid in Georgia. The conclusion was obvious: if the Mint can’t get us coinage (money) for distribution, we’ll make our own.
Thus the classic triangular distribution model became permanently altered.
Fast forward to the California Gold Rush. The Mint built a new Branch Mint at San Francisco to try to establish a hard money source on the West Coast, as well as get control of the massive gold bullion production – a production so large, that it literally changed world economics. The Mint had come into play because hard money demand and history repeated itself. Private coiners popped up as early as 1848, so that by 1854, there were perhaps twenty different private coiners in the West, from Colorado and Oregon to California. Hard money was needed, and if the Mother Mint couldn’t provide it, the mining and business sector would. The result here was the construction of the San Francisco Branch Mint in 1854, then later the Denver and New Orleans Branch Mints in the 1860s, and later still the Carson City Branch Mint in 1870.
Each of these mints would have their own associated specific theoretical triangular distribution for coinage relative to geographic and economic demand.
Now fast forward to Nevada. The rush to California and its seemingly infinite wealth produced an onslaught of prospectors never seen before in the world. By 1858, there seemed no more room in California for prospectors, so they struck out to regions generally never before explored by white man. Major discoveries were made in Oregon, Colorado, Nevada, Montana and elsewhere as thousands of prospectors and would-be miners, ever hopeful of finding their own “El Dorado” prospected incredibly difficult terrain of steep, seemingly unsurmountable cliffs and mountain sides, heavily forested lands and dry, hot deserts even a rat couldn’t live in.
Here in Nevada, a dry massive desert region known today as the “Great Basin,” we have hundreds of miles of parallel north-south trending mountain ranges with dry, empty valleys in between. Prospectors spent weeks and months out looking for precious metals, having to completely fend for themselves on local game and the occasional isolated spring, plus what they could carry on their pack mule. Nothing today can compare with the difficulties of the pre-modern era of prospecting. No cars. No roads. No gas stations. No motels and restaurants. No campgrounds with nice picnic tables and restrooms. You had to go mining camp to mining camp, hoping that the place still had a general store or a saloon.
Sam Clemens was one of these prospectors, going to Aurora (1861), then off to the Humboldt region (Unionville, 1862), which was so isolated and so remote that if something happened, you’d never be heard of again. Read “Roughing It” by Mark Twain and get a feel for it - or any of J. Ross Browne’s works published in Harper’s Magazine in the 1860s. You won’t regret it!
The Explosion of Nevada Mining Camps
Tiny mining camps popped up seemingly overnight. Some lasted weeks. Some months. Others, if they were lucky, lasted a year. But dozens still lasted for several years or more. From the pre-railroad days, only Virginia City and the Comstock remain. Not a single other town or community survives from the pre-1868 period. After the completion of the CPRR (later renamed the SPRR,) the West, and Nevada in particular, opened up for easier access to the remote locations. You still might have to ride horseback from place to place, over 300 miles without any services, but at least there were isolated mining camps to provide supplies. Then came the Big Bonanza of the Comstock in 1873, and the mining world was set on fire. While California gold deposits all over the state garnered $50+ million per year for the ten years of the 1850s, the Comstock – a single ore deposit mind you- produced in excess of $30 million per year. Now even more prospectors fled into Nevada.
Mining camps developed everywhere. The boom lasted through the last of the Big Bonanzas with the Hale & Norcross in Virginia City, then a general depression set in during the 1890s because of the fall in silver prices brought about by huge silver production from Leadville, Park City and elsewhere that adversely affected the world silver market. The market was so severely impacted that it became a matter of national attention with the 1896 Presidential election and the 16:1 platform regarding fixing the price of silver to gold.
The Post-1900 Explosive Nevada Mining Boom
And Then … And then … another major mining boom started with discoveries at Goldfield, Nevada, where more than eight million ounces of gold would be eventually mines. Then Tonopah, another precious metals whopper. It spread like Covid throughout Nevada – the fever for prospecting for gold and silver mines. New mining camps sprung up like California poppies on the coast.
But it didn’t stop with precious metals. Between Franklin, Edison, Tesla and more, the world, and the United States in particular, were modernizing, bringing power and electricity to every town in America. This required copper, and Nevada and Montana produced more copper than anywhere else in the world – leading to even more small mining camps, with Ely at the forefront.
Nevada and Western Mining Camps – where do they get their money supply?
When prospectors came to Nevada, all most prospectors had was the money in their pockets. Paper currency was still problematic, and not widely accepted out West. In fact, in the early days of US currency in the 1860s, it was generally discounted – up to 50%! The reason? Because there were few banks to cash the paper into useable money – silver dollars, gold coins and change. It would usually take a year or more for a bank to be opened in a Nevada mining camp, and sometimes two years or more. Thus circulating coin was in very scarce supply. So what did the miners do? The same thing as their predecessors in Georgia, North Carolina, California, Oregon and Colorado – they made their own money in the form of locally useable coin, today known as “trade tokens.”
How Was This New Money Used?
Small denominations of coin were what was most needed – denominations less than a dollar. And the most highly popularized place to spend money in these mining camps was none other than the local saloon.
Saloons traded in booze, cigars, beer, baths, haircuts and the like. A shot of whiskey was one bit (12 ½ cents). A beer was generally 5 cents. A bath or haircut usually 2 ½ cents. Cigars 2 ½ to 5 cents each. Higher denominations were used at general stores. Most hotels had a bar on one wall. Everybody drank at the saloons. It was safer than drinking the local spring water, usually “contaminated” by horses, cows and other mammals. Billiard games might cost one bit too.
With little pocket change available, merchants had their own tokens made. These coins were made by die sinkers in the big cities like Los Angeles, Salt Lake City or San Francisco. Catalogs were distributed showing various kinds of tokens that could be custom made for each merchant. Choose the designs for the front and back, make the order for a dozen to generally one hundred or so, and off you go. San Francisco had a number of die sinkers, such as Moise, Patrick and others. Some national advertising brands such as pool table manufacturers would supply the local saloon with tokens with the name of the merchant on one side, and the name of the pool table manufacturing company on the other side. Examples include Charles Pick and Brunswick, Balke & Co. Cigar companies sometimes did the same.
Instead of giving change (that might not exist) in US coinage, the merchant gave out his tokens good for use at his saloon or place of business. Thus the term “good for” on the back of most of the tokens. That guaranteed you’d come back and spend the money at his saloon. If you left town, the token in your pocket was no good. It might get pitched into the nearest dry streambed, or along some dirt trail through the Nevada desert for some metal detectorist to find 120 years later so that he/she could use to start their Nevada token collection.
So How Rare Are These Things?
Most collectors know about US coin rarities. The general collecting guides all talk about how many of each date and mint mark were made. That gives you a general idea of what the overall rarity of the piece is relative to others. But what these statistics don’t tell you, is how many were melted, with the metal later used to make new coins in various denominations.
With trade tokens, die sinker records are almost non-existent. The earliest Western tokens were made in the 1850s, and there are very few. In Nevada, the first trade tokens we know of are paper – 1860s-early 1870s – and all there are in this auction. The 1870s saw a bit of a climb in the production of trade tokens, but again, very few. The Monarch Saloon in Carson City, down the street from the US Branch Mint, may be one example. By the 1880s, perhaps a dozen or more Nevada merchants started using this form of money.
But how many of these things did they make? From the few existing die sinker catalogs I’ve seen or owned, orders of as little as 25 pieces were acceptable, though orders of fifty or 100 pieces seemed preferred. But a merchant in the out of the way place like Aura, or Waterloo, Nevada? Maybe they would stick with the bare minimum of 25 pieces. Thus to find one in this catalog is nothing short of astounding. A place like Candelaria, Nevada, with a much larger, and more sustainable population through about 1910, though now in total ruins of broken stone walls embedded with sagebrush, may have had merchants that made 50 to 100 tokens. Where are they all today? Literally gone to history – tossed aside like a rusty can of condensed milk. It is indeed a rare circumstance where some of these precious tokens were kept within the family for 100 years or more. Examples include Elburz, Palisade, Goodsprings and a few more. We are lucky if the family kept a dozen of the 25 they had made.
Others survive as relics of the gambling business. Many tokens were used in slot machines prior to their outlaw on Sept. 30, 1910. Tokens were rounded up by the slot merchants and thrown in the dumps of the mining camps, found on at least two occasions by twentieth century diggers.
© 2026 Fred Holabird