Next month, I'll be attending the California State Numismatic Association's Eighth Annual Northern California Educational Symposium, slated for Oct. 27 in Vallejo.

I'm one of four speakers at the symposium, which focuses mainly on California and its relation to gold. Alton Pryor will be speaking on "Those Lusty Gold Camps of California"; Dr. Donald H. Kagin will present "California Gold Coinages"; and Dr. Michael F. Wehner will talk on "The Golden Gate Bridge on Tokens and Medals."

My presentation is title 'A Tale of Mines plus Trade and Morgan Dollars" and is drawn from my book, Crime of 1873: The Comstock Connection (Krause Publications, 2001).

Few would relate silver to California, thinking first of gold. But it was California that at the Comstock Lode's height controlled most of the silver-rich Nevada mines.

It was also an influential California banker, William C. Ralston, who through secret payments to Treasury agent Henry R. Linderman, engineered many of the provisions of the Coinage Act of 1873 (aka, the "Crime of 1873"), including the adoption of the gold standard and the dropping of the standard silver dollar from the coinage measure. Out of their relationship and maneuverings also came the U.S. Trade dollar and, eventually, the Morgan dollar, with the start of free silver agitation in 1876.

The tale of money during this time is a complicated topic. Specie (hard money) payments had been suspended during the Civil War and wouldn't resume until the late 1870s. Much of the nation relied on depreciated paper money. The West, however, with its abundance of gold, clung to hard money and continued to use gold and silver in change.

An interesting illustration of the problems caused by having one region of the country value currency at different rate than another appeared in the May 21, 1869 issue of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, which wrote:

At Corinne [Utah], the traveller going east strikes a greenback country; a country where the people look with astonishment and perplexity upon a gold coin, and scarcely know what to do with it. Prices, as far as the Promontory, are on a gold basis, east of that on a currency basis. Thus, the traveller who starts from Sacramento pays $1 in gold for his meals, up to Promontory. Thence eastward he is agreeably surprised to find that the charge is only $1 in currency. On the other hand, the traveller bound west discovers, with a lengthening face, that the meal which only cost him $1 in currency at Corinne, requires $1 25 or more twenty miles west of that town.

I suppose with the U.S. dollar recently dropping below the Canadian dollar, Americans traveling to Canada are experiencing similar dismay as 19th-century travelers to the West. On the flip side, Canadians coming to the United States are probably quite happy.

I love coinage history, particularly when it's a bit bizarre. A great example of this appeared in the January 1915 issue of Mehl's Numismatic Monthly under the title, "An Automobile for Four Mint Marks."

B. Max Mehl, a prominent early 20th-century coin dealer from Texas, related that a rumor circulating in the general press of his day was that if a lucky collector were to find four U.S. dimes with the mintmarks F, O, R, and D, he or she would win a car from the Ford Motor Co.

One of those newspapers forced to explain that such a combination was impossible was the Utica (N.Y.) Herald Dispatch. Noting that due to the rumor, "many Uticans are searching for the four coins that are said to bear these letters," the Dispatch broke the news that "Their search is hopeless. Two of the letters are 'F' and 'R.' There is no coin ever struck that bears either of these letters as a mintmark."

The Dispatch was right. At that time you could get a coin from either Philadelphia (no mintmark); Charlotte, N.C. (C); Carson City, Nev. (CC); Dahlonega, Ga. (D); San Francisco (S); New Orleans (O); and Denver (D). Not all of these mints, of course, struck dimes. Charlotte and Dahlonega only minted gold.

Among the few recognizable words you could make, using different mintmarked dimes, was "SOD." By stretching the rules and adding in Charlotte gold coins, besides free "SOD," you could get a free "COD" or, maybe, a free visit to a "DOC." However, when it comes to "FORD," and a free car, the best you could "DO" with your dimes was the "O" and the "D."

The Dispatch related that the necessary four letters could, however, all be located in the legend "United States of America" found on dimes and other U.S. coins, which certainly would have made for a lot of new happy owners of Model Ts would that it had been true.

Don't drink and clean your coins! Actually, it's best not to clean coins in the first place. It's too easy to damage the coin, resulting in an unnatural color or miniscule scratches that can be seen under magnification and lower the coin's value.

However, coin cleaning has not always been taboo. And in one case it led to the death of a prominent 20th-century numismatist.

It all happened on June 24, 1922. World-renowned numismatist J. Sanford Saltus was discovered in his room at London's Hotel Metropole, lying on the floor, fully dressed. He was dead at age 69, but not from natural causes.

A coroner's jury labeled Saltus's passing as "death by misadventure," according to an account in the August 1922 issue of the American Numismatic Association's publication, The Numismatist.

The day prior to his death, Saltus purchased a small quantity of potassium cyanide for use in cleaning silver coins he had just purchased. The Numismatist noted, "Potassium cyanide, although one of the most deadly poisons, is frequently used by collectors in cleaning coins..."

Unfortunately, at some point after Saltus retired to his room, on the 24th, he ordered a bottle of ginger ale. "A glass containing the poison and another glass containing ginger ale were found side by side on the dressing table," The Numismatist reported, "and it is believed that while interested in cleaning the coins he took a drink of the poison in mistake for the ginger ale." Ouch!

At the time, Saltus, who hailed from the United States, was president of the British Numismatic Society as well as one of the major benefactors of the American Numismatic Society. A prestigious award for medallic art is still presented each year in his honor by the ANS.