The Mormon Exodus from Nauvoo, Illinois to the San Francisco area in the 1840s proved to be a pivotal moment in the story of the California Gold Rush. Many of the early members of the newly founded Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fled the conflicts with their neighbors and headed westward, eventually settling in the Great Salt Lake Valley and naming their new home the State of Deseret. Once established, Salt Lake City served as a launching off point for further migrations towards California where numerous groups settled in and around the San Francisco area.

Among these groups included veterans of the Mormon Battalion who served during the Mexican-American War, who were employed by James W. Marshall at John Sutter's mill in Coloma, California, where one of the defining moments of Western history took place on January 24, 1848 when Marshall discovered gold in the channel below the mill. The early Mormon presence in the region allowed them to take advantage of the newly found riches. The local community sent back a large quantity of gold to Salt Lake City and was not only used to pay the Church's tithes but also to alleviate many of the economic hardships in Deseret. The gold influx was primarily in raw form, including large quantities of gold dust, which was soon employed as a medium of exchange.

As with their brethren back in San Francisco, gold dust proved problematic at best in commerce, as it could be very easily adulterated. By the end of 1848, Brigham Young and John Kay announced plans to set up a small mint in Salt Lake City to process the gold dust into coin. The coins were designed by Young and the dies cut by Kay with the first coins, 25 $10 pieces, being struck on December 12, 1848, followed shortly thereafter by $2.50, $5, and $10 coins.

The $5 coins were struck in 1849 and 1850 and each bear the letters G.S.L.C.P.G., an abbreviation for "Great Salt Lake City Pure Gold," a statement that would prove to be entirely inaccurate. There was no local source for the gold, so all of bullion came from the shipments from California. In addition, because of the rather primitive minting and assay equipment, the purity and weight of the coins were consistently below face value, a situation that the mintmasters and assayers did not take into account. In 1850, Jacob Eckfeldt and William DuBois performed an assay of some of the Mormon coins at the Philadelphia Mint and recorded their findings in their work, *New Varieties of Gold and Silver Coins* and found that the coins were wanting in terms of valuation: "The weights are more irregular, and the values very deficient....the 5-dollar about 111 grains, $4.30." This huge discrepancy between face value and intrinsic value irreparably damaged their reputation and would only be accepted in trade at steep discounts.

By late 1850, the assay report doomed the mint and it shut down after producing approximately $70,000 in Mormon gold coins. Despite an attempt in 1860 to resume production, Mormon gold coins played no significant role in the economy in what would become Utah. Most Mormon gold coins of all kinds quickly ended up in melting pots, leaving very few for today's numismatists to examine and appreciate.

The $5 denomination was a workhorse coin even in its brief period of use and suffered the normal rigors of circulation especially for a soft metal like gold. Many are impaired and some have even been found in grade levels as low as AG-3. Mint State examples are prohibitively rare and the PCGS Condition Census is populated almost exclusively with higher-end AU specimens.

The example to the left was sold by Stack's Bowers Galleries in the Larry H. Miller Part II Auction, where it realized $55,200.