California’s Famous Cowboy Coin, The 1850 Baldwin $10, Sets Million Dollar Record

The Spanish word vaquero, meaning cowboy, inspired the English slang buckaroo. A very rare coin whose design was inspired by a famous depiction of cowboys in Mexican California just sold for more than one million buckaroos in a California auction presented by specialty rare coin firm Stack’s Bowers Galleries of Costa Mesa.

A private collector paid $1,260,000 to own a superb condition specimen of the 1850 $10 gold coin graded MS-63+ by the third party grading company PCGS. Worth ten dollars when it was struck by the banking firm of Baldwin & Co, in San Francisco during the height of the California Gold Rush, the coin’s inscriptions CALIFORNIA GOLD, TEN DOLLARS surround a detailed image of a cowboy on horseback with his lasso aloft and ready to throw.

The abundance of gold found in California’s gold fields in 1849 and 1850 created a special problem: how can all the gold nuggets and gold dust be converted into a form that makes the precious metal ready to be exported, shipped to the United States Mint in Philadelphia, or spent in one of San Francisco’s hundreds of bars and bordellos. Private companies like Baldwin & Co. bought gold from miners and created private gold coins that circulated alongside regular United States coins as well as coins brought by new arrivals from countries around the world.

Just 20 or so Baldwin & Co. Horseman $10 gold are thought to exist, and the one sold this week is among the best preserved examples known. It was last sold by predecessor firm Stack’s Rare Coins in October 1988, then bringing $82,500. The gold value of the coin in today’s market is about $1,300.

“The design of the Baldwin $10 has given it an outsized fame among historians and coin collectors,” noted Stack’s Bowers Galleries Director of Numismatic Americana John Kraljevich, who first published research on the origins of the Baldwin $10 design in 2003. “The design was copied — bootlegged or plagiarized, really — from a famous 1828 piece of artwork entitled Californians Throwing the Lasso,” Kraljevich noted. “When Bavarian-born engraved Albrecht Kuner needed a design that told the whole world that the coin was made of California gold, he turned to a watercolor image of cowboys in Mexican California. A cowboy with his lasso was exotic to newcomers but totally familiar to Californians, mostly Spanish-speaking, who had been in the region for decades, even centuries.”

Stack’s Bowers Galleries President Brian Kendrella noted, “As a native Californian, few coins really speak to me as much as this one. Its design is a landmark image evocative of California’s rich history.”

The watercolor Californians Throwing the Lasso was painted by English explorer and naval officer Frederick William Beechey in 1828. Beechey’s travels were summarized in his 1831 book Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Bering's Strait to Co-operate with the Polar Expeditions, 1825-1828, where the watercolor was republished as a print. The book went through several editions and was read all over Europe and the Americas.

The previous record for an 1850 Baldwin $10, set in August 2014, was $381,875. According to Kendrella, "this new record and similar record prices for high quality rare coins and related numismatic items reflect an appreciation of these coins as historic collectibles but also as art. Collectors who were savvy enough to purchase coins like this a decade or more ago have done very well with their investment while also enjoying the hobby of coin collecting.”

For a complete list of prices realized for the Stack’s Bowers Galleries November 2024 Showcase Auction visit StacksBowers.com. To consign to a Stack’s Bowers Galleries auction call 800-458-4646 or email Consign@StacksBowers.com.