Post by evm111 on Jan 1, 2006 15:31:22 GMT -5
STATE OF DESERET: After the Mormon pioneers arrived in Utah's Great Salt Lake Valley (1847) and created a permanent settlement, there was considerable inclination toward independence. The Church leaders felt that either territorial status or statehood itself offered desirable alternatives, but they seemed to vacillate between those two viable options. Though they appreciated living practically without governmental interference, the earliest settlers in and around the unorganized territory were not certain as to which nation would eventually take formal control of their remote region, which was nominally part of the Mexican department of Alta California until the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848) ceded the lands to the United States. With limitations on communication, they were unaware of accord-related decrees until some time after their official consummation. It is interesting to note that during this period of uncertainty residents of the “valley” referred to their location as Great Basin, North America.
The provisional, self-designated State of Deseret — its name is a Book of Mormon term (Ether 2:3) meaning “honeybee” — embodied the true elements of civil government by adopting a constitution, enacting legislation, and defining its limits of jurisdiction. Deseret, which functioned as an autonomous state, had vast boundaries, encompassing all of present Utah, most of Nevada and Arizona, more than one-third of California, large portions of Colorado, and smaller parts of New Mexico, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon. Church President Brigham Young was elected Governor and others in the Church hierarchy comprised its executive and judicial branches as well as much of its legislative branch. To establish control of this burgeoning domain, the State itself was preceded by a homespun government established to provide local laws/ordinances for its thriving religious communities. This original governing body was the High Council of Great Salt Lake City, established in 1847. It was followed by the Legislative Council of Great Salt Lake City, which took decisive steps to provide for an adequate civil government of a provisional nature over the entire Great Basin and which formed a precedent for the future legislatures of the State of Deseret and the Territory of Utah. Concerned with increasing the coreligionist population, Young began a vigorous colonization program, which, before his death in 1877, founded nearly 400 settlements. The State of Deseret was the closest the Church ever came to realizing the theocratic model previously outlined by Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism.
As a result of the lack of federal provision for adequate government of any form in the “Territory of Upper California”, the industrious council of higher-ups formulated a memorial addressed to Congress on 12/13/1848, asking it to charter “a Territorial Government...to be known by the name Deseret.” Several thousand signatures were gathered over a period of months, and the document was dispatched eastward by Dr. John M. Bernhisel on 5/3/1849.
Concurrent with this attempt, Young and his advisers were apparently deciding that instead of pursuing territorial rule under the federal authorities, it would be even more preferable to seek the formation of a new state (as California and New Mexico were doing). To this end, they began to plan accordingly. A Constitutional Convention was organized by the “council” government on 3/5/1849. On the 10th, after much debate and consideration, they ended their indecision regarding which path to follow and adopted an ecclesiastically created “Constitution of the Provisional State of Deseret”. Shortly thereafter, the provisional de facto government was resolutely launched. The bicameral General Assembly (Senate and House of Representatives) of the State of Deseret met for the first time on 7/2/1849, at Great Salt Lake City. This body made another fruitless bid for recognition by adopting a formal memorialization to Congress, asking that the Constitution of Deseret accompanying the entreaty be ratified, and that the State of Deseret be admitted into the Union or that they be given “such other form of civil government as your wisdom and magnanimity may award to the people of Deseret.” The General Assembly sent an emissary of their own, Almon W. Babbitt, Esq., to join forces with Bernhisel and to represent them in Congress. While their first messenger repeatedly pleaded his ill-fated case with influentials in Washington, and the dignitaries of Capitol Hill took no action on the matter of Babbitt, the first true legislative session of the General Assembly began in December of 1849. Meetings resulted in the enactment of measures regulating the militia (patterned and named after the earlier Nauvoo Legion), and procedures providing for the organization of a judiciary, a revenue act, essential municipal services, irrigation projects and roads, a University of Deseret, and the location of the six original counties of Deseret. Unfortunately, their wishes would once again be rebuffed on 7/18/1850, when the House of Representatives finally concurred with the Committee on Territories' unanimous determination and declared it inexpedient to admit the delegate from “the alleged State of Deseret” to a seat.
The Territory of Utah was formally organized by Act of Congress on 9/9/1850 (Brigham Young was appointed its first governor by Millard Fillmore; he was also designated superintendent of Indian Affairs). In view of this, the General Assembly of the Provisional State of Deseret met in the spring of 1851, and initiated a formal dissolution of their tentative state. On March 28, the Provisional Government of the State of Deseret ceased to exist. After the quasi-state of Deseret was dissolved, a shadow government of the same name continued to operate because their territorial status did not provide the self-rule Latter-day Saints desired. Church elders and the territorial legislature continued unsuccessful efforts to obtain statehood. In 1856, delegates met to again draft a Constitution and propose anew the state of Deseret, an effort rejected by Congress. As a part of a third effort in 1862, Brigham Young called the General Assembly into session for the first time since '51. Thereafter it met each year until 1870, each session lasting only a few days and focusing on winning statehood on the basis of the proposed Constitution of 1849 with only minor changes (its boundaries amended to fit the shrinking limits of the Utah Territory). In the meantime, Brigham Young had been replaced as territorial governor by a series of outside appointees, who became progressively more hostile to the meetings of the General Assembly and complained about this persistent “ghost government”, as they called it. In 1872, a Constitutional Convention drew up a new constitution and dropped the name Deseret from the petition. This request also failed, and hope for the state of Deseret came to a disappointing halt. In 1896, Utah gained admission to the Union as the 34th state.
I purchased a 24-karat gold-plated $20 State of Deseret piece, dated 1860, on eBay. According to the seller from whom I bought it, “This is a copy of a work of art that has never been spent or seen.” The obverse shows a couple of actively occupied honeybees, which pertain to the symbol of industry chosen by Deseret. The reverse shows the all-seeing eye of Jehovah (an emblem of the priesthood) and the clasped hands of fellowship (symbolizing unity); there is also the motto “Holiness to the Lord”, written in the Deseret Alphabet (a type of phonetic system prepared by the Board of Regents of the University of Deseret; the idea behind this experimental method of writing English was to develop a sort of universal system, especially so that newcomers/converts who spoke foreign languages could learn to read English more easily. The final version of the written language utilized thirty-eight characters corresponding to distinct sounds of English).
According to a numismatist named Mr. Charles Larson, this coin “is a purely mythical” concoction. He explains: “A few years back a local newspaper columnist from Salt Lake City named Robert Kirby wrote a short novel with the title Brigham's Bees, and the book had a picture on the cover similar to the example here. The text also described how these coins were supposed to have looked.” In Kirby's book, the master engraver responsible for the coins was a fictional character named Bishop Samuel Woodbury.
The elements on the reverse of this piece, however, do pay literal tribute to coinage made by what was once a small adobe building in Great Salt Lake City known as the Deseret Mint (1848-1851). The most notable emblem missing from the $20 piece is the three-pointed Phrygian crown/miter. Types churned out by the Mint include the 1849 “Pure Gold” 10 Dollars (its issuance actually began in 1848), the 1849 “G.S.L.C.P.G.” (Great Salt Lake City Pure Gold) 2½, 5, 20 Dollars, the 1850 “G.S.L.C.P.G.” 5 Dollars, and the 1860 “Deseret Assay Office Pure Gold” 5 Dollars. Under the auspices of the Church, the early Mormons minted their own coins out of necessity, from gold-dust deposited in their treasury as part of the tithes of congregation members, some of whom had taken part in the historic Gold Rush. The Mint/Assay Office was the first western enterprise to produce private coinage from California gold-dust and they preceded the Californian fractional coinage by more than five months.
After the initial 10 Dollars coin was made, the phrase “Pure Gold” was noticeably absent on the Mint's 4 next coins. Instead, they resorted to the abbreviation “G.S.L.C.P.G.”. Mr. Larson has heard that the “P.G.” portion of these ambiguous initials could have stood for “Provisional Government”, based on the suggestion that Mormon leaders became sensitive to charges that the purity of the precious metal contained in their coins was not up to snuff. It is true that in 1850, an assay was performed on a group of these “native gold” pieces at the Philadelphia branch of the U.S. Mint. The results of these tests revealed that the coins were seriously underweight and debased (they fell short by about 10-20%) and that their “Pure Gold” claim was fraudulent. Customarily, the bullion intended for circulating coinage required the admixture of a small touch of a lesser metal in order to give the soft Au some minimal durability, but the Mormons were willfully overgenerous with those impurities whilst preparing their alloys. When it became public knowledge that there was a problem with the fineness faithfully promised by the coins, they were heavily discounted by bankers and merchants. Following a severe smear campaign, there was widespread melting of the lightweight pieces, which accounts for their rarity today. Mr. Larson thinks that the story of “P.G.” being a shortened form of “Provisional Government” is highly unlikely, because the new dies were already in use for some months before the first assay reports challenging their purported/stated value would be circulated.
According to the 1/28/1850 edition of The Adams Sentinel (Pennsylvania) and the 2/2/1850 edition of the Defiance Democrat (Ohio), “The monetary notions of the Mormons at their Great Salt Lake settlement are no less peculiar, it appears, than their ideas of society and religion. We have a very curious coin in our possession, which is manufactured and exclusively circulated among that remarkable people, and quite to the disparagement, travellers tell us, of every other species of gold currency. Of all the fanciful forms into which our golden wealth is wrought, this sainted shape excels in singularity...It is clumsy, and in execution without merit.” Mr. Larson's opinion seems to corroborate this: “The genius Young possessed for administration and colonization did not, alas, extend to coin design, for though well made, these earliest Mormon gold pieces are generally recognized by numismatists as being among the homeliest coins ever produced.” He elaborates: “The poorly designed, crude devices that first appeared on the 1849 series of Mormon gold coins were so enigmatic that most people who encountered them had very little idea what they were supposed to represent. The ‘eye’ wasn't hard to figure out, nor the symbolism of the handshake, but the big, puffy whatever-it-was (meant to symbolize a Phrygian ‘crown’, rather than the Phrygian [Liberty] Cap) made no sense whatsoever. The round body with a pointed end opposite a big eye, with two little round things off to the side reminded some people of a poorly rendered bee, and the coins were actually dubbed ‘Brigham's Bees’ at the time by the people outside of Utah. That's where the name originated; and Robert Kirby picked up on the term and actually composed a coin that the early Mormons would have been quite pleased with — had they had the talent available to have ever produced it.” The author must have done a fairly convincing job of making the book's coinage sound believable to his readers, because Mr. Larson is amazed at “how many people have approached me when I've been demonstrating the Deseret Mint at some public function or event, and spoken of the Brigham's Bees as though they were an actual historic reality.”
Mr. Larson is also a coinsmith who, since 1998, strikes the only museum-quality replicas “of this rare and fascinating series that have ever been made available by anyone, anywhere.” His “reproductions are painstakingly struck exactly the same way as the pioneer coinage was — by hand, from hand-cut dies...using historically accurate methods and tooling”. The story of the Deseret Mint, and Mr. Larson's facsimiles, can be found at his site:
www.coinsmith.com/books/dmint.htm
www.coinsmith.com/gallery/mormon/mormon_g.htm
Great Web-sites containing detailed information about Deseret are:
dmla.clan.lib.nv.us/docs/nsla/archives/political/historical/hist03.htm
www.lightplanet.com/mormons/daily/history/1844_1877/index.htm
*************************
The eBay seller seems to have plenty of these available. She said she didn't know anything about the coin, though (who made it, etc...), and I'm not sure I believe this.
The provisional, self-designated State of Deseret — its name is a Book of Mormon term (Ether 2:3) meaning “honeybee” — embodied the true elements of civil government by adopting a constitution, enacting legislation, and defining its limits of jurisdiction. Deseret, which functioned as an autonomous state, had vast boundaries, encompassing all of present Utah, most of Nevada and Arizona, more than one-third of California, large portions of Colorado, and smaller parts of New Mexico, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon. Church President Brigham Young was elected Governor and others in the Church hierarchy comprised its executive and judicial branches as well as much of its legislative branch. To establish control of this burgeoning domain, the State itself was preceded by a homespun government established to provide local laws/ordinances for its thriving religious communities. This original governing body was the High Council of Great Salt Lake City, established in 1847. It was followed by the Legislative Council of Great Salt Lake City, which took decisive steps to provide for an adequate civil government of a provisional nature over the entire Great Basin and which formed a precedent for the future legislatures of the State of Deseret and the Territory of Utah. Concerned with increasing the coreligionist population, Young began a vigorous colonization program, which, before his death in 1877, founded nearly 400 settlements. The State of Deseret was the closest the Church ever came to realizing the theocratic model previously outlined by Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism.
As a result of the lack of federal provision for adequate government of any form in the “Territory of Upper California”, the industrious council of higher-ups formulated a memorial addressed to Congress on 12/13/1848, asking it to charter “a Territorial Government...to be known by the name Deseret.” Several thousand signatures were gathered over a period of months, and the document was dispatched eastward by Dr. John M. Bernhisel on 5/3/1849.
Concurrent with this attempt, Young and his advisers were apparently deciding that instead of pursuing territorial rule under the federal authorities, it would be even more preferable to seek the formation of a new state (as California and New Mexico were doing). To this end, they began to plan accordingly. A Constitutional Convention was organized by the “council” government on 3/5/1849. On the 10th, after much debate and consideration, they ended their indecision regarding which path to follow and adopted an ecclesiastically created “Constitution of the Provisional State of Deseret”. Shortly thereafter, the provisional de facto government was resolutely launched. The bicameral General Assembly (Senate and House of Representatives) of the State of Deseret met for the first time on 7/2/1849, at Great Salt Lake City. This body made another fruitless bid for recognition by adopting a formal memorialization to Congress, asking that the Constitution of Deseret accompanying the entreaty be ratified, and that the State of Deseret be admitted into the Union or that they be given “such other form of civil government as your wisdom and magnanimity may award to the people of Deseret.” The General Assembly sent an emissary of their own, Almon W. Babbitt, Esq., to join forces with Bernhisel and to represent them in Congress. While their first messenger repeatedly pleaded his ill-fated case with influentials in Washington, and the dignitaries of Capitol Hill took no action on the matter of Babbitt, the first true legislative session of the General Assembly began in December of 1849. Meetings resulted in the enactment of measures regulating the militia (patterned and named after the earlier Nauvoo Legion), and procedures providing for the organization of a judiciary, a revenue act, essential municipal services, irrigation projects and roads, a University of Deseret, and the location of the six original counties of Deseret. Unfortunately, their wishes would once again be rebuffed on 7/18/1850, when the House of Representatives finally concurred with the Committee on Territories' unanimous determination and declared it inexpedient to admit the delegate from “the alleged State of Deseret” to a seat.
The Territory of Utah was formally organized by Act of Congress on 9/9/1850 (Brigham Young was appointed its first governor by Millard Fillmore; he was also designated superintendent of Indian Affairs). In view of this, the General Assembly of the Provisional State of Deseret met in the spring of 1851, and initiated a formal dissolution of their tentative state. On March 28, the Provisional Government of the State of Deseret ceased to exist. After the quasi-state of Deseret was dissolved, a shadow government of the same name continued to operate because their territorial status did not provide the self-rule Latter-day Saints desired. Church elders and the territorial legislature continued unsuccessful efforts to obtain statehood. In 1856, delegates met to again draft a Constitution and propose anew the state of Deseret, an effort rejected by Congress. As a part of a third effort in 1862, Brigham Young called the General Assembly into session for the first time since '51. Thereafter it met each year until 1870, each session lasting only a few days and focusing on winning statehood on the basis of the proposed Constitution of 1849 with only minor changes (its boundaries amended to fit the shrinking limits of the Utah Territory). In the meantime, Brigham Young had been replaced as territorial governor by a series of outside appointees, who became progressively more hostile to the meetings of the General Assembly and complained about this persistent “ghost government”, as they called it. In 1872, a Constitutional Convention drew up a new constitution and dropped the name Deseret from the petition. This request also failed, and hope for the state of Deseret came to a disappointing halt. In 1896, Utah gained admission to the Union as the 34th state.
I purchased a 24-karat gold-plated $20 State of Deseret piece, dated 1860, on eBay. According to the seller from whom I bought it, “This is a copy of a work of art that has never been spent or seen.” The obverse shows a couple of actively occupied honeybees, which pertain to the symbol of industry chosen by Deseret. The reverse shows the all-seeing eye of Jehovah (an emblem of the priesthood) and the clasped hands of fellowship (symbolizing unity); there is also the motto “Holiness to the Lord”, written in the Deseret Alphabet (a type of phonetic system prepared by the Board of Regents of the University of Deseret; the idea behind this experimental method of writing English was to develop a sort of universal system, especially so that newcomers/converts who spoke foreign languages could learn to read English more easily. The final version of the written language utilized thirty-eight characters corresponding to distinct sounds of English).
According to a numismatist named Mr. Charles Larson, this coin “is a purely mythical” concoction. He explains: “A few years back a local newspaper columnist from Salt Lake City named Robert Kirby wrote a short novel with the title Brigham's Bees, and the book had a picture on the cover similar to the example here. The text also described how these coins were supposed to have looked.” In Kirby's book, the master engraver responsible for the coins was a fictional character named Bishop Samuel Woodbury.
The elements on the reverse of this piece, however, do pay literal tribute to coinage made by what was once a small adobe building in Great Salt Lake City known as the Deseret Mint (1848-1851). The most notable emblem missing from the $20 piece is the three-pointed Phrygian crown/miter. Types churned out by the Mint include the 1849 “Pure Gold” 10 Dollars (its issuance actually began in 1848), the 1849 “G.S.L.C.P.G.” (Great Salt Lake City Pure Gold) 2½, 5, 20 Dollars, the 1850 “G.S.L.C.P.G.” 5 Dollars, and the 1860 “Deseret Assay Office Pure Gold” 5 Dollars. Under the auspices of the Church, the early Mormons minted their own coins out of necessity, from gold-dust deposited in their treasury as part of the tithes of congregation members, some of whom had taken part in the historic Gold Rush. The Mint/Assay Office was the first western enterprise to produce private coinage from California gold-dust and they preceded the Californian fractional coinage by more than five months.
After the initial 10 Dollars coin was made, the phrase “Pure Gold” was noticeably absent on the Mint's 4 next coins. Instead, they resorted to the abbreviation “G.S.L.C.P.G.”. Mr. Larson has heard that the “P.G.” portion of these ambiguous initials could have stood for “Provisional Government”, based on the suggestion that Mormon leaders became sensitive to charges that the purity of the precious metal contained in their coins was not up to snuff. It is true that in 1850, an assay was performed on a group of these “native gold” pieces at the Philadelphia branch of the U.S. Mint. The results of these tests revealed that the coins were seriously underweight and debased (they fell short by about 10-20%) and that their “Pure Gold” claim was fraudulent. Customarily, the bullion intended for circulating coinage required the admixture of a small touch of a lesser metal in order to give the soft Au some minimal durability, but the Mormons were willfully overgenerous with those impurities whilst preparing their alloys. When it became public knowledge that there was a problem with the fineness faithfully promised by the coins, they were heavily discounted by bankers and merchants. Following a severe smear campaign, there was widespread melting of the lightweight pieces, which accounts for their rarity today. Mr. Larson thinks that the story of “P.G.” being a shortened form of “Provisional Government” is highly unlikely, because the new dies were already in use for some months before the first assay reports challenging their purported/stated value would be circulated.
According to the 1/28/1850 edition of The Adams Sentinel (Pennsylvania) and the 2/2/1850 edition of the Defiance Democrat (Ohio), “The monetary notions of the Mormons at their Great Salt Lake settlement are no less peculiar, it appears, than their ideas of society and religion. We have a very curious coin in our possession, which is manufactured and exclusively circulated among that remarkable people, and quite to the disparagement, travellers tell us, of every other species of gold currency. Of all the fanciful forms into which our golden wealth is wrought, this sainted shape excels in singularity...It is clumsy, and in execution without merit.” Mr. Larson's opinion seems to corroborate this: “The genius Young possessed for administration and colonization did not, alas, extend to coin design, for though well made, these earliest Mormon gold pieces are generally recognized by numismatists as being among the homeliest coins ever produced.” He elaborates: “The poorly designed, crude devices that first appeared on the 1849 series of Mormon gold coins were so enigmatic that most people who encountered them had very little idea what they were supposed to represent. The ‘eye’ wasn't hard to figure out, nor the symbolism of the handshake, but the big, puffy whatever-it-was (meant to symbolize a Phrygian ‘crown’, rather than the Phrygian [Liberty] Cap) made no sense whatsoever. The round body with a pointed end opposite a big eye, with two little round things off to the side reminded some people of a poorly rendered bee, and the coins were actually dubbed ‘Brigham's Bees’ at the time by the people outside of Utah. That's where the name originated; and Robert Kirby picked up on the term and actually composed a coin that the early Mormons would have been quite pleased with — had they had the talent available to have ever produced it.” The author must have done a fairly convincing job of making the book's coinage sound believable to his readers, because Mr. Larson is amazed at “how many people have approached me when I've been demonstrating the Deseret Mint at some public function or event, and spoken of the Brigham's Bees as though they were an actual historic reality.”
Mr. Larson is also a coinsmith who, since 1998, strikes the only museum-quality replicas “of this rare and fascinating series that have ever been made available by anyone, anywhere.” His “reproductions are painstakingly struck exactly the same way as the pioneer coinage was — by hand, from hand-cut dies...using historically accurate methods and tooling”. The story of the Deseret Mint, and Mr. Larson's facsimiles, can be found at his site:
www.coinsmith.com/books/dmint.htm
www.coinsmith.com/gallery/mormon/mormon_g.htm
Great Web-sites containing detailed information about Deseret are:
dmla.clan.lib.nv.us/docs/nsla/archives/political/historical/hist03.htm
www.lightplanet.com/mormons/daily/history/1844_1877/index.htm
*************************
The eBay seller seems to have plenty of these available. She said she didn't know anything about the coin, though (who made it, etc...), and I'm not sure I believe this.