Lesher Referendum dollars

In the winter of 1900 a silver-mine owner in Victor, Colorado, began striking his own octagonal silver dollars and asking the public to vote on them with their wallets. They are the most famous pieces of Colorado exonumia, and the most argued over.

Why a mine owner coined money

Joseph W. Lesher was born in Ohio in 1838 and spent some twenty years in the Colorado silver camps as a miner, a mine owner and a real-estate man. He was a free-silver man to the bone: he wanted the federal government to coin silver without limit, and he backed William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and again in 1900. Bryan lost twice. Silver was selling for roughly half the value the free-silver movement claimed for it.

Lesher's answer, in November 1900, was to put silver into circulation himself. He had one-ounce octagonal pieces struck, stamped them with a face value of $1.25, and offered them to the merchants of the Cripple Creek district. Nobody was obliged to take one; the public was being asked, as he put it, for a referendum. He pledged to redeem every piece at face value, and the merchants whose names were stamped on them pledged the same. They circulated in Victor and Cripple Creek and, as the merchant imprints show, in Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Salida, Grand Junction and as far as Holdrege, Nebraska.

The scheme could not pay. Merchants bought the pieces for around 80 to 85 cents each and had to accept them at a dollar or more. Lesher gave it up after 1901, having lost money on it, and died in Victor on July 4, 1918. He is said to have designed the pieces himself; Frank Hurd of Denver cut the first dies and Herman Otto of Denver cut all the later ones, at sixty dollars a pair.

The pieces

All are octagonal, plain-edged, in silver of .950 fineness alloyed with copper. The octagon was chosen so that nothing about them could be mistaken for a United States coin.

• 1900 issues: 35 mm, 480 grains, a full troy ounce of silver, face value $1.25.
• 1901 issues: 32 mm, 412½ grains, the weight of a standard silver dollar, face value $1.00, carrying the design-patent number and no mention of banks.

Nearly every variety shows "Pikes Peak Silver Mine" on the obverse with a space below for the merchant's name and a serial number. The serial numbers were punched or engraved by hand in no particular sequence, so every surviving piece is individually numbered and no two are alike. Varieties struck without the obverse serial number are given an "a" suffix in the catalog.

Varieties

Two numbering systems run in parallel. Farran Zerbe published the first study in the American Journal of Numismatics in 1917 after interviewing Lesher, and his Zerbe numbers (Z-1 to Z-18) are still quoted. Hibler and Kappen's So-Called Dollars assigned HK-787 through HK-797, and the second edition added HK-1016 through HK-1021a for the varieties the first edition missed. A frequent error, and one we made ourselves before checking, is to assume the Lesher run continues past HK-797; it does not. HK-798 begins the Elder dollars.

The counts are the figures given on the So-Called Dollars site and should be read as estimates. A jeweler in Florence, C. W. Thomas, is reported to have taken Lesher dollars, but no piece with his imprint has been found. Of the thousand Bumstead pieces struck, about 700 were sold and exactly three came back for redemption, which tells you how the public voted: they kept them.

How many were struck, and how many are left

Nobody agrees, and the honest answer is a range. Lesher himself said 2,000 to 3,000 in 1913 and 3,500 the next year; Zerbe settled on about 3,000. Adna Wilde, who spent decades tracing individual pieces by serial number, worked the figure down to 1,869. Wilde knew of 384 survivors in 1978. The 2017 book by Leonard, Hallenbeck and Wilde puts the number now documented at about 600, less than a third of the issue, with a story of a coffee-can hoard that has never been confirmed. Whatever the true mintage, more than a thousand pieces are unaccounted for.

The Secret Service and the dies

Private coinage had been illegal since the Act of June 8, 1864. Lesher and his die-sinker worded the pieces carefully, but the phrase "at face value" was enough, and federal agents seized his first dies. No Lesher dollars were ever confiscated. He responded by applying for a trademark on "Referendum" in February 1901 (registered in April as No. 36,192) and a design patent (No. 34,359, April 16, 1901), and the 1901 pieces carry the patent number as a shield. The 2017 book traces what became of every die: some seized, some apparently thrown out by his widow. The Secret Service file on the matter is in the American Numismatic Society archives.

Collections and sales

The reference collection for a century was William C. Henderson's. Henderson was mayor of Colorado Springs and treasurer of the American Numismatic Association, and his twenty pieces, covering seventeen of the eighteen varieties, passed to his grandson Christopher Marchase. The set was shown at the 2017 ANA convention in Denver and sold by Kagin's at the National Money Show in Atlanta on February 28, 2020. The ANA's Money Museum in Colorado Springs keeps Lesher dollars on view in its Colorado numismatic history exhibit, forty minutes up the interstate from the Pueblo merchant who once accepted them.

What to read

• Robert D. Leonard Jr., Kenneth L. Hallenbeck and Adna G. Wilde Jr., Forgotten Colorado Silver: Joseph Lesher's Defiant Coins. The History Press, 2017, 128 pp., ISBN 978-1-4671-3525-2. The standard account; Wilde's research completed by two of his colleagues.
• Farran Zerbe, "Private Silver Coins Issued in the United States: The Lesher or Referendum Pieces," American Journal of Numismatics 51 (1917), pp. 153–174. The origin of the Zerbe numbers.
• Adna G. Wilde Jr., "Lesher Referendum Dollars: Where Are They Today?", The Numismatist, February 1978. The first census.
• The Lesher page at So-Called Dollars, the fullest free listing online, variety by variety.
• Lesher dollars have been listed in the Red Book since the 1957 edition.

Sources

• So-Called Dollars, Lesher Dollars: biography, dates, dimensions, die-sinkers, variety table and mintages, trademark and patent numbers.
• E-Sylum, the Numismatic Bibliomania Society newsletter: announcement of Forgotten Colorado Silver; review (Lesher's dates, Wilde's 1,869, the 600 census); follow-up on the dies and the 1864 Act.
• NGC, Lesher Dollars and Kagin's to auction the Henderson-Marchase collection: the 1900/1901 distinction, merchant trades, the collection's history.
• Coin World, ANA expands Money Museum Gold Rush exhibits (2016). ANA, Colorado Numismatic History virtual exhibit; Adna G. Wilde Jr. obituary.
• ISBN confirmed against Open Library.