INDIAN PEACE MEDAL 1834 PIERRE CHOUTEAU MISSOURI OUTFIT

PLEASE BID NOW!

Some auctions end when you are at work, or sleeping or watching your favorite TV show.  I often get frantic calls from someone who forgot to bid... They tell me if they knew the item would have sold so cheap they would have bid!

ALL listed with NO RESERVE!

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Many months ago a fellow phonograph collector, who collects a lot of other things, brought me some Indian Peace Medals to list for him on ebay.   I have listed a lot of phonographs and parts for him and was happy with the outcome, so he thought he would give the medals a try.  I asked him how he got them and he told me from the widow of an elderly phonograph collector both of us knew.  As soon as he mentioned him I remembered running into the elderly collector at a flea market many years ago. We had not seen each other in a long time and the old fart commented on how fat I had gotten since we last met.  He also told me his passion for phonographs had softened as he was now collecting Indian Peace Medals!  He asked me if I knew anything about Peace medals and I had not.  Now all these years later my phonograph consignor shows up with them.   I asked him if he has an expert opinion as to age and quality and all he had was a book on peace medals. The book did not say how to tell a real one from a fake, so I kept them and told the consignor I would ask some coin collector friends and any one else I think of that could help us.  I asked three different coin collectors and two said they weren’t sure, but one did say it looked and felt real to him, but he was not 100% positive.  Recently I took them to a local gun dealer who also deals in frontier antiques.  He said he has seen them before, but does not deal in them because they are so easy to copy.   He told me the only way he knows to tell for sure if they are real or fake is to measure them with a micrometer and if someone has one that is a documented real one we could compare the sizes.  He said a copy should be smaller because of shrinkage when cast from a mold made of an original.  (The frontier gun dealer was most excited about this one... He said Pierre Chouteau is famous amoung the black powder trapper guys.) That sounded like a good idea to me, so I bought a micrometer and took pictures of the results. After all this it dawned on me today that metal expands and contracts with heat and cold.   I took the photos outside on a warm sunny day (Here is Fargo, North Dakota 45 degrees in November is a warm day!)  If it was 30 below zero or 100 above I wonder how much different the size would be? (When taking the photos I tilted the board the coin was on to catch the light to show detail, but the photo makes the coin look out of round...  This is more round than it looks.)

THE WINNING BIDDER HAS THREE DAYS TO INSPECT THIS AND RETURN IT FOR A FULL REFUND, except shipping. IF NOT SATISFIED.