Gold?

No -- artistic fraud

At the 2022 meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver, Jolyon Ralph, the founder of MinDat, the online mineral database, visited the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) Mineral Museum. As he often does, he posted an online tour of the museum on MinDat.

Among the many beautiful specimens, one caught my eye: a small but well-made box of “crystallized gold.” It caught my eye because there’s a box in the mineral case at Quarry Brewing (which I curated; the Quarry example is in the photo above) here in Butte almost identical to the one on display at the CSM mineral museum. It created quite a kerfuffle when it came in to the Quarry maybe 8 or 10 years ago, since the label says it is 850 fine gold, “3 oz, 4 dwt.” “Dwt” means hundredweight, and a hundredweight is a twentieth of an ounce, so that would make the gold in this box 3.2 ounces, times 85% (that’s what the “850 fine” means), or 2.72 ounces of gold. In 2013 gold was over $2000 an ounce; why would someone give something worth more than $5,000 to the Quarry Brewery mineral collection? Granted, in my prejudiced opinion it’s probably the best mineral collection in a brewery, but it’s not really a museum.

Well, examination indicated that it’s not really gold, or at best something painted with gold paint or some non-gold metallic paint. At least that’s what I thought back then, without taking it out of the box in which the specimens are securely mounted.

Fast forward to Jolyon’s photo of the similar box labeled “crystallized gold” at the CSM mineral museum. It is there as an example of an elaborate, and for a time, successful, hoax.

Archie V. Willson was arrested in Colorado July 12, 1963, for the fraudulent sale of gold specimens to individuals and museums. The specimens WERE gold, so they stood up to simple metallurgical testing, but they were made with gold leaf, not solid gold, and they were created with the explicit goal of defrauding purchasers. Willson confessed to the crime.

Mineral cabinet at Quarry Brewing in Butte, as it was a few years ago.

Gold leaf is typically about a tenth of a micron thick, or one ten-thousandth of a millimeter. That amounts to a thickness of only a few hundred atoms of gold, so there isn’t a lot of gold there. Gold leaf is cheap enough to use in printing book covers and gilt page edges (albeit usually for fancy books) and even in some culinary applications. Gold leaf is vastly cheaper than these specimens would be if they were solid gold.

Willson learned a technique of mixing gold leaf with banana oil, a variety of the Orotone process in photography, with powdered gold leaf together with the banana oil as a binder. Essentially he made gold paint. Willson said he learned it from “a Death Valley desert rat named Horse Thief,” to create his products by applying the mixture to quartz. It took him a few days to a couple weeks to make one sample, but his investment typically garnered him a 300% profit or more. According to the news reports of the day, he manufactured 36 fake gold specimens in their fancy little boxes and sold them for a total net income of about $5,000 in 1963 – close to $50,000 in 2022 dollars after an inflation adjustment.

Willson added something to a hidden bottom in his little boxes to give the impression of the heft expected from these relatively large pieces of “gold.” They would not have stood up to direct measurements of their specific gravity, however.

Willson was sentenced to two to six years in prison, and apparently served time in the prison at Cañon City, Colorado. He was out when he reportedly jumped probation in 1964 but was captured. It’s not clear from news reports I found exactly what happened to him after that, but in the 1970s he was supposedly making the gold samples to sell as works of art, labeled as such and not offered as natural gold specimens. He died in 1985 at age 63.

Since the specimens at Quarry Brewing are in a box with a label as “crystallized gold,” and the woodwork, hinge, and typing on the label are identical to the example at the CSM museum, I suspect that this is one of the 36 that Willson made in 1963 to defraud rather than anything he made as legitimate art later. If this were solid gold at the weight indicated on the label it would have a melt value today (September 2024) of about $7,221. As mineral specimens it could possibly be at least $10,000 or more. But the actual value of the gold leaf in the sample is probably no more than $5 or $10 even at today’s prices. As a work of art, and an example of a classic case of mineral specimen fraud from 60 years ago, it certainly has some value, but mostly this is just an interesting curiosity.

Here’s an example of real gold: