can i go?
In that field there's been perhaps 70 to 90 or so reales that I can think of that've turned up. And 6 gold coins. And scores of buttons. But it's no longer easy to work. Heck, even "back in the day" a guy would work hard for a single reale (but with less junk than is there now, so it wasn't as punishing back then).
Wow thanks for all this info and the info that led me to that spot Tom! I will send you some better picures of the coin this week.Steve, Thanx for posting that on the kinzli forum too. Reales are hard enough to find in CA as it is (barring those later ones that were arriving and still circulating at the early part of statehood and the gold rush era). But for reales of the Mexican era and Spanish era: The entire non-indian population of CA, prior to ... say .... 1840, was probably numbered only @ 10k or so ? So to find coins from that era, is a needle in hay-stacks.
And to top it all off, you don't content yourself with merely finding a half reale, 1 reale, or 2 reale. You go straight to the top and get an 8 reale! That's like finding a USA silver dollar as your first silver coin.
And I know you worked hard for that puppy. Because I know where you found it
Of all the reales that've been found in that field, I think perhaps 4 were 8 reale denomination. Including two from the Zacatecas mint .
As far as value of yours: If you want to email me some macro shots, I will forward them to a coin collector wheeler dealer friend of mine for his input. Years ago (before the advent of ebay, etc...) reales were usually of no value. It was hard to find buyers here, as most people in the USA tend to collect USA coins, of course. So no matter WHAT the world coin book said, you'd be hard-pressed to find a buyer. Heck, sometimes we'd even find ones that supposedly were not minted in a certain year, or from a mint that supposedly didn't put out that denomination that year, etc... And even having pointed that out to the coin store guy, they still weren't interested. Because fact was, there simply wasn't buyers.
But the advent of the internet, ebay, etc.... changed all that. Now that the "world is smaller", collectors of niche coin categories like that, can indeed "bid up" the value, spur interest etc... On the downside, of course, is there can be gluts in the market of ones previously thought to be rare. Or perhaps still rare, but all the certain niche collectors have found their sample, hence demand for more that surface go down. So it's a mixed bag. So send me some pix via email, and I'll shoot them to my collector friend.
Congratz again!
