19th Century Gambling Wheel Treasure

I'm so excited to share this with you all! I put well over 100 hours into a professional conservation of this wheel.

When it was found, the wheel itself was painted over with silver paint which hid the true beauty and real numbers. As I began cleaning it, I found that the numbers underneath were hand engraved. I also found a corrosion stress fracture like what occurred in the liberty bell. There was also a faint verdigris on the back. This led me to a curiosity of what the wheel was made of. I took some sample filings to an assayer, and to my astonishment, the wheel is 15% gold, 35% copper, and the other 50% is a mix of other metals that both precious and not. I will include a photo of the x-ray fluorescence printout.

After that mystery was solved, I realized I was working with a different class of object. There were many clues of its age. The most obvious was the Victorian style. The typeface is a didone Bodoni variant, I discovered through research. The brass pole is very old and somewhat imperfect, especially in its crude seam. This wheel has no modern bearing. It has a greased sheet of lead wrapped around a spindle. The remaining original pins seem to be lost wax castings, as does the actual wheel, in my opinion. No two spokes on the wheel, which resemble trees of life to me, are the same. When you look at the back of the wheel you can see it has been "skeletonized" with depressions to minimize the weight of it caused by the precious metal alloy.

The wood base has old curved saw marks around the front like you see in very old furniture. I believe it may be oak. The life came right back to it with a little turpentine and linseed oil.

Now, this was an attic find that I saved from the dumpster. There were many gambling antiques, including very old horse racing photos and also alaskan gold rush photos. I will share some other finds and parts of my collection as time goes on. I feel this wheel was not made in Alaska, but could have been. I believed for a long time that it either came from Dawson during the gold rush or some other Yukon town. However, after doing some research on the Civil War recently, I am beginning to think that this may have been used to hide gold in the South. Either the Knights of the Gold Circle or a family that worried of confiscation.

The only thing keeping me from that conclusion is the Jewish or Kabbalah symbolism in the wheel. The numbers form no known game and there are 72 of them, just like in precious metal Kabbalah prayer wheels for the 72 names of God. Also if you add all of the numbers together it equals 635. In the 10 commandments within the 5 books of Moses there are 620 characters. 620+10+5=635. Also the highest number on the wheel is 50. Moses received the ten commandments after 50 days of self evaluation. There are 50 gates of wisdom, days of Omer, questions God asks Job…
The tally of numbers on the wheel is as follows
5 - 4
6 - 4
7 - 20
8 - 20
9 - 16
10 -1
11 -1
12 -1
13 -1
15 -1
16 -1
20 -1
50 -1

I have tried to contact museums and auction houses to gain some insight, but it seems maybe the story is not very believable. There is one stamp or hallmark on the back which seems to be a 35. After weighing the wheel and looking at the concentration, this may be how many ounces of gold it contains or it could be a hallmark. I don't know.

I invite you all to share your comments, questions, and other input. Sometimes treasure is hidden in plain sight!

 

What's the diameter of the wheel?

Personally I like the way it looked in the 3rd photo a lot better, in the future please consider leaving stuff alone unless restoration is absolutely necessary. Just polishing the brass pole probably cut the value in half. The brass had a "killer" patina that you can't get back now.

And stripping the old paint off the wheel, ooops, gotta take off 50% of what's left value-wise. But if you plan to keep it always, the change in collector value isn't an issue because obviously you like it better the way it is now. I just hate to see interesting, original items ruined by well-intentioned but perhaps uninformed "restorers."

 

The diameter of the wheel is 2ft.

Personally, I like the way it looks in the first photo. In the future please consider leaving the decision to clean an item up to the owner.

Besides, without cleaning the wheel, it looked like an old victorian flywheel that had been painted. The numbers looked stamped, too. There is a huge difference between a stamped leftover flywheel and a giant piece of hand engraved jewelry.

 

The brass is also deeply stained and very full of character, even after a gentle jeweler's rouge polish.

I believe a restoration would entail replacing all of the pins to match each other and actually painting or filling in the numbers with whatever they had in them before someone changed the wheel. There are still remnants of black paint in some of the numbers.

Someday I'd like to do this, possibly.

Here are some more photos. In the first, you can see the engraver made a mistake and almost turned the 9 into an 8. Then, to cover the mistake, the line was filled with silver.

 

That's the most unusual metallurgical analysis I have ever seen.

 

It's a pretty thing. The casting of the thing is a bit rough. Why does the back disc some auto thingy to me?

Are the numbers stamped? They look like an unusual font.

No matter how old it is, I think it's handmade, one of a kind, perhaps a fantasy piece? The metal content is quite bizarre - wonder what was melted to make this?

 

sniped on the metals matter! hah!

 

The numbers are definitely engraved. As you can see, with the new photos I just added, a 9 was fixed after it almost became an 8. I think it is possible raw ores were melted in combination with gold and added copper. Maybe some nickel and zinc for bleaching.

There is more too, The brass pole is actually filled with lead. I am driven to think that maybe some gold was entombed in the lead in there, too….

 

The wheel itself looks like a sand casting.

The pole looks to be a later addition, or replacement.

I keep getting the vibe of some thief who was a sculptor hid the goods! lol

 

Thank you for adding the extra photos.
Yes you are right, the numbers are engraved, not stamped.

 

I don't think you understand the story, the caliber of the item, or what my intentions were in preserving it. That is keeping the oxidation from compromising the metal in various places anymore...

I got that vibe, as well. There was a story of a crooked gambler in Alaska that had rigged games. Actually, part of his story is that he had to flee and left gold hidden here. Many people believed he buried it, but what if it was in plain sight? This would explain the strange numbers.

 

"Cortez D. Thompson, better known in Denver as Cort, was the card-playing, free-wheeling husband of Martha A. Silks, a madam during Denvers lurid red-light-district days. Cort went to Alaska during the gold rush and is said to have accumulated a fortune of $50,000 in gold through crooked card games. When he became involved in a brawl with Jefferson Randolph and Soapy Smith, Cort fled Alaska, leaving his gold buried someplace in or near the town of Chitina."

https://dailyoddsandends.wordpress.com/2012/08/18/lost-treasure-in-alaska/

 

Interesting-looking object - I know nothing about this sort of thing. Appreciate the sharing. I'm one of the people who likes old photos, so look forward to you sharing the ones you have, later.

 

Thank you. I will satisfy your curiosity a little… What you see are two Larss and Duclos photographed performers from Dawson during the gold rush. The other is the first Alaska Airlines plane taken by Hewitt's Photo Shop. It is an old Stinson sitting on skis in Anchorage. It was operated by McGee airways which eventually became Alaska Airlines. All are hand colored.

I believe the other wheel that this thread isn't about is a 1920's H.C. Evans.

 

Orig. Post: "I invite you all to share your comments, questions, and other input."
But later: "Personally, I like the way it looks in the first photo. In the future please consider leaving the decision to clean an item up to the owner."
Guess he didn't really mean "I invite you all..."

 

Listen, I'm doing my best to be nice here, but I used the EXACT same wording as you did. I do appreciate your advice, but we will have to agree to disagree. I'm siding with the antique roadshow on this one.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/tips/polishingmetals.html

I didn't mean to sound abrasive but, in fairness, you came out with guns blazing essentially saying I don't know what I'm doing and the value has been diminished. I don't believe either are true. If you understood the story, the true nature of this object never would have been discovered in the first place had I not preserved it. I know the state I found it in was not its intended state, and it is completely unique, thus there is no standard to hold it to. It is original. No new parts. Just cleaned and preserved. A tiny bit of the original finish still remains if you look close enough in the grooves of the wood.

Neglect does not add value to brass unless you value it...

 

Welcome, Vern, but cool it!

This is a "forum," a gathering of people who discuss various objects and methods of dealing with them. Given Spring's field of expertise, "coming out with guns blazing," was extraordinarily apt, but...actually, he wasn't. Blazing, I mean. He was expressing his opinion and/or his preference.

The quote from the Roadshow gentleman was excellent. The subject of the surface of whatever your widget is, can often bring up different opinions from people who are "experts" in the same field.

From the non-experts, one gets comments about the "patina" on silverware...which is hogwash. The Keno brothers rhapsodize about a card table from 1730, with scratches and dents and white marks and bruises. And rightfully so. But it goes in a museum, not Mrs. Smith's pretty living room. A copy of the same piece, however -- the one made in 1940, can be re-surfaced without guilt.

Part of one's decisions about such matters can be addressed by considering the purpose of the widget, the original intent by the creator, and the present use (or non-use) of that widget.

One assumes that the architects who commissioned copper roofs for their buildings, knew darn well that they would eventually turn sort of Nile green. On the other hand, the masters who made those wonderful copper pots one sees in English country house kitchens, wanted them kept polished. Not only for the look, but because chewing on bits of verdigris in the stew is not recommended.

Despite the numerous people who try to sell unpolished silver, tarnish is NOT patina. Anything having to do with food or drink needs to be CLEAN. If it's a sterling statue of Diana the Huntress -- it's owner's choice.

In the case of your wheel, I, personally, think getting back to the designer's intent was the right way to go, because it is the kind of thing one wants to know what it is actually supposed to look like.

So, while I quite see why Spring and the Keno brothers think as they do, restoration and conservation need to be considered as well.

 

If it really does contain 35 ounces of gold, it's off the refinery for me.

 

I love the photos, especially of the performers. I collect photos of people in costumes. Are the two women identified on the photos at all?