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Found 1773 Spanish Reale in Shockingly Good Shape

Last summer a friend and I were detecting a site when I found this 1773 Spanish reale in shockingly good shape. It was about four inches down. This was at a site along the El Camino Reale trail in central CA. We knew that there was a small and short lived trading post on the spot in the mid 1800's and there were a lot of corresponding seated coins found. However, we also knew that it was in the area of one of D'Anza'a camps as he mapped the inland trail of California in the spring of 1776.

In those days there was really no such thing as coin collecting and therefore the reales that we did find were extremely worn and very thin. I know that the same night I found this one my friend found an 1812 reale but like the other reales found, it was extremely slick and you could barely read it. Being as the reales weren't made very well to begin with, we can say with almost certainly that there is no way this coin could have been carried around for the 80 years necessary to make it to the era of the trading post and still look so detailed. The picture doesn't even do it justice. The fact that it was most likely dropped from one of D'Anza's party makes sense perfectly with the amount of wear it has. Further excursions found other relics from that earlier time period but we didn't find anymore coins.

That's not surprising however, as we know from the journal entries that they only camped there for 1 night and there were only around 12 men in the entire party at this point in the trail. It's just soooo cool knowing almost without a doubt that in all likelyhood this coin was dropped less than a year after our country existed. And the possibilty that this coin travelled with D'Anza as he was the first to map the inland trail of California just overwhelms me. I purchased this Musketeer Advantage detector from you in December of 2001.

Thanks, Carraig

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