This BIG WHEEL engraved chip is a very unusual uncoded chip and very hard to find and it will never be Seymour coded, but it does have an interesting history. A few years ago I found several of them in an antiques store in Tombstone, about 40 miles from home. When I found them I thought EURICA!!! Another "Holy Grail" meaning I found an uncoded chip! Not so fast Smitty... something is just not right with these chips. There were BIG WHEELS available in Red, White, and Blue (two whites, a red & a blue) and they were priced reasonable at about $14+- as I recall. They all had variations from side to side and chip to chip but that is not all that unusual for engraved chips circa 1880. I bought both white chips, brought them home and put one of them up for sale on It sold for about $50 if I remember right. So I went back to Tombstone to buy the rest of them but they were gone. I flipped through the binder picking out some very nice chips and there was a BIG WHEEL chip that was not there the week before. It was made of celluloid and I remember thinking... this is not only unusual but also very strange because I had never seen an example of an engraved clay design on a celluloid chip. As I flipped further through the pages of the binder, there was a BIG WHEEL chip priced at about $35 and it was made of some type of faux ivory. I pulled both chips out of the bider and placed them side by side and they were the same BIG WHEEL profile design with slight variations! About this time I am thinking... I want to meet the person who made these chips because they are spectacular creations of a lost art! How were they made? How were they inked? What a great talent to be able to recreate these great old chips!
At the time I was hanging out at the local bar on Saturday nights because they had a FREE poker tourney. I could usually do quite well against the locals but one night there were some old cowboys playing and I lost my chips fairly late in the tourney and found myself sitting at the bar waiting to see who would win the tourney. The old cowboy that knocked me out came over and ordered drinks at the bar and we started talking. He told me that there was six of them that played poker for money every week and he invited me to their next game. I took him up on the offer and about a week later I was playing poker with the boys in Tombstone. It was a $50 buy in no limit T Hold'em. These guys were very tuff looking, they played a mean style of poker, and I knock out of the tourney just before the money. While waiting for the next tourney, I was talking to Pete who invited me to the game. Pete is in his mid 70s and had lived in Tombstone all of his life and owns Tombstone Pawn. We were talking poker and eventually we started talking about poker chips too. I told Pete about the BIG WHEEL chip that I had found in Tombstone and he told me he was familiar with the chip and this is what he told me.
The chip was sold on the streets of Tombstone in 1979 during the Tombstone Centennial. I asked him who made the chips? He said they were sold on the streets by Hippie Artists! RU Kidding Me? And he said NO! He told me that there was a group of hippie artists that settled in Bisbee, Arizona just a few years before. They made the chips and sold them on the streets of Tombstone during the Centennial in 1979! OK Pete... Please tell me more!
Bisbee Arizona is the home of the Copper Queen mine that opened in 1877 and closed in the mid 1970s. The Copper Queen mine in Bisbee was one of the richest mines in American History and it operated for nearly 100 years. Bisbee was the richest city between St. Louis and San Francisco but in the 70s, the Queen Mine was closing and in a few short years in the 70s, the city of Bisbee was nearly a ghost town. The land was cheap and houses were abandoned. Pete told me that the city placed adds in several California newpapers and the town was soon inhabitated by artists looking for the simple life amplified by the hippie culture from the 70s. Bisbee is located just a couple miles from the Mexican border.

The BIG WHEEL chips were made by a very talented artist who knew the secrets of how our Antique Chips were inked. I do not think that this artist made all of the BIG WHEEL chips but rather taught others how to make them too. It is very interesting to me because this is a "lost art" but it was taught by a very clever teacher who no doubt has some very nice artwork that is still unknown.