I watched The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly yesterday, and at the end of the movie (SPOILER) Clint Eastwood's character rides into the sunset with $100,000 of Confederate gold in the form of coins. This inflation calculator indicates that this would equate to approximately $1.5 million today (using the dollar value rather than the gold value).
How would an individual in that era go about converting that into usable currency? Could he just take it into a bank and get a letter of credit? How accessible were banking services of that value to the average person in the street? Or was gold readily traded in its natural form? I presume that even in that case he would have to melt the gold down to disguise it's origin. Would it be suitable for large transactions, for example a property purchase, without drawing undue attention?
The gold would have been negotiable. Banks in the West took gold on deposit and most merchants traded in gold - particularly in coin form that was recognized as having real gold that gave it value. And by the way, gold was selling for roughly $16 an ounce at the time, which means a $100,000 in gold was roughly 6250 ounces or roughly $8.3 million today.