05/22/2026
San Quentin State Prison as inmate #20316 Clement Duchesne
The Los Angeles River ran low in the spring of 1903, leaving exposed mud banks and thickets of willow that offered a temporary shield from the growing city. For Clement Duchesne, a 42-year-old French immigrant, the riverbed was not a scenic landscape, but a makeshift laboratory.
Clement adjusted his spectacles, his fingers stained a dark, chemical yellow from nitric acid. Beside him, his partner, Emile Bruder, was carefully polishing a newly minted silver coin. It bore the distinct profile of Lady Liberty, dated 1898. To the untrained eye, it was a half-dollar. To Clement, it was a masterpiece of plaster molds and lead alloy.
"Steady, Emile," Clement murmured in their native French, his voice barely rising above the rustle of the wind. "The gloss must look worn, not fresh from the fire. A merchant in a rush never looks closely at a dull coin."
Months earlier, the two men had been sweating under the harsh Mexican sun, panning for gold in placer mines that yielded far more gravel than glory. Frustrated by bad luck, Clement had convinced Emile that making money was far easier than digging for it. They packed up, crossed back into California, and rented a cramped room in Los Angeles. There, they traded shovels for flasks of acid, metal files, and bags of cheap pewter.
But Clement was a miner, not a master criminal. Their operation was clumsy, loud, and smelled strongly of sulfur.
On March 5, 1903, the scent of their latest batch caught more than just the river air. Officer D.V. Helman was patrolling the riverbanks, his eyes sharp for vagrants or smugglers. When he spotted two well-dressed Frenchmen crouching in the brush, surrounded by glass bottles and strange metal blocks, his hand instinctively dropped to his holster.
"Hold it right there!" Helman shouted.
Emile panicked, dropping a heavy cloth sack. Clement bolted, his boots slipping in the river mud. The chase was short. Out of breath and out of luck, both men were tackled to the ground. When Helman opened the dropped sack, twenty counterfeit half-dollars clinked together—bright, heavy, and completely bogus.
By September, the romance of the American West had vanished completely. A federal judge was not amused by the "novice" counterfeiters. Clement was handed a five-year sentence and transferred to San Quentin State Prison as inmate #20316.
For the next four years, Clement traded his riverbed laboratory for the grey stone walls of the prison. The nitric acid was replaced by the smell of jute mills and sea salt from the San Francisco Bay. When he was finally released in May 1907, he walked out of the prison gates with a clean suit, a few dollars in his pocket, and a profound respect for the genuine currency of the United States.
