Item of the Week: Dollar is reminder of harsh Old West living
Before the famous Carson City Morgans came the 1870-CC Seated Liberty dollar, a scarce first-year issue with a story rooted in the Old West.
Images courtesy Heritage Auctions
Dollars associated with the Carson City Mint are special. The vast silver supply in the West provided the legislative push that authorized Morgan dollars. The Carson City, Nev., area was the heart of the silver-mining region, so the association of silver dollars and Carson City has always been a natural one.
Collectors also consider it special to have a dollar from Carson City, as generally speaking, Carson City dollars are
low mintage and sometimes low quality. The Carson City facility was a crude frontier facility compared to other facilities of the day, so there was a limited amount it could do in terms of production. Not only was it a frontier facility, but the number of collectors in the region at the time, putting aside top-quality examples, was limited, which further compounds the problem of finding choice specimens of Carson City coins. A bag of Carson City silver dollars found in government storage in the 1960s helped this problem. The ensuing Carson City silver dollar sale provided nice examples of most Carson City Morgan dates and interested collectors.
These sales, which resulted in enormous publicity for Carson City Morgans, added to their legend. Dubbed “the coins Jesse James never got,” Carson City Morgans became associated with one of the legendary outlaws of the Wild West, whether appropriate or not.
Despite the interest over the coins of Carson City, minimal attention is paid to the first Carson City dollars, beginning with the 1870-CC, which was the first silver dollar produced at the Carson City facility. Of course, the 1870-CC was a Seated Liberty – not one of the more heavily collected Morgans. That likely has an impact, as people study Morgans extensively and discuss famous Morgan dollar collections, but less is said or written about Seated Liberty dollars.
Another factor may be that while the 1870-CC was an important and historic coin, there was an 1870-S silver dollar that did not even have an official mintage recorded. The 1870-S was probably struck as part of the festivities surrounding the new San Francisco facility, but no one is certain. While it might take a back seat to the 1870-S, the 1870-CC takes a back seat in importance to very few other silver dollars. Moreover, the 1870-CC is no slouch when it comes to rarity. The official mintage of the 1870-CC dollar was 12,462. That mintage is about a bad two minutes’ worth of production today and is very low for any U.S. dollar.
There is also a bit of mystery about the 1870-CC. There are rumors that many were underweight and were melted. There is no proof, but it’s a possibility, as it was the first year for silver-dollar production at a crude facility.
Even if many were not melted officially, it’s worth remembering that while a few nice ones might have been saved as souvenir pieces, they were released into a frontier setting at a time when many collectors did not collect by year and mintmark but strictly by year, so any 1870 would suffice for their collections. Most owners of the 1870-CC silver dollars probably slid them across bars instead of carefully preserving them.
Despite its historical importance and scarcity, an 1870-CC is not that expensive today. A G-4 costs roughly $3,200. An XF-40, which probably only slid across a couple of Old West bars, is $7,750.
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