Gold
Dollar
The California gold rush was not the first gold rush in the
United States, and it wasn’t the first to make people
want to get their hands on gold coins. The first one-dollar
coins weren’t even made by the government! They were made
by a jeweler in North Carolina, who charged a small fee to melt
people’s gold dust and gold nuggets into small coins.
People liked the coins because they were easier to trade than
gold nuggets or gold dust, and if you dropped them on the floor,
you could pick them up. (If you dropped your gold dust, you
would spend a lot of time on your hands and knees trying to
sweep it all up).
After
gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California,
however, the government had to get into the gold coin-making
business, and two new coins were designed and minted—the
one dollar gold piece, and the Double Eagle, a coin worth
$20. The one-dollar coin was the smallest-diameter coin ever
made, and the Double Eagle was the largest.
A dollar’s-worth
of gold doesn’t amount to much, so the biggest problem
with the one-dollar coins was that people had a hard time
keeping track of them. The first one-dollar gold coin (Liberty
Head Type I) was even smaller than today’s Roosevelt
dime. You know how easy it is to lose a dime. Imagine how
frustrated you would be if you lost a tiny gold dollar—your
whole day’s pay. After listening to people complain,
the Mint director decided to try to make the coins larger,
but thinner. That way, they would still have one-dollar’s-worth
of gold in them. These coins (the Indian Head Type II) didn’t
last long either. They wore down too easily, and the Mint
had a hard time getting all of the features to show up when
the coins were struck.
The Chief Engraver,
James Barton Longacre, tried one more time by making the head
on the coin flatter. These coins were much better, and they
stayed in circulation until 1889. People thought the head
on the coin looked like an Indian Princess. That’s how
the Indian Princess Gold Dollar got its name
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