Gold Dollar Coins

The USA still produces gold dollar coins, but there are some important differences between the gold dollars of pioneer america and today.

The biggest difference is that most of todays USA gold dollar coin are not gold. They are just gold colored. There are a few exceptions though, such as the presidential first lady series of real gold dollars issued by the US mint.

Consumers are not crazy about modern golden coins such as the Sacagawea "golden dollar" even though the U.S. Mint's has spent millions to promote it. The mint stopped making Susan B. Anthony dollars in 1999, after 20 years of pushing them, because consumers said they looked too much like quarters.

The Sacagawea dollar is purposely made of a gold-colored alloy so it doesn't resemble any other U.S. coin. Critics of the coins say they're too heavy to carry, too cumbersome to use, too hard to get from banks and, ultimately, not worth the trouble.

By contrast, golden dollars from the pioneer days really were made of gold. They were also a lot more popular than their modern day counterparts. Perhaps because they were minted in the days of the gold rush.

In the Carolina gold rush of the 1830s, a North Carolina jeweler by the name of Alt Christoph Bechtler offered to turn prospectors’ raw gold into coins. By 1840 he had produced over $2.2 million in gold coinage, almost half of this was in the form of gold dollars. All this was perfectly legal at the time.

The US Congress also wanted to make use of all the excess gold created during the gold rushes of Carolina and California. But it took almost 19 years before official US minted gold dollars started being produced by the US mint.

The first of these gold dollar coins was the “liberty head” type designed by Joseph Longacre and minted from 1849 to 1854. This coin was actually ¾ the size of a present day dime, only 13mm in diameter and proved easy to lose. Not a good property for a gold coin.

A redesign by the mint created the second and third types of gold dollar coin. These were the “Indian Head” types. The small head type was produced from 1854 to 1856. This coin was 15mm in diameter but the mint had problems striking it properly. It only lasted 2 years before it had to be redesigned yet again.

The large head type came out in 1856 with a slightly larger Indian head and a flatter relief. That was enough to solve the production problems and the coin stayed in production until 1889.

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