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CARSON CITY & HOW THE WEST WAS WON
By Greg Capps
No other mint evokes the imagery of our American Old West better than the Carson City Mint. They produced silver and gold coins with ore mined from the famous Comstock Lode and other Western mines between 1870 and 1893 and was the only U.S. mint to carry a dual character mintmark on its coins: the famous "CC".
 | Front Elevation, U.S. Branch Mint, Carson City, Nevada
By Alfred B. Mullet, 1866
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Among the coins struck at this Old West mint was the popular Morgan Silver Dollar, named after its designer, George T. Morgan. One of the most collected silver coins in our history, the Morgan Silver Dollar was first struck in 1878 and continued to be minted through 1904 with a single year reprise in 1921. However, the Carson City Mint did not mint the Morgan Silver Dollar after 1893.
The Carson City Morgans can be quickly divided into two groups: the ones minted between 1878 and 1885 and the ones struck between 1889 and 1893. The key date of the first group, particularly in grades above Very Fine, is the 1879-CC. In the second group, the 1889-CC is the prize by far.
 
Relative to their contemporaries produced at the other mints, the Carson City products have low mintages. However, because of some hoards created through storage, some of the dates are much more available in uncirculated grades than you would expect from their low mintages. This is particularly true for the 1882, 1883, and 1884-CCs, all of which had mintages of just a little over 1 million coins apiece. As it turns out, few were released into circulation, and more than half of each date was still available in uncirculated condition at the time of the General Services Administration sales of unreleased Carson City silver dollars.
For all that its products are revered today, the Carson City Mint was unpopular during its lifetime. In fact, according to Q. David Bowers, writing in Silver Dollars & Trade Dollars of the United States: A Complete Encyclopedia, the local railroads set up tariffs that made it cheaper to take bullion from the nearby mines all the way to San Francisco to be turned into coins than to deliver it to the Carson City Mint.
Still, with all the contemporary opposition to it, the Carson City Mint turned out gold and silver coins that continue to fire the imaginations of today's collectors. Probably none of these coins are more interesting and widely dispersed than the Carson City Morgan dollars. Today, these Dollars can be the foundation of any portfolio - as an investment, part of a collection, or as a way to preserve money in times of inflation or instability.
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