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Sale 4
Lot 1445
The Seldom Offered 1873-CC Seated Liberty Dollar. AU-50. Signs of an old cleaning, so the luster has disappeared, but the fields on this rarity are without the heavy blemishes usually seen on CC dollars. A tiny rim bump by star 9, but generally the rims are very nice. Carson City regularly struck coins with considerable sharpness, and this one's no exception. In point of fact, this piece has the overall detail and look of an AU55 coin, but we have netted it down five points because of the surfaces. Only 2,300 were struck. The combined grading services have reviewed only about 50 of them. That's rare.
Everybody in coins knows about this difficult date and that it was the final Seated dollar from Carson City. Collectors universally realize its importance. But what do we know of the year itself? Without some historical perspective, what is this, after all, but just another tough coin? Yet the '73-CC dollar is a lot more than that. Grant was in his final term as President, struggling with the issues of Reconstruction in the East and South. It was the age of those ragged scoundrels called Carpetbaggers. President Grant probably already had the cancer which took his life in 1885--one of the ravages of the war he had helped the Union to win. For numismatists today, of course, this important year signaled the passage of the Coinage Act of 1873, in which goldbugs of the time managed to persuade Congress to demonitize silver--which of course was the reason Carson City would coin no dollars the next year (although the new Trade Dollar would take its place in the coining machines, it was not to be seen in use in America itself but was for foreign exchange only). Congress granted itself, meantime, a 50% raise in pay--which came to be dubbed the "Salary Grab" Act by dissenters. In the Midwest, Chicago rose to full prominence as America's meat center--thanks to the new Union Stockyards made possible by the railroad business and its refrigerated rolling stock--as well as the wheat-processing capital of the Nation, a result of prairie farmers rushing to use the new Turkey Red seeds to replace native grasses all over the open lands. Out West, which concerns us most here, the stagecoach was the best means of transport other than the horse, the roads were still all dirt, and a grasshopper plague wrought havoc to farms and forced many farm families into bankruptcy and back to the factories of the Eastern and Midwestern cities. The invention of barbed wire was still a year off and the Indian Wars occupied the energies of the U.S. Army, which would soon experience the wrath of a displaced people under the leadership of a remarkable native commander who called himself Crazy Horse. It was a turbulent year! Place this 1873 Carson City silver dollar against those realities, and doesn't the cleaning of its surfaces fade into insignificance? It's a "real" coin, and not only part of a remarkable heritage--but also a demonstrable image of the times themselves.
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| Realized $18,975 |
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