THE GOLD DOLLAR
FOR COLLECTORS GROWING UP at the present time with base-metal coins for their everyday use, the idea of a real gold dollar is well removed from modern thought. The gold dollars of 1849–1889 have always been something of a challenge because of being struck at several mints and having different sizes and artwork.
Most numismatists think of 1849 as the opening date for mintage of gold dollars but there had been an earlier attempt at the Philadelphia Mint in 1836. Treasury Secretary Levi Woodbury was convinced that small gold coins would aid the American economy and ordered that pattern coins be prepared. They were prepared but Mint Director Robert M. Patterson derailed the idea by remarking that only second-rate countries used such tiny pieces of gold for money.
All of this would change when gold was discovered on the Sutter ranch in California in early 1848; workman James Marshall was helping to dig a ditch when one of his shovels of dirt produced “black earth spangled with gold.” From that day, life in the West would be changed forever.
Ranch owner Augustus Sutter did his best to keep news of the discovery a secret but it soon spread like wildfire. When word reached the East Coast, imaginations were fired up and by the tens of thousands men abandoned their way of life and headed for El Dorado. The California Gold
