My Compromise On A Rare Carson City Morgan

Nice coin! Usually see these looking like they were beat with a heavy chain for some reason.

Any CC coin is a great piece of history. Liking the looks of this one

looks nice

Very nice Morgans.

My great-great grandmother was Emma Goldsmith a rather well known worker and proprietor in the underground scenes of Virginia City and Carson City before settling up in Bodie, California, one of the wildest of the wild Wild Western boom towns in the 1890s. Before finding its way into a Vegas casino in the 1950s, this coin may have passed through the pockets of illicit affairs and been at the heart of saloon gambling and brawls. Emma is recorded as getting into a street fight with another worker, and somehow I'm sure money played a role in that tussel. Later she fired three rounds at a horse racer and gambler in a saloon in Bodie, but missed him and thankfully eveyone else as the bullets landed in the street outside.

A future in-law of Emma's, if she had lived long enough, was the 6th husband of another great-great grandmother of mine. In the 1920s in southern Utah, at the age of 70, he shot and killed his son-in-law over a longstanding money dispute, although he claimed self-defense in his old age. There were probably a few CC dollars involved in that one too.

The newspapers back then in the west proved that truth was stranger than fiction. But those old silver dollars out of CC that travelled around saw some incredibly crazy stuff even before the casinos popped up! I'd gladly argue that an eye appealing specimen like yours lived a much fuller life than a shiny MS example that sat in a bag, oblivious to all the action going.

That is very interesting.

Flying Tiger
By all means get to Carson City and Virginia City. The old Carson City Mint is a great museum and has a wonderful display of CC coins. You can catch a quick train ride up to Virginia City where you can drop in to the Silver Queen Hotel and see the famous Silver Queen.
You will not miss the giant woman standing in the saloon. Her dress is made from 210 pounds of silver dollars -- and she's always visible.

The Silver Queen is 16-ft. tall and 8-ft. wide, a ceiling-touching painting of a lady in an evening gown decorated with 3,261 real silver dollars, some of them minted from silver dug from mines beneath Virginia City. Her belt is fashioned from 28 twenty-dollar gold pieces, and her choker and bracelets are made from silver quarters and dimes. Tourists pose at the base of the Silver Queen, and kids count the coins.

@ Collects82 - Thanks for sharing. I always love the history part of coin collecting. Yes, owning a beautiful coin is nice, but it's the history behind them that fascinates.