Cardston Trade Dollars

Here's another complete set of Canadian local trade tokens. With only two tokens, this set is not exactly difficult to complete, but I find their designs quite compelling.

Cardston, Alberta
Population (2011): 3,580

Cardston is a small town with a unique history. In the late 1800s, Mormon pioneers traveled west in an effort to find a place where nobody (including the U.S. government) would bother them. Most of them ended up in Utah, but Utah's modern borders don't correspond exactly to the huge area of Mormon settlement, and you can find counties with Mormon pluralities in a few other neighbouring states as well. But one of the most far-flung Mormon migrations was to southern Alberta.

In 1887, Charles Ora Card led twelve (large) families north in covered wagons (a mode of transportation that seemed old-fashioned even at the time). They ended up settling in the Canadian Northwest Territories, just across the border with Montana. (The province of Alberta would not be created until 1905.) Cardston was founded in a fairly dry region, and the irrigation techniques learned by the Mormon pioneers in Utah served them well.

Cardston is notable for a few things (it's one of the very few "dry" communities in Canada), but it is best-known for its Mormon temple, completed in 1923. The impressive Cardston Alberta Temple was the eighth such temple in the world, and it holds the distinction of being the first Mormon temple constructed outside of the United States. Naturally, the Temple is depicted on both of Cardston's tokens.


This token was struck by Universal Emblems and has a "wordy" design typical of that mint. The "Centennial of Canadian Confederation" design you see here was used on multiple Universal Emblems products in 1967, so that mint really only had to engrave one unique die for this token. 1967 saw a great proliferation of Trade dollars issued in Alberta, as municipalities across the country set aside funds to commemorate Canada's centennial year. This token has a mintage of 20,000, a figure far greater than Cardston's actual population.


20 years later, in 1987, a token was struck to commemorate the centennial of Cardston itself, with a portrait of Charles Ora Card and a nice full view of the temple. This token, like almost all Trade dollars from the 1970s through the 1990s, was struck by the Sherritt Mint, and its mintage is a respectable 10,000.

Today, Cardston attracts tourists for non-religious reasons as well: the Remington-Alberta Carriage Museum is located in the town, boasting the world's largest collection of horse-drawn vehicles.

If you can't afford any Mormon gold coins but still want to own some LDS-related numismatic items, these tokens are a much cheaper alternative