coins

FOOTPRINTS OF THE HISTORY

Coins are the footprints of history, it has been said, and without question it is interesting to hold history in your hand. Whenever I see a Morgan silver dollar with a CC mintmark, minted in the 1880s, I can conjure up in my imagination a vision of Carson City, Nevada in the rough and ready days of the Wild West, of miners working underground to take precious silver ore from the Comstock Lode, and of the main street of nearby Virginia City, with its saloons, gambling parlors, red-light district, and perhaps even a shootout between the sheriff and an outlaw. I almost forgot to mention Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who early in his career in the 1860s was on the staff of the Territorial Enterprise, the local newspaper.

However, even if coins are the stuff of which nostalgic and romantic dreams are made, the inescapable fact is that most buyers of coins are in the game for the money (no pun intended). While an 1882-CC Morgan dollar might for me stir up notions of a bygone era, the typical buyer of such a coin sees it as a store of value, an item to buy today with the hope that down the line it can be sold for a profit. Whether the coin will yield an investment return seems to be a more timely and important question than whether this very same silver dollar once figured in a Saturday night poker game in Virginia City.