The Lewis and Clark Exposition Gold Dollar

A hundred years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark walked across the continent, Portland, Oregon threw a party. The 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition was the city's bid to put itself on the map — a world's fair to mark a century since the Corps of Discovery reached the Pacific.

Fairs needed money, and one reliable way to raise it was a commemorative coin. On April 13, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the appropriations bill that funded the exposition and authorized a gold dollar to mark the fair. Congress allowed up to 250,000 of them.

The plan was simple. The Mint would strike the coins, the fair would sell them above face value to collectors and visitors, and the difference would help pay for the celebration — including a statue of Sacagawea, the young Shoshone woman who guided the expedition, for Portland's Washington Park. The coins did help fund that statue. What they did not do was sell.

Charles E. Barber, the Mint's chief engraver, made a bold choice. Most coins have an obverse — the "heads" side, usually a portrait or an allegory — and a reverse with a different subject. Barber put a portrait on both sides. Meriwether Lewis faces left on one face; William Clark faces left on the other.

That makes it the only US coin ever struck with a head on each side — a true two-headed coin, and an answer to the old "heads or tails" joke that has no tails at all. Barber drew the explorers' likenesses from period portraits and kept the lettering plain and the relief low, in the restrained style that defined his work.

The result is small. At just 15 millimeters across — smaller than a modern US dime — and weighing 1.672 grams, the gold dollar is a delicate thing. There was barely room for two faces, but Barber fit them.

The two dates are close cousins, and most collectors want both. Each survives in roughly the same tiny number — only about 10,000 of each year reached buyers after the melting. That makes the 1904 and 1905 a near-matched pair in rarity, unusual for a commemorative.

The bigger problem for collectors is condition. Many of these coins were never tucked into albums. They were mounted in brooches, stickpins, and watch fobs and worn — gold jewelry honoring a famous journey. Worn coins picked up scratches, and removing a coin from a mount often left a faint trace. A piece that survived a century without ever being mounted, with full original strike (the sharpness the dies pressed into the metal) and clean fields, is genuinely scarce. High Mint State grades — coins that never circulated and show little contact — command a steep premium over an average example for exactly this reason.

Both dates belong to the small, prized family of classic US gold commemoratives struck between 1903 and 1926. Collectors chasing that set come straight to the Lewis and Clark dollar, and the two-headed novelty makes it a favorite well beyond the people who try to complete the run.