The Sacagawea Dollar: America's Golden Dollar

The United States had a dollar-coin problem, and it was self-inflicted.

The previous attempt — the Susan B. Anthony dollar of 1979 — was almost exactly the size and color of a quarter. Cashiers fumbled it, the public hated it, and the Mint stopped striking it for circulation after barely a year. But vending machines and transit systems had quietly come to rely on dollar coins, and by the mid-1990s the Treasury's stockpile of Anthony dollars was running low. The government needed a new dollar fast.

Congress answered with the United States $1 Coin Act of 1997. The new coin had to be the same size as the Anthony dollar — so existing vending machines would still take it — but it had to look and feel completely different. The fix was color and edge: a copper core wrapped in manganese brass to give it a warm golden tone, and a smooth, plain edge instead of the quarter-like reeding. You would know it by sight and by touch, even in a pocket.

Then came the harder question: whose face goes on it? Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin convened a nine-member design committee. A public poll run by the General Accounting Office actually favored the Statue of Liberty, 65 percent to 27. The committee chose Sacagawea anyway — the Shoshone teenager who guided Lewis and Clark across the continent, carrying her infant son the whole way. It was a deliberate, modern choice: the first circulating U.S. coin to honor a Native American woman, depicted not as a symbol but as a real person.

The coin has two sides and two very different artists.

The obverse — the heads side — is the work of Glenna Goodacre, a celebrated sculptor from Lubbock, Texas, best known for the Vietnam Women's Memorial on the National Mall. She won a national competition in 1999. No portrait of the real Sacagawea exists, so Goodacre needed a living model. She found one in Randy'L He-dow Teton, a young Shoshone-Bannock woman and college student, who became the face on the coin. Goodacre's Sacagawea looks back over her shoulder, straight at you, with her baby — Jean Baptiste Charbonneau — bundled on her back. It is warm and human, not heraldic.

The reverse — the tails side — was designed by Thomas D. Rogers, a sculptor-engraver on the Mint's own staff. He gave it a soaring eagle ringed by seventeen stars, one for each state in the Union in 1804, the year the expedition set out. Rogers' eagle carried the coin from 2000 through 2008.

A small, telling detail: the Mint paid Goodacre her $5,000 design fee not in cash but in 5,000 specially finished Sacagawea dollars, struck with a distinctive burnished surface. Those "Goodacre Presentation" coins are now prized collector pieces in their own right — a designer's paycheck that turned into a rarity.

The original Rogers eagle reverse ran its course in 2008. The Native American $1 Coin Act, signed in 2007, then required the reverse to change every year starting in 2009, each one honoring a different contribution of Native peoples — turning the one-off Sacagawea dollar into an ongoing series.

Here is the paradox of the Sacagawea dollar. Over a billion of the first two years were struck, so a common 2000 piece is worth a dollar — the face value on it. Yet a handful of varieties from those same years are among the most chased coins in modern American numismatics.

The mule — the holy grail. Sometime in 2000, a Mint press was accidentally fitted with a Washington quarter die on one side and a Sacagawea dollar die on the other. The result is a "mule" — a coin with mismatched denominations, face value $1.25. A collector named Frank Wallis first spotted one in a roll from an Arkansas bank in May 2000. Fewer than two dozen are known across all die pairings. It is ranked the number-one entry in The 100 Greatest U.S. Error Coins, and in January 2024 a single example sold for $194,062.50.

The Cheerios dollar. In 1999, General Mills dropped a Sacagawea dollar into one in every 2,000 boxes of Cheerios — about 5,500 coins in all. For years nobody thought twice about them. Then in 2005 a collector noticed that these early coins carried a sharper eagle reverse, with bold raised veins in the tail feathers — a prototype design the Mint quietly softened before mass production. A breakfast giveaway turned out to be a scarce pattern reverse hiding in plain sight.

The Goodacre Presentation strike. The 5,000 burnished coins paid to the artist as her fee. A distinct finish, a tiny mintage, and a great backstory.

The Wounded Eagle. A die gouge that cuts across the eagle's chest, giving it the look of a wound. Fewer than a thousand are known in all grades — a popular, affordable entry into Sacagawea varieties.

Why high grade is scarcer than the mintage suggests. A billion coins does not mean a billion nice coins. Manganese brass scuffs and spots easily, and these dollars were tossed in tills and cash drawers, not protected. Pristine, fully struck examples are genuinely tough. NGC, one of the major grading services, has certified only a few hundred 2000-D coins at the lofty MS68 level and a single-digit number at MS69. The story repeats across the series: ordinary in your hand, scarce in top condition.