1859-S $1 Liberty Seated Dollar Osburn Cushing-1
This silver dollar is the first produced by the U.S. Mint in San Francisco. It has a mintage of 20,000 coins in contrast to the 255,700 silver dollars minted in Philadelphia and 360,000 minted in New Orleans that year. The production of this coin was for the Far East trade prior to the introduction of the Trade dollar in 1873. This coin came about to reduce the risk and cost of shipping silver dollars from Philadelphia or New Orleans to San Francisco for ships sailing with silver to purchase goods in China.
The coin ended up having limited uptake because Chinese merchants preferred the Mexican dollar which contained more silver. U.S. coins had reduced their silver content in 1853. The commercial unpopularity of the U.S. dollar in overseas trade was the main reason for the introduction of the Trade dollar.
1859 was also interesting because it was the year of the discovery of the Comstock Lode. Until this discovery, domestically mined silver remained scarce in the United States. In 1859 two prospectors, Patrick McLaughlin and Peter O’Reilly, discovered a deposit of silver ore on Mt. Davidson, in Washoe, Nevada, on property claimed by Henry Tompkins Paige Comstock, age 39. Comstock sold his interest in the mine, but his name remained on the Comstock Lode. This silver did not make it into the 1859-S dollars but figured later into the large numbers of Seated, Trade and Morgan dollars minted starting in the early 1870s. The Comstock Lode is estimated to have been worth $397 million in recent dollars.
