Although a fair number of dies were sent to the Carson City Mint in 1881 for the striking of Morgan silver dollars, it seems that the supply of silver to the fledgling branch mint dried up after the first quarter of the year. This led to a meager production of less than 300,000 silver dollars. Luckily for the collectors of today, nearly half of those coins survived in original bags until the GSA sales. To show what a huge affect this had on the number of survivors, one need only look at a coin with a slightly large mintage, the 1893-O. To date, NGC has graded only 2 examples of that coin in gem, compared to nearly 4,000 of the 1881-CC! (11/2016)

*Photo is a stock photo*