By Mike Thorne for Numismaster

Carson City, Nev. The name conjures up visions of the Old West, gunfighters, playing cards in a saloon, with piles of silver dollars in the pot. And not just any silver dollars: These would undoubtedly be coins newly minted in either Carson City itself or San Francisco. In my mind’s eye, I see stacks of shiny cartwheels worth just a dollar apiece to their owners at the end of the 19th century but worth much more to their possessors a century later.

Amazingly, for all that’s been written about CC Morgans, a complete collection of them (not counting minting varieties of some of the dates) consists of just 13 different date/mintmark combinations.

By the time the Morgan dollar came along in 1878, the Carson City Mint was in full operational mode. It had begun minting coins in 1870. With Nevada then and now a relatively sparsely populated state, you might wonder why it deserved a mint at all.