Indian Head Half Eagles 1908-1929

The half eagle got its new design at the same time as the quarter eagle, and for the same reasons. After Augustus Saint-Gaudens died in 1907, the Mint meant to put a reduced version of his double eagle on the two small gold coins, but Chief Engraver Charles E. Barber could not fit the legends the law required. Dr. William Sturgis Bigelow, a Boston friend of President Theodore Roosevelt who had admired Egyptian sunken reliefs at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, proposed instead a design cut below a flat surface, and he brought in the sculptor Bela Lyon Pratt. Roosevelt and Mint Director Frank Leach agreed to it in April 1908.

Pratt kept the layout of Saint-Gaudens's $10 eagle but replaced its Liberty with a Native American man drawn from a photograph, and he adapted Saint-Gaudens's standing eagle for the reverse. Barber's engravers then modified the models, which Pratt resented. Unlike the quarter eagle, the half eagle went to the branch mints from the start. Denver and San Francisco both had trouble striking it, and Philadelphia advised them to shave the planchets slightly. The finished coins were thinner than older half eagles because the fields stand above the design, which upset automatic sorting machines.

The coins reached circulation in early November 1908, and the Philadelphia dealer Samuel Chapman soon complained to the President that the recesses would hold dirt and germs and that the coins would not stack. Philadelphia had already struck 421,874 Liberty Head half eagles dated 1908, so both designs carry that year.

New Orleans struck 34,200 half eagles in 1909 before it stopped coining in March of that year. Half eagles came from Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco every year through 1916, much of the output going to gift-giving and to the West, where gold still circulated. After 1916 the spread of Federal Reserve notes and the gold drain of World War I ended the need for them. The only later issue was Philadelphia's 1929, struck when there was little demand. Most of those coins never left the vaults, and after the Treasury stopped paying out gold in 1933 and Executive Order 6102 called gold coins in, they were melted along with recalled coins in the mid-1930s.

Obverse. A Native American man faces left in a feathered war bonnet, with LIBERTY above, 13 stars along the edge and the date below. Pratt's initials BLP are just above the date. The whole design is sunk below the flat fields.

Reverse. A standing eagle faces left, its feet on a sheaf of arrows that an olive branch twines through. The legend across the top reads UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, the value FIVE DOLLARS is at the bottom, and the two mottoes, IN GOD WE TRUST and E PLURIBUS UNUM, fill the fields beside the eagle.

Mint mark. On the reverse, just left of the arrowheads, and raised. D is Denver, S is San Francisco and O is New Orleans (1909 only). Philadelphia coins have none.

Things that cause confusion.

• 1908 Liberty Head or Indian Head. Both designs are dated 1908. The Liberty Head has a raised portrait with a coronet and the value FIVE D.; the Indian Head is sunk into the coin and spells out FIVE DOLLARS.
• Quarter eagle or half eagle. The design is the same on both. The half eagle is 21.6 mm and says FIVE DOLLARS; the quarter eagle is 18 mm and says 2 1/2 DOLLARS.
• Weak mint marks. CoinWeek notes that most San Francisco issues come with a weak S. Look closely at the space left of the arrowheads before deciding a coin is from Philadelphia.

• 1909-O: 34,200 struck, the only Indian Head half eagle from New Orleans, made in the last months before that mint stopped coining.
• 1929: 662,000 struck by the figure NGC, CoinWeek and USA Coin Book give (Wikipedia says 668,000). Few were released, and most were melted in the 1930s. No proofs were made.
• 1911-D: 72,500 struck at Denver. NGC says most went into circulation.
• 1908-S (82,000) and 1908-D (148,000): the first branch-mint coins of the new design.
• 1909-D: 3,423,560 struck at Denver.
• 1916-S: 240,000 struck, the last half eagles before the 1929 issue.
• Weak S: the catalog lists the 1912-S Weak S and 1913-S Weak S; the number of weak-S coins in each year's mintage is not recorded.
• Proofs, 1908-1915: Philadelphia made proofs every year from 1908 to 1915, from 167 in 1908 and 250 in 1910 to 75 in 1915. NGC describes the dark sandblasted matte finish of 1908 as unpopular, the brighter "Roman gold" finish used in 1909, and 1915 as the last year of the matte process.

• Composition: 90% gold, 10% copper
• Weight: 8.36 grams
• Gold content: about 0.2419 troy ounce
• Diameter: 21.6 mm
• Edge: reeded
• Designer: Bela Lyon Pratt

The Indian Head half eagle kept the weight, fineness and diameter of the Liberty Head coin it replaced. Its sunken design leaves the flat fields as the highest part of each side, so wear and marks show first on the fields rather than on the portrait.