Afternoon everyone…
Most of you reading my posts have been doing so for quite some time now. I am a huge Morgan silver dollar fan and collector. I have quite a collection of them, most of mine are graded examples. Whether they were bought that way or i personally submitted them (I have submitted many raw Morgan’s).
There were no grading companies around when I was hardcore collecting. But my knowledge and eye for quality coin was always very picky. I have never submitted a Morgan silver dollar that came back with less than an MS63 grade. That’s pretty impressive in my personal opinion.
There are many VAM’s (a unique die variety identified by, and named after, researchers Leroy Van Allen and A. George Mallis). I have collected nearly every VAM over the years. There are a few that are next to impossible to find. There are a handful I’ve never personally seen in person in my over forty years of collecting.
Today I’m going to share a graded Morgan from my collection. It’s known as the “Spitting Eagles”. I will show you the coin, as well as two close ups which were grabbed from a Coinweek article.
Here is a write up by Coinweek magazine describing it:
The Spitting Eagle is an example of a Mint error known as a “die gouge”. A die gouge is when something or someone accidentally makes a hole or gash (deeper than a scratch) in the die. Since the die is incuse (engraved or imprinted in negative relief into the surface, the opposite of a coin), this hole or gash shows up as a bump or raised mark on the finished product. At first glance, it can even look like a strange part of the design.
Well, that’s what happened at the Carson City Mint in 1891, producing this variety of Morgan silver dollar.
A Spitting Eagle is identified by the glob under and to the left of the eagle’s open beak on the reverse. It does indeed look like a “spitting” eagle. It’s not as prominent as the coin’s design itself, but it’s very obvious on nice examples.
I’d expect to pay anywhere from $500 – $600 for the better material but don’t let that deter you. This is one variety that’s easy to explain and show off so go ahead and buy that Very Fine or About Uncirculated Spitting Eagle. You might be the hit of the next coin club show and tell.
But if you like complicated, the Spitting Eagle has several subvarieties, mostly involving die doubling (when the die strikes a coin a second time slightly off-center from the previous strike, resulting in the appearance of a second image underneath part or all of the main design) and different die pairs (a lot of dies are used to produce a coin’s mintage, and some of them have idiosyncratic characteristics that numismatists can identify or hypothesize about).
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Coin die issues do make for an interesting line of collecting apart from collecting MS 70 flawless strikes. Would such flaws classify a coin as an error coin or not?
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Yes VAM’s are all error coins. But not in the same way the newer coins have errors.
It's a whole different level, @silverd510!
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