1912

The 1912 half eagle is a workhorse of the Indian Head series. Philadelphia struck 790,144 pieces, a healthy run that placed plenty of coins into commerce and into bank vaults. Bela Lyon Pratt's incuse design, with its sunken portrait and recessed eagle, was now four years old and no longer raised the eyebrows it had at debut. Collectors and the general public had simply absorbed it as the look of the five-dollar gold piece, and the mint produced the date without fanfare.

Authentication on a coin this common still rewards a careful look. Genuine examples weigh 8.359 grams on a 21.6 mm planchet of 90% gold and 10% copper, and a weight that drifts low is the first warning of a problem. Because the design sits below the field rather than above it, the highest points of wear are actually the rims and the flat field around the headdress, so a coin with crisp rims and softness only inside the recesses should be set aside for closer study. The reeded edge needs to be even and uninterrupted, and the surfaces should carry the faint orange-gold cast typical of the copper alloy rather than a flat brassy yellow that can hint at plating or a base-metal core.

Survival is broad across the grading scale. Circulated pieces in VF and XF are easy to source, Mint State examples through MS-63 are routine in dealer cases, and gem coins exist in enough numbers to keep registry sets active without bidding wars on every appearance. A PCGS MS-64 brought $36,800 at Goldberg in May 2009, a useful marker for the date at the upper end of the typical collector range. Ordinary uncirculated examples trade for far less and remain one of the more accessible ways into Pratt gold. For background on the incuse experiment and how the series moved across its 1908 to 1929 run, see the Indian Head Half Eagle series history.