Sacagawea & Native American Dollars (2000–Present)

No Authenticated Portrait of Sacagawea Exists, So the Coin's Face Is a Living Model

The United States $1 Coin Act of 1997, enacted as part of the 50 States Commemorative Coin Program Act and signed on December 1, 1997, authorized a new golden dollar to replace the Susan B. Anthony dollar. The legislation required a golden color, a distinctive edge, and tactile and visual features that would make the denomination readily discernible. Sacagawea, the Lemhi Shoshone woman who served as interpreter and guide for the Lewis and Clark Expedition from 1804 to 1806, was recommended as the subject by the Dollar Coin Design Advisory Committee in June 1998, and the Mint then invited 23 artists to submit designs. No authenticated portrait of her exists; she died in 1812, long before photography. The Mint's design guidelines directed artists to avoid a representation of a classical European face in Native American headdress and to be sensitive to cultural authenticity. Sculptor Glenna Goodacre, already known for the Vietnam Women's Memorial on the National Mall, found her model at the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum in Santa Fe: Randy'L He-dow Teton, a Shoshone-Bannock college student in her early twenties.¹

Goodacre's obverse shows Sacagawea in three-quarter profile, looking directly at the viewer, with her infant son Jean Baptiste Charbonneau carried on her back. LIBERTY arcs above; IN GOD WE TRUST appears in the left field; the date and mintmark are in the lower right field. Thomas D. Rogers Sr., a Mint sculptor-engraver who had joined the Philadelphia Mint in 1991, designed the original reverse: a soaring eagle with wings spread, flanked by seventeen stars representing the states in the Union during the Lewis and Clark Expedition. E PLURIBUS UNUM, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, and ONE DOLLAR complete the reverse. The first official striking took place on November 18, 1999, during a ceremony; full production followed. The coin was released to the public on January 27, 2000.²

The Mint chose manganese brass cladding (77% copper, 12% zinc, 7% manganese, 4% nickel) over a pure copper core because this composition produces a golden color while remaining electromagnetically identical to the copper-nickel Susan B. Anthony dollar, so vending machines and transit fare systems could accept it without hardware modification. Goodacre received a $5,000 commission for the obverse design and requested payment in Sacagawea dollars. The Mint struck 5,000 coins on specially burnished blanks and delivered them to her; these Goodacre Presentation Coins, identifiable by their distinctive finish, circulate in the numismatic market separately from regular-issue coins.³

The Cheerios Dollar Carried a Prototype Reverse That Went Unconfirmed Until 2005

In the fall of 1999, before full-scale production of the finalized Sacagawea dollar began, the Mint supplied 5,500 coins to General Mills for a Cheerios promotion: one in every 2,000 boxes of Cheerios would contain a Sacagawea dollar. The coins were struck from reverse dies made before a late change to the eagle's tail feathers, the same reverse dies used on the gold pattern coins, rather than the dies adopted for the circulation issue. The difference on the Cheerios coins was not confirmed at the time. In 2005, numismatist Tom DeLorey examined a Cheerios dollar and identified that the eagle's tail feathers carried more prominent diagonal detail lines than the circulation reverse, a difference matching the prototype die confirmed by Mint sculptor Thomas Rogers. By 2022 PCGS and NGC had certified just under 200 Cheerios dollars with the prototype reverse, a ceiling rather than a count of distinct coins, and not every Cheerios coin carries it: both services have also certified Cheerios dollars with the regular reverse, so the number struck from the prototype die is unknown.⁴

The Mule Paired a State Quarter Obverse With the Dollar Reverse

In spring 2000 a Washington quarter obverse die was paired with a Sacagawea dollar reverse die in a dollar press at the Philadelphia Mint. The quarter and Sacagawea dollar obverse dies are close enough in size that the mismatched die was not caught immediately, and coins were struck on Sacagawea dollar planchets before the error was identified. The resulting coins carry the Washington State Quarter obverse paired with the Sacagawea dollar reverse, and because Washington quarters in 2000 were dated on the reverse and Sacagawea dollars on the obverse, the mule coins are undated. In late May 2000, Frank Wallis of Mountain Home, Arkansas discovered the first example in a roll of Sacagawea dollars purchased from a bank. The Mint formally acknowledged the error coins as genuine on June 19, 2000. Nineteen examples are now confirmed across three identified die pairs.⁵

Thirty-Nine Gold Pattern Coins Were Struck; Twelve Flew Aboard the Space Shuttle

The Mint struck 39 Sacagawea dollars in 22-karat gold at the Philadelphia Mint in June 1999, bearing the date 2000 and the W mintmark of the West Point Mint, where it planned to strike gold versions of the new dollar for sale. The plan was dropped after members of Congress questioned the Mint's authority to sell them; the Mint kept the best 12 coins and destroyed the other 27. Twelve of the gold coins flew aboard Space Shuttle Columbia on mission STS-93 in July 1999 under Commander Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a shuttle mission. In August 2001 the twelve space-flown coins were moved from a Mint vault to the Fort Knox Bullion Depository. In September 2025, the U.S. Mint offered seven of the twelve through a dedicated auction conducted by Stack's Bowers Galleries; two of those seven, lots 1006 and 1007, each realized $550,000, the highest price recorded for any gold dollar struck since the Civil War era. The sale, which also included the first-struck 2025-W 24-karat Sacagawea dollar at $120,000, totaled $3.28 million. The five remaining space-flown examples are reserved for the Mint's heritage collection and public institutions and will not be sold.⁶

The Native American $1 Coin Act of 2007 Added Annual Reverses and Moved the Date to the Edge

From 2002 through 2008, Sacagawea dollars were struck only for sale to collectors, in rolls, bags and sets, rather than for general circulation. The Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005 kept the Sacagawea design in production by requiring that it make up at least one-third of the dollar coins struck each year of the Presidential program. The coin's course was changed by the Native American $1 Coin Act, signed September 20, 2007 (Pub. L. 110-82), which required that from 2009 the reverse be changed annually, each design to depict a different aspect of Native peoples' contributions to the history and development of the republic. The legislation also moved the date, mintmark, and E PLURIBUS UNUM from the coin's faces to incused edge lettering, freeing the faces of the coin for the obverse portrait and the rotating reverse designs. Goodacre's Sacagawea portrait has remained unchanged on the obverse since 2000; the annual reverse program, which began with a design honoring Three Sisters agriculture, the companion-planting tradition shared across many Native peoples, has continued through the present.⁷

Building the Set

A type set requires two coins: one example of the original soaring eagle reverse (2000–2008) and one example of any Native American annual reverse (2009–present). A date-and-mintmark set of all regular business strikes and Proofs from 2000 through the current year is large but composed almost entirely of inexpensive material; the annual reverses give the set a natural annual structure. The key first-year varieties, the Cheerios dollar with the prototype reverse, the Goodacre Presentation Coins, and the mule error, are far rarer and costlier than any regular date and are not needed to complete a standard set. The primary specialist reference is Bowers, Q. David, A Guide Book of Modern United States Dollar Coins (Atlanta: Whitman Publishing, 2016).⁸