Sacagawea & Native American Dollars (2000–Present)

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

The United States Dollar Coin Act of 1997, signed as part of the 50 States Commemorative Coin Program Act in December 1997, authorized a new golden dollar to replace the Susan B. Anthony dollar. The legislation required a golden color, a plain (non-reeded) edge, and a design of clear historical significance. Sacagawea, the Lemhi Shoshone woman who served as interpreter and guide for the Lewis and Clark Expedition from 1804 to 1806, was selected as the subject after a national design competition. No authenticated portrait of her exists; she died in 1812, long before photography. The Mint's design guidelines explicitly directed sculptors to avoid a representation of a classical European face in Native dress and to pursue cultural authenticity. Sculptor Glenna Goodacre, already known for the Vietnam Women's Memorial on the National Mall and the Irish Memorial in Philadelphia, found her model at the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum in Santa Fe: Randy'L He-dow Teton, a 22-year-old Lemhi Shoshone college student.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 in the Hidatsa custom used by the Shoshone. 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 legislation mandated manganese brass cladding (77% copper, 12% zinc, 7% manganese, 4% nickel) over a pure copper core specifically because this composition produces a golden color while remaining electromagnetically identical to the copper-nickel Susan B. Anthony dollar, ensuring immediate acceptance in vending machines and transit fare systems 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 No One Recognized for Five Years

In the fall of 1999, six weeks before full-scale production of the finalized Sacagawea dollar began on November 18, the Mint struck 5,500 coins on the current obverse hub for distribution to General Mills as part of a Cheerios promotional arrangement: one in every 2,000 boxes of Cheerios would contain a Sacagawea dollar. The coins were necessarily struck from whatever reverse dies were available at the time, which turned out to be the prototype reverse dies used in pre-production testing and on the gold pattern coins, rather than the dies adopted for the circulation issue. The difference was not reported or noticed 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. No more than approximately 70 Cheerios dollars with the prototype reverse have been confirmed among the 5,500 originally distributed, though the number actually struck on the prototype die is believed to be the full 5,500; the gap reflects the difficulty of locating coins that entered drawers and piggy banks in 2000 as a promotional novelty.⁴

The Mule Was the First Authentic Mule in Regular-Issue Coinage

In spring 2000 a press operator at the Philadelphia Mint requested an obverse die for the Sacagawea dollar and was given a Washington quarter obverse die instead. The quarter and Sacagawea dollar obverse dies are close enough in size that the substitution was not caught immediately, and a substantial run was struck on Sacagawea dollar planchets before the error was identified and production halted. 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. Approximately two dozen examples are now confirmed across three identified die pairs, making this the first authentic mule struck in regular-issue coinage of the republic and one of the most sought-after modern error coins at any price.⁵

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

The Mint produced 39 Sacagawea dollars in 22-karat gold at the West Point Mint in 1999, bearing the date 2000 and the W mintmark, in anticipation of a possible congressional authorization for gold versions of the new dollar. The authorization was not granted, and the Mint retained ownership of the coins. 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; the flight was itself a historic occasion, and the decision to carry the gold dollars linked the coin to a second milestone moment. After the shuttle's return, the twelve space-flown coins were placed in storage at Fort Knox. 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 seven coins together totaled $3.28 million. The five remaining space-flown examples have been permanently retained in the Mint's heritage collection.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 collector sets rather than for general circulation, a result of the same pattern of public indifference that ended the Eisenhower and Susan B. Anthony dollars. The Presidential Dollar program beginning in 2007 further displaced Sacagawea production in those years. 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 the Three Sisters agricultural tradition of the Haudenosaunee, 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, stand entirely apart from the regular collecting set in price and rarity and are treated as distinct trophies rather than as required components of any standard set. The primary specialist reference is Bowers, Q. David, A Guide Book of Modern United States Dollar Coins (Atlanta: Whitman Publishing, 2016).⁸