Indian Head Cents

James Barton Longacre designed the Indian Head cent, and despite the name the portrait is not of a Native American. The obverse depicts Liberty wearing a feathered headdress, and the popular story has Longacre sketching his daughter Sarah wearing a headdress borrowed from a visiting delegation of chiefs. The tale is almost certainly apocryphal. Sarah would have been around thirty at the time, not the young girl the anecdote describes, and Breen dismissed the whole thing. Longacre more likely worked from the same classical sources he always used, adapting a Greco-Roman profile and sticking a feathered headdress on it as a distinctly American touch. Contemporary observers understood the headdress as a symbol of the continent rather than a portrait of anyone in particular, even if later generations have found the combination of European features and Native headgear a bit odd. Longacre had been Chief Engraver since 1844. The Indian Head cent was arguably his best work on the denomination, certainly more successful than the Flying Eagle that preceded it.

The reverse went through one real change during the series. The original 1859 reverse had a simple laurel wreath around ONE CENT, not much different from what earlier cent types had carried. In 1860, Longacre swapped in an oak wreath and added a small federal shield at the top. Bowers has suggested the shield may have been a nod to the gathering secession crisis, a little burst of federal symbolism at a moment when the Union was under threat. Whether Longacre actually thought about it that way, nobody recorded.

Production started in 1859 and the design worked from the beginning. Unlike the Flying Eagle, which had opposing high points that fought each other across the die, the Indian Head struck up cleanly. The Mint produced over 36 million cents in the first year. Composition was the same copper-nickel alloy the Flying Eagle had used, 88% copper and 12% nickel, at 4.67 grams and 19 millimeters.

Then the war came and changed everything. Hoarding started in earnest around 1862. The public lost confidence in paper money and began pulling hard coin out of circulation, cents included. The Mint could not keep up. Congress stepped in with the Coinage Act of April 22, 1864, authorizing a switch to bronze, 95% copper with 5% tin and zinc, at a lighter weight of 3.11 grams. The copper-nickel planchets had been hard on the dies and expensive besides, and the softer bronze was an improvement on both counts. The changeover happened midyear, so 1864 cents exist in both compositions. The bronze version includes the well-known "L" variety, where Longacre's initial appears on the ribbon behind Liberty's ear. The letter had shown up on some earlier dies too, but the 1864-L is the one that gets the attention, partly for its scarcity and partly because you can actually see the L without a loupe on decently preserved specimens.

The series ran annually from 1859 through 1909, fifty years of continuous production that puts it among the longest-running American coin designs. Output dipped during the rough economic years of the 1870s and bounced around after that, but by the 1880s and 1890s the Mint was cranking out 30 to 80 million cents a year as a matter of routine. San Francisco struck Indian cents in 1908 and 1909 only, adding the S mintmark to what had been a Philadelphia monopoly for the entire run. The design ended in August 1909 when Victor David Brenner's Lincoln cent took over, timed to the centennial of Lincoln's birth.

The 1877 is the key date, no argument. Mintage of 852,500 pieces, lowest of any regular issue in the series. It was recognized as scarce almost from the start. Breen thought some were hoarded at the time by people who noticed the low numbers, though that might be giving nineteenth-century speculators a bit too much credit. The 1909-S is the other big one, 309,000 struck, most of which went straight into circulation and wore down to nothing. Finding one in mint state is a real challenge. The 1908-S, first branch-mint cent in the series, comes in at 1,115,000 and qualifies as a semi-key.

The copper-nickel issues of 1859 through 1864 have their own quirks. The 1861 and 1862 cents were made in big numbers but hoarded heavily during the war, which produces a strange distribution among survivors. You tend to find them either well worn, from the pieces that actually stayed in commerce, or surprisingly sharp, from hoards that got tucked away and never spent. Not much in between. The 1864-L bronze remains a perennial favorite, though its exact mintage is unknown because the Mint did not bother to track L and no-L production separately. Snow's variety reference covers die varieties across the full series, repunched dates, misplaced digits, die clashes, the usual catalog, and there is enough material even among the common dates of the 1880s and 1890s to keep a variety specialist busy for years.

Proofs were struck every year from 1859 through 1909. The early copper-nickel proofs are scarce and, frankly, underappreciated for what they are. The bronze proofs from the 1880s forward turn up more often, though "more often" is relative when you are talking about mintages of a few thousand pieces per year at most.

The Indian Head cent was the small-change coin of American life for half a century, and the country it served changed enormously during that span. A cent in 1859 bought a newspaper or a piece of candy. By 1909 it still bought roughly the same things, though inflation had nibbled at the edges. Street vendors ran on pennies. Newsboys made their living in them. Penny arcades took their name from them. The coin circulated during a period of rapid industrialization, mass immigration, and explosive population growth, and the Mint sometimes had trouble producing enough to keep pace with demand. Close to two billion Indian Head cents were struck over the life of the series, which made them genuinely ubiquitous. Everybody handled them, every day, for decades. They wore smooth, fell through floorboards, got tossed in jars, sat in cash registers until the bronze turned dark. The ones that survive today in anything like sharp condition are a small fraction of what originally existed, which is easy to forget when you see how many damaged and corroded examples turn up in junk boxes at coin shows.

Sources: Q. David Bowers, A Guide Book of United States Coins: The Official Red Book (Whitman Publishing, 2015); Walter Breen, Walter Breen's Complete Encyclopedia of U.S. and Colonial Coins (Doubleday, 1988); Richard Snow, A Guide Book of Flying Eagle and Indian Head Cents (Whitman Publishing, 2009); R.S. Yeoman & Jeff Garrett, A Guide Book of United States Coins (Whitman Publishing, 2025); PCGS CoinFacts.

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1859–1909Years struck

54Date/variety entries

Philadelphia, San FranciscoMints

Circulation Strikes Proofs

Key date

Semi-key

Variety

Proof

Special

NIFC

Regular

1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 Bronze 1864 Copper Nickel 1864 L on Ribbon 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 Closed 3 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 Type 1 1886 Type 2 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909

Date	Variety	Mintage	Classification	CK #
1859	—	800	Key Date	CK-308
1860	—	1,000	Key Date	CK-310
1861	—	1,000	Key Date	CK-313
1862	—	550	Key Date	CK-315
1863	—	460	Key Date	CK-317
1864	Bronze	—	Key Date	CK-319
1864	Copper Nickel	—	Key Date	CK-320
1864	L on Ribbon	—	Key Date	CK-322
1865	—	500	Key Date	CK-324
1866	—	725	Key Date	CK-328
1867	—	625	Key Date	CK-330
1868	—	600	Key Date	CK-333
1869	—	600	Key Date	CK-335
1870	—	1,000	Key Date	CK-337
1871	—	960	Key Date	CK-339
1872	—	950	Key Date	CK-341
1873	Closed 3	—	Key Date	CK-343
1874	—	700	Key Date	CK-347
1875	—	700	Key Date	CK-349
1876	—	1,150	Key Date	CK-351
1877	—	900	Key Date	CK-353
1878	—	2,350	Key Date	CK-355
1879	—	3,200	Key Date	CK-357
1880	—	3,955	Key Date	CK-359
1881	—	3,575	Key Date	CK-361
1882	—	3,100	Key Date	CK-363
1883	—	6,609	Key Date	CK-365
1884	—	3,942	Key Date	CK-367
1885	—	3,790	Key Date	CK-369
1886	Type 1	17,654,290	Key Date	CK-371
1886	Type 2	17,654,290	Key Date	CK-373
1887	—	2,960	Key Date	CK-375
1888	—	4,582	Key Date	CK-377
1889	—	3,336	Key Date	CK-380
1890	—	2,740	Key Date	CK-382
1891	—	2,350	Key Date	CK-384
1892	—	2,745	Key Date	CK-386
1893	—	2,195	Key Date	CK-388
1894	—	2,632	Key Date	CK-389
1895	—	2,062	Key Date	CK-393
1896	—	1,862	Key Date	CK-395
1897	—	1,938	Key Date	CK-397
1898	—	1,795	Key Date	CK-399
1899	—	2,031	Key Date	CK-401
1900	—	2,262	Key Date	CK-403
1901	—	1,985	Key Date	CK-405
1902	—	2,018	Key Date	CK-406
1903	—	1,790	Key Date	CK-409
1904	—	1,817	Key Date	CK-411
1905	—	2,152	Key Date	CK-413
1906	—	1,725	Key Date	CK-415
1907	—	1,475	Key Date	CK-417
1908	—	1,620	Key Date	CK-419
1909	—	2,175	Key Date	CK-422