Overlooked 1878 Indian Head Cent Tough to Find

The key Indian Head cent for more than a century has been the 1877. There is no serious debate. It is the king of the Indian cents with its 852,500 mintage. The 1909- S, with a total of just 309,000 pieces, has the lower mintage, but it’s widely known that the 1877 is a tougher coin having not survived in substantial numbers.

Conventional wisdom would have it that way: the 1877 followed by the 1909- S with no other Indian cents even close. In recent times, however, there has been a challenge of sorts to that conventional wisdom from serious collectors and students of the Indian Head cent. They point to a number of other dates and particularly the dates from 1869-1872 as overlooked dates every bit as tough as perhaps even the 1877 Indian cent.

Their reasons are not limited to population reports from grading services, though. They suggest that the 1877 Indian cent and the others were simply purchased as proofs from the Mint at the time of their release. There were not that many other collectors to save a simple uncirculated coin. Even though the 1877 had just over half as many proof sales as the 1872, for example, the 1877 was known quickly as rare and some high grade examples were saved. The scholars, however, suggest that except for the proofs, virtually no one saved dates like the 1869 or 1872. The business strikes went into circulation and with relatively few collectors and little special recognition they circulated until they were either unfit for additional circulation, or saved by a generation of collectors half a century or more after their production, although by then the coins were little more than space fillers. Additionally, the Panic of 1873 was almost certainly the reason that many of the nation’s few cent collectors were forced to give up and spend their collections.

The case for the dates from 1869-1872 is a good one and slowly over the years the prices of those dates have been rising as collectors learn that there really is something special about a coin like an 1871 Indian cent.

There has also been a long- standing belief that the only truly good Indian Head cent after 1877 was the 1909- S. Such a belief ignores the obvious historical importance of the 1908- S and its fairly low mintage, but more importantly it also ignores the 1878.

In fact, much of what has been said with regard to the dates from 1869-1872 also applies to the 1878, although perhaps to a slightly lesser degree. The 1878 did have a big proof mintage for the time of 2,350, way up from the 510 1877 cents. That however, was very possibly a reaction to the 1877 and the case can certainly be made that once again the bulk of the nation’s serious collectors had the 1878 they needed as a proof. Moreover, if they were going to pluck a business strike from circulation, it would have been one of the still fairly nice 1877s still in circulation and not the 5,797,500 mintage 1878, which in recent times has come to be appreciated by some as a terribly tough coin in upper circulated grades.

Actually the 1878 Indian cent has gained some respect in virtually all grades in recent years. It may never be in the same class or be as popular as the 1869-1872 dates and certainly it is not an 1877, but the days of suggesting there are no good Indian Head cents after 1877 except for the 1909- S have come to a well-deserved end.