Jeff Ambio: All 1871-CC Liberty Seated dollars were struck from Reverse B of the 1870-CC issue, with the CC mintmark widely spaced.

Rusty Goe: In 1870, the Carson Mint's first year in operation, workers at the facility would have considered $40,000 worth of production on bullion bars and coins a successful month. By January 1871, thanks to the government's granting of new superintendent Henry F. Rice's request for a bullion fund and Rice's offering of the mint's assay services to Comstock miners, business had increased substantially. The approximately $188,000 in deposits the mint received in the first month of its second year, for processing into bars and coins, impressed everyone in and around Carson City, except perhaps members of a group of independent assayers in the region.

A Daily Alta California correspondent wrote on January 4, 1871, about how Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise had expressed the sentiments of Comstock assayers who had complained about the innovation of "doing custom work in the assaying department of the [Carson] Mint." The Enterprise and the offended assayers attacked Superintendent Rice for opening his mint's assaying department to outside jobs and for charging less for the work than did anyone in the area.

The increased production at the Carson Mint in January 1871 attested to the success of Rice's "innovation." That first 31-day total paled in comparison, however, to the $450,000 monthly average sustained by Rice's crew for the whole year.

Coinage output accounted for a small percentage of work at the Carson Mint during this period. After the first three months of 1871, for example, workers had executed about $850,000 in bullion deposits and had converted only ten percent of it into coin. Silver pieces represented $12,012.50 of that first quarter's coinage production. But still the mint had produced no dollar-size coins dated 1871 thus far, in contrast to the 8,000 or so silver dollars it had delivered by the end of March the year before.

At the halfway point in 1871, as of June 30, local newspapers in northwestern Nevada could not praise Superintendent Rice enough for his strong performance ever since he had replaced Curry the previous fall. A chief clerk from the Treasury Department had visited the Carson Mint during fiscal-year settlement time. He examined the books and inspected all departments. Reno's Nevada State Journal on August 19, 1871, took the opportunity to praise Rice on several fronts. First, "The excellent management of Mr. H.F. Rice as Superintendent is being appreciated by our mine owners." Second, for the "steadily increasing work being done in assaying ores and turning out the bright coins." Third, the Treasury Department agent "reports that the system of account and management is as good if not better than that of any other mint in the Union."

The compliments launched Rice and his assistants into a busier second half of the year. Bullion assayed and converted into unparted bars again exhausted most of the workers' time, with totals from July through December exceeding the aggregate recorded between January and June by over $1 million. Coinage production in the last six months of 1871 more than doubled the level achieved in the first six, most of it attributed to the three gold denominations and silver half dollars.

The Carson Mint experienced little demand for silver dollars in 1871. It delivered none in the first half of the year and offered up only 1,376 pieces in the second half. At the time, the silver value out West in a dollar-piece was worth more than that in two half dollars. It would have made little sense for depositors to request coins (silver dollars) whose face value would have been less than their bullion value. Curiously, while the coiners at Carson City recorded their lowest output of silver dollars in their mint's history in 1871, their counterparts at the Philadelphia Mint reached the million-piece level for that denomination for the first time. The San Francisco Mint did not strike a single silver dollar in 1871.

According to the numbers, which show that the Carson Mint made fewer 1871-CC silver dollars than any other date-denomination combination in its history (1870-1893), it would make sense if this issue were the rarest to survive from that institution. With many of the survival rates for non-Morgan silver dollar "CC" coins descending as low as one quarter of one percent, we could presume that only four or five 1871-CC silver dollars would exist. Even if we used the 1870-CC silver dollar's higher than normal survival rate of 5 percent or so -- which we know is partly attributable to demand for the first-year issue -- the extant population for the 1871-CC would total 70. For some unexplainable reason, however, the survival rate for the lowest mintage coin made in Carson City is closer to eight percent.

Most survivors rank low in condition rating, usually falling below the Extremely Fine cutoff.

Q. David Bowers: The production figure for Carson City silver dollars reached its lowest point in 1871 when just 1,376 were minted. However, today this is not the rarest date numismatically but comes in second after the 1873-CC, of which 2,300 were struck, but with a generous number melted later. Apparently there were enough silver dollars on hand in the region that it was not until August 1871 that any were minted in Carson City and those pieces were passed routinely into circulation and quickly became worn.

Rusty Goe estimates that just 100 to 120 are known in all grades, with 35 to 50 at the level of EF and AU and only three or four in true Mint State. As was the case for other CC mintmarked coins, numismatic interest in such pieces was non-existent at the time, and the survival of examples was a matter of rare chance. Estimates of known pieces have varied widely over the years. Population reports are of little help as any 1871-CC silver dollar is rare and valuable, prompting holders of such to submit them multiple times, with each being counted in the reports as a separate coin. In actuality, population reports reflect submission events, not distinctly different pieces. One of these times there will be some rarities for which more have seemingly been certified than were struck. That said, population reports are exceedingly valuable to collectors and dealers alike, for even though the numbers might not be absolute, in a relative sense there is an indication as to rarity at different levels. This too must be taken with a grain of salt, as a coin qualifying for AU or Mint State is apt to be submitted more times than one in, say, VF. The study of population reports and the determining of actual rarity is an interesting study in itself. For newcomers a quick illustration would be to consider a large mintage Lincoln cent, say 1958, and look at the population reports. There are clusters of certifications at extremely high levels, but at lower grades it would seem that such coins in Good to Fine grades were extreme rarities. In actuality lower grade coins are exceedingly common and of no numismatic value, and for this reason have not been certified.

The example to the left was sold by Stack's Bowers Galleries in the August 2012 Battle Born Collection of Carson City Coinage, where it realized $70,500.