Jeff Ambio: Winter 2-C is perhaps the easiest of the three known die marriages of the 1880-CC half eagle to attribute. The obverse pegs the variety, and it is readily identifiable by the presence of a series of fine die lines that appear as "tears" streaming from Liberty's eye, as well as a small die lump on Liberty's cheek immediately behind the mouth. This obverse is known to have been paired with only a single reverse that displays a small, even mintmark with the C's positioned above the left and right sides of the letter V in FIVE.

Rusty Goe: Coinage had been suspended at the Carson City Mint from October 1879 through the end of that year. As 1880 began, talk around town suggested that the local mint might remain closed for an indefinite period of time and, in the worse-case scenario, might not open again. On March 22, 1880, the Reno Evening Gazette reported that, "The Carson Mint is running on one-third force; coinage operations [are] temporarily suspended: nothing but assaying and melting [being] done." Small amounts of silver still trickled in, and gold deposits were being received as usual, albeit in limited quantities. To almost everyone in Carson City's surprise, the newspapers reported in the fourth week of April that Secretary Sherman had sent orders for the Carson City Mint to resume coinage operations starting in the first week of May. Workers came in on a Saturday, on May 8, to deliver the first coins struck at the Carson Mint in seven months. Coiner Dague pressed out 4,195 half eagles dated 1880 that day. He would add another 5,314 examples of that denomination before May ended, and 9,688 more in June. The 19,197 pieces struck in those two months eclipsed the total output of half eagles at his mint for 1879.

In the second half of the year, Dague coined 31,820 more $5 gold pieces, which brought the annual mintage figure for 1880 to 51,017. This total nearly equaled the combined yield of half eagle production at the Carson City Mint from the previous five years. The staggering outputs of half eagles at the Philadelphia Mint and San Francisco Mint in 1880 dwarfed the production total of the Carson Mint. Mint Director Horatio Burchard explained in his annual report that imports of gold bullion and coins had surged in the past year and a half. The Mint Bureau apportioned this huge influx of gold to the various branches and assay offices located across the country. It chose to limit the coinage of double eagles in order to ensure a substantial supply of eagles and half eagles. "For the first time [since the introduction of double eagles in 1850]," said Burchard, "a successful effort has been made to obtain a large portion of the coinage of gold pieces in denominations less than twenty dollars."

The Carson Mint's share of this apportionment of gold was small, but sufficient enough to allow it to resume coinage operations after a seven-month hiatus. However, for the first time since it opened in 1870, no double eagle coins were struck at the Carson City branch.

Q. David Bowers: From an unusually generous mintage of 1880-CC half eagles, Rusty Goe estimates 525 to 600 survive in total, with 20 to 30 Uncirculated. The circulated population is about double my guess, and for Mint State I was only able to find a small handful. VF is the usual grade encountered, but EF examples can be easily found. High grade AU coins are rare.

The example to the left was sold by Stack's Bowers Galleries in the Fairmont Collection, JBR Set, where it realized $36,000.