Wooden Dollar
...all those Americans who might have hoped that the "golden" coin stamped with a likeness of the Indian maid Sacajawea was meant not merely to inspire but to represent them, and who dared to believe by the close of the twentieth century that the Mint's worst work lay well in its past. Buffalo nickels, which seemed a denial of the fact that we had killed off most of the buffaloes and stocked our boutique ranches with the remainder, and their Indian Head faces, which likewise seemed to imply that we had never poisoned or starved or hung or gutshot the greater share of the Indians and ranched them out too, were themselves all but extinct and corralled in our grandfathers' dusty coin sets. Walking Liberty half-dollars were confined there as well, along with Standing Liberty quarters and varied treatments of Liberty's detached head. I assumed that the Mint had learned to hold itself to likenesses of party hacks murdered by their own countrymen while still in office, or by time and the bottle once retired, and to stray from this plan only after hard thought, lest we be forced to ignore another Susan B. Anthony at great public outlay. Had it done so the Mint might yet have created the same Sacajawea dollar we disregard today, and are unable in some places even to exchange for candy, but it would not then have had the foolishness to argue that the figure on the coin, a Shoshone girl enslaved by the Minnetarees and sold if not gambled away to a French-Canadian fur trader later employed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, was a beacon of aid and virtue, wholly free of taint and flaw; that is to say, in no real sense an American.
In the three years that the Sacajawea dollar has been among us, the Mint has spent the equal of 67 million Sacajaweas to convince us to use just one of them, and the effort has failed so thoroughly that the Mint has for now stopped pressing the...
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