Silver Dollar Blog - Sources of Silver for the Morgan Dollar

Mining on the Comstock

Where did the Silver come from? The mints silver use to come mostly from Mexico and South America but since 1800's most of the silver came from mines in the United States.Usually you didn't find gold and silver all by it's self no, a gold nugget might have some silver ore or some lead and copper might contain silver ore. The California nugget usually held about 88% gold with the remaining being mostly silver. The lead and copper ores of the west contained silver as well. There were copper minerals of Utah, Arizona and Montana that contained Silver.

Now how to part the gold from silver. There were generally three methods used when parting. The nitric acid process was the oldest mostly used in the fifteenth century. The sulfuric acid which was in full swing by the 1880's followed by the electrolytic process which started in 1901. In the end simpler and cheaper won out. The advantages of the electrolytic process was it didn't require large quantities of silver and acids to process. 

Now that you have your pure form of silver the first step would be to get you proportions correct which would be 900 parts pure silver to 100 part of pure copper. This melted mixture would be poured into ingots which were rolled flat to produce dollar planchets. There were many checks and balances along the way to ensure the correct proportions of silver/copper. Soon that silver was on it's way to becoming a Morgan Silver Dollar.

The entire process is amazing that they could find the precious metal tightly wrapped around each other and figure away to extract both the pure form of gold and pure form of silver with the end result being the Morgan Silver Dollar!

Image Source: Library of Congress