Well i've noticed that people sale Morgans/Peace dollars in bunch and i wonder were talking that these coins are more than around 100-90 years old yet there is still a lot of them out there??? Why is that? Did they not circulate much back then?
You could make a movie about the Morgan dollar. They were minted primarly because of the large amount of silver being mined in the late 1800s. So much so that the price of silver was hitting rock bottom prices. The US government bought millions of ounces to prop up the silver mining industry. Much of that silver was made into Morgans. So many were made the treasury department simply bagged up the majority of them and put them in vaults, many of those being forgotten about! From the 50s thru the 80s the treasury would release them.
Silver dollars were govt mandated for a while, even though, 2/3rds of the country didn't care for using them. So you're right, huge batches of them sat in bags and never circulated. Resulting in many MS still around today. Here's a thread of mine from Jan. 09 you might find interesting though. The mintages you see in the Red Book are deceiving. http://www.cointalk.com/t46228/
This is extremely oversimplified. The Bland -Allison Act of 1878 and the Sherman Silver purchase Act of 1890 mandated the government to purchase an average of 4 million oz of silver every month and coin it into silver dollars. The marketplace did not need or want all of these silver dollars because the use of paper money was now widely accepted. So these coins were used to back an equal number of silver certificates and almost all of the coins went into government vaults and stayed there. Almost all of these dollar coins stayed in the vaults until the 1962 - 1964 period when they came flowing out of the Treasury in exchange for silver certificates when silver rose above $1.29 and oz and the metal in the coins became worth more than the face value. So almost all of these 100+ year old coins actually only became available a little over 40 years ago, and they never did circulate.
