1797 DRAPED BUST $10, SMALL EAGLE AU53

SMALL EAGLE. WELL STRUCK AND LOVELY PLANCHET. VERY SCARCE AS ONLY 50 TO 60 SPECIMANS BELIEVED TO EXIST TODAY IN ALL GRADES. The early United States Mint kept records on the number of coins struck each year without any consideration given to the date(s) that these pieces bore. Since it was also common practice in the early Mint to use dies until they became irretrievably broken, multiple dates were often represented in a single year's delivery for each denomination. We believe that this probably happened in the case of the 1797 Small Eagle Ten, for which there is just a single die marriage known. While federal records list a mintage of 3,615 pieces for this issue, die emission studies conducted by Harry W. Bass, Jr. and John W. Dannreuther suggest that some 1796 Eagles were delivered after the initial (if not the entire) production of 1797 Small Eagle examples. To compensate for this, the researchers provide an approximate mintage of 1,250-3,615 coins for the 1797 Small Eagle Ten in the 2006 book Early U.S. Gold Coin Varieties . With a surviving population of just 55-65 coins, the 1797 Small Eagle is rarer than the 1796. Discounting two individual die varieites of the first-year 1795, therefore, the 1797 is the rarest Capped Bust Right, Small Eagle Ten.