1888 $3 Indian Princess Three Dollar PCGS MS66 (CAC) - Registry Set Candidate!

Beloved by numismatists, the Indian Princess is truly a stunning design. The piece offered by AUCM is representative of the penultimate year of this issue. With its mintage of 5,000 this is a rare coin. However, when you consider that PCGS has awarded just 34 specimens the lofty grade of MS66, with only 8 finer, it becomes a condition rarity and an excellent candidate for a Registry Set. In CAC there are 14 in MS66 with a mere 1 finer.

Artist-engraver James B. Longacre, who crafted the beautiful Indian Princess design on U.S. gold coins.

The design upon the gold $3 gold piece obverse presents a head representing an Indian princess with her hair tightly curling upon her neck, her head adorned with a ring of feathers encircled with a band inscribed LIBERTY. Upon the field of the reverse is found a wreath of tobacco, wheat, corn, and cotton.

Numismatic art scholar Cornelius Vermeule writes, "The 'princess'... is a banknote engraver's elegant version of folk art of the 1850s. The plumes or feathers are more like the crest of the Prince of Wales than anything that saw the Western frontiers, save perhaps on a music hall beauty. Iconographically this type of Indian maiden had occurred in American and 'primitive' paintings for many years past. The figureheads of ships and the sculptures before tobacconists' shops sported faces, tresses, and bonnets of this type."