Sacagawea Dollars were developed by the United States Mint as the next generation of dollar coins for general circulation. These coins were first issued in 2000. The idea was to eventually replace the $1 bill with these coins, since they would last much longer than paper bills. The government figured it could save $550 million every year in printing, storage, and shipping costs when they stopped printing the $1 bill. However, the government never found the willingness to stop producing the $1 bill. Today, the US mint continues to produce dollar coins, although circulation is limited.

The face design of the Sacagawea Dollar is that of the Shoshone woman, Sacagawea, with her infant son on her back. Sacagawea was part of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. She was the wife of a French trapper, Toussaint Charbonneau. A few months before she and Charbonneau left with Lewis and Clark, she gave birth to a son, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau. That is the baby depicted on the coin. The Lewis and Clark Expedition picked up Charbonneau and his family in the spring of 1805. For the next year and a half, they traveled up the Missouri River, over the Rockies, and to the Pacific Coast, then back. They left the Charbonneau family in South Dakota at the end of the journey in August 1806.

There is no known portrait of the real Sacagawea. The designer of the Sacagawea Dollars, Glenna Goodacre, used a real Shoshone woman as a model to get a good approximation of Sacagawea’s possible face. The original design idea was to use Sacagawea as an ideal to recreate the early design of the Liberty Head gold dollar. However, the idea of using a more realistic portrait of the historical woman won out in the end.

In 2009, the US Mint began offering a redesigned reverse on Sacagawea dollars. The face remained the same. The reverse side now offers a scene to commemorate the contributions that Native American have had on the development of the United States. The design for 2009 Native American Dollar depicts a woman sowing squash, maize, and climbing beans, the three main crops of many Native tribes. These three also go by the name of the Three Sisters. The design for 2010 is the contributions made by the Iroquois Confederacy to the development of the United States government. All of these coins are available from the US Mint in uncirculated sets.

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