Yellowstone National Park Commemorative Silver Dollar

The coin was authorized to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the establishment of Yellowstone, the country's first national park. Congress authorized a mintage limit of 500,000 silver dollar coins. The Yellowstone Park Commemorative Coin was the last Silver Dollar issued by the U.S. Mint in the 20th Century.

Yellowstone Park

For many Americans, if they want a taste of the untamed West, they head to Yellowstone Park. At 3,472 square miles, the park spans parts of three states, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho and is larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

President Ulysses S. Grant created Yellowstone Park in 1872, the first in America's National Park system. Since 1948, the park has played host to more than one million visitors a year and in 1998, that attendance tripled. These visitors come to see the park's hundreds of lakes, creeks, mountains, valleys, famous geysers and hot springs.

The most famous of the park's geysers is "Old Faithful," so named because of the regularity of its eruptions. Yellowstone (which comes from the Minnetaree Indian word for "Rock Yellow River") has 290 species of birds, including some especially rare species such as the peregrine falcon and the whooping crane.

The obverse shows a spouting geyser with the park's tree-lined landscape in the background.

The reverse, adapted from the U.S. Department of Interior's seal, shows an American Buffalo on the plains with a sun rising above the mountains in the background.

• YELLOWSTONE
• IN GOD WE TRUST
• LIBERTY
• 1999

• UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• E PLURIBUS UNUM
• ONE DOLLAR

• Philadelphia