The Sacagawea Golden Dollar features a portrait of her and a bundled Jean Baptiste, her baby that accompanied her on her journey with Lewis and Clark. Learn More: Learn about the face behind Sacagawea's image on the Golden Dollar.

Reaction to the choice has not always been positive. Rep. Michael N. Castle of Delaware organized to try to replace Sacagawea's image with that of the Statue of Liberty, on the grounds that the dollar coin should have something or someone more easily recognized than Sacagawea. Indian groups, including Shoshones, expressed their hurt and anger, and pointed out that not only is Sacagawea well known in the western U.S., but that putting her on the dollar will lead to more recognition of her.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune said, in a June 1998 article,

The new coin was supposed to bear the image of an American woman who took a stand for liberty and justice. And the only woman they could name was a poor girl recorded in history for her ability to beat dirty laundry on a rock?

The objection was to replacing Anthony's likeness on the coin. "Her struggle on behalf of temperance, abolition, women's rights and suffrage left a broad wake of social reform and prosperity."

Yet another irony: in 1905, Susan B. Anthony and her fellow suffragist Anna Howard Shaw spoke at the dedication of the Alice Cooper statue of Sacagawea, now in Portland, Oregon.

Glenna Goodacre: The Artist Behind the Coin
Considered by many as "America's sculptor," Glenna Goodacre is internationally renowned for her work in bronze, and is best known for her sculpture-in-the-round for the Vietnam Women's Memorial Project on the Mall in Washington D.C. The sculpture, installed in 1993 as part of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, was the first public artwork to specifically honor the contribution of women to the Vietnam War. Other commissioned works by Goodacre are on public view in over 25 states, and her work is represented in numerous private, corporate, municiple, national and international collections.

Her design for the new gold-colored dollar coin will be srtuck this November at the Philadelphia Mint, and will go into circulation in 2000. The award-winning sculptor is one of a small number of independant artists, as opposed to engravers from within the U.S. Mint, to have her artwork minted on a circulation coin.

Goodacre's sculpture for the dollar coin depicts Sacagawea, the Shoshone Indian interpreter who accompanied Meriwether Lewis and William Clark across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean in 1805, with her baby, Jean Baptiste, who she carried with her. The caly relief Goodacre created for the coin shows Sacagewa turning, as if ready to leave, with her baby in a pouch asleep on her back. The word "Liberty" crowns her head.

To create the relief, Goodacre worked from a model — 22 year-old Randy'L Teton, a fine arts student at the University of New Mexico and a member of the Shoshone-Bannock tribe from the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Idaho. Sacagawea was a member of an inter-mountain Idaho tribe of Shoshone Indians, known today as the Lemhi Shoshone.

"The are no documented images of Sacagewea, so I approached the Institute of American Indian Arts in hope of finding a Shoshone model, which is how I found Randy," said Goodacre. "I then had her pose in an antique beaded doeskin dress, loaned by Morning Star Gallery, looking back over her shoulder, perhaps, at Lewis and Clark."

Goodacre's artwork was chosen from over 121 submissions by 23 sculptors. The submissions were shown to historians, public officials, representatives of Indian organizations, coin collectors, and various arts organizations including the U.S. Commisions on Fine Arts. Mint officials then culled the submissions to 13 designs, almost half of which were Goodacre's, which were posted in the Mint's Internet site in order to gain feedback from the American public. From the 120,000 responses that came in via the Internet, the majority favored Goodacre's image of the young mother and her infant son. According to Mint officials, there are no coins depicting a mother and child currently in circulation.