American Argent Mint Mystery Round
Today I'm going to share a bit of a mystery round that I have in my collection. It is from another 1980s mint that spring up and disappeared within a couple of years leaving little information behind for us to try to figure it out now.
Here is about all of the information I could find online pertaining to the mint. Once again it's AG ROUNDWORLD.COM coming to the the rescue. They have a little bit of information listed. It looks like it was only in operation of couple of years, but the confusing part is they supposedly did not mint very many varieties, and this is certainly not the one that most people think of. You can find a coin with the same reverse that that makes you think it's from the same mint, but the obverse is completely different.
https://agroundworld.com/pshop/american-argent-mint-silver-rounds-129
American Argent Mint
Little is known about the history of the company. They began circa 1982 and according to IRS filings, ceased to exist around 1984. They were based out of Provo, Utah. During their short lifespan, American Argent only produced one type of 1 Oz bar and one type of 1 Oz round. The only known round produced was a silver trade unit on the reverse. One version has a shield on the obverse and another variety has a stylized flying eagle.
American Argent Mint Products
• Undated 1 Oz trade unit rounds (Shield, Heraldic eagle)
I don't think this eagle qualifies as a flying eagle so I'm a bit miffed at what exactly I have here.
Obverse
This obverse looks very familiar. There's a random Reddit post with one of the comments is that someone else trying to identify this round said that the eagle looked familiar but they couldn't place it. Since I live close to iowa, I know that this round is a dead ringer for a tiger hawk or otherwise known as the Hawkeyes symbol. It's all over Hawkeyes athletics, football, and everything else. In fact it is identical to the Hawkeye symbol in every way when looking at the round. This confuses me since this mint was supposedly out of Utah and I'm not sure why they would have any tie to Iowa but there it is.
Those two are a 100% match in my book. Unfortunately no amount of googling has gotten me any closer to figuring it out and the fact that it is a eagle or hawk just confuses it since there are so many rounds that are eagle and hawk focused.
Reverse
As you can see in the reverse it names the mint along with a one troy ounce of 999 fine silver. It has the classic imagery of a scale and once again ties back to wheat. Overall I like the reverse design and I think it's relatively clean and simple.
What to do???
I'm not quite sure what to do or think about this round. Full transparency I did buy this round in iowa, so there certainly could be a private mintage of Iowa rounds for someone in the Iowa program at that time when I meant was operational. I'm sure they were happy to do custom minting but I would have thought it would be dates. There are some later Hawkeye rounds that were minted from a different mint in celebration of a Holiday bowl appearance for the football team, that the eagle was very similar but in this case there's no trademark which is odd. I guess I'll hold on to it and hope that someday more information is found out about this
