Millions were struck. Precious few survived beautiful. The story of why is the story of what makes classic silver dollars worth collecting at all.
Morgan and Peace dollars were working money in a cash economy: dropped on counters, stacked in tills, hauled in canvas bags. Circulation grinds high points first, Liberty’s cheek and hair, the eagle’s breast, and a few years of honest work permanently separates a coin from the uncirculated census.
Even dollars that never circulated rarely escaped unhurt. They sat by the thousand in 1,000-coin canvas bags in Treasury and bank vaults, and every time a bag moved, heavy silver coins ground against each other. The nicks and scuffs collectors call bag marks are why even fully uncirculated dollars usually grade in the lower Mint State range, and why clean-cheeked gems are the exception that commands attention.
Then came the furnaces. The Pittman Act of 1918 alone melted roughly 270 million silver dollars, and later silver-price spikes consumed millions more, all without regard for date or condition. Whole swaths of the original mintage simply ceased to exist, which is why mintage figures and real-world scarcity are such different numbers.
Put it together and the arithmetic of classic-coin value appears: enormous mintages, brutal attrition, a fixed surviving population, and a condition census nobody can ever expand. A gem Morgan is scarce because history made it scarce, which is precisely the difference between earned rarity and the factory-fresh perfection of modern commemoratives. When you hold a high-grade classic dollar, you are holding a statistical escape artist, and that, not the silver, is what you are collecting.