Thanks man! I can't get it to show up in the picture but both sides still have traces of the original mint luster..... kind of a shiny look to the portrait and the wreath. Must not have been in circulation for too long.
The ground is weird up here. Almost all places preserve coins phenomenally but I've been to a place where tokens and pennies come out very corroded. I think it might be alkali in the soil there.That's an awesome Indian!! Between this one and the 1883 Indian you posted the other day, you darn near have me convinced I need to move to ND! Your soil is like velvet up there
You know, I've been wondering about the same thing - I've been noticing that my Indians just seem to have a fuller, greener patina than the older Wheats that I've dug, in general. In the pic below, all four coins were dug in the same farmer's field, and presumably were in the ground for a similar amount of time. The Wheats are only about 10-15 years newer than the Indians, yet the Indians have a far more prominent green patina despite the coins supposedly having the same composition. Sorry for the thread hijack - but someone smarter than me must have an explanation. Only thing I can think of is what DougF suggested - that although the percentage of copper is the same, the actual copper is used is of different grade?
For some reason it's very nice to the Indianheads. The nickels it turns brown but they don't get crusty though. Every so often I find silver with some dark gray patina on it but that is fairly rare. The only drawback of this nice ground up here is that the finds only ever date back to around the 1880s and 90s. Nothing too terribly old..... there was no one here with coins before that.
Nah..... I just cleaned it off with the Armorall cleaning wipes I keep in my truck. That's what I use to clean all my finds.
