Cyrus E. Dallin

Cyrus Edwin Dallin was born in 1861 in Springville, in what was then Utah Territory — a frontier mining town a long way from any art school. As a boy he played alongside Ute and Paiute children, and that early closeness to Native life shaped almost everything he made later. He would become one of America's most respected sculptors of Native American subjects, and he never stopped insisting their dignity be taken seriously.

The path out of Utah ran through clay. Local mining investors saw promise in the young man's modeling and paid for him to go east. At nineteen he arrived in Boston to train with the sculptor Truman Howe Bartlett, then crossed the Atlantic to study in Paris — at the Académie Julian and under established French sculptors. Paris was where ambitious American artists went to be taken seriously, and Dallin came home with the technical command to match his subjects.

He settled in Arlington, Massachusetts, taught for decades at what is now the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and worked until late in life. By his death in 1944 he had produced hundreds of works — and, in a detail that says something about the man, he had also competed as an archer at the 1904 Olympic Games, taking a bronze medal in the team event.

Dallin's reputation rests on bronze, not coins. His signature achievement is a series of four large equestrian sculptures — a mounted Native American figure, returned to across two decades — that traced a single, deepening idea: A Signal of Peace, The Medicine Man, Protest of the Sioux, and finally Appeal to the Great Spirit. The series read, in order, as a people moving from welcome to defiance to a last reaching toward the heavens. It was a quiet argument in bronze about how the country had treated the people who were already here.

Appeal to the Great Spirit (1909) is the one most people have seen, even if they don't know the name. A rider tilts his head back and opens his arms to the sky, reins slack. It has stood in front of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts for more than a century and remains one of the most reproduced works in the museum. Earlier pieces in the series had already won him gold medals in Paris and at the 1904 world's fair in St. Louis — recognition that placed him among the front rank of American sculptors.

So when the Pilgrim Tercentenary Commission needed an artist for its 1620 anniversary coin in 1920, it hired a Boston sculptor at the height of his fame. Coin work was unusual for Dallin — a small, hard-edged medium for a man used to monuments. The difference shows in the story of how the coin came together, and in the marks it carries.

The commission handed Dallin sketches; his job was to turn them into the plaster models a coin is struck from. The result honors the 300th anniversary of the Pilgrims' 1620 landing. The obverse — the heads side — shows Plymouth Colony's Governor William Bradford in his tall hat, a Bible under his arm, head bowed. The reverse — the tails side — carries the Mayflower under full sail.

The coin did not sail through smoothly. James Earle Fraser — himself a great coin designer, the man behind the Buffalo nickel — sat on the federal Commission of Fine Arts and thought the lettering was crude, but by then there was no time to change it. In the back-and-forth, the words "HOLY BIBLE" and Dallin's own initials were dropped from the design. A small "D" for Dallin was added to the obverse, tucked near Bradford's elbow — apparently as an afterthought, and easily mistaken by collectors for a mint mark even though every one of these coins was struck in Philadelphia, which uses no mark at all.

Numismatists have had two centuries of fun at the ship's expense, too: the Mayflower on the coin flies a triangular "flying jib" sail — rigging that hadn't come into use in 1620. A small anachronism on a coin meant to capture a precise historical moment. None of it stopped the coin from becoming a collector favorite and, for many, the unofficial "Thanksgiving coin" of the U.S. commemorative series.