Jo Mora: the cowboy who put a prospector and a bear on a half dollar

Joseph Jacinto Mora was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on October 22, 1876 — about as far from the American West as a person could start. Yet he grew up to be called the "Renaissance Man of the West," and the title was not flattery. He was a cowboy, a photographer, a cartoonist, a muralist, a sculptor, a mapmaker, and an author, often all in the same decade.

Art was the family trade. His father, Domingo Mora, was a Catalan sculptor; his older brother, F. Luis Mora, became the first Hispanic member of the National Academy of Design. The family left Uruguay during unrest in 1877, passed through Catalonia, and reached the United States around 1880, settling in New Jersey. Young Jo trained at the Art Students League of New York and the Cowles Art School in Boston — and studied under the celebrated painter William Merritt Chase — before paying the bills as a newspaper cartoonist for the Boston Evening Traveller and Boston Herald.

Then he went West and stayed. He reached California in 1903, and the following years he spent in Arizona living among the Hopi and Navajo, learning their languages and documenting their ceremonial life in photographs and paintings. That immersion fed everything after it. He eventually settled on California's Monterey Peninsula — Carmel-by-the-Sea, then Pebble Beach — where he built a home, a studio, and a reputation. He died in Monterey on October 10, 1947, twelve days short of his seventy-first birthday.

Mora's gift was breadth. He sculpted the cenotaph for Father Junípero Serra at Mission Carmel and the Cervantes monument in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park; he carved bas-reliefs for the Monterey County Courthouse; he built enormous, crowded dioramas — one nearly a hundred feet long, packed with dozens of sculpted figures — for world's-fair pavilions and Western museums. He drew the pictorial maps he is still famous for, dense with cowboys, cattle brands, and tall tales. He wrote and illustrated his own books about the Californios and the cattle country he loved. Whatever the medium, his work was warm, narrative, and a little tongue-in-cheek.

Coins were not his usual stage, which made 1925 a test. To mark California's 75th year of statehood — the "diamond jubilee" — a San Francisco citizens' committee, led by future mayor Angelo Rossi, picked Mora unanimously. He gave them two plain, powerful images. The obverse — the heads side — shows a Gold Rush prospector kneeling to pan for placer gold, the loose flakes that miners washed from streambeds. The reverse — the tails side — carries a grizzly bear, lifted straight from California's Bear Flag. Mora left the fields, the flat background areas, deliberately rough and unpolished, so the figures stand out against texture rather than mirror.

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts hated it. Its sculptor-member, James Earle Fraser — designer of the Buffalo nickel — dismissed the early sketches outright. He called the bear "entirely too short," and the whole design "inexperienced and amateurish," and pushed to hand the job to a different sculptor. The committee refused to drop Mora. He sharpened his sketches, other commissioners came around, and the coin was approved. History sided with the committee: Mora's two-figure design is now widely judged one of the most successful classic commemoratives, and the very directness Fraser distrusted is what collectors prize.