The Buffalo Nickel

At the turn of the 20th century, President Theodore Roosevelt thought American coins were ugly. He launched a quiet campaign to make them beautiful — to hand the work to real sculptors instead of career engravers. That push gave the country a run of stunning new designs, and the nickel was next in line.

By 1911 the Treasury wanted to retire the staid Liberty Head nickel that had run since 1883. The job went to a sculptor named James Earle Fraser, and Fraser had one ambition: make something unmistakably American. Years later he summed it up plainly — he wanted "a coin that could not be mistaken for any other country's coin."

He chose two subjects no European mint could ever claim — a Native American and an American bison. The first coins were struck in February 1913 and reached the public that March. People called it the Buffalo nickel almost at once. (You'll also see it called the Indian Head nickel — same coin.)

There was a hitch right away. The very first design put the bison on a raised mound of earth, and the words "FIVE CENTS" sat on a high spot that wore down fast in circulation. Within months the Mint recut the design, sinking the denomination into a recessed line below the ground so it would survive in your pocket. That split 1913 into two versions — collectors call them Type 1 (raised mound) and Type 2 (the recessed "FIVE CENTS"). The fix helped, but Buffalo nickel dates still wore away faster than most — which is exactly why a sharp, fully dated one is worth a second look.

James Earle Fraser (1876–1953) grew up on the Great Plains and trained under Augustus Saint-Gaudens — the sculptor behind the gold double eagle widely called the most beautiful U.S. coin ever struck. By the time the nickel came his way, Fraser was already famous for End of the Trail, his haunting statue of an exhausted warrior slumped on a spent horse. He designed both sides of the coin himself.

The obverse — the "heads" side — is a portrait of a Native American in profile. It is not one man. Fraser built it as a composite from chiefs who sat for him, and over the years he named different sitters in different interviews: Iron Tail of the Lakota Sioux and Two Moons of the Cheyenne were the two he cited most, with others mentioned later. The exact mix is genuinely uncertain — Fraser's own accounts didn't agree — and honest sources leave it there.

The reverse — the "tails" side — is an American bison standing in heavy relief (relief is how far the design rises off the flat field of the coin). Collectors tell a story that the model was a bison named Black Diamond from a New York zoo. Fraser said as much himself, but historians have poked real holes in it — the details of where that animal lived and how its horns sat don't square with the coin. Treat the Black Diamond tale as a good story that may be embroidered, not settled fact.

Together the two sides did exactly what Fraser set out to do: they put the American West, and the people the West displaced, into the hand of every person who carried a nickel.

Most Buffalo nickels are common and affordable. The chase is in a handful of scarce dates and a couple of legendary mistakes.

The key dates are the low-mintage San Francisco and Denver coins. The 1926-S has the lowest mintage of any regular issue in the series — just 970,000 — and is genuinely rare in high grade, with pristine Gem examples nearly unheard of. The 1913-S Type 2 (roughly 1.2 million struck), the 1921-S, and the 1924-S round out the dates that make completing a set hard.

The famous varieties are where the romance lives:

• 1937-D Three-Legged Buffalo. The bison appears to stand on three legs. A Denver Mint worker, repairing a damaged die, polished it too aggressively and ground away most of the animal's front right leg, leaving little but a floating hoof. It's a true error, caught only after the coins shipped — and it became one of the most beloved rarities in all of U.S. coins.
• 1918/7-D overdate. A 1918 date was punched over a die already bearing 1917, leaving both years faintly visible. It's one of the most valuable Buffalo nickels of all.
• 1936-D "3½-Legged." A fainter cousin of the 1937-D, where part of the leg is weak rather than gone.
• 1916 Doubled Die Obverse. The date shows clear doubling — scarce and sought after.

A word on grading. Because Buffalo nickel dates wore off so easily, the single most important thing on a circulated coin is whether the date is full and sharp. On higher-grade coins, collectors hunt for strike — how completely the design transferred from die to blank — especially the fine fur and horn on the bison's head, which often came up soft. That combination is why high-grade, fully struck Buffalo nickels stay scarce even for common dates.