FEBRUARY 22
1913•Buffalo Nickel
2011•Presidential $1 Proof Set
The Buffalo Nickel Makes Its Ceremonial Debut at Fort Wadsworth
On February 22, 1913, the first examples of America's new Indian Head five-cent coin—better known today as the Buffalo nickel—were ceremonially distributed at the groundbreaking for the proposed National American Indian Memorial at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. President William Howard Taft attended the event along with a delegation of Native leaders. The ceremony joined one of the most famous designs in American coinage with a memorial project that was never built and with a period of U.S. history whose romanticized image of a “vanishing” Native America sharply conflicted with the lives and experiences of Native peoples themselves.
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The Buffalo nickel did not begin its public life at a bank counter.
It began at a ceremony.
On George Washington's birthday in 1913, dignitaries gathered at Fort Wadsworth overlooking New York Harbor.
President William Howard Taft was there.
So were Native leaders representing numerous tribal nations.
They had come for the groundbreaking of an enormous proposed monument called the National American Indian Memorial.
During the ceremony, examples of the nation's new five-cent coin were distributed.
It was a fitting—and deeply complicated—debut.
The Coin Americans Call the Buffalo Nickel
The coin is popularly known as the Buffalo nickel.
It is also commonly called the Indian Head nickel.
The obverse shows a Native American male profile.
The reverse shows an American bison.
Sculptor James Earle Fraser created both designs.
The coin would be produced from 1913 through 1938 and become one of the most recognizable pieces of twentieth-century American money.
The date requires an important distinction.
The February 22 Fort Wadsworth event was a limited ceremonial distribution of the new nickel.
The coin's broad release into general circulation followed on March 4, 1913.
Those are two different milestones.
February 22 marks the coin's extraordinary ceremonial introduction.
March 4 marks its general circulation debut.
Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island
Fort Wadsworth occupied a commanding position at the entrance to New York Harbor.
The federal military site looked across the Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn.
It was selected as the proposed location for the National American Indian Memorial.
The plan called for a monumental structure visible to ships entering one of the world's most important harbors.
Anyone arriving in New York would encounter the memorial before reaching Manhattan.
The memorial project was championed by Rodman Wanamaker, son of department-store founder John Wanamaker.
Wanamaker had sponsored expeditions involving Native American communities and became an advocate for a grand national monument.
The proposal envisioned a massive Native figure and associated museum or memorial complex.
Congress authorized federal land at Fort Wadsworth for the project.
The monument, however, would never be constructed.
The memorial reflected a common but deeply flawed idea of the era.
Many non-Native Americans portrayed Indigenous peoples as a “vanishing race”—figures belonging to the past rather than living nations and communities adapting, resisting and surviving in the present.
Modern scholarship emphasizes how this romanticized framing erased Native agency and obscured the consequences of federal policy, dispossession, forced assimilation and cultural suppression.
The February 22 ceremony therefore cannot be understood simply as a neutral celebration.
Dozens of Native representatives attended the groundbreaking.
Historical research identifies leaders associated with nations including Cheyenne, Lakota, Crow, Blackfeet, Apache, Kiowa, Chippewa and others.
The gathering itself was extraordinary.
Native leaders from across the country stood at a military installation in New York Harbor with the president of the United States while a monument supposedly dedicated to Native peoples was begun.
The ceremony brought very different political and cultural perspectives into the same space.
President William Howard Taft presided at the February 22 ceremony.
Contemporary accounts describe him breaking ground with a ceremonial spade.
Speeches addressed the proposed memorial and the place of Native peoples in American history.
The event was deliberately national in tone.
George Washington's birthday supplied additional symbolism.
And then the new nickel entered the story.
The First Buffalo Nickels Are Distributed
Historical accounts record that the United States Mint supplied a small number of the new nickels for the ceremony.
Numismatic histories commonly give the number as 40 coins.
Most were distributed to Native leaders participating in the event.
Scholar Frederick E. Hoxie's history of federal Indian policy describes the shiny new Indian-head nickels being ceremonially passed to Taft, Wanamaker and the assembled Native representatives.
It was the first distribution of the new design.
The symbolism was obvious.
The memorial purported to honor Native Americans.
The new five-cent coin displayed a Native American profile.
Its reverse displayed the American bison, an animal inseparable from the history and cultures of many Plains nations.
Federal officials could present the nickel as a distinctly “American” artistic object.
But the symbolism also reflected the same era's tendency to turn Native identity into a national icon while actual Native communities continued confronting discriminatory federal policies.
The Buffalo nickel was designed by sculptor James Earle Fraser.
Fraser had studied under Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose influence transformed American sculpture and coinage in the early twentieth century.
Fraser grew up partly in the American West.
His artistic career frequently drew on western subjects.
His best-known sculpture, End of the Trail, became another powerful—and controversial—image of Native America.
The Buffalo nickel emerged from the broader artistic transformation of U.S. coinage that began under President Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt believed American coins lacked the artistic quality of ancient Greek coinage and wanted designs worthy of a major nation.
His collaboration with Saint-Gaudens produced dramatic new gold coinage.
The movement continued after Roosevelt left office.
The five-cent piece became another target for redesign.
Replacing the Liberty Head Nickel
The Buffalo nickel replaced Charles E. Barber's Liberty Head nickel, which had been issued since 1883.
By law, coin designs generally could be changed without additional congressional authorization after they had been used for 25 years.
The Liberty Head design had passed that threshold.
Treasury officials wanted something more artistic and more distinctly American.
Fraser's Native portrait and bison answered that desire.
Fraser's obverse presents a powerful Native American profile facing right.
The word LIBERTY appears near the rim.
The date sits on the subject's shoulder.
Unlike earlier allegorical Liberty portraits, the figure is unmistakably intended to evoke an Indigenous American man.
The design was strikingly different from the classical female figures that had dominated U.S. coinage.
The identity of the obverse model has generated debate for more than a century.
Fraser stated that the portrait was a composite based on multiple Native men rather than a literal portrait of one individual.
Names associated with his recollections have included Iron Tail of the Oglala Lakota and Two Moons of the Northern Cheyenne.
Fraser's accounts varied over time, and claims by other individuals added confusion.
It is safest to describe the design as a composite Native portrait.
The reverse shows a large American bison standing in profile.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA appears above.
E PLURIBUS UNUM is also included.
FIVE CENTS appears below the animal.
The animal's massive form nearly fills the coin.
It remains one of the most memorable animal designs ever placed on United States circulating coinage.
A popular story identifies the reverse model as Black Diamond, a bison associated with New York's Central Park menagerie.
Fraser himself gave statements connecting his model to a bison in New York.
But the exact identity has been disputed, and details in the traditional Black Diamond story do not fit perfectly.
Collectors should treat a single-animal identification cautiously.
The design's artistic importance does not depend on proving the bison's name.
The Hobbs Manufacturing Company Fight
Before the coin could be released, Fraser's design became entangled in an unexpected industrial dispute.
The Hobbs Manufacturing Company made devices intended to detect counterfeit or altered coins in vending and coin-operated equipment.
The company objected that Fraser's design would not work properly with its machinery.
It demanded changes.
The controversy delayed final approval.
Treasury Secretary Franklin MacVeagh eventually concluded that the Hobbs objections had consumed enough time.
The design moved forward.
President Taft declined to stop the new coin during the closing weeks of his administration.
Production began in February 1913.
The Fort Wadsworth ceremony arrived only days later.
This is what makes February 22 numismatically unusual.
The Buffalo nickel existed.
Production had begun.
But the general public had not yet received the coin through ordinary nationwide circulation channels.
A tiny ceremonial group reached the hands of people at Fort Wadsworth first.
Those pieces effectively previewed one of America's most famous coins.
The groundbreaking did not lead to the towering monument its promoters envisioned.
Fundraising faltered.
The First World War shifted national priorities.
The National American Indian Memorial remained unrealized.
Today, the unbuilt project survives largely through archival records, photographs and historical scholarship.
Ironically, the coin distributed at its groundbreaking became vastly more enduring than the monument itself.
Millions of Buffalo nickels eventually circulated throughout the United States.
Americans carried them in pockets.
Children saved them.
Businesses received them.
Collectors preserved them.
The proposed Fort Wadsworth monument disappeared into history, while Fraser's tiny nickel became an enduring national image.
That contrast is one of the most striking elements of the February 22 story.
The broader public release followed on March 4, 1913.
The date coincided with the presidential transition from William Howard Taft to Woodrow Wilson.
The new nickel quickly attracted attention for its bold American imagery.
Not every critic liked it, but few could mistake it for the Liberty Head design it replaced.
Type I and Type II Buffalo Nickels
The original 1913 reverse showed the bison standing on a raised mound.
The denomination FIVE CENTS was positioned on that raised area.
Mint officials worried that the lettering would wear too quickly.
The reverse was modified during the first year.
Collectors now distinguish the original Type I design from the revised Type II, which places the bison on a flatter ground line with the denomination recessed below.
The modification did not solve every durability issue.
The date on the obverse sits on a raised portion of the Native subject's shoulder.
Circulation wear often erased the numerals.
As a result, dateless Buffalo nickels are extremely common today.
A coin can retain the unmistakable Fraser design while losing the very information needed to identify its year.
Buffalo nickels were struck at Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco during the series.
Philadelphia issues normally carry no mintmark.
Denver coins carry a D.
San Francisco coins carry an S.
For many dates, branch-mint issues are considerably scarcer than Philadelphia coins.
The series offers a deep field for date-and-mint collectors.
The Buffalo nickel series contains some of the best-known varieties in American numismatics.
The 1918/7-D overdate is a celebrated rarity.
The 1937-D Three-Legged Buffalo resulted from excessive die polishing that removed much of one of the bison's forelegs.
Other doubled dies, repunched mintmarks and varieties attract specialists.
The design that debuted ceremonially in 1913 developed into an entire collecting universe.
After 25 years, the Buffalo design became eligible for replacement without special congressional legislation.
In 1938, the Jefferson nickel replaced it.
Felix Schlag's design paired Thomas Jefferson with Monticello.
Fraser's bison disappeared from circulating five-cent pieces.
But the design never disappeared from American numismatic culture.
The imagery returned dramatically in the twenty-first century.
In 2001, the U.S. Mint issued a Buffalo commemorative silver dollar inspired by Fraser's famous designs.
In 2006, the Mint introduced the American Buffalo one-ounce 24-karat gold coin.
That bullion and collector series adapted Fraser's Indian Head and bison imagery to a modern gold format.
The 1913 design had become an American numismatic classic.
Understanding the Ceremony Today
The Fort Wadsworth event deserves more than nostalgic retelling.
Its organizers believed they were honoring Native peoples.
Yet the memorial concept was deeply shaped by the “vanishing race” ideology of the era.
Native nations had not vanished.
They were living communities dealing with federal assimilation policies, land loss, boarding schools and restrictions on cultural and political autonomy.
Modern interpretation must hold both realities together.
Fraser's nickel is admired as art.
Its Native profile is dignified and powerful.
Its bison is monumental despite the coin's small size.
At the same time, the coin emerged from a cultural environment that often treated Native people as symbols of a disappearing past rather than as citizens and members of sovereign tribal nations.
Recognizing that context does not diminish the coin's artistic achievement.
It makes its history more complete.
The Buffalo nickel has several dates that matter.
Production began in February 1913.
The ceremonial distribution occurred on February 22.
General circulation followed March 4.
The February 22 event is distinctive because it placed the first distributed examples into a setting deliberately connected to Native American imagery and national identity.
The coin and the ceremony were meant to reinforce one another.
The proposed memorial was supposed to tower over New York Harbor.
The Buffalo nickel was only 21.2 millimeters across.
The giant monument was never built.
The tiny coin survived.
Millions followed the ceremonial examples, and Fraser's imagery remains familiar more than a century later.
On February 22, 1913, at the Fort Wadsworth groundbreaking for the never-built National American Indian Memorial, the first Buffalo nickels were ceremonially distributed to President Taft, project leaders and participating Native representatives—giving one of America's most famous coins an extraordinary debut eleven days before its general circulation release.
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