MARCH 4
1913•Buffalo Nickel
1921•Missouri Centennial Half Dollar
The Buffalo Nickel Enters General Circulation
On March 4, 1913, the Buffalo nickel entered general circulation, bringing James Earle Fraser's bold new American design into everyday commerce. Liberty Head nickels had circulated since 1883; now Americans received a five-cent coin bearing a Native American portrait on one side and an American bison on the other. The coin had already appeared in a limited ceremonial distribution on February 22, but March 4 marked its broader public release—and the beginning of one of the most recognizable series in United States numismatics.
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The Buffalo nickel looked nothing like the coin it replaced.
There was no classical female Liberty.
No Roman numeral V.
No conventional heraldic eagle.
Instead, one side showed the powerful profile of a Native American man.
The other showed an American bison.
In 1913, those images represented a striking change in the appearance of everyday American money.
The Liberty Head Nickel Had Lasted Thirty Years
Since 1883, the nation's five-cent coin had carried Chief Engraver Charles E. Barber's Liberty Head design.
The obverse showed Liberty in a classical style.
The reverse centered on a large Roman numeral V for five.
By the early twentieth century, the design belonged to an older generation of American coinage.
The artistic reform movement that had already transformed the gold denominations was coming to the nickel.
President Theodore Roosevelt had pushed the United States Mint toward more ambitious coin designs beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century.
His collaboration with Augustus Saint-Gaudens produced the magnificent 1907 eagle and double eagle.
Although Roosevelt left office in 1909, the broader movement toward sculptural, distinctly American coinage continued.
The Buffalo nickel emerged from that artistic environment.
Sculptor James Earle Fraser designed the new nickel.
Fraser was born in Minnesota in 1876 and spent part of his childhood on the Dakota frontier.
He became an important American sculptor and studied under Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
His work frequently explored western and Native American themes.
The nickel would become his most widely distributed creation.
A Coin Intended to Look American
Fraser wanted imagery rooted in the United States rather than generic European classicism.
The Native portrait and bison gave the coin an unmistakably American visual identity.
The design reflected an early twentieth-century fascination with the West and with imagery associated with a supposedly disappearing frontier.
That context is important to understanding both the coin's appeal and its limitations.
The obverse presents a right-facing Native American profile.
Fraser said the portrait was based on studies of several Native men rather than a single individual.
Over the decades, numerous people and tribes have been connected to the design.
The exact identity of every model remains debated.
Claims that one specific person alone was unquestionably “the Indian on the nickel” should therefore be treated cautiously.
Fraser later named Iron Tail of the Oglala Lakota and Two Moons of the Northern Cheyenne among the men who influenced the portrait.
Accounts differ over the identity of an additional model.
The artist's composite approach allowed him to create an idealized portrait rather than a literal likeness of one person.
The result became one of the most famous Native images in American numismatics.
The Buffalo nickel is often praised for presenting a dignified Native profile rather than a caricature.
At the same time, the design came from a period when non-Native artists frequently portrayed Indigenous people as symbols of a vanishing past.
Native nations were not vanishing.
They were living communities confronting federal assimilation policies, land loss and cultural suppression.
The coin is therefore both admired art and an artifact of its historical moment.
The reverse shows a large American bison standing on a raised mound.
The animal dominates the coin.
FIVE CENTS appears below.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and E PLURIBUS UNUM complete the national inscriptions.
The image is muscular, simple and immediately recognizable.
Was the Bison Black Diamond?
A famous tradition identifies the model as Black Diamond, a bison associated with the Central Park Menagerie in New York.
Fraser's own recollections and later accounts are inconsistent enough that the identification cannot be treated as completely settled.
The Black Diamond story remains part of Buffalo-nickel lore, but the safest historical description is that Fraser modeled his bison from animals he observed rather than claiming an absolutely proven single model.
Treasury Secretary Franklin MacVeagh played an important role in replacing the Liberty Head nickel.
The Barber nickel had reached the statutory period after which its design could be changed without special congressional authorization.
Fraser developed models for the new coin.
By 1912, the design was moving toward production.
Then an industrial company intervened.
The Hobbs Manufacturing Company made devices intended to detect counterfeit nickels in vending and coin-operated machines.
The company objected to Fraser's design.
It argued that the coin's relief and other features could interfere with its detection equipment.
The dispute delayed final approval and became one of the most famous episodes in the coin's creation.
Chief Engraver Charles E. Barber worked on converting Fraser's models into practical coinage dies.
Barber and Fraser did not always agree over the changes.
The tension reflected a recurring problem in coin design:
a sculptor may create an artistic model, but the Mint must make that design strike reliably by the millions.
The Hobbs objections threatened to delay the new nickel indefinitely.
Secretary MacVeagh eventually rejected further demands for changes.
The government was not going to redesign national coinage simply to accommodate one manufacturer's equipment.
Production could proceed.
The first public appearance of the new nickel came before its general circulation release.
On February 22, 1913, examples were distributed ceremonially at the groundbreaking for the proposed National American Indian Memorial at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island.
President William Howard Taft, Rodman Wanamaker and Native representatives participated in the event.
The memorial itself was never built.
Why February 22 and March 4 Are Both Important
These dates describe different stages.
February 22 represents a limited ceremonial distribution connected with the memorial groundbreaking.
March 4 represents the coin's general release into circulation.
Neither date needs to displace the other.
Together they explain how the Buffalo nickel moved from symbolic debut to everyday American money.
On March 4, the new nickels entered broader circulation.
Americans could now encounter Fraser's design in ordinary transactions.
The transformation was immediate.
A thirty-year-old Liberty Head type gave way to one of the boldest circulating designs the Mint had yet produced.
The earliest 1913 Buffalo nickels show the bison standing on a raised mound.
Collectors call this the Type I reverse.
The denomination FIVE CENTS sits prominently on the mound.
That placement soon created a practical problem.
The denomination stood on a high point of the design.
Normal circulation could wear it down quickly.
The Mint revised the reverse during 1913.
The mound was flattened into a recessed ground line, giving FIVE CENTS better protection.
The revised version is known as Type II.
That means a collector building a type set can find two visibly different Buffalo nickels dated 1913.
The Type I coin preserves Fraser's original mound concept.
The Type II shows the practical modification.
Like the 1793 cent and several other early designs, the Buffalo nickel demonstrates how quickly the Mint could revise a new coin once circulation exposed weaknesses.
Buffalo nickels were struck at Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco.
Philadelphia coins carry no mintmark.
Denver coins use D.
San Francisco coins use S.
The mintmark appears beneath the denomination on the reverse.
The Buffalo nickel remained in production from 1913 through 1938.
Over those twenty-five years, it became a familiar part of American commerce.
Millions circulated through World War I, the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression.
The design's artistic reputation grew even as its technical weaknesses became obvious.
One of the series' biggest problems is familiar to anyone who has handled a heavily worn Buffalo nickel.
The date sits on a raised area of the Native portrait.
Years of circulation can erase it.
Countless surviving Buffalo nickels are completely dateless.
That makes identifying them by year impossible without chemically altering the surface.
Why “Restored Dates” Need Disclosure
Commercial products can reveal worn dates with acid treatment, often using ferric chloride solutions sold under names such as Nic-A-Date.
The process etches the metal and permanently alters the coin.
A restored date can be useful for curiosity or inexpensive study.
It does not turn a dateless coin back into an original collectible example.
Such pieces should always be described honestly.
The Buffalo nickel's design also challenged the Mint's striking technology.
Important details on the Native portrait and bison correspond to demanding areas of relief.
Some issues are frequently found weakly struck.
Collectors therefore evaluate not only wear but also how completely the design was brought up when the coin was made.
Among early issues, the 1913-S Type II is a key coin.
Its relatively low mintage and strong collector demand make it significantly scarcer than common dates.
The first year alone can become a specialized collecting field because of mintmarks and the two reverse types.
One of the most famous Buffalo nickel varieties is the 1918/7-D overdate.
A 1918-dated die was created using a hub carrying the previous year's date, leaving a visible 7 beneath the 8.
Genuine examples are scarce and valuable.
Because of that value, authentication is particularly important.
No Buffalo nickel variety is more famous than the 1937-D Three-Legged.
Excessive die polishing removed much of one of the bison's front legs from the working die.
Coins struck afterward appear to show a three-legged animal.
The error became one of the iconic varieties of twentieth-century U.S. coinage.
The final year also contains an important overmintmark variety in which a Denver mintmark was punched over an underlying San Francisco mintmark.
Varieties like these keep the series interesting far beyond a basic date-and-mint set.
Buffalo nickel specialists can study dies, repunching, overdates and other diagnostics in remarkable detail.
The Coin Circulated Hard
Five cents had meaningful purchasing power in the early twentieth century.
Nickels bought streetcar rides, small foods, newspapers and access to coin-operated machines.
Buffalo nickels therefore worked hard.
Many surviving pieces show extensive wear because they performed exactly the job for which they were made.
Fraser's imagery captured a powerful national mythology.
The Native profile and bison evoked the western frontier just as the frontier era was passing into memory.
That imagery appealed strongly to early twentieth-century Americans.
It also simplified complex histories of Native nations, federal expansion and the destruction of bison herds into two dramatic symbols.
American bison once numbered in the tens of millions.
Nineteenth-century commercial hunting, federal policy and westward expansion reduced the herds catastrophically.
By the time Fraser designed the nickel, conservation efforts were helping save the species from extinction.
The reverse therefore depicted an animal that had already become a symbol of both western abundance and environmental loss.
At the same time the government celebrated a Native portrait on its money, federal policies continued pressuring Native communities toward assimilation.
Boarding schools, allotment and restrictions on cultural practices formed part of that history.
The nickel's dignified portrait did not mean federal treatment of Native peoples had suddenly become equitable.
That contradiction belongs to the coin's historical context.
By 1938, the Buffalo nickel had reached the statutory 25-year period after which the Treasury could replace a coin design without new congressional authorization.
Mint officials had long been frustrated by production and wear problems.
A new design honoring Thomas Jefferson was selected.
The Buffalo nickel disappeared from production after 1938.
Felix Schlag's Jefferson nickel debuted in 1938.
It replaced Fraser's western imagery with a presidential portrait and Monticello.
The Jefferson type proved far easier to manufacture and became one of the longest-running designs in American circulation.
But it never erased the Buffalo nickel from public affection.
The Buffalo Returns on Modern Coins
Fraser's imagery proved too popular to remain only in the past.
In 2001, the U.S. Mint issued the American Buffalo commemorative silver dollar, drawing heavily on the classic nickel design.
Then in 2006, the Mint introduced the American Buffalo one-ounce 24-karat gold bullion coin.
Fraser's Native portrait and bison returned in precious metal.
The transformation is remarkable.
An image originally created for an everyday five-cent piece became the design of America's first 24-karat one-ounce gold bullion coin.
The modern Buffalo gold coin demonstrates the extraordinary staying power of Fraser's artwork.
Few circulating coin designs have enjoyed a comparable second life.
Buffalo nickels remain popular with beginning collectors.
Common circulated examples are affordable.
The design is immediately interesting.
A collector can learn about mintmarks, varieties, strike quality, wear and date restoration without needing an enormous budget.
At the same time, the rarest pieces challenge advanced specialists.
A beginner might collect one Buffalo nickel as a type coin.
A more ambitious collector might build a date-and-mint set.
A specialist might pursue Type I and Type II varieties, overdates, repunched mintmarks, doubled dies and die marriages.
The same series can support a lifetime of study.
February 22 was the ceremonial preview.
March 4 was when Fraser's design became broadly available as American money.
That distinction makes March 4 an important circulation milestone.
The Buffalo nickel moved from an event souvenir in a limited ceremonial setting to a coin Americans could encounter in normal commerce.
The Buffalo nickel circulated for only twenty-five years.
Yet its imagery remains familiar more than a century after introduction.
Collectors still hunt 1913 types, 1918/7-D overdates and Three-Legged Buffalos.
The Mint still uses Fraser's imagery on gold bullion.
The coin's cultural life far exceeded its original production period.
On March 4, 1913, the Buffalo nickel entered general circulation, carrying James Earle Fraser's Native American portrait and American bison into everyday commerce and beginning one of the most beloved series in United States coinage.
ALSO ON THIS DAY
1921 — Missouri Centennial Half Dollar — Congress authorized the Missouri Centennial commemorative half dollar