Last week I showed off a few Indian Head pennies, the US penny design that came before the Lincoln penny, featuring Liberty in a Native American Headdress.

Today I want to continue this exploration of old American coins by looking at the Indian Head nickel—also known as the Buffalo nickel.

This may actually be my favorite US coin after the Mercury dime. It's one of the few non-president coins to not feature Liberty. It was part of Teddy Roosevelt's push to beautify US coins. I would say the previous nickel, the V nickel, was already pretty beautiful, but it was time for something new. T.R. actually wanted Augustus Saint-Gaudens to redesign all the coins, but the man was near the end of his life and just didn't have the time of energy to do everything. James Earle Fraser, who had been an assistant to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, proposed a design for the nickel with an Indian and bison. It was approved and put into action.

If there is one theme we can see in US coins it's that the public almost always hates any new design. So too with this one. The New York Times called it dull, and a coin magazine suggested removing the "ugly buffalo". The mint did make some small changes, both in an attempt to appease the critics and to make minting it easier, but the reaction remained mixed. Thus as soon as the minimum 25 years that a coin much remain in circulation passed, it was replaced with the Jefferson nickel.

And as these things go, as soon as they stopped minting it, people started talking about how nice the design had been. People are funny that way: they always hate new things, but only when they are gone do they realize how good they had it. Oh well. The design has since gone on to be a very popular one, find its way into all kinds of silver and gold rounds and on other commemorative coins.

You can see the ones I have are in decent shape, just dirty.

Good coin? Certainly much better than the ugly Jefferson nickel that followed. Like I said above, I like the V nickel, but it is kind of boring, and this one is much more interesting. I do have some V nickels around here somewhere. My non-silver coins are so unorganized... I'll make a post about them when I find at least one. Anyway, what do you think about the buffalo nickel?

David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Mastodon.