The Buffalo Nickel

1913–1938

There may be no coin more American than this one — and almost nothing about it is simple. The chief on the front is three men who never sat in the same room. The buffalo on the back may be the wrong animal, sketched at the wrong zoo, and was butchered into steaks and turned into the upholstery of a car. There's a chief who spent his old age insisting he was on the coin when he almost certainly wasn't, and a famous bison whose own zookeeper called him a "sad failure."

This is the strange, tangled, deeply human story of the Buffalo nickel.

A boy who watched a world end

It starts with a boy who watched a world end. James Earle Fraser was born in 1876 and raised on the Dakota frontier, where his father worked the railroads pushing into Native land. As a child, Fraser saw two things vanishing at once — the great buffalo herds hunted to the edge of extinction, and the Native tribes forced from their homelands onto reservations.

That loss burned into him. At just fifteen, he sculpted a warrior slumped exhausted on a worn-out horse and called it "The End of the Trail" — an image of a way of life collapsing. That sculpture made him famous, and it told you exactly what kind of coin he would one day create: not a triumphant America, but an elegy for what America had destroyed.

Little Bighorn, two generations apart

There's a haunting coincidence buried in Fraser's own family. When he was an infant in 1877, his father was sent out to the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn to help recover the remains of Custer's fallen 7th Cavalry. And decades later, when Fraser needed models for his Native American chief, one of the men who sat for him was Two Moons, a Cheyenne war chief who had actually fought in that very battle.

Two generations of one family, standing on opposite sides of the most famous clash of the Indian Wars — the father among the dead, the son sketching one of the victors for a coin. You could not invent a stranger link.

Three chiefs, one face

Now, the face itself. Fraser always said it was not one man but a composite — features blended from three different chiefs to form an ideal, a tribute to all Native peoples rather than a portrait of one. He named three: Iron Tail, a Lakota Sioux; Two Moons, the Cheyenne; and Big Tree.

But here's where the legend gets tangled, and where a lot of popular retellings go wrong. Iron Tail is often said to have fought Custer at Little Bighorn — he didn't. That's a case of mistaken identity; people confuse him with a war chief named Iron Hail. The real Iron Tail was something else entirely: a star performer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, a world traveler who met heads of state, a man described as dignified and quiet, fond of children and horses, who cared nothing for flashy regalia. His fame came not from war but from the strange traveling spectacle that turned the vanishing frontier into entertainment.

The third chief, and the man who claimed him

And the third chief became a mystery that outlived everyone. Fraser could never clearly document who the third model was, and into that gap stepped one of the great characters in coin folklore — a Seneca man known as Chief John Big Tree. For decades, he traveled to coin conventions billing himself as "the nickel Indian," making public appearances well into the 1960s, once claiming he'd passed his hundredth birthday when records suggest he was closer to eighty-seven.

When he died, wire services reported him as the model for the nickel — and the Mint had to step in and say, gently, that he most likely wasn't. He may have believed it himself. But the coin's true third face was probably lost to history long before anyone thought to write it down.

Black Diamond, the contrary bison

Then there's the buffalo — and his story might be the strangest of all. Fraser said he modeled the animal on a bison named Black Diamond, and he complained bitterly about the experience. Black Diamond, he wrote, was the most contrary animal he'd ever dealt with, who refused point blank to turn and show his side, and stubbornly faced the artist head-on for hours. By one account, Fraser only got his angle when an assistant was sent to distract the beast so he could finally sketch its profile.

But almost nothing about Black Diamond adds up cleanly. Fraser said he sketched him at the Bronx Zoo — yet Black Diamond never lived at the Bronx Zoo. He lived at the little Central Park Menagerie, which happened to be much closer to Fraser's studio. The best guess of historians is that Fraser simply misremembered, absentmindedly attaching the more famous zoo's name to the animal years later. Worse, the horns on the coin don't match the horns on Black Diamond's own mounted head, which has led some to argue the real model was a different bison entirely.

And in a delicious bit of pettiness, the director of the Bronx Zoo — apparently annoyed the honor hadn't gone to one of his animals — sneered that the buffalo on the nickel looked like a "sad failure with its head drooped as if it had lost all hope in the world." Which, given that Fraser meant the whole coin as an elegy for a dying frontier, may have been more fitting than the man realized.

Steaks and car upholstery

Black Diamond's ending is genuinely grim. In 1915, the famous bison — by then old — was put up for auction, and not a single bidder came forward to save him. A group of citizens, led by a banker, tried to raise money to spare him. It failed. He was sold to a meat dealer for three hundred dollars and slaughtered, and his meat was sold as "Black Diamond steaks" at two dollars a pound.

A taxidermist mounted his head — the one that would later be displayed, fittingly, at coin conventions — and turned his hide into a thirteen-foot automobile lap robe, the fashionable car blanket of the day. The animal who may have symbolized the American West on its most beloved coin ended up as steaks and car upholstery. It is hard to imagine a more brutally literal version of the very story Fraser was trying to tell.

A tribute to what America destroyed

Once the coin was released in 1913, not everyone loved it. The New York Times sniffed that it was ugly new and would be worse when old. Some critics wanted the buffalo removed entirely.

And a few collectors' magazines raised a genuinely uncomfortable question — one worth sitting with. Was it right, they asked, to honor a Native American and a buffalo on American money, when the nation had forced those very peoples onto reservations and shot those very animals nearly to extinction? The coin was a monument to two things America had spent a century destroying. Fraser knew that. It's arguably the whole point of his art. But there's a real tension in a country stamping its conquests onto the coin of the realm and calling it a tribute.

Hobo nickels

The coin also became a canvas for one of the most extraordinary folk arts in American history. Because the Indian's head sat in thick, deep relief, drifters and out-of-work craftsmen during the Great Depression discovered they could carve into it — reshaping the face into new portraits, self-images, skulls, and characters.

These are the hobo nickels: humble five-cent coins transformed into tiny hand-carved sculptures by men riding the rails with nothing but a pocketknife and time. They're collected today as genuine folk art, each one unique, each one a small act of creation squeezed out of hard times.

The buffalo that lost a leg

And collectors chase one legendary mistake above all. In 1937, at the Denver Mint, a worker over-polished a die to clean it up and accidentally ground away one of the buffalo's front legs. The result was the famous "Three-Legged Buffalo" — a nickel where the great beast stands impossibly on three legs, a tiny stream of metal where the fourth should be. It escaped into circulation, and to this day it's one of the most sought-after error coins in America.

The design that refused to die

The Buffalo nickel was retired in 1938 for the Jefferson nickel we still carry. But Fraser's design refused to die. In 2006, the U.S. Mint reached back nearly a century and revived his original artwork for America's first-ever pure gold bullion coin — the same striding buffalo and noble profile, now struck in twenty-four-karat gold. The design once called ugly had become one of the most treasured images the nation ever made.

Why it matters

And maybe there's a final irony Fraser never got to see. He put that buffalo on the coin as a memorial to an animal he was certain was disappearing forever. Yet in the decades after, the American bison clawed its way back from near-extinction and survived. The very symbol of a vanishing world became, against all odds, a symbol of endurance.

That is the Buffalo nickel — a coin built on a composite chief, a misremembered zoo, a butchered bison, and a boy's grief for a dying frontier — and still, after everything, the most American coin ever struck.