THE BUFFALO NICKEL

 

Rare 1937-D Buffalo Nickel

Kansas Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve Herd 

I walked and rode over the Kansas Flint Hills as a youth with my dad and family members in pursuit of small game while the ever-present winds were part of my existence.  That experience taught me to understand that one cannot know a land or city unless you walk the trails and sidewalks and convene with both nature and the people.  I was vaguely aware of the distant past while walking over the prairies when encountering a buffalo wallow or wagon ruts that were destined for Oregon.

I never encountered a live buffalo until later in life at various zoos.  The animals were always out of their element in their loss of freedom and they languished in their reliance on their captors for survival.  I recently ran across the poster buffalo for this tragic end in Steven Rinella’s book on the American Buffalo.  At one point in our not too distant past around thirty-two million roamed free on the Great Plains alone.  Then upon the arrival of our ancestors to America, they were almost exterminated.  

In 1911 the U.S. Mint commissioned sculptor James Earle Fraser to design a replacement for the Liberty Head nickel which was considered to be too Romanesque.  He chose the buffalo as uniquely representative of America.  Fraser selected a buffalo in a New York Zoo named Black Diamond as his model.  The Philadelphia Mint began production in 1913 until 1938, making Black Diamond’s image widely distributed.  Ironically, Black Diamond was auctioned off in 1915 for $300 to a meat specialist where he was slaughtered and his head was prominently displayed in the owner’s office!

I like the way Rinella saw the buffalo symbolizing some of “our most confounding contradictions…At once it is a symbol of the tenacity of wilderness and the destruction of wilderness; it’s a symbol of Native American culture and the death of Native American culture; it’s a symbol of the strength and vitality of America and the pettiness and greed of America; it represents a frontier both forgotten and remembered; it stands for freedom and captivity, extinction and salvation.”

POSTSCRIPT:  

Senators Kassebaum and Bob Dole introduced a Senate bill in 1994 to begin setting aside a small segment of the once 170 million acres of North American tallgrass prairie that the vast herds of buffalo had occupied.  The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in the Kansas Flint Hills now occupies 10,000 acres and in 2009 the Nature Conservancy introduced a small herd of bison to roam free in their natural habitat.  

A rare 1937-D MS69 buffalo nickel now sells for $2,385—8 times the price of it’s model!