1913 Type 1

Treasury Secretary Franklin MacVeagh had been carrying forward Theodore Roosevelt's Renaissance of American Coinage agenda since McKinley left office, and in May 1911 his son reminded him that a new nickel design would be "a permanent souvenir of the most attractive sort." The Coinage Act of 1890 allowed coin designs to be changed after 25 years, and the Liberty Head nickel had reached that threshold in 1908. MacVeagh started the process in 1911 and pointedly bypassed Charles Barber (the Mint's competent but aesthetically mediocre Chief Engraver) by selecting James Earle Fraser instead.

Fraser was a former assistant to Augustus Saint-Gaudens and a prolific sculptor best known for his monumental "End of the Trail" statue of an exhausted Native American on horseback. His Buffalo nickel design departed sharply from earlier American coin imagery in one critical respect: where previous "Indians" on United States coins had been primarily Caucasian figures wearing Native American headdresses (epitomized by Saint-Gaudens's Greek Nike head on the 1907 $10 Indian eagle), Fraser's obverse portrait accurately depicted a male Native American. Only Bela Lyon Pratt's 1908 quarter eagle and half eagle had attempted similar authenticity. The obverse portrait was a composite of three chiefs who had posed for Fraser years earlier, and the bison on the reverse was modeled on a real animal (commonly identified as Black Diamond, then resident at the Central Park Zoo in New York).

The design met resistance inside the Mint. Barber complained that Fraser's elements were too large to leave proper placement for the inscriptions. The vending machine industry was even more vocal: Hobbs Manufacturing Company, which marketed a counterfeit-detection device built around the dimensions of the existing nickel, demanded significant changes to the models. MacVeagh refused. He instructed the Mint to proceed with Fraser's original design and let the vending machine companies adapt their mechanisms to the coin. On March 4, 1913, the first Buffalo nickels to enter circulation were presented to outgoing President William Howard Taft and 33 Native American chiefs at the groundbreaking ceremonies for the proposed National Memorial to the North American Indian at Fort Wadsworth, New York. The Buffalo nickel had launched.

The Type 1 reverse placed FIVE CENTS on a raised exergual mound beneath the bison, an artistically striking choice that proved practically disastrous. As early as April 1913 the Mint was already noticing rapid wear in this area on coins in circulation because the denomination sat at the highest point of relief. Barber finally got his chance to modify Fraser's design, cutting away the mound and setting the denomination into a recessed exergue. The Type 2 reverse entered production by mid-year. Philadelphia delivered 30,992,000 Type 1 nickels before the change, all bearing the original raised-mound configuration that defines the variety.

The 1913 Type 1 is common in all grades and readily available in Mint State. Strike tends to be strong on Type 1 examples, with sharper bison hair detail and crisper obverse portraiture than the Type 2 coins that followed Barber's mid-year smoothing. The coin is the required opening entry in any Buffalo nickel date set and one of the most historically significant American coins of the twentieth century. MS63 through MS65 examples are accessible to most collectors, and Gem pieces at MS66 and above command modest premiums driven by strong demand for first-year-of-issue Buffalo nickels. Fraser's design would remain on the nickel for the next twenty-five years, and when it was replaced in 1938 by Felix Schlag's Jefferson nickel, collectors and design critics alike mourned the end of what many considered the finest American coinage design ever produced.