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The origin of the 'Hobo nickel'


First minted between 1913 and 1938, the "Buffalo" or "Indian Head" nickel was designed by James E. Fraser, a former assistant to Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The coin's obverse, or "heads," side featured a Native American profile that was said to be a composite of three individuals from three different tribes?an Ogalala named Iron Trail, a Northern Cheyenne known as Two Moons, and Big Tree, a Seneca that had a brief career in 1920s silent movies. The reverse side of the coin was an image of a bison named Black Diamond, who then lived in New York's Central Park Zoo.

The coin was relatively plentiful?over 1.2 billion were minted during the 25 years of its run. However, a small number of them were adapted by the nation's then-significant population of itinerant workers, both as a mode of craft and a kind of parallel currency. (During the Depression as many as one out of every five able-bodied individuals was idle; thousands took to riding the rails in search of temporary work as a way of life.) Often using little more than a pen-knife, many of these drifters pain-stakingly altered the extremely hard copper-nickel alloy, transforming the Indian's head into profile portraits of friends and loved ones (both male and female), of other hobos, or of themselves. Rare examples also feature alterations of the "buffalo," typically into donkeys or elephants. These "Hobo Nickels" were a way for the vagabonds to increase the value of the coin so that it brought a more advantageous exchange when used to barter for food and drink, or for lodging or transportation.

For today's coin collectors and scholars (including the 350 or so aficionados that make up The Original Hobo Nickel Society, Inc., in which my friend has become a member-in-good-standing), these so-called hobo nickels fall within the category of exonumia, defined by numismatists as "objects of historical interest that resemble coins or currency." Some have fetched thousands of dollars at auction as examples of vernacular American craft.