The White Woman Indian Head

Sometimes when bored I lay coins out on the counter and sort through them in search of old and interesting ones. Late last night a regular customer named Paul came in while I was sorting through pennies. I told him that I have found a few Lincoln wheat pennies – mostly made in the 1940s but one that was minted in 1916 – and that my 14-year old son Cory has taken an interest in them. Paul asked if I had found any Indian head pennies. I told him I hadn’t, but that Cory has read and talked about them and is hoping I might find one for him. Paul left, then returned a half-hour later and handed me an Indian head penny. “Give that to your son,” he said.

It’s dated 1906.
 
I’ve done a bit of Googling and this is what I’ve learned: Indian head pennies were minted from 1859 to 1909 in various sizes and designs that changed with the times. (It was replaced by the Lincoln penny in 1909.) U.S. Mint Director James Ross Snowden chose the Indian head design over other proposals at the urging of an engraver named James B. Longacre who, in 1858, wrote this:  

“From the copper shores of Lake Superior, to the silver mountains of Potosi, from the Ojibwa to the Aramanian, the feathered tiara is as characteristic of the primitive races of our hemisphere as the turban is of the Asiatic. Nor is there anything in its decorative character repulsive to the association of Liberty . . . It is more appropriate than the Phrygian cap, the emblem rather of the emancipated slave, than of the independent freeman, of those who are able to say ‘we were never in bondage to any man’. I regard then this emblem of America as a proper and well defined portion of our national inheritance; and having now the opportunity of consecrating it as a memorial of Liberty, 'our Liberty', American Liberty; why not use it? One more graceful can scarcely be devised. We have only to determine that it shall be appropriate, and all the world outside of us cannot wrest it from us.^” 

The facial features of the ‘Indian’ on the coins are Caucasian; supposedly a white woman wearing the headdress of a Native American man posed for the engraver. Mint Director Snowden said this of it: "The artists at the Mint evidently not realizing the absurd incongruity of placing this most masculine attribute of the warrior brave on the head of a woman.”  

Nevertheless, my son Cory is grateful and excited. We looked up the value: About $2.00 to $6.00.

The coin was minted when Theodore Roosevelt was president (the same year he won a Nobel Peace Prize). Here’s a few other things that happened in 1906: A massive earthquake destroyed most of San Francisco and killed nearly 4,000 people; Jack London wrote his novel White Fang; the Wright Brothers patented an aeroplane; Henry Ford became president of the Ford Motor Company, and the San Francisco Board of Education sparked a diplomatic crisis when they ordered the segregation in separate schools for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean children.  

No telling how many hands and pockets and places that coin has passed through during the past 108 years. Last night at a 24-hour convenience store at a place where wild grizzlies walked (and native Salish people lived sustainable) in 1906, it went from Paul’s hands to mine and today to my son Cory . . .  and now all the world outside of us cannot wrest it from us.