Cyrus E. Dallin

Cyrus Edwin Dallin was born in 1861 in Springville, in what was then Utah Territory — a frontier settlement a long way from any art school. He grew up alongside the Ute families who lived nearby, and that early closeness to Native life shaped almost everything he made. He would become one of America's most respected sculptors of Native American subjects, and he never stopped insisting their dignity be taken seriously.

The path out of Utah ran through clay. The story collectors love — and the museum that bears his name tells it too — is that a wealthy mining man, C. H. Blanchard, saw the young man's modeling and told his father, "That boy ought to have a chance." Blanchard and another investor paid to send him east. In 1880, at nineteen, Dallin arrived in Boston to train with the sculptor Truman Howe Bartlett. Later he crossed the Atlantic to study in Paris — at the Académie Julian and under the French sculptor Henri Chapu. Paris was where ambitious American artists went to be taken seriously, and Dallin came home with the technical command to match his subjects.

He settled in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1900, taught for four decades at what is now the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and worked nearly to the end. By his death in 1944 he had produced more than 260 works. In a detail that says something about the man, he was also a champion archer — he competed at the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis and took a bronze medal in the team event.

Dallin's reputation rests on bronze, not coins. His signature achievement is a set of four large equestrian sculptures — a mounted Native American figure, returned to over nearly two decades — that traced a single, deepening idea: A Signal of Peace (1890), The Medicine Man (1899), The Protest (1904), and finally Appeal to the Great Spirit (1908). Read in order, they move from welcome to defiance to a last reaching toward the heavens. It was a quiet argument in bronze about how the country had treated the people who were already here.

Appeal to the Great Spirit is the one most people have seen, even if they don't know the name. A rider tilts his head back and opens his arms to the sky, reins slack. The full-size bronze, cast in Paris, won a gold medal at the 1909 Paris Salon, and it has stood in front of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts for more than a century — one of the most reproduced works the museum owns.

His patience was legendary. Dallin won a Boston competition for an equestrian statue of Paul Revere at age twenty-two — and then watched the project crawl. Through seven different models and fifty-seven years of delays, the Paul Revere monument was not finally dedicated until 1940, four years before he died. Coin work, by contrast, was a sprint in miniature — and it would show.

What separates Dallin from many sculptors who used Native subjects is that he meant it. He did not just model warriors; he argued for the living people. In the 1920s and '30s he served as president of the Massachusetts branch of the Eastern Association on Indian Affairs and sat on the board of the Algonquin Council of New England, pressing on land and water rights, health, education, and the survival of Native art.

In a 1921 speech in Lowell, Massachusetts, he put the accusation plainly — and at his own country.

So when the Pilgrim Tercentenary Commission needed an artist for its 300th-anniversary coin in 1920, it hired a Boston sculptor at the height of his fame. The commission supplied design sketches; Dallin's job was to turn them into the plaster models a coin is struck from. The obverse — the heads side — shows Plymouth Colony's Governor William Bradford in his tall hat, a Bible tucked under his arm, head bowed. The reverse — the tails side — carries the Mayflower under full sail.

The coin did not sail through smoothly. James Earle Fraser — himself a great coin designer, the man behind the Buffalo nickel — sat on the federal Commission of Fine Arts and judged the lettering crude, but by then there was no time to fix it. (Fraser used the episode to argue, for the future, that designers be given three months to review their work.) Along the way the words "HOLY BIBLE," originally cut into the book on Bradford's arm, were dropped from the design.

Then there's the "D." A single recessed D sits under Bradford's elbow — Dallin's initial, not a mint mark. The likely explanation is the kind of accident a collector remembers: it was punched into the master hub late in the process, apparently by a punch normally used to stamp the Denver mint mark. Easy to misread, but no Pilgrim half dollar was ever struck in Denver. Every one came from the Philadelphia Mint, which used no mark at all — so a "Denver" coin in this series does not exist.

Numismatists have had a century of fun at the ship's expense, too: the Mayflower on the coin flies a triangular "flying jib" sail — rigging that had not come into use by 1620. A small anachronism on a coin meant to capture a precise historical moment. None of it stopped the coin from becoming a collector favorite, and for many the unofficial "Thanksgiving coin" of the U.S. commemorative series.

The Pilgrim half dollar comes in two dates, and the second is the prize. In October 1920 the Philadelphia Mint struck 200,112 coins; they were shipped to the National Shawmut Bank of Boston and sold to the public for $1 apiece, the profit going to the celebration. When 1921 sales slowed, the commission ordered 100,053 more, now carrying an added "1921" date to the left of Bradford's face.

Then the math turned brutal. Unsold coins went back to the Mint to be melted — 48,000 of the 1920 issue and 80,000 of the 1921. That left roughly 152,000 of the 1920 coin and only about 20,000 of the 1921. The added date and the heavier meltdown are exactly why the 1921 trades at a steep premium to its older sibling: scarcity, not age, drives this one.

For variety hunters, the 1920 reverse is worth a close look. A die crack between the main and mizzen masts grows through several stages as the dies wore — the late, "shattered" state is the one die-break collectors chase.