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[L#0187] 1914/3-S 5c NGC MS64

Currency:USD Category:Coins & Paper Money Start Price:1,800.00 USD Estimated At:3,000.00 - 5,000.00 USD
[L#0187] 1914/3-S 5c NGC MS64
Golden with nickel blue and gray patina, an occasion blush of other tints overlays choice lustrous surfaces. Sharply pin-point strike, with no obvious blemishes; best of all the coin is absolutely free from annoying spots or flyspecks. The upper bar of the 3 is faintly visible on both sides of the peak of the digit 4 in the date, with the San Francisco mint 1914/3 much scarcer and a more recent discovery than the Philadelphia Mint overdate.

It appears that even the artist who designed this piece, James Earle Fraser, preferred the familiar term "buffalo" to the more zoologically correct bison. Semantics aside, the model for the nickel's reverse is known to have been a bull named Black Diamond. This animal was then a resident of New York City's Central Park Zoo and was already about seventeen years old at the time. Nowadays, paragons of "correctness" in the numismatic press prefer to describe to the charming Buffalo Nickel as an Indian Head five-cent coin -- which looses all the charm and musicality of the former term, so we'll stick to the one collectors have grown accustomed to: Buffalo Nickel. At the time this design was being considered, mint correspondence refers continuously to the new "nickels," though now and then the words "five-cents" crop up as well.