When I was a young boy, I worked in a variety of jobs, one of which was as a newspaper delivery person. Subscriptions were cheap in those days, and people paid me mainly with coins.
Some of those half-dollars, quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies were from an earlier era -- before World War 2, some even before World War 1.
I have saved those coins all my adult life.
Recently, when visiting Petaluma, I saw this lovely rendition of what the old nickels used to look like -- with an American Indian on the front and a buffalo on back. Both, of course, were incredibly valuable species we European invaders almost exterminated.
I suspect the reason they were placed on one of our coins was based in the sense of nostalgia, fueled by guilt, felt by all people who know they have done a bad thing, but wish to romanticize it nonetheless.
Maybe I'm right and maybe I'm wrong, but here is the image that inspired this post.
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