Buffalo Nickels Hobo Nickel Movement

You've probably never heard of the hobo nickel. Most people haven't, and that's a shame, because the history of the hobo nickel coin is one of the most fascinating in the world of numismatics. Maybe it doesn't have the glamor and pompous cachet of a Saint-Gaudens gold coin, or the sought-after status of a commemorative coin or medallion.

But, in its own strange way, the hobo nickel attests to a much more authentic history than any of those coins. Sure, it wasn't struck by any mint in the United States. Instead, it has something better to offer: it was lovingly crafted by the often anonymous "knights of the road" that wandered the country during the Great Depression.

So if you've never heard of the hobo nickel, you're in for a real treat. Keep on reading to learn all about the fascinating story of how the Buffalo nickel, and its secret flaw, led to the hobo nickel movement.

The Weird and Wandering History of the Hobo Nickel

The hobo nickel represents Americana at its finest—a genuine form of folk art that takes a legal tender US coin as its canvas. In short, the "hobo nickel" is a native art form that has its roots in the eclectic hobo culture of the early twentieth-century United States.

These altered Buffalo nickels often attest to the great talent and artistry of those itinerant men who roved the country looking for work. During the idle hours of long, wandering days, the more artistic hobos would lovingly reshape the classic Buffalo nickel. Usually, they refashioned the noble features of the Indian head obverse, delicately shaping it to resemble the hobo's own profile, or perhaps some more fanciful character.

Even the bison on the reverse side of the coin was subjected to this treatment, and was transformed into some other animal or even a person. The hobo artisans were truly versatile, and the hobo nickel has remained ever since as a colorful witness to their skill. These coins—once so plentiful during the Depression—are very rare, and are much prized by knowledgeable numismatists and coin collectors.

Buffalo Nickel - A Unique Work of Art

There's something romantic and authentic about the rare hobo nickel. After all, the coins that often attract collectors are all uniform. They're standardized, official pieces with little to distinguish them save occasional mint mistakes or quality issues.

But the hobo nickel is a different animal altogether. Each one is unique; the collector will always have a one-of-a-kind coin. The reshaped Indian head is born of the individual whims and fancies of a real person, a wandering hobo with dreams and aspirations of his own.

Most coins are stamped and pressed by a cold, unfeeling machine. The hobo nickel is the opposite of this. They are true works of art—idiosyncratic, unusual, and unique.

The Buffalo Nickel: The Perfect Canvas

The sheer variety of hobo nickels is what distinguishes them from other coins.

There are no uniform patterns and designs here; it's all up to the passing inspirations of the artist. And this can be traced to the versatility of the canvas that these itinerant craftsmen chose to employ. The Buffalo head nickel happened to come along at just the right time, and it was perfect for altering.

The Buffalo nickel, also known as the Indian Head nickel, was produced from 1913 to 1938. The story of this coin is interesting in its own right. It followed on from the earlier attempts to beautify the American coinage, initiated in 1907 with the issuance of Saint-Gaudens' gold double eagle.

The coin was designed by the sculptor James Earle Fraser, and depicted a striking portrait of a Native American on the obverse, and an American bison on the reverse. However, because of the design, the coin often struck indistinctly. This made the coin's features liable to wear away.

In other words, there was a flaw in the Buffalo nickel. It was this that limited the coin's run to only twenty-five years. This was the minimum period during which the coin could not be replaced without Congressional authorization. But during the quarter-century that the coin was in circulation, enterprising hobos discovered its flaw and exploited it to the full.

Using chisels, knives, and whatever other suitable tool was at hand, the hobos worked long hours to shape the Indian head into any manner of fanciful images. In many cases, the Indian head was refashioned into some other portrait.

A skull was a popular one, but so were clowns, self-portraits, portraits of friends or family, and various caricatures. The reverse Buffalo could be shaped into other animals, such as elephants or donkeys, or even a stereotyped hobo.

And there was nothing crude about these images. The highest-quality hobo nickels evince the sort of care and meticulousness that only a dedicated craftsman brings to his art. It's estimated that just one hobo nickel could take up to 100 hours to create.

The Venerable History of Coin Altering

It turns out that altering coins has quite a long, if not quite so illustrious, history.

Long before the folk art form of hobo nickels was ever born—in fact, long before the United States was born—people were altering coins for various reasons. For instance, in Merrie Olde Englande, there was a practice of bending coins to form "love tokens."

The heyday for this sort of thing spanned the period from about the reign of Queen Mary to that of King George III (ca. 1553-1820). Mostly it involved bending the coin into an "S" shape, when viewed from the side, and gifting these to a lover.

But true coin altering of the sort that presages the hobo nickel seemed first to appear in the nineteenth century. Some of the first "proto-hobo nickels" appeared in the Second French Empire, during the eighteen-year reign of Napoleon III.

After the second Emperor's defeat at Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, irreverent French engravers took to mocking the deposed sovereign on his coinage. With remarkable skill, they reshaped the emperor's portrait to depict him wearing the spiked Prussian Pickelhaube helmets made famous by Otto von Bismarck.

At the same time, vulgar-minded Americans were having fun with their own altered coins. This included the so-called "potty coin," modified from the "Seated Liberty" coinage. The august image of the Goddess of Liberty reclining upon a rock was, alas, too much for certain talented jokers. They took great delight in modifying the scene to represent a figure seated on a chamber pot.

Meanwhile, love tokens made their reappearance, this time in America. They now took the form of large coins, often Morgan silver dollars. These were smoothed on both sides to create a blank surface upon which to engrave initials, a monogram, or different scenes. The tokens were given as gifts, and often mounted in jewelry.

The Depression Launches a New Art Form

True hobo nickels, of the kind later recognized as a folk art, were rare in the pre-Depression era.

They showed up every now and then in someone's pocket, but they were uncommon, much like a dollar bill with drawings or writing scrawled on it. With the conclusion of the First World War, the United States entered the optimistic decade of the Roaring Twenties, and hobos were not yet as common as they would become.

But with the Great Crash of 1929, the history of altered coinage entered a new period. Almost overnight, it seemed, the country was plunged into the depths of despair and hopelessness. Jobs were scarce, and where once hobos were unusual, now their ranks swelled with new recruits.

There were more hobos and vagrants wandering the country, and this brought new life to the flagging production of hobo nickels. There were many more people adopting the hobo lifestyle, and many of them had a lot of time on their hands.

Of course, it helped that the Buffalo nickel—with its special flaw—was then at the peak of its circulation and distribution. It was, in short, the perfect coin for modifying, and it came at just the right time. The thing about the Buffalo nickel was that the Indian head obverse was so large, making it ideal for idle engraving.

The portrait busts on most coins are much smaller in relation to the coin's total surface area. As an example, Lincoln's head on the one-cent piece covers only a sixth of the coin's total area. Contrast that with the Buffalo nickel, which sprawls across five-sixths of the coin's total area.

Add to that the fact that a standard nickel is a fairly large coin, which makes it easier to work with. Of course, there are large portrait busts on other coins, such as the Morgan silver dollar, but no hobo worth his weight in nickels would dream of defacing such a valuable denomination—even if one ever managed to fall into his hands.

A Token of Bygone Times

The 1930s are forever associated with the worldwide Depression.

And this is why collectors will often find hobo nickels among the final years in the Buffalo nickel issue. Whether it's a 1935 Buffalo nickel, a 1936 Buffalo nickel, or—especially—a 1937 Buffalo nickel, these are often among the most-modified coins.

The hobo nickel represents no coin ever issued by an official government mint, but it captures a great deal of real history, the history of real human beings struggling to survive. The hobos of the Depression Era sought escape from the hardships of their life, just as any of us would do.

Sometimes they sang "hobo songs" to pass the time, like Harry McClintock's Big Rock Candy Mountain or Jimmie Rodgers' Waiting for a Train. Or they spent the long hours bumming a train ride by scratching a Buffalo nickel into a work of art. These art pieces could then be traded for a warm meal, a place to spend the night, or a ride to the next town over where rumor had it there were jobs to be found.

The life of a Depression-era hobo was difficult, but it had little in common with the perception of idleness and shiftiness that clings to "tramps" and "bums." The hobos liked to think of themselves as descendants of wandering Medieval minstrels, romantic nomads who lived a precarious life of freedom. They worked hard whenever they could find work, they shied away from trouble, and they comported their lives with a rough-and-ready kind of ethics.

The hobo nickels are among the few surviving testaments of that period, and of that way of life.

The Story of George Washington "Bo" Hughes

If you shun anonymity, then the hobo lifestyle is not for you.

Almost by definition, the hobo life is a life of nameless obscurity. But even so, there are a few that achieved some level of notoriety—and among these were the great hobo nickel artisans.

One such name is that of George Washington "Bo" Hughes, who was something of an infamous character in the world of hobos. George Washington Hughes was born in Mississippi, sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. He was the youngest of the numerous progeny (twelve according to some accounts) of a freed slave, and along with his siblings was made to work in the fields as a sharecropper.

It was no life for Bo Hughes, and at the tender age of fifteen he left his family and hopped a freight train. Bo Hughes was a hobo now, and his life would never be the same.

In time, he found his way to a "hobo jungle," a makeshift village or encampment for vagrants and transients. While staying in this jungle, Bo encountered a fellow hobo named Bertram Wiegand—better known simply as "Bert."

Bert had started carving hobo nickels in the 1910s, and he usually signed his work by chiseling off the "L," "I," and "Y" in the "LIBERTY" legend on the coin. Bo Hughes became something of an apprentice to Bert, who taught him everything he knew about the art of fashioning skillful hobo nickels.

At first, carving hobo nickels was just a way to pass the time. But over the years, Bo Hughes became adept in the art, and it became a passion with him. He was also a great experimenter, and developed new techniques and skills in hobo nickel carving.

Changing Times

At the height of the depression, Bo Hughes was at the top of his game.

Unfortunately, Bo's "profession" as a creator of hobo nickels was tied up with that particular historical era. The life of a hobo was not an easy one, and there was no market for folksy art that could have attracted a wide audience and clientele for Bo's artwork.

In other words, crafting hobo nickels wasn't Bo's day-job. Like all hobos, he had to take what work he could find to survive, and this was often tough physical labor of the kind that could lead to arthritis and other damage to his hands. Of course, the beatings from the railroad bulls (rail cops) as they sought to find and turn out hobos didn't help things either.

As a result, Bo's ability to craft the beautiful works of art from his heyday began to decline. Nevertheless, he soldiered on, and continued working despite his injuries throughout the Forties and Fifties. But things got worse in 1957, when Bo injured his hand with a chisel while working on a nickel.

The End of an Era

This was the injury that largely ended Bo's nickel-carving career. Afterwards, he was compelled to use a cruder, less precise punching technique to chisel new images on the coins. Inured to hardship, and dedicated to his craft, Bo tried to carry on, but the quantity and quality of his nickels gradually lessened.

By the postwar period, America was a very different place from what it had been just twenty years before. The Depression was a thing of the past, and most were grateful to forget it. Few had any interest in reminders or mementos of that dismal period, and this included the clever and creative hobo nickels.

The cessation of the Buffalo nickel issue in 1938 didn't help matters either. No coin had ever been a greater canvas for the work of hobo coin engravers.

They continued to circulate for several decades, in lessening quantities. But by the Seventies, most of these coins had disappeared. Bo Hughes even had to resort to buying the coins from collectors just to find something to work on.

As for George Washington "Bo" Hughes, he remained a hobo until the very end. For him, the life of a hobo was more than a temporary expedient—it was all he knew. Still going strong into the ninth decade of his life, Bo Hughes was last seen in December of 1981 at a Florida hobo camp.

He took his leave one day to seek work in a neighboring town, and was never seen again. The only worldly possessions he left behind was a small vise, still bearing a partially-carved nickel in its jaws. It was a mysterious and in many ways fitting end for one of the most enigmatic and colorful American artists of the twentieth century.

Hobo Nickels Today

What about hobo nickel coins today? Are they still produced? And what kind of value can they command?

Hobo nickels, overlooked and dismissed in their own day, are nowadays much in demand among coin collectors. First, they stand out as unique and fascinating pieces of folk art. They are true Americana, and attest to a period in American history that—now remote in time—seems more romantic than traumatic.

When a collector finds a hobo nickel for sale, what kind of prices can they expect? Usually they would command only a few hundred dollars, but some have sold at auction for thousands of dollars. In recent years, they've gone for much more than that.

In early 2021, one of Bert Wiegand's original hobo nickels sold for a record $31,800 at auction. And in 2012, a horde of 218 hobo nickels sold for a staggering $170,000. It's safe to say that Bert and Bo would be shocked at how popular their idle artworks have become.

An Enduring Art Form

Hobo nickels have become so popular that some enthusiasts founded their own association.

It's called the Original Hobo Nickel Society, and puts out a newsletter bearing the name of "Bo Tales"—a tribute to the master, Bo Hughes himself. The Society even holds an annual hobo nickel convention.

The purpose of the Society is to keep alive the memory of hobos and their culture—a surprisingly rich one that contributed a great deal to today's popular culture. Few things capture that quite so well as the hobo nickel, the only really unique art form that grew out of the hobo life of the early twentieth century.

No official mint ever coined them, and they're not legal tender. As far as the Treasury Department is concerned, the coins are less than worthless. They're damaged product—fit only to be melted down and pressed into legal currency.

But hobo nickels bear the individual stamp of their creators, real human beings who were left behind by the economic devastation of the Great Depression. For that reason, they are priceless, and it's no wonder they command such high prices at auction.

Priceless Americana

Ask any knowledgeable collector, and they'll tell you the hobo nickel is fit to stand beside the Saint-Gaudens double eagle and the Flowing Hair silver dollar as among the most valuable coins in American history.

The hobo nickel is one of the stranger stories in numismatic history—and it shows you that sometimes the most precious coins aren't always the product of an official mint. From hobo nickels to untouched Buffalos, and from Mercury dimes to Kennedy half dollars, there's something for every collector of classic American coins. 

FAQs

1. What is a Hobo Nickel?

A Hobo Nickel is a coin, typically a nickel, that has been artistically altered by hand. The term originally referred to nickels carved by hobos or itinerant workers, starting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These coins often feature altered images that turn the original portrait into figures, faces, or scenes of various kinds. The Buffalo Nickel, minted from 1913 to 1938, is the most commonly used coin for this art due to its large and soft surface area, which makes it easier to carve.

2. When did Hobo Nickel art start?

Hobo Nickel art began in the early 20th century, with the introduction of the Buffalo Nickel in 1913. This period provided the ideal combination of a coin with a suitable surface for carving and the presence of skilled individuals with time on their hands, often riding the rails and looking for work. The art form has continued to evolve and remains popular among collectors and artists today.

3. How are Hobo Nickels made?

Hobo Nickels are made by carving into the surface of a coin, usually a nickel because of its size, softness, and the relief of its design. Artists, historically hobos, used whatever tools they had available, such as knives, chisels, and nails, to alter the coin's original design into something new and unique. Modern artists may use more sophisticated tools like Dremel tools, engraving tools, and microscopes to achieve more detailed and intricate designs.

4. What makes a Hobo Nickel valuable?

The value of a Hobo Nickel is determined by several factors including the intricacy and quality of the carving, the reputation and skill of the artist, the historical significance, and its rarity. Unique and high-quality carvings by well-known artists from the early 20th century are particularly sought after and can fetch high prices among collectors.

5. Are all carved nickels considered Hobo Nickels?

Not all carved nickels are considered Hobo Nickels. The term "Hobo Nickel" specifically refers to nickels that have been artistically altered, typically with the intent of creating a new image or scene on the coin. While the art form originated with hobos, today's artists who create these works may not necessarily fit that historical background. However, the spirit of creativity and transformation inherent in the creation of Hobo Nickels applies to all such carved coins.

6. How can you tell if a Hobo Nickel is authentic?

Authenticating a Hobo Nickel involves examining the style of carving, the wear on the coin, and any known history or provenance. Older, authentic Hobo Nickels will often show appropriate wear for their age and may have a known history that can be traced. Expertise in the field and consultation with knowledgeable collectors or dealers can also help in determining authenticity. The uniqueness and craftsmanship of the carving are also key indicators.

7. Where can I find or buy Hobo Nickels?

Hobo Nickels can be found or purchased through various channels including coin shows, online auctions, specialized dealers in numismatic art, and directly from artists who create them. Online forums and social media groups dedicated to Hobo Nickel art are also good resources for finding available pieces and connecting with the community of collectors and artists.

8. How do modern hobo nickel artists differentiate their work from historical pieces, and are there any contemporary trends or themes in hobo nickel art?

Modern hobo nickel artists continue to honor the tradition of their predecessors while incorporating contemporary themes and advanced techniques into their work. They differentiate their creations by exploring current social, political, and cultural motifs, often reflecting on modern life's complexities through their carvings. Additionally, advancements in carving tools and magnification technology allow for more intricate and detailed designs than were possible in the past. Contemporary artists also engage with the hobo nickel community through social media and online forums, where they share their work and innovations, contributing to an evolving art form that bridges historical craftsmanship with modern artistic expression.

9. What are the ethical considerations and legalities involved in creating hobo nickels, considering they involve altering U.S. currency? 

Regarding the ethical considerations and legalities of creating hobo nickels, it's important to note that while U.S. law prohibits the fraudulent alteration of currency with the intent of deception, the artistic modification of coins without intent to defraud is generally tolerated. Hobo nickel artists respect the legal boundaries by ensuring their work is clearly artistic and not meant for fraudulent use. The community of artists and collectors values the artistic and historical significance of these pieces, which are often traded, sold, and displayed as art rather than used as currency. However, artists remain mindful of the legal framework surrounding their work, often engaging in discussions about the ethical implications of altering currency for art.

10. How can collectors verify the authenticity and provenance of hobo nickels, especially given their handcrafted nature and the potential for modern forgeries?

Collectors looking to verify the authenticity and provenance of hobo nickels face unique challenges due to the handcrafted and often anonymous nature of these pieces. To ensure the authenticity of a hobo nickel, collectors can seek advice from experienced numismatists and utilize services from reputable coin grading companies that have expertise in evaluating hobo nickels. Provenance can be more difficult to establish, but collectors often rely on documented histories of specific pieces, signatures or identifiable styles of known artists, and comparison with well-documented examples. Networking with other collectors and experts through clubs, societies, and online communities dedicated to hobo nickel art can also provide valuable insights and help collectors make informed decisions about the pieces they acquire.

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