Old Spanish Trail half dollar
The Old Spanish Trail half dollar was a commemorative coin struck by the U.S. Bureau of the Mint in 1935. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was an officer on a Spanish expedition that landed around Tampa Bay in 1528. He and others made their way west by small boats along the coast, and eventually reached Galveston Island.
About Old Spanish Trail half dollar in brief
The Old Spanish Trail half dollar was a commemorative coin struck by the U.S. Bureau of the Mint in 1935. It was designed by L. W. Hoffecker, a coin dealer, who also was in charge of its distribution. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover vetoed the Gadsden Purchase half dollar bill. The fact that only 10,000 of the half dollars were struck has made them prized among those seeking to complete a \”type set\” of early commemorative coins, that is one coin of each different design.. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was an officer on a Spanish expedition that landed around Tampa Bay in 1528. He and others made their way west by small boats along the coast, and eventually reached Galveston Island. He lived with the Karankawa tribe as a medicine man before continuing west overland: in 1536 he found a Spanish patrol in northern Mexico. He returned home and wrote of his experiences in his book, “The Spanish in America: A History of the Spanish-American War” (1936-1938) The coin was struck in 1935 by the United States Bureau ofthe Mint. It is one of only two commemorative half dollars to feature the head of a cow, the other being the New Mexico Liberty half-dollar, which is struck in 1859 and commemorates the Louisiana Purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1805.
The coin is now displayed at the El Paso Museum in El Paso, Texas, and is on display at the National Numismatic Museum in New York City, where it is on sale for $1,000. The other is at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where it costs $2,000 to $3,000 for a set of 10 coins of the same design. It has been on display in the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History for more than 50 years, along with a replica of the original coin, which was on display until the end of the 20th century. It is now in the collection of the National Museum of the American History, which has a collection of more than 1,500 of the old Spanish-era coins, including some from the 16th-century Spanish explorer, Á lvar Cabeza de Vaca and his family. The coin has been in the museum’s collection since the 1970s, when it was donated to the Smithsonian by a private collector. In the 1980s, it was sold by the Smithsonian to a private museum. The collector, Q. Q. Bowers, called the sale of the coins a “lie” in his correspondence with the Numismatist. The coins were sold to collectors on behalf of the local museum, but in fact for his personal profit.
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This page is based on the article Old Spanish Trail half dollar published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
