Somebody sets a buffalo nickel on the felt. The animal is sharp, the shoulder still has its texture, the horn is where the horn belongs. Then you turn it over. The Indian's cheek is worn soft, the braid has faded into the field, and where the date should sit there is a smooth crescent. Just a curve of copper-nickel where four digits used to be. The coin is warm from a pocket it just came out of. It has been warm like that for a long time.
The first thing everyone wants to know is whether it counts for anything without the date. Fair question. The Red Book prices run by year and mint, and if you can't read the year, the book has nothing to say. Most of what gets written about buffalo nickels assumes you can see the number. But half the buffalos that come across this counter can't be read at a glance, and the people carrying them didn't wear them down on purpose. Somebody carried this a long way. The question isn't whether the coin failed. The question is why the date wore off first, when the buffalo on the other side is still standing.
Look at the coin edge-on and you'll see it. The date sits on a little raised platform, the highest point on that side of the design. James Earle Fraser put it there in 1913, and by 1916 the mint was already trying to sink it lower because they could see what was going to happen. On a coin, the highest point is the first point that touches anything, a thumb, a pants pocket, another coin in a drawer. Every time this nickel slid across a counter for a cup of coffee or a newspaper, the date took the hit. The buffalo's shoulder is protected by the field around it. The date had nowhere to hide. Forty years of pocket change is forty years of thumbs finding the same spot.
That's the strike telling the story, and it's telling a specific one. This isn't a weak strike from the mint, where the die was tired and the coin came out soft on both sides. On a tired-die coin, the buffalo goes soft too, the horn fades, the shoulder blurs. Here the buffalo is crisp. The reverse is where it lives. What you're holding is a coin that was struck properly, entered circulation, and got used, honestly and thoroughly, until the softest point of the design gave up. The wear pattern is honest.
Now, about acid. Somebody in the shop across town will tell you that a dateless buffalo can be restored with ferric chloride, sometimes called Nic-a-Date. The chemistry is real. The date, even worn flat to the surface, sits on metal that was compressed differently than the field around it when the die struck it. The acid eats the softer, uncompressed metal faster than the compressed metal of the old numerals, and after a minute the digits ghost back up out of the surface. You can read the year. What you can't do after that is sell the coin as anything but a dateless buffalo with a stain on it. The acid leaves a dark, matte crater where the date came back. Collectors know that crater on sight. So the restored date is worth something to you, the owner, who now knows what year the coin is. It's worth nothing to the next buyer, who was going to pay for a dateless buffalo either way. Clean it and you halve it. Restore it and you don't add much back.
So what's a dateless buffalo actually worth. It's worth its metal, which is copper and nickel, no silver in these, and it's worth a little over that because people like buffalo nickels and always have. Call it a jar coin, the kind that trades in bulk at the shows, twenty cents apiece on a slow day, a little more on a good one. That's the price. The story is better than the price.
Because here is what the price doesn't say. This coin was in somebody's pocket for the better part of a working life. It bought things that don't exist anymore at prices that don't exist anymore. It came home in the same trouser pocket every evening for years and got dropped in the same dish on the same dresser. The date wore off because a human being was alive around it. That's not nothing. That's a good jar coin, and a good jar coin has its own kind of honest value. Put it in a flip. Keep it with the others. The buffalo is still standing.