Indian Head Quarter Eagles were minted from 1908 through 1929, with a break from 1915 through 1925 because gold disappeared from general circulation during World War I. Earlier Indian cent coins did not represent actual people. The first coin that depicted a real Native American was the quarter eagle of 1908. The same Indian design was used for the half eagle too. The design—by famed sculptor Bela Lyon Pratt—was panned at first, but has since been recognized as part of the early-20th-century renaissance of American coinage that began with Theodore Roosevelt and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The designs were incuse, or inset in the surface, a first for a circulated U.S. coin. Some 15 different varieties of the Indian Quarter Eagle were created, but the rarest is the 1911-D, of which fewer than 55,680 were issued.
