The Silver Remembers the Trail

By John Cimral, Trophy Point Coins

In 1852 a young man of twenty-one walked beside an ox team out of Iowa and into the West. His wife, Eliza Jane, was eighteen. Their son Marion was six weeks old. The young man’s name was Ezra Meeker, and everything he loved in the world was inside one wagon.

The newborn lived. Hold on to that, because so many did not. The trail Ezra walked was lined with graves, and a great many of them were small.

A lifetime later, more than seven decades on, there is a half dollar. I believe it is the most beautiful coin America ever struck. It is storytelling in silver.

On one face a wagon rolls west into a setting sun. A man walks beside the oxen. Inside the wagon, under the canvas, a woman sits holding her newborn. You cannot see what she is doing. I want to believe she is nursing him. That is my wish and not the coin’s claim, but I hold it anyway, because it is the quietest and bravest thing a mother could be doing on that road.

Turn the coin over and you are in another world. A warrior of the Native nations stands across the whole map of the country, and his arm is stretched out with the hand open. Nobody has ever fully agreed on what that hand means. Not the sculptors, not the Mint. They could not even agree which side of the coin is the front. Hello? Welcome? Keep out?

I once handed the coin to a Wenatchee elder who had never seen it. I showed him the family headed into the sunset, and the woman with her newborn. Then I turned it over and asked him what the warrior was saying.

He did not have to think. To him it was obvious. The warrior is speaking to her. He is saying: do not bring that newborn here.

That is not a threat. It is the opposite of a threat. The warrior knows this country. He knows the rattlesnakes and the weather that turns in an hour. He knows the mountains still ahead, and what an iron-rimmed wagon wheel does to a child who slips beneath it. He is a warrior, yes. He is also a father, and he loves all children. His open hand is love.

So the two faces of the coin are two worlds, the pioneer world and the Native world, with a great gulf between them. What bridges that gulf is one thing: love for a newborn. Across it the warrior speaks to the young man father to father, as a brother would. Protect your family.

Two fathers. One walking toward a dream with all he loves in a wagon. One standing in his own country, watching that wagon come, afraid for a child who is not his. Each loving. Each fearing. Good people on both sides, caught in a tragedy none of them could stop.

And here is what moves me most. The young man on that coin is Ezra. He lived the wagon side. Yet when the time came to put the trail on silver, he did not put only the wagon and the sunset there. He put the warrior there too. He looked at that figure and saw not an enemy but a brother, the other father, the one who tried to save the children. He was honoring him.

Ezra was in his nineties by then. He had crossed the trail again as an old man, marking the trail so that no one buried along it would be forgotten. And at the end he stood before Congress, and he was not asking for anything for himself. He was pleading for memory. The coin was that plea made permanent, and it paid for the stones that mark the trail.

Four souls are held in that half dollar, and none of them is lost. The young father who became the old man. The mother. The newborn everyone on both sides was trying to protect. And the warrior, with his hand open.

The silver remembers the trail.
First and foremost, the silver remembers the warning.

See our Oregon Trail Memorial halves, 1926 to 1939, each with its own story card.