Buffalo nickel
On receipt, the sketches and letter were forwarded to the Commission of Fine Arts, charged since 1921 with making recommendations on coinage design, and then to its sculptor member, James Earle Fraser, designer of the Buffalo nickel. Fraser wrote to Rossi on May 18, deprecating the designs, "the bear is entirely too short, and the whole thing inexperienced and amateurish." He recommended that Chester Beach (credited with the design of the 1923 Monroe Doctrine coin) or Robert I. Aitken (who had created the 1915 Panama-Pacific $50 pieces) be hired, as both were from California and might create "something which would be far more interesting and with a bigger sense of what California really is".