page_title: Old Spanish Trail half dollar
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Old Spanish Trail half dollar / Background
caption_attribution_description: Expedition des Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca 1528 bis 1536
context_page_description: The Old Spanish Trail half dollar was a commemorative coin struck by the United States 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. Hoffecker had been the moving force behind that bid, and he sought another commemorative coin proposal that he could control if authorizing legislation was passed. He chose the travels of Spanish officer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in the early 16th century. Hoffecker took liberties both with the timing of Cabeza de Vaca's travels and their location; though Hoffecker's hometown of El Paso, Texas, is featured on the coin, Cabeza de Vaca came nowhere near its site. All this made little difference to Congress, which passed the Old Spanish Trail coin bill without opposition, and it was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
  Once they were struck, Hoffecker purchased the coins from the government and sold them to collectors, ostensibly on behalf of the local museum, but in fact for his personal profit, something he later denied in testimony before Congress.
context_section_description: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was an officer on a Spanish expedition that landed around Tampa Bay in 1528. Their searches for treasure led to hostile reception by the local Native Americans, and de Vaca was eventually marooned there. He and others made their way west by small boats along the coast, and eventually reached Galveston Island, where 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. Cabeza de Vaca, or "head of a cow", was a name said to have been given by the King of Spain to an ancestor of Álvar Núñez for his help in guiding the army through the mountains, enabling an attack on the Moors from the rear, defeating them. 
  In the 1930s, commemorative coins were not sold by the government—Congress, in authorizing legislation, usually designated an organization which had the exclusive right to purchase them at face value and vend them to the public at a premium. In the case of the Old Spanish Trail half dollar, the responsible group was the El Paso Museum, acting through its chairman.
  Lyman William Hoffecker (usually known as L.W. Hoffecker) was an El Paso, Texas coin dealer and an official of the American Numismatic Association (ANA). In 1929, he organized the Gadsden Purchase Commission (consisting mostly of himself) to seek a commemorative coin issue for the 75th anniversary of the Gadsden Purchase. A bill that would have authorized one passed both houses of Congress in 1930, but it was vetoed by President Herbert Hoover, who deemed commemorative coins abusive. Undiscouraged by this, in 1935 Hoffecker made a second attempt for a commemorative coin issue he would control, for the Old Spanish Trail, becoming chairman of the El Paso Museum Coin Committee. This time, he visited Washington and had discussions with several lawmakers, and was even granted a five-minute interview with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a talk Hoffecker said "that saved us". Hoffecker later testified before Congress that he was asked to handle the arrangements of the Old Spanish Trail half dollar as the only coin collector in El Paso, something Q. David Bowers, in his volume on commemoratives, called a lie, as Hoffecker elsewhere in his correspondence refers to local collectors buying a few of the coins.
caption: Map showing Cabeza de Vaca's route
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