Buffalos: Is it a type 1 or type 2?
Have you ever noticed that it is mostly in the first year of a new series, that some “oopsey” requires the US Mint to change something in the design? In the case of the Buffalo Nickel, the first design placed the denomination above the relief of the mound. The date was actually above the mound the buffalo was standing on.
It did not take long for the US Mint to start receiving complaints about the denomination wearing off on what was in the day, a very much used coin. Machine counters were everywhere and when you think about a nickel being able to purchase a loaf of bread in 1913, You should kinda get the idea of how much of the medium of exchange the nickels were in the system. I am trying to give you the mental picture of how important having a readable denomination on your money in those days was, and it did not take much circulation or many passes through the counting machines to lose it on that first tissue.
There was a cultural fear in the US Mint about missing denominations. You do not have to go back far to when the first Liberty V Nickels were ironically, released without the denomination on them at all. Very soon after, the nefarious were gold plating them and passing off the big V on the back to mean $5 and not 5C to the unsuspecting. The so-called infamous "Racketeer Nickel" was born.
So, the US Mint trying to avoid any such potential for mischief, changed the design. Instead of being placed so high on top of the mound, the mound was excavated down to the baseline relief and now the denomination was safely recessed. Besides the fact that a coin without a denomination is really called a medal, I think the US Mint, usually makes the changes for good reasons, But design flaws are not the only thing fixed in Type 2 Versions. Many changes like with the Liberty Quarter and the Morgan Dollar, were driven by public sentiment, but those are stories for another day...