<P> According to Walter Breen, Snowden most likely chose the combination of the Indian Head and the laurel wreath as it was the lowest relief of any of the options, and could be expected to strike well . On November 4, 1858, Snowden wrote to Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb about the Indian Head design, and two days later wrote to Longacre, informing him that it was approved . Longacre was to prepare the necessary dies for production, which was to begin on January 1, 1859 . </P> <P> Longacre advocated his Indian Head design in an August 21, 1858, letter to Snowden: </P> <P> From the copper shores of Lake Superior, to the silver mountains of Potosi from the Ojibwa to the Aramanian, the feathered tiara is as characteristic of the primitive races of our hemisphere, as the turban is of the Asiatic . Nor is there anything in its decorative character, repulsive to the association of Liberty...It is more appropriate than the Phrygian cap, the emblem rather of the emancipated slave, than of the independent freeman, of those who are able to say "we were never in bondage to any man". I regard then this emblem of America as a proper and well defined portion of our national inheritance; and having now the opportunity of consecrating it as a memorial of Liberty,' our Liberty', American Liberty; why not use it? One more graceful can scarcely be devised . We have only to determine that it shall be appropriate, and all the world outside of us cannot wrest it from us . </P> <P> By numismatic legend, the facial features of the goddess Liberty on the obverse of the Indian Head cent were based on the features of Longacre's daughter Sarah; the tale runs that she was at the mint one day when she tried on the headdress of one of a number of Native Americans who were visiting, and her father sketched her . However, Sarah Longacre was 30 years old and married in 1858, not 12 as in the tale, and Longacre himself stated that the face was based on a statue of Crouching Venus in Philadelphia on loan from the Vatican . He did often sketch his elder daughter, and there are resemblances between the depictions of Sarah and the various representations of Liberty on his coins of the 1850s . These tales were apparently extant at the time, as Snowden, writing to Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb in November 1858, denied that the coin was based "on any human features in the Longacre family". Lee F. McKenzie, in his 1991 article on Longacre, notes that any artist can be influenced by many things, but calls the story "essentially false". </P>

What do the two indian head pennies represent