Norse-American medal personnel from making dies for private medals, and was enacted after Philadelphia Mint Chief Coiner Franklin Peale had for some years run a private medals business on Mint premises, prior to his firing in 1854. Kvale hoped that his friend and fellow Minnesotan, Senator Henrik Shipstead, could persuade sculptor Gutzon Borglum to design the medal for no fee or a nominal one. Borglum, who was busy with construction at Stone Mountain in Georgia (he would later sculpt Mount Rushmore), had designed the Stone Mountain Memorial half dollar; he had no time to accept the work. Buffalo nickel designer James Earle
Gutzon Borglum a high-relief frieze of Lee, Jefferson Davis, and 'Stonewall' Jackson riding around the mountain, followed by a legion of artillery troops. Borglum agreed to include a Ku Klux Klan altar in his plans for the memorial to acknowledge a request of Helen Plane in 1915, who wrote to him: "I feel it is due to the KKK that saved us from Negro domination and carpetbag rule, that it be immortalized on Stone Mountain". After a delay caused by World War I, Borglum and the newly chartered Stone Mountain Confederate Monumental Association set to work on this unexampled monument, the size