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California Indians, Historians, and Ethnographers (18 pages)
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Page: of 18
By the late nineteenth century, many individuals were acquiring private collections of
California Indian baskets and other artifacts that became the bases for modern-day museum
holdings. This private collection, built by a Dr. Palmer, is shown as set up in the display hall
of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in June 1904. CHS/Ticor Collection, University of
Southern California.
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nineteenth century, people were actively, and some-’ / and his other notes are a useful supplement to eal...
times aggressively, collecting. Since baskets were © ““”’ the works of Kroeber and his students and John
Peabody Harrington. The C. Hart Merriam North
American Ethnographic Collection at the Department of Anthropology Museum at the University
of California, Davis, contains over 1,300 baskets,
most of them from California, and the National
Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution has five cubic feet of glass negatives made
by Merriam. }8
Actually, American settlers had from their earliest arrival in California been collecting baskets,
grinding stones, ornamental articles, and other
Indian artifacts, sometimes as exotic items to decorate their homes or themselves, sometimes to
provide an additional cash income to an Indian
employee or neighbor. By the later decades of the
some of the most popular trade items, contempo“
rary Indian basketmakers increasingly modified
and elaborated their designs in response to the
tastes of eager collectors nationwide. The appearance on the scene of the burgeoning collectors’
market brought with it the emergence of dealers,
who dealt with both private collectors and museums. One of the most notable was Grace Nicholson,
whose papers at the Huntington Library in San
Marino shed interesting light on this aspect of
Indian/non-Indian relationships from the turn of
the century.
Native Californians willingly parted with some of
their traditional tools to collectors, having by now
adopted instead the technology, as well as some of
FALL 1992 333
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