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A.5141.42-38 - Blanket: Chief Style, First Phase |
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Catalog Number: A.5141.42-38
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| Object Name/Descriptor |
Blanket: Chief Style, First Phase |
| Provenience |
North America, USA, Southwest |
| Culture/People/Style |
Navajo (Dine) |
| Period |
c. 1800 - 1860 |
| Date Accessioned |
February, 1942 |
| Material Type(s) |
Cloth - Wool
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| Length (cm) |
132.000 |
| Width (cm) |
182.000 |
| Other Information |
Associated Text from the Native American Hall (1992-2006):
Chief-Style, First Phase, Ute Style
Chief-style blankets are characterized by their wider-than-long format and background pattern of broad brown and white stripes. Between 1800 and 1850, Navajo weavers added only narrower blue or red stripes to the basic pattern of First Phase blankets. Prized by other Indian groups, these blankets were traded as far as the northern Plains. The origin of the term chiefs blanket may lie in the use of these valuable commodities by persons of wealth and achievement among the distant tribes.
Blankets for Trade
"Blankets of rare beauty and excellence."
- Josiah Gregg, 1844
In the first half of the 1800s the Navajo became known throughout the Southwest and across the Plains for their boldly patterned weavings. Contact with the Spanish provided Navajo weavers with new yarns and dyes, which they used to develop a series of complex designs expressing their Navajo aesthetic.
Until the mid-1800s, the Navajo lived in mobile family groups, supporting themselves through a mixture of hunting, gathering, herding, farming, trading, and raiding for horses and sheep. In 1863, United States troops rounded up the entire tribe, burned their peach trees and corn fields, and killed their sheep and horses. Families were forced to walk hundreds of miles to Bosque Redondo, near Fort Sumner, New Mexico. They spent the next four years as government prisoners of war. |
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