HOME

Baskets For Sale 
Wanted Items 
Consign Baskets

Shows/Auctions 
Links

 Basket News
Basket Books
Weavers
Tribal Map

Native American 

   Arrowheads 
  
Nez Perce Bag    
   Ledger Drawings 

Columbia River
  
Turtle Bowl 
   Columbia Bowl
   River Rock  
Atlatl Weights

Bead Work
  Moccasins 
   Pit River 
Klamath Dress

Art Work
   Don Hummel
   Vicki Hummel
   Craig Bates
   Steve Allely 
   Curtis Prints 

Tribes 
Pomo
 Klamath/Modoc
Hupa/Karok/
Yurok

 Maidu
Yokut
Washoe
 Pit River/Hat Creek
Miwok 
Panamint
Misson
Shasta
Paiute
Wintun

Rare  Books

Contact Us 

Cal Collectables

CaliforniaBaskets

Lucy Telles


One of the first baskets sold by Lucy Telles at Yosemite, 1912. 10 1/4" diam. 4 1/2" high. She got $25.


Lucy Parker Telles with huge 36" World's Fair winner basket it took 4 years to make, 1933

Lucy Parker Telles (1870-1956) was of Yosemite Miwok and Mono Lake Paiute descent. Shortly after her son Lloyd was born in 1902, her husband Jack Parker, Paiute, died. Miwok and Paiute peoples of the Yosemite area had begun to find new occupations with the influx of tourists and status of Yosemite valley as a National Park: guides, domestics. Traditional lifeways were partially supplanted by a money economy, with purchased beans, coffee, white bread and purchased cloth supplementing the traditional acorn and fish.

To support her family, Lucy turned to basket weaving, which she had learned as a child. Her innovations had a large and continuing influence on the styles of Yosemite weavers. She modified traditional Miwok shapes. More importantly, she began to use 2 colors where by tradition only one per basket -- either black from bracken fern root or red from split redbud twigs -- had been used. She adapted motifs from the showy Plains beadwork that was just reaching the area. Her designs were large, often had stylized pictorial elements arranged in overall symmetric patterns, making the whole basket surface one unified design, like the high-shoulder gift basket shown above whose price seems astonishingly low now, but was high for the early 1900's. By the 1920's, she was acknowledged as the best weaver in the valley, and other women were copying the style innovations she had introduced.

Text by Paula Giese from 


Yosemite Basketmakers: Miwok - Paiute Tradition

 

Picture from: Tradition and Innovation
A Basket History of the Indians of the Yosemite - Mono Lake Area

By: Craig D. Bates, Martha J. Lee
Click Here To Buy This Book

Home          Baskets          Wanted Items          Contact Us          CaliforniaCollectables

CaliforniaBaskets.com
please e-mail us at
info@californiabaskets.com


Last edited on: 09/25/01