Footnotes

Provenance
George Terasaki, New York

Alan L. Hoover, formerly Manager of Anthropology at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, wrote an expertise on this bag in May of 2009. A copy of that writing accompanies the lot. Excerpts indicate the following:

A UNIQUE TAHLTAN BEADED AMMUNITION BAG, CIRCA 1850

"The Tahltan are an Athapaskan speaking nation who live in north-western British Columbia in the drainage of the Upper Stikine River. They are renowned for the unique beauty of their beadwork, described...as 'the most elegant of all Athapaskan styles'. This paper presents a newly discovered bag that is unique and has not been described to date.

Tahltan beadwork appears primarily on fancy shoulder bags..., knife sheaths..., and cartridge belts...worn on special occasions. Of these three types the shoulder bag is the most common...George Emmons who collected amongst the Tahltan in 1904 and 1906 states that the shoulder bags originally carried materials to light fires. this could include strike-a-lights, a type of flint, steel, rolls of paper birch bark and dried fungus...Emmons states that in every house there were as many as a dozen bags owned by each individual and that: 'Indeed these bags from their number and ornamentation seem to mark the measure of the wife's affection for her husband, for in no other product of the Tahltan (save the knife case which forms a companion piece) is so fully expressed a sense of the aesthetic both in elegance of design and in harmony of the color...'

All the comments made by the two early collectors, George Emmons...and James Teit (1912, 1915), about the function of the shoulder bags at the time of collection are unanimous in stating that these bags are essentially ceremonial in nature. They were worn on special occasions such as feasts and potlatches. James Teit's hand-written note for a bag he collected in 1912 reads: 'Bag [ato'n si's] of dressed mooseskin (flesh side out). Ornamented with red cloth, braid and beads...Bags of this style were used as ammunition bags, but of late their use is almost entirely ceremonial, consisting of part of the full dress costume at dances, etc.'

Emmons goes further and states that the shoulder pouches that he saw and collected 'had degenerated into a ceremonial appendage.' He states that these bags lost their function when the breech loading rifle replaced the old muzzle loaders and men no longer had a need for a bag to hold wadding and round shot...

This recently discovered artifact...displays the two major Tahltan preferred types of design motifs: abstract curvilinear forms on the strap and geometric zigzag patterns on the pouch...What makes this piece unique is the fact that no other Tahltan shoulder bag is known to exist that has an attached powder horn. There are at least four powder horns collected from the Tahltan in museum collections, none of which are attached to bags and none of which are decorated...

Another unique characteristic of this bag is the presence of four round wooden rods attached to the back of the carrying strap. They may have functioned as stays, keeping the strap flat and distributing the weight of the bag across the strap's entire width when worn on the shoulder. They are analogous to the bone stretchers that were used to keep tumplines flat and the weight evenly distributed. The presence of these accessories again suggests that this shoulder bag was a functional ammunition bag early in its history...

The extreme wear on the bag itself, the patination on the decorated powder horn, the presence of the square nail in the wooden plug to which the leather strap is attached and the fact that there is more than one hole suggesting multiple repairs indicates great age reaching back to the introduction of muzzle loaders in the early decades of the 19th century. A date of 1850 for this ammunition bag and powder horn is appropriate...

This handsome beaded ammunition bag is equivalent in quality to the finest bandolier bags from Southeastern groups including the Creek, Delaware and Seminole. The significant amount of wear and patination demonstrate that it was a treasured family heirloom that had been transferred from generation to generation and worn with great pride on important social and ceremonial occasions."