vacation tours pegleg or peralta? - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

Ho-ho-it-si. A cousin to the coreopsis.
The flowers make an orange-red basket
dye used by the Hopi.
HE "big room" of the
ranch house at the LK
Bar, near Wickenburg,
Arizona, had three
doors. There was the
old north door, sinister
and forbidding for no obvious reason and
never used. Some doors are like that.
Then there was the south door just about
the right means of egress if you had to
go to Phoenix to see a lawyer. Then there
was the door. This was simply the entrance
to the big room from the kitchen,
a door to invite loitering and conversation.
Its entire personality was friendly
and unsophisticated. It was several days
before I realized that this feeling of
good will radiated from a well-worn Navajo
blanket that served as a rug in the
doorway.
This blanket was obviously a veteran.
Certain frayed creases told of service as a
saddle blanket. Three burnt holes spoke
of campfires, and two darned places reflected
credit upon unknown owners. It
had been five years in its present place. A
little threadbare and trampled pretty
smooth, the colors were still there, creamy
white, grey, brown, black and a strangely
interesting reddish cinnamon that fitted
the scheme as perfectly as the orange
spots fit the pattern on a Gila monster.
But how did the Indian weaver get such
pleasing colors that defied time and heedless
boots?
From my aunt I learned that some of
The wild cochineal insect furnished
shades of red. A young bug is shown
at upper left; two mature females are
shown at lower right. Tufts of cotton
on the cactus pad are tents of the insect.
these colors were the natural colored
wool of the Navajo sheep. But the black
and red were artificial. Black was said to
be made from the leaves of a certain bush
and a mineral the Navajo found in their
own territory, and the red came from
boiling two different kinds of bark. My
aunt ran short of information at this
point but could contribute a few items of
her own about natural dyes. One plant
she showed me was a kind of dock, canaigre
(Rumex hymenosepalus), source
of a reddish dye for leather and an
orange-yellow on wool or cotton. The
other plant was rabbit brush, Chrysothamnns
nauseosus), whose blossoms furnished
a brilliant yellow on yarn or cloth.
The question of Indian dye making
has intrigued students of American
ethnology for a long time and much has
been published in official reports, but in
some cases the information is unsatisfactory.
The origin of black dye is unknown
but some of the Cliff-dwellers and Basket-makers
were acquainted with a fast
black, perhaps this same dye prepared
by a formula now lost. They also had a
fast red. After hundreds of years cotton
textiles from the debris of long-abandoned
cliff houses near Kayenta in northeastern
Arizona still show strong color.
These ancient dyers were no mere dabblers
in their art since they understood
the importance of certain chemical assistants
to good dyeing called mordants
Mountain mahogany. The bark, rich
in a peculiar dyestuff makes interesting
shades of red on wool and cotton.
which serve to fix the color fast to the
fiber. The theory as to how mordants
work is highly technical but briefly it
can be described as a kind of "go-between"
action where some chemical
which "likes" both the dye and the fiber
carries along the coloring material when
it fastens itself upon the yarn. Other
mordants work by putting the fibers in
a chemically friendly mood toward the
dye so that the latter will stay fa$t after
it once colors the yarn. So much for.the
black in my aunt's blanket. The red was
a different subject entirely.
In old times the Indians found it difficult
to obtain a good red. With the exception
of the Pimas who had the means
for making true reds and pinks which
I will describe later, the best they could
produce were low-toned shades of reddish
brown, pinkish tans and dusky orange.
These are the reds found in the
oldest textiles. Of course, before Spanish
times there was no wool except a
little from mountain sheep killed in the
hunt. The only yarns of animal origin
were made from the hair of rabbits,
dogs, badgers, etc., and from feathers.
These were twisted into string with
yucca fiber and cotton. With the arrival
of sheep and plenty of wool there still
was the difficulty about a true and brilliant
red of scarlet or crimson shade.
Later they met this need by unraveling
yarns from a type of Mexican red flannel
called bayeta and re-weaving it in
July, 1968 / Desert Magazine / 27