ay by long odds the most prosperous Indians in
America. Their vast Reserve offers ample pasturage for their sheep and
ponies; and though their flocks are a scrub lot, yielding little more
than fifty to seventy cents a head in wool on the average, still it
costs nothing to keep sheep and goats. Both furnish a supply of meat.
The hides fetch ready money. So does the wool, so do the blankets; and
the Navajos are the finest silversmiths in America. Formerly, they
obtained their supply of raw silver bullion from the Spaniards; but
to-day, they melt and hammer down United States currency into butterfly
brooches and snake bracelets and leather belts with the fifty-cent coins
changed into flower blossoms with a turquoise center. Ten-cent pieces
and quarters are transformed into necklaces of silver beads, or buttons
for shirt and moccasins. If you buy these things in the big Western
cities, they are costly as Chinese or Hindoo silver; but on the Reserve,
there is a very simple way of computing the value. First, take the value
of the coin from which the silver ornament is made. Add a dollar for the
silversmith's labor; and also add whatever value the turquoise happens
to be; and you have the price for which true Navajo silver-work can be
bought out on the Reserve.

Among the Navajos, the women weave the blankets and baskets; among the
Moki, the men, while the women are the great pottery makers. The value
of these out on the Reserve is exactly in proportion to the intricacy of
the work, the plain native wool colors--black, gray, white and
brown--varying in price from seventy cents to $1.25 a pound; the fine
bayetta or red weave, which is finer than any machine can produce and
everlasting in its durability, fetching pretty nearly any price the
owner asks. Other colors than the bayetta red and native wool shades, I
need scarcely say here, are in bought mineral dyes. True bayettas, which
are almost a lost art, bring as high as $1,500 each from a connoisseur.
Other native wools vary in price according to size and color from $15 to
$150. Off the Reserve, these prices are simply doubled. From all of
which, it should be evident that no thrifty Navajo need be poor. His
house costs nothing. It is made of cedar shakes stuck up in the ground
crutchwise and wattled with mud. Strangely enough, the Navajo no longer
uses his own blankets. They are too valuable; also, too heavy for the
climate. He uses the cheap and gaudy Germantown patterns.