To be clear, Navajo silversmith John Silver, the owner of the star hallmark found on many silver and copper butterflies (and other exceptional jewelry) never worked for Reese Vaughn at any of his locations. Our research has found no connection between John Silver and Vaughn’s Indian Store. That is not to imply that further research, or as yet undiscovered resources, may one day indicate otherwise.
The assumption that John Silver worked at Vaughn’s Indian Store seems to have originated in a design decision in Reassessing Hallmarks of Native Southwest Jewelry: Artists, Traders, Guilds, and the Government that we never imagined would result in any confusion.
In March 2008, after attending the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market, Pat and I unexpectedly ended the debate about whether to have the jewelry in our next project professionally photographed, or take the photos ourselves, when we stopped at a Phoenix camera shop to obtain a static-free lint brush and instead walked out with a Nikon digital camera and a home studio set-up.
During our initial efforts to photograph our own collection, with only a hazy vision of the final publication, we grouped four hallmarked butterfly pins into a single photograph. It turned out to be a visually appealing image, but the hallmarks on the pieces were diverse; two were signed with the same star hallmark, one marked with a knifewing figure, and another signed VAUGHN’S. At the time of the photograph only the Vaughn’s shop mark had a clear attribution, we still needed to research the other two marks.
The star mark on the silver and copper butterflies, a five-pointed star with a raised circle in the center, had given us grief from the first time we saw it.
We had trouble accepting the general consensus that the mark belonged to Harold Koruh (Hopi) or to Dan Simplicio (Zuni). Neither attribution felt right as the work was nothing like we would expect from Koruh, a Hopi who learned in the GI Bill classes under Paul Saufkie; nor Simplicio who most often worked with stone settings. The Koruh attribution sprang from the star hallmark illustrated in Margaret Wright’s Hopi Silver:
And the Simplicio attribution from Barton Wright’s Hallmarks of the Southwest:
Though neither drawing was a match to the star hallmark in question, there wasn’t any evidence that it belonged to any other silversmith.
After some time, and discussions with Russell Hartman—then Collections Manager for the Anthropology Department at California Academy of Sciences—we discovered the star hallmark on those butterflies had been documented in the Elkus Collection as that of John Silver (Navajo), found at this link Collections Database listing for CAS 0370-1646. The Elkus Collection, as discussed in previous blogs, is one of the most thoroughly documented collections of Indian art ever assembled.
Supporting our attribution of John Silver for the star mark on butterflies were actual examples of Dan Simplicio’s hallmark, only available after the proliferation of digital cameras, which confirmed his mark to be very similar, yet different from the one we had.
Finally, the last hallmark in our grouping of four butterflies, the knifewing with GALLUP in the center, was identified as that of Gallup Mercantile with the help of Jay Evetts.
After lengthy research it finally came time to write the manuscript. We had enough information on Vaughn’s Indian Store to not only include the shop mark, but also a couple of paragraphs about the owner Reese Vaughn and a few of the silversmiths who worked there. We had two photographs that each contained different versions of the Vaughn’s shop mark, so it felt natural to place them with the text. Unfortunately, this didn’t allow the two marks not associated with Vaughn’s to speak for themselves.
Here is page 48 from the book as the publisher designed it:
With the caption:
As you can see, we never actually wrote anywhere that John Silver worked at Vaughn’s. But we now see that having his hallmark on the same page devoted to the history of Vaughn’s Indian Store implied that he did. We regret the unfortunate misperception that this has caused.
As for John Silver, he has been challenging to pin down. It is possible that he could have also gone by the names John Etcitty, or John/Johnny Silversmith, who worked at Zion National Park and Garden of the Gods Trading Post. However, listed in the appendix of Navajo silversmiths working in 1938 in John Adair’s Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths, are two John Silversmiths and one John Silver. Unfortunately it may be impossible to ever know exactly which of these may have used the star hallmark.
Originally published on our Goodreads.com blog May 28, 2018.