Grey Moustache — Eyewitness to the Birth of Navajo Silver

Biography by Mateo James

Diné (Navajo) · b. c. 1858–1862 · Active c. 1878 – c. 1920s · Sunrise Springs, Arizona

Before hallmarks

Grey Moustache never stamped his work, and neither did anyone he knew. He belonged to the generation before marks — Navajo hallmarking didn't take hold until after the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1935, decades after blindness ended his career at the bench. Hougart's hallmark reference has no entry for him; neither does Rosnek. That's not a gap in the record — it's the record. No documented Grey Moustache mark exists, and any piece offered under his name should be treated accordingly. What he left instead is rarer than a hallmark: his voice.

The witness

Of all the Navajo who learned silver from Atsidi Sani — the first Navajo silversmith — only one is known to have lived long enough, and talked long enough, to leave a first-person record. When the anthropologist John Adair reached Sunrise Springs around 1938, he found Grey Moustache close to eighty, totally blind, and in full command of his memory. The testimony Adair took down, pages 3 through 11 of The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths, is the closest thing the craft has to an eyewitness account of its own birth.

He remembered the years before silver, before Fort Sumner: "I remember watching Atsidi Sani make bridle bits out of pieces of scrap iron. He made them with jingles hanging from the bottom. Some of these he exchanged for buffalo hides with the Utes." The relation was family — in his own words, "Atsidi Sani was my father's uncle by marriage; he married my grandmother's sister." Bedinger later shortened that to "great-nephew," a gloss worth flagging: the affinal chain Grey Moustache actually described is more precise than the shorthand that replaced it.

"It was ten years after I returned from Fort Sumner that I learned how to make silver from Atsidi Sani. At that time I was fourteen years old." Adair's arithmetic puts that at 1878, and Bedinger (1973, p. 20) gives the same year. The primary quote favors 1878 — but the honest answer is a three-year window. He started with conchas, then bridles and bracelets. A good silver-mounted bridle brought sixty dollars, a heavy one a hundred; he once traded a bridle for a horse with saddle and blanket. He hammered quarters into bells in a cup-shaped hollow in the anvil log, and made silver tobacco canteens at the price of "a horse or a calf for each one."

He was standing at the right elbow of history more than once. His brother-in-law was Atsidi Chon, and Grey Moustache watched him set the first turquoise into silver — a ring, one stone, c. 1878: "I remember when this ring was finished, many Navajo gathered around to see it, and all of them thought that it was very pretty." Adair adds the necessary caution — first as far as Grey Moustache knew — and so should we. Twenty years later Grey Moustache made his own contribution to technique, spotting a soft white pumiceous rock on a hillside near Sunrise Springs that cast better than the hard dark stone smiths had used; he told Atsidi Chon, and "after that time we always used that stone for our molds." He is also the first person on record to mention Navajo women making silver, around 1918.

The forge took its payment. "I think that I burned my eyesight looking at the red hot charcoals. I think that those coals baked my eyes... From that time on, I couldn't see well enough to make silver, so I had to give it up." He earned his living afterward as a prayer-singer at ceremonials. When Adair asked to photograph him without his jewelry, he refused: "I would feel like a chicken with all its feathers plucked out."

References

• Adair, John. The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths (1944), pp. 3–11, 13, 99, 104 — the primary first-person testimony.
• Bedinger, Margery. Indian Silver: Navajo and Pueblo Jewelers (1973) — corroboration of the 1878 date and the great-nephew relation.
• Hougart, Bille. Native American and Southwestern Silver Hallmarks, 5th ed. (2022) — no entry (pre-hallmark era).
• Rosnek, Carl & Stacey, Joseph. Skystone and Silver (1976) — no entry (covers a later period).
• Bedinger, Margery. Indian Silver: Navajo and Pueblo Jewelers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973. Cited by printed page. Statements describe conditions as of 1973.
• Adair, John. The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths. The Civilization of the American Indian Series. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1944. Cited by printed page. Statements describe conditions as of 1944.
• Schaaf, Gregory, with Angie Yan Schaaf. American Indian Jewelry I: 1,200 Artist Biographies, ca. 1800-present. American Indian Art Series, Vol. 5. Santa Fe: CIAC Press, 2003. Cited by printed page. Statements describe conditions as of 2003.

Field Notes by Mateo James

Field Notes by Mateo James: This page once said Bedinger dated Grey Moustache's apprenticeship to 1875. Her printed page 20 says 1878, the same year Adair's arithmetic gives. The two sources agree on the year.

This profile is maintained in support of Native American silversmiths and compiled from published references. See something inaccurate, or want to add to it? Contact us.

Name-card placeholder — no authentic hallmark existed to recreate. © Turquoise Skies Inc.

I notice Schaaf's 2003 entry dates his life a little later than this page. Schaaf gives his birth as 1864, a baby at the time of the Long Walk, and dates Adair's interview to about 1936, while this page has him born about 1858 to 1862 and remembering the years before Fort Sumner. I show both accounts as printed.