“Fine Indian Jewelry of the Southwest: The Millicent Rogers Museum Collection,” by Shelby J. Tisdale (Museum of New Mexico, 216 pages, $50)
This is the kind of book you generally see at Christmas. It’s big and beautifully designed and filled with colorful pictures of some of the best Southwestern Indian Jewelry ever made.
Millicent Rogers, the Standard Oil heiress, discovered Taos in 1947 and fell in love with it. Taos and Rogers were an unlikely match. The sculpted beauty was a fashion icon, a favorite of the women’s magazines, which photographed her in designer clothes, her hair and face impeccably styled.
It was that sense of style that drew the cultured woman to the Southwest’s Indian jewelry. She soon began combining designer blouses with squaw skirts and moccasins and layering her arms with Navajo bracelets. A famous photo shows her wearing a Charles James linen blouse, a huge jeweled Russian brooch and eight Indian bracelets.
Rogers had an eye for the best Indian jewelry and collected hundreds of bracelets, pins, necklaces, rings and ketohs. She even tried her hand at making her own jewelry, inspired by Southwestern designs. The heiress died in 1953, and her jewelry now makes up the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos.
“Fine Indian Jewelry of the Southwest,” with its dozens of pages of full-color illustrations, showcases Rogers’ collection. She had a fine eye for jewelry made in the late 19th and early 20th century and the money to purchase it, sometimes with a bit of deception. One of the finest pieces in her collection, a Zuni necklace made up of some 300 polished turquoise tabs, was purchased by her son’s tutor. Rogers knew the price to her would be astronomical. The tutor bought it for a much smaller sum.
“Classic Hopi and Zuni Kachina Figures,” Photographs by Andrea Portago, text by Barton Wright (Museum of New Mexico, 186 pages, $55)
Andrea Portago first saw a kachina when her friend Andy Warhol introduced her to a private art dealer. She was fascinated with these Hopi and Zuni Indian figures, which were collected by Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, Max Ernst and other well- known artists.
In her first book, the former fashion- model photographs the carved kachinas as people, picturing some 85 of a pantheon of 250 to 300 kachinas. They come from both public and private collections. Among the most dramatic are kachinas depicting snake dancers – Indians who dance with live rattlesnakes in their mouths at summer ceremonies.
Portago intersperses her full-color, full-page photographs of kachinas, taken with available light, with black-and-white shots of the Southwestern Indian country.
“San Juan Bonanza: Western Colorado’s Mining Legacy,” by John L. Ninnemann and Duane A. Smith (University of New Mexico Press, 104 pages, $24.95)
An old miner noted that the San Juan mountains produced “three months of pretty late fall and nine months ‘of damn hard winter.’ ” That’s only a little bit of exaggeration. As if to make up for the harsh climate, the mountain summers in the San Juans are glorious, as John L. Ninnemann shows in this fine collection of photographs of historical sites.
Ninnerman photographs the detritus of mining days – old mills and railroad trestles, the jail at Animas Forks, the wonderful superintendent’s house at the Camp Bird Mine.
In accompanying text, Duane A. Smith maintains that the mining districts were not much of a frontier. While they were isolated, they essentially were urban areas of blue-collar workers. Smith quotes from a number of poems and first-person accounts. Miners faced “dangers more grim than the cannon’s mouth,” wrote Alfred King, a poet who was blinded in a mining accident. There was also the danger of a “San Juan head,” Smith says – drinking whiskey at 10,000 feet.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who writes a monthly column on new regional nonfiction.
