Estes Park – “Backs of drawers!” Toni Miller says. “I find things in the backs of drawers.”
That’s how it’s been since Miller inherited her parents’ business, Miller’s Indian Village in downtown Estes Park.
She pulls an assortment of silver pins out of a display case to show me – little pieces of the silversmith’s art from the middle of the past century. Some of them combine traditional American Indian forms with a streamlined aesthetic that reflects the era in which they were made, silver birds, and bows and arrows with the curves of a 1940 Mercury. The old silver glows with the patina of age – not dull, just subdued, like well-earned gray hairs on a handsome man.
Among the odds and ends, in the back of a drawer, she found a sterling tie bar with her late father’s name on it, and then an oddly shaped piece of silver, also monogrammed, that looks like it might have been a business-card holder.
And it doesn’t end within the four walls of the store at Moraine and Elkhorn avenues. One day not long ago, she walked into a neighboring shop in Estes and immediately spotted something familiar. “That’s our bracelet!” she recalls saying, at first startling the owner of the other store.
Sure enough, the piece was stamped inside with “Miller Curio Co.” and the mark of its maker, Navajo silversmith Tom Bahé. But Toni Miller recognized it by a distinctive pattern, a hallmark of Bahé’s in the work.
The heavy silver cuff had been owned by a summer resident, then was purchased at an estate sale and wound up at the other store. Miller paid for it, added another mark – “NOT FOR SALE” in black Sharpie – and put it in a place of honor in the display cases at the front of Miller’s Indian Village.
“It’s home now,” she says.
The real deal
Among the shops of Estes Park, full of an all-American assortment of treasures and trash, T-shirts and polycarbonate statues of howling wolves made in China, Miller’s Indian Village is the real deal.
And so is Toni Miller, who wears a museum’s worth of silver and turquoise as lightly as the sun on her face.
Charlie and Charlotte Miller opened the business in 1936 as an offshoot of their Tucson store. They developed an extensive network of dealers, traders and artisans around Indian Country to buy and make native handcrafts.
Toni Miller remembers long car trips between Estes and Tucson as a child. She remembers cooling her heels with her brother while her parents did business at the Bell Trading Post in Albuquerque and with the Fred Harvey Co., credited with popularizing indigenous American arts and crafts through “Harvey Houses” in Santa Fe Railroad towns.
The family way
There’s a page from the Miller Curio 1954 catalog hanging on the store wall, showing Bahé, who died this spring at age 81 in Burntwater, Ariz. Other photos show the young Charlie and Charlotte outside their new Colorado store and a grandmotherly Charlotte smiling behind the store counter.
Every summer of her adult life, Toni Miller would leave her family in Arizona and come up to Estes to staff the store with her mother. When Charlotte Miller died in the spring of 2004, Toni was not sure she could bring herself to make the trek north but finally decided it was too late not to go one last time.
All that summer, Toni Miller says, people she knew and people she didn’t came in to the shop to tell her their favorite stories about her mother, how much it had meant to them to bring their children to the same place they had come as kids, and see the same smiling woman behind the counter.
“I thought, how can I not be here to carry that on?” she says. “It meant so much to everyone to tell me these things, and it meant so much for me to hear it.”
And so, two years later, here she still is, slowly sorting out the backs of drawers and selling a little bit of everything.
A recent story in the Sunday Denver Post business section described attempts on the part of the Estes Park Convention and Visitors’ Bureau to turn their community more upscale. In an attempt to capture business beyond the day-hike-and-
an-ice-cream-cone crowd, hotels have been renovated and some new stores have opened, selling sleeker, trendier goods.
“We’re not quite rubber tomahawks anymore,” the story quoted the CVB’s Suzy Blackhurst.
But, hey, some of us love the rubber tomahawks of our childhood. This would include Toni Miller, who sells a $2 ring to a child with as much enthusiasm and respect as she does an antique squash blossom necklace, worth thousands, to a collector.
“My bows and arrows haven’t come in yet, and I am very upset,” she says.
Lisa Everitt is a freelance writer who lives in Arvada. Contact her at lisa@well.com.
