as buttons, rosettes, and bracelets; those who make the more elaborate
articles, such as powder-chargers, round beads (Pl. XVI), tobacco cases,
belts, and bridle ornaments are few. Tobacco cases, made in the shape of
an army canteen, such as that represented in Fig. 6, are made by only
three or four men in the tribe, and the design is of very recent origin.

Their tools and materials are few and simple; and rude as the results of
their labor may appear, it is surprising that they do so well with such
imperfect appliances, which usually consist of the following articles: A
forge, a bellows, an anvil, crucibles, molds, tongs, scissors, pliers,
files, awls, cold-chisels, matrix and die for molding buttons, wooden
implement used in grinding buttons, wooden stake, basin, charcoal, tools
and materials for soldering (blow-pipe, braid of cotton rags soaked in
grease, wire, and borax), materials for polishing (sand-paper,
emery-paper, powdered sandstone, sand, ashes, and solid stone), and
materials for whitening (a native mineral substance--almogen--salt and
water). Fig. 1, taken from a photograph, represents the complete shop of
a silversmith, which was set up temporarily in a summer lodge or
_hogan_, near Fort Wingate. Fragments of boards, picked up around the
fort, were used, in part, in the construction of the _hogan_, an old
raisin-box was made to serve as the curb or frame of the forge, and
these things detracted somewhat from the aboriginal aspect of the place.

A forge built in an outhouse on my own premises by an Indian
silversmith, whom I employed to work where I could constantly observe
him, was twenty-three inches long, sixteen inches broad, five inches in
height to the edge of the fire-place, and the latter, which was
bowl-shaped, was eight inches in diameter and three inches deep. No
other Navajo forge that I have seen differed materially in size or shape
from this. The Indian thus constructed it: In the first place, he