4. Lidded storage basket.
Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 18-03-10
Photograph by Hillel Burger
There is a mystery about this basket. It is lined with Vermont newspapers
from the 1820s but most people assume there were no Indians in Vermont in
that period. Where did it come from?
Close examination reveals hints of red as well as black paint on the
splints. This and other qualities link it to baskets made in the Hudson
River Valley by Mahicans--the people whose disappearance James Fenimore
Cooper imagined in "The Last of the Mohicans."
A photo of the basket modified by Knopf to show what it might have looked like originally:
