Fulfilling the Need for Warmth and Comfort

QUESTION: On a recent road trip through the Southwest, I stopped at a flea market in Arizona where I found an old Indian blanket in black and white on a red background which I purchased for my bed back home. It looked to be in good shape and the price was right. Can you tell me which tribe may have made it and perhaps how old it is?

ANSWER: While your blanket may look like it had been made by one of the Native American tribes in the area, it actually wasn’t. Contrary to what most people think, blankets like this—known as American Indian trade blankets—were commercially machine-woven for the Native American market. Prior to the production of these blankets, Native Americans provided  warmth for themselves using natural materials and traditional weaving techniques.

Native Americans had long engaged in intertribal trading for useful items, but it was the colorful European goods that caught their attention. Over time, traders upgraded their goods from beads, looking glasses, and fish hooks to more practical items such as metal axes and cookware, flintlock rifles, and blankets. To trade a beaver skin or two for a durable woolen European blanket seemed fair to 18th and 19th-century Native Americans. Making a robe from an elk, deer, or buffalo hide was a time consuming, labor intensive process.

It was the French traders who began trading blankets as a result of their insatiable need for beaver pelts in the early l7º-century in the St. Lawrence River area. By 1780, the British Hudson's Bay Company soon followed suit.

Blanket trading soon spread across America. The Hudson's Bay Company shipped hundreds of blankets to St. Louis, the last supply outpost for those venturing westward in the 1820s and 1830s. While those heading to the Rocky Mountains trapped their own beavers, those going north into the Upper Missouri region traded for beaver pelts with the Native Americans

The early Hudson's Bay Company trade blankets were a solid color with a wide darker band near each end. They sold their thick, striped blankets to trappers who, in turn, traded them to the Blackfeet and Northern Plains Indians.

Like any successful product, Hudson's Bay Company trade blankets attracted imitators. While some copied the Bay's blanket style, especially the bright multicolor pattern introduced around 1820, other companies duplicated geometric Indian designs.

By 1845 there were dozens of woolen manufacturers in America, but only 11 who made blankets, and just one, the Buffalo Manufacturing Company, which made Indian-style blankets.

The introduction of the Jacquard loom in the 1880s created a boon to the blanket business. It enabled blankets to have two sides and launched what historians and collectors call the 'Golden Age" of the American Indian trade blanket that lasted from 1880 to 1930.

Eventually, five major woolen mills began making Indian trade blankets in the United States during the latter part of the 19th century—J. Capps and Sons, Oregon City Woolen Mills, Buell Manufacturing Company, Racine Woolen Mills, and Pendleton Woolen Mills. Another, the Beacon Manufacturing Company of North Carolina, made Indian-style blankets for the American consumer.

Of the above makers, Pendleton is the most familiar label. It’s also the only one still in existence. The company credits its early success to marketing its blankets directly to Native American reservations through trading posts and producing colors and designs acceptable to specific tribes.

By the late 19th century, most Native Americans had settled on reservations. Trading posts became the distribution points for food, jewelry, clothes and, of course, blankets. Through the trading posts, the English and American woolen mills found a built-in market for their blankets, the quality and designs of which Native Americans appreciated. Eager to please their Native American customers, many mills sent designers to live among the Indians in order to learn what designs and colors would appeal to the different tribes and pueblos across the United States and Canada. From the beginning, Pendleton produced high-quality blankets that eventually became the favorite among Native Americans.

Unlike Europeans, many native people became bonded with their blankets day and night. The fact that they were made by someone else made no difference.

They gave blankets as gifts to celebrate births, marriages, and christenings. They also used blankets to pay off debts, to show gratitude, or to indicate status. And some used them to provide temporary shelter, as curtains or awnings, or for warmth and adornment. Native Americans cradled their babies in blankets, danced in blankets, and were often buried in blankets.

The name Pendleton became a universal and generic name for any of these distinctively patterned blankets, even those made by other mills. Today, collectors seek out pre-World War II blankets for their light weight and warmth.


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The Blanket That Warmed and Won the North

QUESTION: My grandmother recently passed away. As my family was going through her things, I found an old woolen blanket with three stripes on a cream-colored background. My mother told me that the blanket was given to someone a few generations back by a friend who lived in Canada. I think I’ve seen blankets like this before, but I can’t remember where. Can you tell me anything about this blanket? The label that’s on it has faded and it’s hard to read.

ANSWER: From the photo you sent, it looks like you have a Hudson’s Bay Blanket. These wooly, warm blankets, often white with bold bright bands of colors, are the heavy Hudson's Bay blankets have been keeping people comfortable for years.

The Hudson's Bay Point Blanket—its official name—is far more than a fashionable accent piece for the rustic interior. These blankets have a long history that’s as interesting as they are warm. They played a key role in the European settling of North America.

The durable, all-wool, British-made blankets have been coming to North America for over 300 years. Fur traders of the 17th and 18th centuries used these blankets as a primary implement of barter in exchange for beaver pelts. According to company records, the earliest reference to any commercial blankets being used for trade is from 1682, but the first authentic Hudson’s Bay blanket, made by Thomas Empson of Witney in Oxfordshire, England, dates from 1740. These blankets soon became a staple trading item.

It was the trade in beaver pelts that eventually led to the exploration and settlement of Canada, and of the creation of the Hudson's Bay Company. Men crossed oceans and hacked their way through the wilderness of North America just to hunt beaver. For about 150 years, from the late 16th century until around the mid 19th century, beaver felt hats were all the rage in fashion.

But the Hudson's Bay Company didn’t invent the point blanket. The idea to weave points, or a small dark stripe, into a blanket was actually a 16th-century French idea.

It was Germain Maugenest who suggested putting points on the Hudson Bay blankets in 1779. The former French trapper who switched allegiance to England said his countrymen had been trading pointed blankets, which the Indians preferred.

The points, about 6 inches in length, originally ranged from one to three on each blanket. Some blankets had half-points. The points designated the blanket's size. When trading with the Indians commenced, each point equaled a beaver. Thus, points broke down language barriers and promoted trade.

The beaver-for-blanket deal favored the Indians, who were not ruthlessly exploited as speculation has presumed.

Two French explorers, Pierre-Espirit Radisson and Medard Chouart Sieur des Groseilliers, sparked the creation of the Hudson's Bay Company. In the mid-17th century they had independently explored the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River and established a trading relationship with the Cree tribe. Radisson even had been adopted by them.

But the French Colonial Government based in New France (Quebec) seized the voyagers' furs without permission. It was suggested they leave New France altogether and trap in the British Colonies to the south in New England.

Disheartened by the treatment of their own countrymen, the pair traveled to Boston. There they met Colonel George Cartwright, who had been sent by Charles II to New England to placate the residents and collect taxes. Cartwright brought them back to London in 1666 to meet with the King.

Charles Il charged his cousin, Prince Rupert, with the task of outfitting two ships—the Nonsuch and the Eaglet—to make the journey to New France. Although the Eaglet had to turn back after storm damage, the Nonsuch arrived in September 1668 and obtained both land and furs from the natives of James Bay.

When the Nonsuch arrived in London laden with furs, King Charles II bestowed a Royal Charter upon Prince Rupert and his associates. They were described as "The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay." They now had "sole trade and commerce" in all of the lands that drained into the enormous bay. The Hudson's Bay Company officially came into existence May 2, 1670 and is still in business.

Over the next 300 years, the Hudson Bay Company established over 500 trading posts, including many forts. The quest for the beaver pushed company operations from the Hudson Bay all the way to Pacific coast, south into California and into the Northern Plains.

The earliest Hudson Bay blankets traded in Canada were those with solid colors with a wide band of darker color on each end. White blankets with a dark band were the most popular, as they proved to be good winter camouflage when hunting. Other solid colors were indigo, scarlet, green and light blue. All had a single wide dark band at each end, and points.

The Company introduced the multistriped blanket on white around 1820. The color order of stripes on modern blankets, from the inside out, is green, red, yellow, and indigo. Older blankets had a different color order than later ones. The earlier style has also been called a "chief's blanket."

Native people in both Canada and America found many uses for the blankets. Some were cut up to make coats, called capotes, while others were used to make leggings and rifle scabbards. Native peoples carried and draped them as part of their everyday clothing, but they also used them as covers while sleeping and even as burial shrouds.

The Hudson Bay Company sold many blankets in pairs. The purchaser could keep them intact as a single large blanket or cut them in half to make two regular size blankets. For instance, using today's sizing standards, a four-point blanket measures 72 by 90 inches (double bed). But if it were sold as a pair it would be 72 by 180 inches.

The typical trade blanket had three points and was white with a dark band at each end. The three-point was considered a good personal size for wearing and sleeping. In the early 19th century a three-point measured 72 by 62 inches. They didn’t have labels back then.

The multistriped blanket, with its 180-year popularity track record, has been copied by many other manufacturers. Lookalikes include the Polar Star and Rugby Striped (J.C. Penny), Glacier Park (Pendleton), and Greenlander (Woolrich). The "Genuine Trapper Point Blanket" is another knockoff made by the T. Eaton company in the early 20th century.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Article section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the other 18,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about western antiques in the special 2019 Winter Edition, "The Old West," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques & More Collection on Facebook.