Mysteries are the bread and butter of the museum world. The quest to understand the complexities of human existence, past, present and future, is a large part of the museum experience. Museums are not simply large warehouses filled with dusty old things; they are, more importantly, places where we go to unravel some of the mysteries of the world around us.
Many of the objects in museum collections have arrived from the distant shores of the past without their traveling papers. They come to us with scant or nonexistent information about their origins – their provenance and history seemingly lost forever. Occasionally we get lucky in the search to document and understand an object’s past. The smallest clue can lead to a thin and winding trail of discovery. This was the case recently with one of the objects in the Museum and Research Center’s collections (Figure 1).
Rebecca Hayes, a graduate research intern from the Cooperstown Museum Studies Program, discovered something interesting about one of our cradleboards while conducting her research project here this summer. The project involved complete documentation and analysis of all of the museum’s cradleboards. While reviewing some publications she noticed a cradleboard that was very similar to one that we owned (Figure 2). Upon closer examination the similarities seemed quite remarkable. Both were short, doll’s cradleboards and contained carved wooden dolls bound with cloth wrappings. The wrappings were of particular interest since each appeared to be small patchwork quilts that shared some of the same printed fabrics. In addition, the cradleboards shared the unusual characteristic that all of the holes for attachments were burned, rather than drilled into the wood. The cradle in the reference work was labeled as Mesquakie, an Eastern Woodlands tribe currently located in Iowa. Unfortunately, our cradleboard did not have any documentation other than the dealer’s name the museum had purchased it from.
On a long shot we called the dealer to see if he might remember anything useful about the piece. It turned out that he seemed to remember that the person he had acquired it from had purchased it “many years ago” at an auction of material from Loras College in the Midwest. A quick search of the internet revealed that there was, indeed, a Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. Its website did not mention a museum or collections of any kind but did list the number for their archivist. He confirmed that Loras College had at one time owned a sizeable collection of material, mostly acquired during the 1930s and 1940s. Most of the collection had been sold at auction in 1977, but the college archives retained the original catalogue for the collection. A quick search showed that they had owned not one but two Mesquakie cradleboards. It now seemed likely that our cradleboard was one of these.
Of the two cradleboards listed in the Loras catalogue, one had been accounted for previously, having been sold at a Sotheby’s auction in December, 1993. An examination of the photograph in the auction catalogue indicated that it was not the cradle in our collections. However, it was very similar in construction with a carved wooden doll and holes burned into the wood for attaching the various fittings. This cradleboard was donated to the college by a Dr. Mahoney of Tama, Iowa. The two cradleboards were entered into the Loras College’s catalogue in 1937.
The other avenue of our investigation was to try and determine the location of the cradleboard pictured in the reference publication. This publication was a catalogue for an exhibit held at the University of Iowa Museum of Art in 1989. We were able to track down one of the curators of the exhibit. It turned out that he not only remembered the exhibit but also had significant information from the owner about this particular cradleboard.
The cradleboard pictured in the exhibit catalogue was originally collected by a local doctor at the Mesquakie Settlement in Iowa in the early 1950s. He bought it from a member of the Young Bear family at a powwow in nearby Black Hawk State Park, Illinois. The Young Bear family included a number of prominent woodcarvers and artists from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time this cradleboard was reported to have been made at the turn of the century.
There are now three known cradleboards with carved wooden dolls that all appear to have originated from the Mesquakie Settlement of Tama, Iowa. The one from the 1998 University of Iowa exhibit and the two originally from the Loras College collection. It appears likely that the cradleboard owned by the museum is of Mesquakie origin, from Iowa and possibly carved by a member of the Young Bear family sometime during the early twentieth century. This helps to establish a relatively firm cultural and historical attribution for this work of art and vastly increases the research value of the piece. It also illustrates the importance of recording even the most seemingly insignificant detail associated with an object in a museum collection. The simple fact that our cradleboard may have come from “a Loras College somewhere in the Midwest” led to significant discovery concerning the origin of this piece.
Special thanks to Michael Gibson of Loras College, Gaylord Torrence of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Ted Trotta and Rebecca Hayes for assistance with this research.
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