Antiques Roadshow

APPRAISER

Marcia, your grandfather collected Indian artifacts.

GUEST

Yes.

APPRAISER

And, uh, what do we have here in these pictures?

GUEST

Well, those are pictures of his collection. He was from Barrington, Rhode Island and he collected it out west at the turn of the century. Um, at one point, he used to label everything with the prices of everything but when his wife began to hear how much they cost he began to code things, so we have...

APPRAISER

Smart guy.

GUEST

Right. We have a number of things with codes so we have no idea what they spent for them.

APPRAISER

Now, if I understand correctly the vast majority of these items were donated by your family to the Yale Peabody Museum sometime in the 1950s or so.

GUEST

Probably, right.

APPRAISER

But what I find even more interesting are these wonderful photographs that you brought along that were apparently part of the collection that didn't get donated.

GUEST

Right.

APPRAISER

Do you know who the photographer was on these?

GUEST

Yeah, it was a man named Fred Meyers. Many of them annotated with what's happening in the picture itself.

APPRAISER

Well, let me tell you a little bit about Fred Meyers and I can only tell you a little bit because he's one of those photographers that we don't know a great deal about. Fred Meyers was a photographer who traveled in the summer and spent time on the Blackfoot Indian Reservation in Montana and these are all photographs of Blackfeet Indian from around 1900, 1905. And they're absolutely marvelous portraits very typical of the kind of work that another Montana photographer named Roland Reed was doing. These photographs in themselves-- the large 11 x 14s-- are great but what really is the story here are the small snapshots...

GUEST

Right.

APPRAISER

Because they're all annotated on the back we know exactly what's going on. These are photographs of the Sundance, a rite of passage that many of the Northern Plains Indians did that was basically an initiation rite of a boy into manhood. It was a ceremony that was very seldom photographed. They're rare but in this case, not necessarily worth a lot of money because they're sort of this esoteric stuff.

GUEST

Right.

APPRAISER

The individual large photographs were probably worth between $500 to $1,000 apiece. The small photographs because you've got a notebook of these of about 50 different photographs I'd average those photographs out at about $100 apiece. So in terms of what you've got here you probably have somewhere between $7,000 and $10,000 worth of photographs.

GUEST

Wow! That's wonderful!