'Bill Benson was a totally phenomenal talent-he was so good that perhaps the ordinary rules don’t apply to him.Michael Ellison ( is president of Alumni Monitor. 'I don't know if there's any definitive way to make this judgment,' Smith-Ferri says. The museum's director, Sherrie Smith-Ferri, a leading Pomo scholar, is staying neutral on the question of when Benson may have made the basket. Today, about 20 subgroups within the federally recognized sovereign Pomo peoples remain in the general vicinity of their ancestral lands. Perhaps the greatest collection of Pomo baskets is at the GraceHudsonMuseum in Ukiah, California. 'He presented this to me after a successful operation on his wife's eyes.' 'This basket made by William when he was a boy to hold his charms,' she wrote. 'The materials-willow for the warp, sedge and bulrush root, silk thread, all of different diameters, with variations in flexibility and tension'-suggest the work of a master.īut Nicholson herself, one of the foremost experts on Pomo basketry, took Benson at his word.

'The stitches are so even in size, and it is so evenly shaped,' he says. Today, Bruce Bernstein, who is the organizing curator of the HeyeCenter exhibition, believes that the basket is too sophisticated to represent Benson's first effort. This basket was the first I made.'Īfter Nicholson's death in 1948, her private collection, which included Benson's gift, was donated to the Gustave Heye Foundation-later to be incorporated into the Smithsonian's Museum of the American Indian. 'I was a little over five weeks making the basket. 'I builted the basket in the spring of 1882,' Benson wrote his friend Nicholson. Black cotton thread and shreds of dark blue and red silk, painstakingly plucked from a handkerchief, are seamlessly woven into a matrix of cured sedge root in two hues-a natural shade of taupe and a vegetable-dyed brown. Diagonal twining traverses three warps (vertical components). The following year, William sent Nicholson a token of his appreciation: a bent-willow vessel, only about three inches high and incorporating thousands of intricate stitches. There is no danger of any baskets going out of our hands without you knowing.' In 1912, as Mary recovered, she wrote to her friend and benefactor: ' Bank of Happiness Deliver to Miss Grace Nicholson Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days of Health, Wealth and Prosperity.' William wrote to Nicholson as well, promising her that 'you alwis are to have the first chance of our baskets. 'She always said to the weaver, 'How much do you want for that piece?' And whatever they wanted, she paid.'

'She never said, 'I'll give you this much money,'' Perkins says. Generosity was Nicholson's hallmark, says Jeanne Perkins, a Pasadena-based writer who is working on a biography of the dealer. Nicholson paid for the surgery that restored her sight. Without treatment, she would have grown completely blind. Mary Benson was diagnosed with corneal disease in December 1911. The market was heating up as a first wave of collectors began vying to purchase outstanding examples of Native American craft. The Bensons, who spent most of their lives on Pomo tribal territories near what is now Ukiah, California, met Grace Nicholson, a Pasadena dealer in Native American basketry, in 1903 she soon signed the couple to an exclusive contract. It is now among 200 artifacts in 'The Language of Native American Baskets' exhibit at the Smithsonian's HeyeCenter at the Museum of the American Indian in New York City (through January 2005). In 1912, they gave one of William's most masterly pieces to a trusted friend. In the early 1900s, William and Mary Benson, a Pomo Indian couple, won renown for their exquisite Native American baskets.

Token of appreciation