found

Finely woven basketry hats elaborately figured with whales, canoes, thunderbirds, and intricate geometric patterns were being made by the Westcoast people when Europeans first arrived on the coast. But these hats are quite different in technique and materials from the late nineteenth- and twentieth- century Makah and Westcoast basketry. White settlers' interest in baskets may very well have been a motivating force in the development of decorated wrapped-twined baskets by the Makah. (Holm, Spirit and Ancestor, 1987)

S'abadeb-Seattle Art Museum This basket was collected by Judge James Wickersham in 1899 on the Puyallup Reservation. It was made by the mother of Yuckton, an elder of the Kwalhiokwa (Qualhioqua) people of Pe Ell Prairie in western Washington (near Chehalis). Nothing is known of this artist except that her son was a knowledgeable linguist who provided data to George Gibbs and Wickersham. Judge Wickersham lived in Washington Territory from 1883 to 1898 and was a probate judge, city attorney for Tacoma, and a member of the State House of Representatives before moving to Alaska, where he had a successful political career. He was also an amateur ethnologist and collected and catalogued a sizable Native basket collection.