Around 1910, Spencer and Julie Penrose purchased a collection of 91 pieces of Ancestral Puebloan pottery from the Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon areas. These artifacts were sold by Walter C. Wyman, a former coal company magnate turned noted antiquarian who dealt in American Indian artifacts from his galleries in Chicago and New York. Wyman helped organize the archaeological exhibitions at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and some of his collections were later donated to the Field Museum in Chicago and the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. Spencer and Julie Penrose donated their newly acquired collection of Ancestral Puebloan pottery to the El Paso County Pioneers Association (later the CSPM) in 1911. A significant portion of the Museum’s collection of Plains Indian beadwork, war bonnets, moccasins and pipes came from the private collection of J. D. Clark. Calling himself Sanke Gwanaf, (meaning White Feather) Clark claimed that his Chippewa mother was the daughter of Chief White Horse, and that she died shortly after his birth. According to Clark, he was raised by a maternal aunt who was married to a Kiowa man. He spent his boyhood on the Kiowa Reservation in Oklahoma, later serving as a member of the American Indian police and sent to Colorado in 1879 to deal with the “Ute uprising at the White River Agency”. In a later interview conducted with museum staff, Clark’s daughter revealed that not a word of her father’s story was true. Around 1910, Spencer and Julie Penrose purchased a collection of 91 pieces of Ancestral Puebloan pottery from the Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon areas. Instead, Clark was born in Iowa in 1863 and obtained his collection in trades with the Sioux in 1922. A decade later, Clark was living in Colorado Springs and possessed an impressive collection of American Indian materials that the El Paso County Pioneers Association wanted for their museum. On November 19, 1937, J. D. Clark requested $268 in cash to pay for an eye operation, and thirty dollars a month for the rest of his life in exchange for over 70 artifacts. Museum Curator Maude McFerran Price negotiated a unique purchase arrangement. With her own money, Price agreed to pay Clark one dollar a day until the sum of $1,000 had been paid. She subsequently donated the collection to the Museum as the W.W. Price Memorial Collection, in honor of her late husband William Wells Price. Records indicate that she paid J.D. Clark every single month until he died in April 1941. Boy’s Shirt, Jicarilla Apache, ca. 1900 W.W. Price Memorial Collection, CSPM Girl’s Dress, Sioux, ca. 1880 W.W. Price Memorial Collection, CSPM For more information about a specific object, please access our collections database online at cspm.org or contact our collections staff at 719-385-5990. MUSELETTER MAY 2019| PG 3
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