Atsidi Sani — The First Navajo Silversmith

Name-card placeholder — no authentic hallmark existed to recreate. © Turquoise Skies Inc.

Diné (Navajo) · c. 1820s – c. 1918 · The first Navajo silversmith

Before hallmarks

Atsidi Sani worked a full generation before any Navajo smith thought to stamp his name into metal. There is no mark. Hougart's hallmark reference — the definitive index — has no entry for Atsidi Sani, Herrero, or Old Smith, and no source documents a single surviving piece attributed to his hand. Attribution, where anyone attempts it, rests entirely on oral history and provenance paper — never on a stamp.

The grandfather of all Navajo smiths

Rosnek and Stacey put it best: if Atsidi Sani had not existed, it would be necessary to invent him — "he is to the Navajos as Odysseus was to Homer." Part verifiable history, part founding legend.

The verifiable part starts with iron, not silver. His Navajo name means "Old Smith," but the Mexicans called him Herrero — and Spanish is precise here: a herrero works iron; a silversmith is a platero. The name records what he actually did all day. Around 1850, seeing that the Navajo bought every bridle they owned from Mexican traders, he traveled south toward Mount Taylor and watched a Mexican smith named Nakai Tsosi — "Thin Mexican" — at the forge. The motive was frankly economic: there was money in bridles. He made bits with jingles hanging from the bottom, knife blades, and small chains, trading some to the Utes for buffalo hides. By 1858 he was prominent enough that the U.S. government "elected" him head chief of the Navajos in the Fort Defiance area, under the name Herrero. He was also a medicine man and a singer who knew the Mountain Chant and the Shooting Chant. Grey Moustache, who knew him, said it plainly: "He never made very much silver, but spent most of his time making iron bits."

The date everyone argues about

So when did the first Navajo silver happen? This is the central controversy of the entire craft's history, and the sources genuinely disagree — four ways.

Before Fort Sumner. Woodward concluded Atsidi Sani picked up silversmithing between 1853 and 1858, after watching the agency forges at Washington Pass. Newspaper accounts from 1863–64 describe Navajos making "silver buttons of their own execution and design," and Major Wallen, commanding Fort Sumner in April 1864, wrote that "some of them are quite clever as silversmiths."

After the return, post-1868. The Navajo oral record — Grey Moustache, Chee Dodge, and at least three other informants interviewed by Adair — insists silver came only after the people returned from Fort Sumner. Chee Dodge was blunt: "The Navajo were locked up there just like sheep in a corral." Adair, weighing it all, favored 1868.

At Fort Sumner itself. A third version has Navajos learning from the post blacksmith or Mexican plateros around the fort. Grey Moustache categorically denied it.

Somewhere in the window. Rosnek and Stacey declined to pick, concluding he learned "sometime between 1853 and 1870."

Bedinger's resolution is the elegant one: it depends what you mean by "making silver." If you mean professionally — spending real time at it — the date is 1869, after the Exile. If you mean the first groping efforts, agree with Woodward and say 1853. Both can be true of the same man. Who taught him the silver itself is equally unsettled — Nakai Tsosi knew silverwork, the Franciscan Fathers name a Mexican called Cassilio — and we won't pretend to know.

The lineage

He taught his four sons — Big Black, Red Smith, Little Smith, Burnt Whiskers — and Red Smith became prolific in his own right. Grey Moustache learned from him around 1878, at fourteen; nine students in all are named in the record. By 1890 he was a paid teacher of the craft at Crystal, New Mexico. His brothers were smiths too — among them Slender Maker of Silver, one of the most celebrated first-generation smiths (though whether Atsidi Sani or another brother taught him is one more honest maybe). From that family cluster at Crystal descend the Peshlakai brothers — Andrew, John, Henry, and Fred Peshlakai — carrying the line forward under a family name that is simply the Navajo word for silver.

He went blind in old age; Chee Dodge used to lead him around by a cane. He died around 1918, past ninety — the Old Smith outliving the era he started.

References

• Adair, John. The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths (1944), pp. 3–6, 93, 104.
• Bedinger, Margery. Indian Silver: Navajo and Pueblo Jewelers (1973).
• Rosnek, Carl & Stacey, Joseph. Skystone and Silver: The Collector's Book of Southwest Indian Jewelry (1976).
• Frank, Larry. Indian Silver Jewelry of the Southwest, 1868–1930.
• Hougart, Bille. Native American and Southwestern Silver Hallmarks, 5th ed. (2022) — consulted; no entry exists, as expected for a pre-hallmark smith.