Dan Simplicio — Originator of Zuni Nugget Style

Name-card placeholder — hallmark imagery to follow. © Turquoise Skies Inc.

Zuni Pueblo · 1917 – 1969 · Active 1920s to 1969

The marks

Hougart's reference documents two marks for Dan Simplicio:

• DS — the initials mark (recorded courtesy of Gloria Dollar)
• A five-point star — which Hougart flags for comparison against the star used by John Silver, a visually similar mark that has to be told apart

The man who said he started the nugget style

Somewhere around 1945, by his own account, a Zuni silversmith set a ring with a large chunk of polished turquoise left exactly the shape it came out of the ground — and soldered an irregular mass of silver on either side, formed to balance the stone. Dan Simplicio claimed that ring was the beginning of Zuni nugget work.

Honesty requires the hedge: that origin story is self-reported. Bedinger, who recorded it in 1973, writes that Simplicio "claims to have originated this style in 1945" — she passes it along as his claim, not as verified fact, and no source in the reference literature independently confirms it. But he claimed it, and the design mechanics Bedinger describes back the plausibility: the trade called these rough, irregular lumps of turquoise wavy-cut, polished without changing their form, and the style's whole logic — varying bezel heights, outlines plain, toothed, or scalloped, prongs shaped or omitted entirely — is composition built around a stone nobody cut to fit. Once natural coral became available, branches and small lumps of it joined the vocabulary, with silver alone or alongside turquoise. Hougart independently records that Simplicio worked in nugget style in the 1940s, which squares with the date. Bedinger's verdict on where it all went: nugget work spread into every article of Zuni adornment, with "no limit to the range of beautiful free-form compositions."

Simplicio learned the craft inside a lineage — Hougart records him as nephew of Juan de Dios, who taught him silversmithing — and he appears in Adair's census of Zuni silversmiths already working by 1940. His career then traces the two defining commercial relationships of mid-century Zuni jewelry: nugget-style work in the 1940s with C. G. Wallace, the long-time trader at Zuni Pueblo, and later with John Kennedy at the Gallup Indian Trading Company, the house Kennedy took over in 1952. Wallace to Kennedy is, in miniature, the arc of the whole trade — the pre-war trader era into the post-war distribution era — and Simplicio worked both chapters. His range ran wider than most of his Zuni contemporaries in Hougart's pages: cluster work, leaf appliqué, channel inlay, casting, stampwork, silver and gold, and — rare for the era's Zuni entries — hollowware.

Then there's the family. Simplicio taught his brothers Chauncey and Kirk, and the Simplicio name accounts for more than six documented working smiths across the following generations — the largest family cluster in Hougart's Zuni section. The nugget style he claimed as his own runs straight through it: brother Mike Sr. worked nugget and leaf appliqué; Chauncey and his wife Isabel carried nugget work and mosaic inlay forward. Whatever a skeptic makes of the 1945 claim, the teaching is documented — and it built a dynasty.

He worked the same pueblo, the same era, and the same trading post as carver Leekya Deyuse — another Zuni master of the C. G. Wallace years.

References

• Hougart, Bille. Native American and Southwestern Silver Hallmarks, 5th ed. (2022), Zuni section (Simplicio entries, incl. footnotes 29, 31–35) and Gallup Indian Trading Company entry.
• Bedinger, Margery. Indian Silver: Navajo and Pueblo Jewelers (1973), pp. 200–201.
• Adair, John. The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths (1944), Appendix II §D (Zuni silversmiths, 1940).
• Ostler (1996), as cited in Hougart for the nugget-style dating and the Chauncey/Kirk teaching lineage.