Tom Burnsides — The Smith Who Taught the Man Who Wrote the Book

Name-card placeholder — T. B. mark unverified in source scan; hallmark imagery to follow if confirmed. © Turquoise Skies Inc.

Diné (Navajo) · b. c. 1911 (Adair) or 1917 (Hougart) · Active 1920s–1940s · Pine Springs, Arizona

The marks

Here is an honest problem: the best-documented Navajo silversmith of the classic era barely has a hallmark story. Hougart's reference lists a mark of T. B. for Tom Burnsides — but in our source scan that entry is OCR-degraded, and the reading is inferred from fragmentary characters. Treat "T. B." as reported, not confirmed, until checked against a clean copy of Hougart.

What's better documented is institutional: Hougart records that Tom's work was marked with the Navajo Guild stamp, and that around 1940 John Adair interceded with the Indian Arts and Crafts Board on behalf of Ambrose Roanhorse, seeking funds to hire Tom among a small group of smiths — the standards-program world Tom worked inside. Roanhorse had already visited Pine Springs in the summer of 1937 under IACB auspices, encouraging Tom and several neighbors to make silver in the old style.

The smith who taught the man who wrote the book

In June 1938, the anthropologist John Adair did something no scholar of Southwest silver has matched since: he apprenticed himself to a working Navajo smith, in the smith's own hogan — a single-room log structure a mile north of the Pine Springs trading post, forty miles west of Gallup. The smith was Tom Burnsides, then twenty-seven, a sheepherder and cattleman who spoke no English (his uncle Isadore interpreted) and worked silver between shearing and corn planting. The publisher put it on the book's flap: Adair "actually learned to work silver himself in the hogan of one of the leading artisans, Tom Burnsides." Every later account of traditional Navajo technique stands on those sessions.

What Adair recorded is the fullest bench sequence in print. For one old-style filed bracelet — twelve and a half hours of work — Tom melted 3.5 one-ounce slugs in a charcoal forge, poured the ingot into a stone mold greased with mutton tallow, and hammered on an anvil made from eight inches of railroad track he'd hacksawed off at Houck station. An hour of alternating pounding and annealing stretched the bar to eight inches; then came chisel-grooved lines worked center-out so the silver spread evenly, and die stamps placed entirely by eye, each mark equidistant from the last — with no pre-marking, and no possible correction, since a misplaced stamp means melting the piece. Hours of fine filing, a nitric-acid blanch, a scrub, even a handful of hogan-floor dirt as abrasive, then the buffing wheel. One telling step: Tom oxidized the finish only because his buyer was Anglo. For a Navajo customer the bracelet would have stayed bright — Navajo taste ran to shine, not artificial age.

The second documented piece answers for itself. Tom carved a two-piece volcanic tuff mold with a knife made from an old file, cast a ketoh — a bow-guard — in one clean pour ("the silver had flowed evenly to every corner of the mold. Tom was pleased and smiled"), and finished it over two days. That ketoh took first prize at the Navajo Tribal Fair at Window Rock, September 1938, and entered the Taylor Museum for Southwestern Studies in Colorado Springs. He also built his first-ever tobacco canteen under Adair's eye — the hardest form in Navajo silver — and, asked to copy a model exactly, quietly declined to: like all Navajo smiths Adair knew, Tom made each piece slightly different, on principle.

He finished one piece before starting the next, and the local trader paid him to fix the sloppy work of other smiths. Adair's verdict: a perfectionist whose work "never has the slightest blemish."

The record's rough edges

The sources disagree on basics. Adair, on site in 1938, makes Tom twenty-seven — born about 1911; Hougart says 1917. We weight the contemporaneous field observation. Adair never names Tom's wife, herself part of the silver-wearing household; Hougart names Mary Daye, an accomplished smith in her own right — accurate, or possibly a later marriage. Uncorroborated either way.

The Burnsides of Pine Springs

Tom learned wrought work at twenty from his half-brother John Burnsides, and casting from Left-Handed Red at Houck — tuition: one bracelet for one day of watching. Adair names the family plainly: "at Pine Springs, the Burnsides," one of the great community outfits of Navajo silver. The line ran long — John worked until 1988, and Tom's nephew Chester Kahn (1936–2019) became an Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Living Treasure. Hougart's pages carry Burnside marks into later generations.

References

• Adair, John. The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths (1944), Chapter IV and pp. 55–101 — the primary first-hand account.
• Hougart, Bille. Native American and Southwestern Silver Hallmarks, 5th ed. (2022), Burnside family, Mary Daye, Chester Kahn, and IACB entries.
• Bedinger, Margery. Indian Silver: Navajo and Pueblo Jewelers (1973) — cites Tom's turquoise-setting as exemplary.