Color Primer, Part 1b

Hibernation is (almost) over: dissertation is written, approved, and submitted for graduation–which means I can get back to the business of keeping an active blog! For those of you who have patiently waited, checked back, and waited a bit more, thank you. Really. There are never enough hours in a day to take care of a full “to do” list, but now that my dissertation is completed, I can focus more time on sharing the research.

Almost over, because I am about to go on the road and will have little/no internet access for the next two weeks. I wanted to get back to why yellow quills, for instance, look yellow instead of blue. Since it’s been so long since the last posting, I thought it might be useful to fill this “almost” gap with a quick recap and a couple of web links for additional information and foreshadowing.

In the last post, we established, in the most general sense, that objects are colored because of the ways in which that object interacts with light. Specifically, a yellow quill looks yellow because the quill reflects those wavelengths of light associated with yellow, and absorbs the rest. It has just occurred to me that it might be helpful to have a visual of what wavelengths are associated with which color (red, yellow, blue, etc)….rather than re-invent a perfectly good wheel, I’m going to direct you to this page, What Wavelength Goes With a Color? from NASA’s Atmospheric Science Data Center:

http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/EDDOCS/Wavelengths_for_Colors.html

Part 1 ended with the promise of looking at how the structure of the various colorant molecules dictate the color observed when dyeing with that material. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer, exactly, but there are a couple of models that can be used to explain the contribution of molecular structure to color. What will follow in the next post is a discussion of these models based in part on material from Mary Virginia Orna’s 1998 book, Chemistry and Artists’ Colors. It’s not necessarily the easiest book to find, but well worth the hunt if you’d like to know more on the chemistry of artists’ paints. A more physics-oriented presentation can be found in Kurt Nassau’s The Physics and Chemistry of Color: The Fifteen Causes of Color (this one will give you the chemistry behind pigments like lapis lazuli and gemstones like rubies, too). There’s also a web site on the causes of color,

http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/0.html

Finally, at the risk of stating the obvious but to make sure there’s no understanding, I’m interested in organic dye molecules–those made primarily of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms–as opposed to inorganic pigments, which in the simplest sense tend to contain at least one metal atom like copper or iron. So if you start flipping through a copy of Orna’s or Nassau’s book–or check the webexhibits.org link above–and want to focus on the most relevant content with respect to this blog, stick with sections on color in organic molecules.

And if you also don’t have enough time in your day for extra homework, no problem! The next posting will be mid-May, and will dive right in to where Color Primer, Part 1 left off.

“radix flava Americana”

A funny thing happens when you start writing dissertation chapters: time seems to move very quickly and very slowly all at the same time! Coming into the home stretch, postings should become more regular again this spring. In the meantime, though, a quick mention of another Native American dye, this time for yellow:

On October 4, 1782, a paper on “some of the principal dies [sic] employed by the North-American Indians,” by Hugh Martin, was read at a meeting of The American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. In Mr. Martin’s opinion, “the root of a plant which grows spontaneously in the western woods, and which might, very properly, be called radix flava Americana” was used by the local communities to dye a bright yellow. My loose translation for radix flava Americana is “American yellow root,” and Martin’s description of the plant suggests that the root in question is from goldenseal, Hydrastis canadensis.

Martin’s paper goes on to describe his experiments dyeing silk, linen, and wool with goldenseal, sometimes using a mild acid (conditions similar, for instance, to the acid levels in a cup of black tea), a stronger acid (sulfuric, in this case), and a mild base (perhaps wood ashes) to adjust the pH of the dye bath. In all cases, Martin successfully obtains a nice yellow color–results consistent with expectations for dyeing with berberine. Berberine is the primary colorant in goldenseal, and gives a bright, stable yellow with or without a dye mordant and across a wide range of pH.

Some of you may interested to know that goldenseal was also used by several Native American groups for its medicinal properties. A listing of the medical uses of goldenseal can be found here,

http://herb.umd.umich.edu/

a searchable ethnobotany database researched by Dan Moerman and hosted by the University of Michigan, Dearborn.

There is much more to say on the subject of quillwork dyes, and much more to come–I promise! Postings to summarize possible yellow dyes, talk about sources for blues and purples, and my approach to sorting probable from less possible are all forthcoming. Also in the works is the second half of Color Primer, Part 1, delving a bit more into the chemistry of why a given dye looks yellow instead of blue. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading!

Color primer, part 1, and osage orange dye recipes

When I asked a few posts ago about topics to write on, I got a couple of great questions relating to why different dyes produce a given color–why osage orange, for instance, gives a yellow, but bloodroot gives a red. The answers to these questions are related to the approach I’m using to identify dyes on quillwork in museum collections, but before jumping straight to the causes of color, I thought it would be useful to post a short-and-sweet explanation on why objects appear colored in the first place–my way of laying the groundwork for what will follow. And since this blog is about early quillwork dyes, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the instructions for dye bath preparations as I come across them. With no further introduction, then:

Why objects are colored

In the simplest sense, objects are colored because of the interaction of light with the object. If you shine a light on an object, that light is either reflected back to you or is absorbed (i.e., not reflected back); if the object is transparent, like a piece of clear glass, some of that light will be transmitted through the object and emerge on the other side. You’ll probably recall that ‘white’ light–whether from standard light bulbs or the sun–is made up of several wavelengths of light, representing the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. How do these two facts contribute to a quill’s color?

Consider the yellow quills in the photo at the top of the last posting. If having to choose between opaque or transparent, we’d easily call these quills opaque because we can’t see through them. Since it’s opaque, a yellow quill has to reflect or absorb light; in this case (as in most), it does both. When white light hits a quill colored with a yellow dye, all wavelengths of light except those corresponding to yellow are absorbed. The yellow wavelengths are reflected back to our eyes, and thus the quill looks yellow.

If you’ve ever worked with stage lighting, you’ll know that light mixes a little differently than, say, paint. While the primary colors of paint (those that can’t be made from mixing other colors) are yellow, blue, and red, the primary colors of light are green, red, and blue. By mixing red and green light, we’ll produce a yellow beam; that beam in turn will be reflected by our dyed quill, and it will still look yellow. But If we mix pure red and pure blue light, the resulting magenta beam will be completely missing the yellow wavelengths. When viewed in this new light, our yellow quill will now appear black.

If this seems a little strange right now, hang in there with me! In the next posting, we’ll turn to some graphics to look at why some dyes are red, some yellow, and how it’s possible to have dyes as chemically different as osage orange, wolf moss, and gold thread give nearly the same color to a quill. In the meantime….

A dye procedure for osage orange

Lynne Richards and Ronald J. Tyrl have written a useful book titled, Dyes from American Native Plants: A Practical Guide. This book doesn’t claim to be a guide to Native American dye technology, but there’s some inevitable overlap in the plants discussed. Nor am I presenting the following procedure for producing a yellow dye bath from osage orange as one that would have been used by any of North America’s Native communities. Nonetheless, I thought it would be interesting to see how a bath could be produced:

According to Richards and Tyrl, a ‘golden yellow’ can be obtained on wool from an osage orange dye bath using the bark of the tree with an alum mordant over heat. For those of you familiar with the Munsell Color System, ‘golden yellow’ is described further as either 2.5Y 8/8 or 2.5Y 8/10. A ‘bright yellow,’ 5Y 8.5/14 or 7.5Y 8/12, can be obtained from a bath prepared using the leaves (still mordanted with alum).

A tale of two yellows

From left to right, wolf moss, osage orange, gold thread

I’m (mostly) back! Apologies of the delay, and many gracious thanks to those of you who hung in there over the last week, and have come back for this posting.

Moving from red to yellow dyes, I thought this would be a great time to touch on one of the problems with trying to identify quillwork dyes by sight. By this, I mean looking at a particular color on a quill and extrapolating back to what dye must have produced that color. Tempting though it is (and I do know how tempting, just from first-hand experience) to pronounce that, say, a yellow quill was dyed with goldthread because the tone of the color was, oh, more orange-yellow than a pure yellow, this approach can quickly lead to mistaken assumptions. Hence, the tale of two yellows….

Wolf moss and osage orange are two yellow dyes used to color porcupine quills. Both are pretty spectacular plants to see in nature–but first prize might just have to go to wolf moss. Wolf moss, or Letharia vulpina, is (to my eyes) like bright, bright, BRIGHT yellow spanish moss. A member of the fungus kingdom, wolf moss (or wolf lichen) can be found on the barks of trees in dry, coniferous forests. As a quillwork dye, it is most strongly associated with western Native American communities from the Rockies to the Pacific, Alaska to California. If you’ve noticed that the scientific name looks a little like ‘lethal,’ there might be a reason: the chemical responsible for the bright yellow color, vulpinic acid, is rather toxic. The website Lichens of North America has several great photos of wolf moss, such as the one here:

http://www.lichen.com/bigpix/Lvulpina.html

Osage orange, Maclura pomifera, is a different dye plant altogether. It is, in fact, in the plant kingdom, mulberry family. Though its original habitat was in the central US (i.e., SW Arkansas, Texas, SE Oklahoma), the USDA estimates that osage orange may be found in just about every state of the Union. The tree can range in size from 40-60 feet tall, and earned the name ‘hedge apple’ in part for its use as windbreaks across prairies (I guess the apple part is a nod to its fruit, resembling a shriveled grapefruit). A yellow dye can be extracted from the wood. Unlike the vulpinic acid of wolf moss, the primary colorants in an osage orange dye bath would be morin, osajin, and pomiferin. For a photo of the tree and fruit, check here:

http://lancaster.unl.edu/hort/Articles/2002/HedgeApple.shtml

Now, let’s take a closer look at the photo that starts this posting. Despite the very different chemical nature of the dyes produced from wolf moss and osage orange, the yellow-dyed quills look nearly identical. This means it would be risky business to state with 100% certainty that a yellow quill was dyed by wolf moss, because it may have just as easily been dyed by osage orange. The history of the quillwork to be gained from knowing the precise materials used could be a stake: Suppose you have a piece of yellow quillwork from Fort Simpson, NWT, Canada. It would be a very educated guess to think that the yellow dye used was wolf moss–but what if it was osage orange instead? Osage orange trees aren’t common in Canada outside of Ontario, so if the dye really was from this source instead, just think about the story that quillwork could tell now!

Placeholder: a tale of two yellows…

It’s time for a new posting, this time on two prominent yellow dyes. I’m experiencing brief technical difficulties, though, so this post will, I’m afraid, be delayed a few days. My apologies to all of you who take the time to visit this blog; I’m debugging as quickly as I can!

Got topics you want to hear about?

Trust me: I’m not short on material on quillwork dyes–but this blog is as much about what you want to know as it is what I can share! What do you want to see posted? More information from the literature–perhaps for dyes other than red? Postings on the science of the analysis? How it’s been working with museum collections generally and with Native American material culture specifically?

Let me know–I’m all ears!

Red dye round-up

With the last two posts addressing specific red dyes, I thought it would be good to finish out the list, to use this posting to report on other materials suggested by the literature for dyeing quills red. There are 3 convenient categories: reds from plants (not trees), reds from trees, and other reds.

Reds from plants, but not trees
For lack of a better distinction, I’m using ‘plants’ to mean those that aren’t trees; I’m sure there’s a specific word for this, but it’s not coming to mind. If any of you know it, I’d be very grateful! Bedstraw, bloodroot, and puccoon were mentioned in the earlier postings. In the course of this research, I’ve spoken with some contemporary quillworkers who use natural materials to dye their quills; from what I’ve seen, bedstraw gives a uniform red-orange. That color seems to be consistent with, say, Denys’ “flame,” but not necessarily in line with Le Clercq’s “brilliant red.” Bloodroot-dyed quills are also what I would describe as an orange-based red–and, again, based on contemporary dyed quills. In both cases, it’s probably not unreasonable to think that the intensity of the red obtained would be related to how long the quill is left in the dye bath.

I’ve not yet seen contemporary quills dyed with puccoon. If the puccoon of the literature corresponds to L.carolinense (which is precisely the if motivating this research!), I would expect puccoon-dyed quills to be a more purplish red, based on the anticipated colorant chemistry. And speaking of purplish or pinkish reds, there is a whole crop of berries that have been suggested for red quill dyes: high-bush cranberries, Solomon’s Seal berries, poke berries, blueberries, choke cherries, and wild grapes.

Reds from trees
There are a few recipes for quill dyes in the literature, and several of them call for mixing the roots or inner barks of 1 or more trees to produce a red dye. In her contribution to the 1928 BAE Annual Report, Frances Densmore noted that alder, wild plum, and red osier dogwood inner barks could be mixed with the roots of bloodroot to give a “brilliant scarlet resembling aniline dyes.” Hemlock and red cedar roots and bark have also been named in recipes collected from the Mi’kmaq in the early 20th century.

Other reds
There are two species of mushroom native to North America, P.cinnabarinus and C.sanguineus, that each contain a red colorant. Though I’ve not seen any specific mention of the use of these mushrooms for red quill dyes, I’m including them in the list as a possible source of a natural red. And, of course, there are red dyes such as madder and lac that may have been introduced to Native communities by European settlers. Cochineal from Central America may have already been an established commodity, or could have also been introduced through European trade.

Much esteemed, Part 2

The last post left off with Champlain, Le Clercq, and Denys each describing brilliant red “flame-colored” quills among the Native communities of New France in the 1600s. The red dye was also described as presumably coming from a skinny, thread-like root, which Le Clercq named Tissaouhianne. But what plant, really, is this?

A good clue to its identity comes in 1748, from the travel journels of Peter Kalm (or Pehr, in the original Swedish). Kalm studied at Uppsala University in 1740, under the scientist Linnaeus. Linnaeus was interested in the orderly classification of plants and animals; today’s system of naming by genus and species is a based on his research. Students of Linnaeus would collect specimens during their travels, sending them back for classification, and in 1747, Kalm was selected to travel to North America to collect plant materials that could be promising for agricultural development.

A year later, Kalm arrived in Pennsylvania. From his base in the Swedish communities of southern New Jersey, Kalm traveled as far as Niagara Falls and Quebec before returning to Sweden in 1751. On one of his many journeys, Kalm not only observed the bright red quills seen a century or more earlier by Champlain & Co., but–as a good student of Linnaeus–he provided the source of the dye with a systematic name:

The Galium tinctorium is called Tisavojaune rouge by the French throughout Canada…The roots of this plant are employed by the Indians in dying [sic] the quills of the American porcupines red, which they put into several pieces of their work; and air, sun, or water seldom change this colour.

It’s a pretty reasonable assumption that Le Clercq’s Tissaouhianne and Kalm’s Tisavojaune are the same material, and just different spellings of the word. If correct, then, it would seem that G. tinctorium, or stiff marsh bedstraw, would be responsible for that brilliant, flame-colored red. In the analysis stage of this project, it will be interesting to see if this dye is, indeed, found on red quillwork matching these 17th century descriptions!

“And much esteemed among them.”

So wrote Father Chrestien Le Clercq in 1685, a Recollect priest who spent about 12 years among the Miramichi of Gaspé, on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The full excerpt from New Relation of Gaspesia, with the Customs and Religion of the Gaspesian Indians reads:

The red which they employ is not vivid like our vermilion [sic]; it is a sombre red, much like that of dragon’s blood. But as to the Tissaouhianne [sic], which is a little red and slender root like the fruit of parsley, it is valued, say they, and much esteemed among them. In fact, our Gaspesians, who preserve it with much care, make remarkably good use of it in staining their quills of porcupine a beautiful brilliant red; and with these they ornament their canoes, their snowshoes, and their other works which are sent into France as curiosities.

At about the same time, Nicholas Denys wrote of a “flame-color” better than any known in France, noting that its source was a thread-like root. Both Denys’ and Le Clercq’s descriptions echo those of Samuel de Champlain from about 60 years earlier:

They put on their robes bands of porcupine quills, which they dye a very fine scarlet color. They value these bands very highly, and detach them so that they may serve for other robes when they wish to make a change.

The $1, 000, 000 question–if you’re interested in dye analysis, like I am–is what, precisely, is that red dye? There is a very good clue in a travel journal written nearly 150 years after Champlain’s. Take a day to sleuth a bit: I’ll post on the clue tomorrow!

Bloodroot by another name may not be bloodroot after all

If the first hurdle to understanding the quillwork literature is figuring out what’s original and what’s reinterpreting earlier reports, the second hurdle is figuring out plant names. Many writers refer to dyes from plants and trees by these materials’ binomial names; the common names may or may not also be included. When earlier sources are cited by later ones, the later authors repeat these binomial names; occasionally, though, common names are used instead (presumably for ease of understanding).

The problem is that common names don’t always have a one-to-one correlation with binomials. For instance, consider bloodroot. Bloodroot is a North American plant that is often included in lists of plant sources for red quill dyes. Its binomial name is Sanguinaria canadensis. According to William Downey in his 1803 examination of bloodroot’s properties while in pursuit of a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, S.canadensis is known in the U.S. “as the puccoon, bloodroot, red root, Indian paint, turmeric, &c.” An inventory of commodities listed as growing or otherwise available (i.e., imported through Europe) in Virginia in 1621 includes “pocoon [sic] root” and other “berries for dies [sic] and drugs.”

This 15th century pocoon might be bloodroot: as Downey notes, S.canadensis can be a stimulant and a diuretic in addition to a coloring material. This double use would certainly fit with the description of a 1621 material useful for both dyeing and medicine. However, pocoon might also be Lithospermum carolinense, another North American plant listed as a red dye source. Even more enticing is a set of dyed porcupine quills in vials, in the collection of the National Museums of Scotland. These quills are from Canada’s Northwest Territory, and some of the vials are labeled with quills’ dye. One of the vials contains yellowish quills and is labeled, “turmeric.” Although it is entirely possible (maybe probable) that these quills really are dyed with turmeric, the fact that bloodroot is also known as puccoon and turmeric raises some very interesting questions!