In the South-west it is not the house-building Pueblo who is the metal-worker _par excellence_ but the semi-pastoral Navajo, who, besides his flocks and herds, possesses a wealth of silver ornaments that runs up into the thousands. Silver and copper ornaments are turned out by the native silversmith not only for his own people but for whites also, and a considerable trade exists between the Navajos and other Amerinds in this native jewelry as well as in blankets. If you desire to have an article made, you give the silver it is to contain, usually in dollar pieces, and an equal quantity as wages. The objects manufactured are globular and semi-globular buttons; bracelets like a letter C in form and shape, buckles, rings, plate for the bridle, tobacco canisters, flat buttons, beads, and various discs, and other ornamental objects. These are often engraved quite artistically, and sometimes elaborately. Copper seems to be a valued metal for ornaments, and I have seen copper bracelets on a Navajo woman made exactly the same as silver ones. The Navajo silversmith is up to a trick or two as well as his white neighbour. At Manuelito there was a white trader who often sold Navajo bracelets to passengers from the railway trains that ran within a hundred feet or less of his door, and he was a man who prided himself on “square” dealing. One day a gentleman who had purchased several silver bracelets rushed in full of ire, demanding the return of his money for the worthless bracelets which he threw upon the counter. They were copper. The trader took down a string containing a number, from which the returned ones had been originally taken, and which he had purchased for silver, and found that every one was copper. They had been thinly washed over by the Navajo smith with silver. [Illustration: NAVAJO SILVER WORK, ARIZONA Engraved button Bracelet Usually about 2½ inches long ] It has sometimes been suggested that the Navajos learned their metal-working from the Pueblos, but if so it was a lesson obtained in quite modern times, for the Pueblos themselves, as has been mentioned, appear to have known nothing about the working of metals before the arrival of the Spaniards. The art of metal-working both among the Navajos and the Pueblos is probably a modern acquisition. Washington Matthews, writing about 1883, says: “Old white residents of the Navajo country tell me that the art has improved greatly within their recollection.”[263] It is likely that the Navajos, having a keen perception of mechanical matters, had wrought copper to a limited degree and that through their intercourse with, and absorption of, Pueblo tribes, this tendency was developed by a certain amount of knowledge in this line which the Pueblos acquired from Mexicans who followed in the train of the early Spanish explorers; but this skill was not given a real impetus till after the South-west fell into our possession, when tools and trade rapidly developed.[264]