Four Ways to Make a Glass Bead, Seen in Fort Vancouver's Collection

Nearly all the beads cataloged at Fort Vancouver were made one way. According to archaeologist Lester Ross (1976), hot-tumbled drawn beads make up 97.6% of them, while beads made by the other three 19th-century methods are rare. This National Park Service article uses examples from the site's museum collection to explain how bead makers worked.

Why the fort had so many

Beads turn up at prehistoric sites around the world. Ancient Egyptians made glass beads, and Romans sold them widely across their empire. In North America glass trade beads appear at fur trade sites from the 16th to the early 20th century, from the east coast to Alaska.

Beads were among the most common European goods in the fur trade. They were made as ornament, and fur trade cultures put them on clothing, storage bags, horse tack and musket holsters. Most American Indian tribes that met glass beads took them up readily and valued them for several reasons, so beads also worked as a kind of currency. At Fort Vancouver, the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) imported them by the ton every year. The HBC bought from England through several suppliers, who in turn bought from many makers. Most of the beads were probably made in Venice, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) and China.

Soft-sole moccasins with beaded decoration from the Columbia River area, about the 1860s, attributed to the Chinook and collected by George Gibbs. Image from the Fort Vancouver article, credited to the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian.

The four methods

Drawn beads

Drawn beads were the most common type. A maker heated a large hollow wand of glass and stretched it from both ends, so the tube grew longer and narrower until its width suited a bead. The tubes were cut into three-foot lengths, sorted by diameter, and chopped with a chisel-like tool into single beads. Most were then "hot tumbled" in a heated drum to wear off sharp edges. Some were faceted instead, with up to 20 facets ground onto them. Last, the beads were sieved into size classes.

A drawn bead with chopped ends, found by archaeologists at Fort Vancouver (NPS photo).

A drawn bead with chopped edges and facets (NPS photo).

Wound beads

The second most common type was made one bead at a time. A "lamp winder" heated a glass wand at a lamp and, once it was molten, wound it around a wire wand. Using several colors of glass gave a polychrome bead.

A wound bead from Fort Vancouver (NPS photo).

A decorated wound bead from Fort Vancouver (NPS photo).

Mandrel pressed beads

Less common beads were pressed in a two-part mold, a "mandrel press." Pins on either side of the mold formed the hole, which often stayed partly filled with glass and had to be punched through once the glass cooled. These beads were commonly faceted to complete their decoration.

Faceted mandrel pressed beads from Fort Vancouver (NPS photo).

Blown beads

Blown beads are the rarest, both in the 19th century and in this collection. A glass blower put a mass of molten glass, a "gather," on a hollow iron rod, blew air into it, and used tools to stretch and decorate the single bead while it was inflated. The walls are extremely thin, so these beads are very fragile.

A delicate mold-blown bead from Fort Vancouver (NPS photo).

What the records and the studies add

The HBC sold beads by the "bunche," by the pound or by the yard. Bunche beads are assumed to have been relatively large and costly, those sold by the pound small and sorted by size, and those by the yard strung on strands. Its records also sort them by color, with names like "Crystal," "White," "Amber," "Green Blue," "Blue Opaque" and "Lapis Blue." The article says these historical categories are hard to match to what archaeologists dig up.

Of the hot-tumbled drawn beads, the majority are plain, single or double layer, in blue (60%) and white (10%). In 1990 Ross published a classification of the fort's beads in the journal Beads, "Trade Beads from Hudson's Bay Company Fort Vancouver (1829-1860), Vancouver, Washington." It builds on a system by Kenneth Kidd and Martha Kidd (1970), as modified by Karlis Karklins (1982, 1985), and remains the standard resource when archaeologists examine newly found beads. The Fort Vancouver Cultural Resources Division created a quick reference guide with large color images, to help students and volunteers identify beads and to give others a closer look at them.

Sources

• National Park Service, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, Bead Types at Fort Vancouver; rewritten in hubnx's own words.