Brigadier General John Bullis Apache Items, ca. 1880
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GUEST:
An Apache Indian gave these to General John Bullis. After General Bullis moved to San Antonio, Texas, he gave a lot of his Apache Indian things to my great-grandmother. They had named one of their children William Bullis Cassin. You know, after General Bullis. She had them put in the Witte Museum, uh, just loaned them to the museum, for a long time. But when the museum wanted them donated, she did not want to donate it.
APPRAISER:
Mm-hmm.
GUEST:
So she took it back. And I think it was all stored for quite some time, and then my mother had these things framed.
APPRAISER:
John Lapham Bullis was born in 1841 in Macedon, New York. And he was a Quaker, and he enlisted in the New York infantry as a volunteer at the beginning of the Civil War.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
He goes to Harpers Ferry, gets shot up and taken prisoner. He recovers, and the Union government trades for him and gets him back. He was wounded again, and goes, gets sent to Libby Prison, one of, you know, the most notorious Confederate prison that ever existed. They get him out again, and he goes back into service. He wants to be an officer. He's not, he enlists as a private. He begins working with what was called the U.S. Colored Troops, and they were an infantry group that was made up of ex-slaves and freemen from the North. They were all African Americans fighting against the Confederacy for the Union Army, and he worked his way up as a white officer rapidly.
GUEST:
Uh-huh.
APPRAISER:
After he was in the wars, he, he went to Arizona, where he served at San Carlos, which is Apache. And people started giving him gifts, and he also started buying things. These moccasins were made by the Jicarilla Apache for a dance called the Mountain Spirit Dance, and they're some of the few known with all of these figures on them. He got these things about 1880, 1882, so pretty early. Everything in this case is Apache. This was probably a pouch for a peace medal. This, and this piece here, held iron strikers for making fires. They were called strike-a-lights. And this probably did, also. This is a war club for horseback, and this is a woman's awl case, because women sewed a lot.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
Because of this incredible history, and because you can trace where he was, it makes it very important. There are, there are not many pieces you can trace like that. If they were to come up for sale, I think they would bring, on the low end at an auction, $25,000 for what's in this case here.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
And on the high end, probably as much as $35,000, maybe a little more.
GUEST:
It's wonderful to know that.
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