On a Tuesday in June, three women at the Pueblo weaving cooperative set a pot of chamisa flowers to boil, then added crushed pinon pitch on a hunch. The yellow that came up was not the yellow they were expecting — warmer, closer to something none of them had actually seen dyed into wool before.
The same combination turns up, underlined twice, in a field notebook Millicent Rogers kept in her last years collecting in Taos. She never mixed the dye herself — she recorded it from a weaver whose name she wrote down and then, in the next line, apologized for possibly spelling wrong.
Seventy-three years separate the notebook from the pot. What ties them is not the recipe alone but the fact that it was written down at all — and that someone, this summer, went looking for the notebook instead of guessing.
The cooperative is dyeing a full run this month. If the color holds through washing, it will go into a blanket already promised to the museum — a small return delivery, seventy-three years late.