He Turns Wooden Indians Into Wampum (Aug, 1954) He Turns Wooden
Indians Into Wampum Newspaperman Robertson whiffled a redskin on
a hunch, now finds his idea is one heap big business, By Frank
Lynn ONE day in 1934, Thayne Robertson, a Boise, Idaho
newspaperman whose hobby was carving wooden figures, heard that
a wooden Indian was wanted for a Western movie in Hollywood.
Although he had never turned a piece of wood into an Indian,
Robertson was fixed by the challenge and decided to give it a
try with the hope that he would sell the carving to the film
company. In his spare time he felled a large pine tree in a
nearby forest and hauled the cleaned log to his garage where he
began to chop on it with an ax. As the chips flew, the log was
slowly transformed into a life-size model of Sacajawea, the
Indian girl who guided Explorers Lewis and Clark across our then
untracked continent in 1805. This first masterpiece of the
brightly colored Sacajawea, complete with papoose on her back,
consumed about 100 hours of Robert