DECATUR - It's like one of those moments from public television's Antiques Roadshow: A guy turns up with a humble-looking American Indian basket and suddenly finds out he's holding a coveted national treasure.

Only this time, the moment is happening right here in Decatur and generating ripples in the Indian antiques world that are prompting museum and collector interest from coast to coast.

The drama started when the Consider it Sold eBay consignment shop in Decatur agreed to auction a basket brought in by a Decatur man who wishes to remain anonymous. He thought the basket might be valuable, as he had taken it to a museum several years ago and had been told it could be a Panamint Indian work and worth maybe $5,000 to $10,000.

When the store tentatively listed it as such a week ago, the phone began ringing so frantically that receptionist Mandy Spradlin thought it would blow up.

"They kept calling and calling and calling and telling us what it really was," said Spradlin, 18. "It got kind of exciting."

It turns out that experts quickly identified the 11-inch diameter, 4½-inch-tall basket as being made by the coastal Californian Chumash people and dating from maybe 1875 to 1895. Their baskets are highly prized and very rare and, icing on the cake, elaborate dark patterns in the weave of this one mean it might well be the work of a weaver named Petra Pico, who died in 1902 and whose baskets are counted among the Smithsonian's treasures.

And now, for the very best bit: "We've heard that other baskets like this have sold for up to six figures," said Amy Marshall, chief operating officer of Consider it Sold. "When I found out, I thought 'Wowee.' When I told the owner, he just started laughing and laughing."

That laughter is likely to last all the way to the bank. Consider it Sold quickly sought more expert opinion, rewrote the basket description and listed it correctly on July 27, prompting the bidding to take off like a scalded cat.

"The next morning, after the first night it was on, it was up to $7,000," said Spradlin. "And on a typical eBay auction, we've usually got 20 or 25 people watching, but on this one, there is close to 200 people watching the auction right now."

The bidding has since topped $16,000, and the auction doesn't end until 4:46 p.m. Central time Sunday. "I expect it is now going to just sit there for a couple of days," said Marshall, 26, who is keeping the basket in a safe-deposit box. "And then the people with the money will come in at the last moment; The final 10 seconds is when it is going to skyrocket."

How a Californian Indian basket wound up in Decatur appears to be linked to the iron horse: The owner had a relative who worked on the railroad traveling coast to coast, and he may have just picked it up during the course of his job.

"That is absolutely possible," said Jan Timbrook, curator of ethnography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History in Santa Barbara, Calif. She says the baskets often were bought by visitors with money to spend.

"There's actually been quite a number of Chumash baskets that have turned up among the possessions of the old whaling families of New England," she said.

She said few Chumash weavers are left, and none have equaled the excellence achieved by their ancestors. The baskets, woven in a laborious process with intense skill, are made so finely that they are watertight and were actually used to boil water over hot stones for cooking.

"They could do anything pottery could do, and they didn't break when you dropped them," Timbrook said. "But the Chumash not only made their baskets functional and practical, they also made them beautiful by weaving in elaborate designs, and they didn't have to do that."

The Santa Barbara Museum holds the world's biggest public collection of Chumash baskets, with 45 examples. It bought a group of seven in 2001 and paid $100,000 for them.

Tony Reid can be reached at treid@herald-review.com or 421-7977.
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