From The New Yorker: “… money that became valueless.”

Originally posted on Friday, August 24th, 2012

“…there must have been a moment when Indians suddenly realized that beads were basically worth nothing, and they’d been trading all this valuable stuff for them.”

In the July 23, 2012 New Yorker, p. 23, Lost and Found by Ian Frazier:

Matthew Jensen is a conceptual landscape artist who lives in Brooklyn and walks all over the place.

One Saturday in June, an admirer of Jensen’s joined him for a walk uptown.  They saw the downed elm [in Highbridge Park, in far uptown Manhattan], and the little beach on the Harlem River where he found his first bead–a cobalt-blue one, of Murano glass–and discovered serveral more beads in sand and gravel that recent rains had washed along park paths.  “Manhattan was a center of the fur trade for a long time, and beads were a main trade item,” he said, over lunch at the Indian Road Cafe, in Inwood.  “But I think there must have been a moment when Indians suddenly realized that beads were basically worth nothing, and they’d been trading all this valuable stuff for them.  I can see them just tossing out the beads in disgust.  That’s probably why you can still find so many of them–they’re money that became valueless.”

Image of Indian trade beads, ca. 1740 by Uyvsdi under Creative Commons License

Glass.  Paper.  Worth nothing.  Gold retains its value over millennia.