Shinnecock Decoys Sell for Thousands
During a two-day auction held last week in Easton, Md., in conjunction with the annual Maryland Waterfowl Festival, six shorebird decoys carved by Eugene Cuffee, a Shinnecock Indian who has been dead for 73 years, sold for a total of $12,550. At the same venue the year before, two Cuffee wood ducks with “relief wing carving and carved eyes and crests” — a “rigmate,” as a male and female pair are called — went for $8,250 against an estimate of $4,000 to $6,000, despite “several small dents, a small crack in one side of the hen, and two small rough areas in wood from when the decoy was made, in drake’s breast.”
Decoys, once the humble tools of wildfowl hunters (the rigmates were branded “W.D. Halsey”), have become big business over the last three decades. Now classed with great American folk art, they sell at specialized auctions for sums that would have stunned their creators, often in the high six figures. And the market has exploded, thanks in part to digital services like invaluable.com or liveauctioneers.com that make online bidding a snap.
Guyette and Deeter of St. Michael’s, Md., which calls itself “the world’s leading decoy auction firm” and is acknowledged as such by the collectors’ bible Decoy Magazine, has embraced Internet bidding in a big way. For last week’s auction the firm posted all 593 items on eBay a couple of weeks in advance to drum up yet more interest. In addition to the audience on site, bids were submitted beforehand, and a dozen people manned phone lines. (Jon Deeter, a partner, said it was the firm’s “first eBay live.” Sotheby’s, too, recently formed a partnership with eBay.)
Guyette and Deeter has a long track record of selling Cuffee carvings, at least a couple of times a year. “He was pretty prolific,” Mr. Deeter said. His decoys have “interesting paint and patterns” and, often, “applied wings,” he said, as opposed to conventional one-piece birds. In July 2010, at a G&D auction in Portsmouth, N.H. (there are four a year in four locations), one of Cuffee’s full-size great gray herons, 38 inches tall with “carved and dropped wings and a removable head,” sold for $10,750, even though, as the catalog scrupulously noted, it showed “moderate wear, crack on the back, chip on one side of the tail, a couple of thin cracks in the neck.”
Eugene Cuffee (1866-1941), who is also said to have created decoys as bookends, paperweights, and decorations for lamps, was 10 years old when his father, Warren, was lost from the ship Circassian, bound from Liverpool to New York and wrecked off the Bridgehampton sandbar on Dec. 30, 1876, in a furious snowstorm. All 10 Shinnecock men who answered the call for volunteers to help right the stricken ship died trying. Three were Cuffees, cousins, two of whom had three or four children each. Some of the bodies were found as far off as Montauk, encased in ice.
No photograph of Eugene Cuffee has come to light and little is known of his life. The East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection has a memo stating that he was “one of the Shinnecocks who unsuccessfully tried to oust Negroes from the Shinnecock reservation in 1936 and who tried vainly to discourage inter-marriage between the two races,” but that note is attributed to Chief Red Thunder Cloud, whose assertions are sometimes questionable.
According to Cuffee’s Feb. 28, 1941, obituary in the old Bridgehampton News, he died at the Central Islip State Hospital, which is disconcerting. That facility, which was shut down in 1996, was the largest psychiatric institution in New York State at the time.
In catalogs and online, the carver is sometimes called “Chief” Eugene Cuffee, sometimes just Eugene Cuffee, and is said to have hailed from Southampton, East Hampton or Easthampton, Shinnecock, the Shinnecock Reservation, or simply Long Island. His actual place of residence was in all likelihood the reservation, but as Mr. Deeter pointed out, “A lot of information was lost at some point. These guys were making objects to be used.”
A Mastic Beach man, Jamie Reason, a respected folk art collector and decoy specialist, believes that Cuffee was not in fact the maker of the works attributed to him, many of which are in museums. In several articles published in recent years in Decoy Magazine, Mr. Reason contends that William H. Bennett of East Hampton, who died in 1954, was the true creator of the decoys credited to Cuffee, based on Bennett family lore and other evidence, including a marked resemblance in style. In light of Mr. Reason’s research, the magazine has reportedly agreed that later Cuffees are indeed Bennetts, but still considers earlier pieces, from the first quarter of the 20th century and before, to be the work of the “Chief.”
Eugene Cuffee and his wife, the former Ida Beaman, a Montaukett, left a number of descendants, among them the craftsman Lyle Smith of the Shinnecock Reservation, who carves not only collectible shorebirds but also his own gunning decoys. According to Raven’s Way Antiques of North Kingston, R.I. (“the home of antique duck and shorebird decoys”), which sells Mr. Smith’s work online, “much of his carving shows the influence of those decoys that have been historically attributed to Chief Cuffee.” Raven’s Way offers Cuffee decoys as well; one sold recently is described as having “an early whalebone bill, typical of Cuffee’s work.” Mr. Smith’s often have deer-antler bills.
Unlike most antique decoys, Mr. Smith’s are both signed and dated. He carves a Native American symbol on the bottom, along with “Lyle G. Smith/ Shinnecock” and the year he made them.