Your strand is beautiful.

I was so excited when I saw your link. Then I saw the price. (gulp) Not this year! :^D Thank you for the link, it will help me track them down in the future.

Once upon a time I posted some "Russian" beads at what I thought was a reasonable price, and got pushback about "devaluing" heirloom beads.
So now I guess at a price based upon rarity, mostly, and figure if someone really wants something, they'll make an offer and we can work it out from there.

Someone who wants something because they really like it is, I feel, in a different bargaining category than someone who's just trying to get a deal so they can profit from reselling it themselves.

I found some similar beads on Picard's website and they were very pricey. VERY pricey. :^D

Here are two photos from a discussion I instigated in 2003 at my Yahoo Group, Trade Bead Talk.

I wanted to compare translucent brown "Russian" beads to certain agate-glass beads (that I suspect may also be Bohemian—but MIGHT be Venetian). A specimen of these beads was shown in the first edition of The History of Beads (1987), and I had challenged the accuracy of the idea that this was an "ancient" bead, during my period of consultation for The Bead Chart. However, Lois said the bead was presented to have had a 'good archaeological association.' (I'm paraphrasing.). But I continued to think, "this is a trade bead."

Anyway, as you can perhaps tell from the photos, the brown glasses in all of these beads are very similar.

I have seen so few of these beads, in person, I am not really aware of differences in tones of brown (some being lighter or darker brown).

I bought my brown "Russian" beads from Ascona Beads in Santa Monica, in the 1990s, when I was occasionally teaching there. At that time I had never seen brown "Russian" beads before. The strand I have came from the African trade.

Jamey

As an aside to this conversation : brown glass " gemstones" were faceted and mixed with similar colored faceted garnets that were sourced in the San Diego gem mine region in about 1900.Faceting in America was advancing rapidly as was gem mining especially tourmalines. Garnets were a reasonably priced easily cut low end faceted stone but glass in the form of " breweryites" was a constant problem in the parcels. The garnets were never made into beads but the pink tourmaline was occasionally made into beads but all production was exported.

The reddish hank of beads are old brick red greenhearts - galet rouge? - in pristine condition. Also note the similar half mass of cobalt blue "Russian" beads on the right of the case. The Museum also has what appear to be unused hanks of white galet blanc beads.

At any rate, the amber glass "Russian" strand is distinctly lighter in tone (and also appear to be longer beads) than the beer bottle brown beads under discussion. I seem to recall that the beads Lester Ross documented from Ft. Vancouver were also this lighter color.

Just as an interesting little tidbit, I recently acquired a copy of Emmons: The Tlingit Indians (edited by Frederica de Laguna). On page 56 deLaguna has a parenthetical note:

A note among Emmons's papers at AMNH [American Museum of Natural History] indicates: 'Beads were valued at so much according to color: Yellow 30 cents; Red 20 cents; Blue 50 cents. Chilkat.'

I plugged 50 cents into a consumer price index calculator that went back to 1890, and got an equivalency of $14 today. It also produced a rather confusing result of 50 cents in 1895 worth $15 today. At any rate, those numbers actually correspond to what the best, biggest beads are going for among collectors today - around $15 per bead.

The "V" accession code indicates "Russian." The curator explained to me that there is very little accession data. Many of the museum's artifacts date to the 1880s (it was founded in 1887), and were collected by Sheldon Jackson himself. The inventory of the Russian American company in Sitka were supposedly transferred to the Alaska Commercial Company in 1867, when Alaska was sold to the U.S. So I wonder if the pristine hanks of beads and other items accessioned merely as "Russian" were obtained from the Alaska Commercial Company, because they appear to still be in the original bunches in which they were shipped.

There's a mysterious comment on page 9 of Arthur Woodward's 1965 booklet Indian Trade Goods:

...the large ultra marine blue faceted beads found south as Washing and Oregon, became "Russian beads", in spite of the fact that original packages of these beads, wrapped in grey coarse paper, were found unopened in the warehouse of the Rusian American Fur Company in 1867, marked "Brussels." In the latter case it was probably a repakaging job done by an export company in the Belgian City.

There's no citation for this statement. Wonder where Woodward learned this?

The curator reports:

Small string of 30 brass beads, handmade. They were from Gov. John Brady, but its significance is unknown.

Google has this to say about John Brady:

John (James) Green Brady (May 25, 1847 – December 17, 1918) was an American politician who was the Governor of the District of Alaska from 1897 to 1906, when he was forced to resign due to his alleged involvement with the fraudulent Reynolds–Alaska Development Company. He was later exonerated.