Collection Trouble

Last week a man named Paul M. Angle was in Manhattan trying to sell a treaty concluded about 1800 between the U. S. Government and the Indian chiefs of the Ohio Valley tribes. A valuable piece for any museum or collector, the document bore some 30 signatures representing the Miami, Wyandotte, Ottawa, Chippewa, Delaware, Shawnee and Potawatomi nations.

Mr. Angle was acting as agent for the Springfield (Ill.) Marine Bank. The treaty was once in the possession of Collector Edward Waldron Payne, Illinois dynamite manufacturer, bank president, director of utility companies, chairman of the State museum under three governors. When Edward Payne died in 1932 his real estate holdings, once worth $2,000,000, were not enough to pay his debts. The Marine Bank and another Springfield bank obtained liens against his estate. Chief asset was not the treaty but the Payne Stone Age Collection, pronounced one of the world's great archeological treasures by the few archeologists acquainted with it. The banks declared their intention of selling the Collection piecemeal if they could not sell it whole. Last week no item had yet been disposed of but not a few scientists and historians had the jitters as they contemplated the disastrous scattering of the Collection beyond hope of exhaustive study as a unit.

The Payne Stone Age Collection consists of about 2,000,000 relics of war, ritual, agriculture and social life in the North and Central American cultures before Columbus. There are symbolically sculptured alabaster bowls of the Mayan Empire, for catching the blood of sacrificed victims; hundreds of "banner stones," evidently symbols of immortality in Stone Age ritual; thousands of pipes carved with images of birds, animals, fish. For these and the rest Collector Payne paid something like $300,000.

Edward Payne was a man of many enthusiasms. He was a fancy skater and a crack rifle shot, an expert on locks and trees, an imitator of bird calls. Blessed with an eagle eye for counterfeit money, he was accredited the fastest counter of genuine money in his State. Trusted friend of the Chinese in the Midwest, he resembled Lloyd George, was a second cousin of Charles Dickens. He wore $40 beaver hats, baggy trousers, pleated linen shirts that buttoned down the back. When he ran across an item he wanted, he was accustomed to buy the whole collection containing it. Dying, he muttered with his last breath: "Keep my Collection intact."

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