This is the daughter of American Horse of the Oglala Sioux.  Her dress is covered with dentalia shells as a sign of wealth.  She is also wearing a necklace of longitudinally-perforated cylindrical beads, most likely made of conch shell or bone.

Close examination of her face raises the suspicion that she was infected with but survived small pox.

This is a wedding veil covered with dentalia shells and blue glass beads; it is accented with red fabric and a variety of other beads - red, dark blue, white, and clear.  The upper tiers are attached to a blue cap and the remaining rows of dentalia are free hanging.  The sound produced by the dentalia and beads as the wearer moves is distinctive and added to the overall enhancement of the wearer, as it gave sound to the movements of the bride.  This might be comparable to the "rustling" noise produced by silk garments used by American authors to describe a scene.

The dentalia in this sketch are engraved; this adds to their value and creates a unique identity for the string.  The shells are very hard and engraving them was no easy task.  It took  strong hands to cut through the shell without making an error because the shells are so hard and because of the ridges created as each dentalium increases the size of its shell.

Purses were created for individual strands of dentalia from a hollowed out section of elk antler.  They kept the hard but brittle shells from breaking, which in effect destroyed the wealth.  A lid was sliced from the antler; it was secured to the purse by wrapping with a leather thong that passed through a hole bored in the lid.  A more sophisticated lid fit into a recess which kept it from sliding sideways.

Each purse was different and designed individually by the makers.  The conventional designs seem to include incised rings of equal number on each end.  These rings are accompanied by some kind of sharply pointed motif like a zig-zag line or a row of triangles or diamonds.

Sometimes dentalia were sewn with cushioning strips of leather placed between the rows to minimize breakage.  Despite this precaution uppermost the shell on the right broke anyway.  The wedding veil pictured above used this padding technique, too.