By Wetherbee and Taylor
                There was a basket we kept seeing that people called Shaker.  We knew it wasn’t Shaker but we didn’t know wo made it.  The design of it, the way the materials were used in it, and the fine workmanship expressed in it put a strong signature on it.  But whose signature it was, no one seemed to know.  The answer came over time when we met Nellie Ptaszek, an antiques dealer from Claverack, New York.  She didn’t call it Shaker.  She called it Taghkanic.  And there began the unfolding of a basket story.
               The baskets take their name form the township in New York where they were made.  We went there, expecting just to piece out a few facts….So much of the history of basket art has been lost, it is not often we are able to retrieve even a name or a locale that can be linked with a body of work.  What we found at Taghkanic was extraordinary: for generations a group of families had been making baskets there, and the baskets were still being made.  But their story had been distorted, and even locally it was suppressed.  Many mysteries overlay the lives of the basketmakers; and as our research unraveled them, we realized there was a story in them that had to be told.  Over the years more than their name had been lost from their baskets.  We write this book to bring them back from anonymity, and to set their story straight.
                “The legend of the bushwhacker basket” is an important chapter in American basketry.  Although a strange history accrued around them, the Taghkanic basketmakers were typical of other makers in the way they practiced and passed on their craft.  By documenting their experience, we are able to uncover some of the culture and the traditions that have given us the great legacy of basket we now revere.