It was the quintessential Antiques Roadshow find. In 2002, a man named Ted from Tucson presented appraiser Don Ellis with a simple striped wool blanket,saying that it had been hanging over the side of a rocking chair in his bedroom for years, ever since he had inherited it from his aunt. His first clue that it might be something valuable? The Roadshow producers assigned burly security men to escort him around before his television taping. Sure enough, when the cameras rolled, Ellis informed Ted that he was in possession of a “national treasure.”

Turns out, the blanket his grandmother had put at the foot of his bed on cold nights when he was a boy earned the highest valuation ever conferred in the Roadshow’s ten year history. What was it, exactly, that Ted had? A first-phase Ute style Navajo chief’s blanket, woven between 1840 and 1860, one of the oldest, rarest and finest examples ever to hit the market—one of only 50 or so known. And how much did Ellis think it might fetch at auction? Somewhere between $350,000 and $500,000.

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