Glass Bead (FOUS 39311) - Public Domain image, National Parks Gallery

Very light yellowish-brown, lampworked drawn glass bead. According to Lester A. Ross, author of Trade Beads from Archeological Excavations at Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site, "beads of this class were manufactured by heating a tube of glass at a flame or lamp. The process was used for reworking tubes of glass and for decorating wound beads with applied decoration, using a solid glass cane rather than a glass tube. Apparently, glass tube lampworking was a technique in widespread use throughout nineteenth-century Europe."