American Heritage Center (AHC) #AlwaysArchiving

One afternoon at the American Heritage Center an old photograph retrieved from deep in the archive propelled me on a fascinating research journey. It also led me to reckon with the power of photography as a colonial tool and to reconsider the layered complexities that inevitably exist beyond the frame.

An Unsettling Discovery

I pressed my forehead against the edge of the wooden stereoscope. Across the bottom of the image in glib white print my eyes skipped across the words, “Sitting Bull’s Camp sectional view. Winter Quarters.” I had pulled the old stereograph from a dull grey box filled with old stereographs. I was about to pluck the stiff image from its mount to look for something else, but my eyes were drawn back to the little girl, to the soldier, and to the women posing like self-absorbed holidaymakers. What were they doing there? The question seemed to well up from deep in my belly.

The little white girl stands apart from everyone else. Head tilted forward, arms dangle dejectedly at her sides. The pose conveys petulant boredom. Or perhaps it is the posture of dark wonderment, an expression of a thing her youthful mind cannot articulate but that her body understands viscerally. The white man in the uniform faces the camera. Shoulders back, level chin, the buttons on his jacket glint in the biting morning light. Two women smile at the viewer from beneath their stylish black chapeaux. One of them is buttoned up tight in a dark jacket and gloves. The other looks like a Victorian Frida Kahlo. A white version. A scarf is sinched around her hips and she has draped a colorful shawl over her shoulders. Perhaps her costume is an attempt to blend in with the natives, like blond co-eds dawning saris on the beaches of Goa.

Behind the white people and a bit off center, two Lakota women sit on the ground in front of a tipi. They are wrapped in dark blankets and long, black braids brush their shoulders. It is winter in South Dakota. The grove of young box elders are jagged and naked. To the left of the interlopers a few tribe members are gathered in front of another tipi. It looks larger than the others. There are five seated figures before the entrance. A tall man draped in black, stands facing them. His back is toward the camera. 

As with most stereograph productions, the two images were mounted on thick cardboard. On the back a description was affixed. There, I found another conundrum. In grand capital letters at the top of the description were the words PYRAMID PARK. Below them it said, (Known as “BAD LANDS”) D. T. Territory. Then, set off and separated by decorative lines I read, Northern Pacific Rail Road Extension. Below that, the first paragraph described a rugged landscape of canyons and buttes and upturned trees and rocks that bore no resemblance to the photograph. The second paragraph was more confusing.

Also, Views of the Wild Sioux Indians, showing their methods of living, and modes of burying the dead; together with many of the principal Chiefs, including SENTEGALESKA, or Spotted-Tail, who was assassinated in the Fall of 1881, and was, at the time of his death, Chief of 8,000 Indians. This Event to the Indians was the loss of a wise counselor, and to the whites a true friend.

Views published and kept constantly on hand, and for sale, at my Gallery in In Niobrara, Neb.

W. R. CROSS, photographer.

The narrative on the back of the stereograph led me to think it was a sort of canned description of the harrowing terrain, and exotic creatures an intrepid Easterner might encounter if they were brave enough to take the Northern Pacific line through the Dakota Territories. Mr. Cross was clearly a businessman, as indeed so many of the young men were who took up the trade of photography in the West. Profit motive notwithstanding, the description on the back of the stereograph had so little correlation to the actual image I wondered if it were a mistake. Why would you sell a photo of anonymous white people in a Native settlement identified as Sitting Bull’s Winter Quarters? Where was Sitting Bull? Was he the tall standing figure giving his back to the camera? Where was the photo actually taken and why was there a man in uniform?

These are a smattering of the questions that propelled me in search of the origins of the photo. That sepia fragment of history sent me on a journey with Native scholar, Thomas King as he explored and re-storied the mythology of the American Indian, and with Susan Sontag as she dissected the work of the photograph, the way an image can distort reality, dehumanize and symbolically objectify. But before alighting upon a philosophical quest, I first had to learn more about the object itself.

Following the Photographer’s Trail

William Richard Cross seemed like a good starting point. According to the South Dakota State Historical Society, in the course of his career, Cross had a trade list of more than 2,000 images. These not only included photographs of Native American but also landscapes and domestic scenes “that were truly representative of the lives of white settlers on the frontier.”[1] That sentence rankled me as my mind went back to the photograph and woman with the scarf around her hips. Clearly, it did not seem equally important to truly represent the lives of the Native people living on the frontier.

Beginning in the 1860s, Cross was among a handful of professional men who traveled a region encompassing northern Nebraska and into what is considered today as southern South Dakota, with aim of capturing life in the West. This included the Indigenous peoples, of course. Among Cross’s cohort, was a man named Stanley J. Morrow. This fact would later prove to be important.  These photographs were primarily created for a rapacious market in the Eastern part of the United States and Canada.

The Business of Native Photography

For the public, those images complemented written accounts of the Wild West and the barbaric Red Men that circulated in newspapers, magazines and dime-store novels. Photographs from men like Cross provided “visual proof of the existence of American Indian tribes.”[2] Susan Sontag notes the photographer “both loots and preserves, denounces and concentrates.”[3] The photograph becomes not only proof of something but also a way to lay claim, to possess; and then, for men like Cross, to sell for profit. In many ways one can think of frontier photography as emblematic of the entire capitalist colonial project ¾ claim, conquer, exploit and destroy to create wealth. It was the Gilded Age after all.

Thomas King agrees with Sontag, though he sees the phenomenon through a different lens. He explains, in the second half of the nineteenth century people east of the Mississippi suddenly became fascinated with Indians. Not all people, of course, he cautions. Basically, the curiosity lie with people who had never seen a real Indian. People living in places like Pennsylvania or Quebec, “those for whom Indians were a distant memory.”[4] Curiosity seemed to be the highest is places where roads had long ago replaced forests and where disease, war and relentless capital expansion had driven the Native people away. Since the original inhabitants were gone from those territories, they took on a new persona, the Indian had become symbolic.

King pushed me to see the impossible situation of the Native people at the time, and perhaps still today. In most cases it appears to me Native people were either feared or made the exotic (erotic) other. But once pushed to the brink of extinction, they suddenly become peculiarly precocious. This realization was deeply unsettling; there is something of the zoo in it, like the way people today might flock to see an endangered snow leopard. Through men photographing tribes across the West, King laments, “Somewhere along the way, we ceased being people and somehow became performers in an Aboriginal minstrel show for White North America.”[5]

Unraveling the Mystery

As part of the George V. Allen collection of Native Americans and the American frontier, the Smithsonian Museum’s online digital collection also has a stereograph titled, “Sitting Bull’s camp. Sectional view. Winter quarters.”[6] The canned narrative on the back is identical to the stereograph I found at the American Heritage Center, but the image is different. In the Smithsonian collection, the white people are gone and instead the camera’s gaze is fixed on two women standing near a tipi draped in dark mantles. Six seated figures are swaddled in blankets and appear to be children. No Sitting Bull in sight. It seems Mr. Cross’s photographs made it into more than once collection. The all-purpose description affixed to the image troubled me. If W.R. Cross, photographer, had actually taken the picture, why didn’t he write a better description? I was beginning to suspect what the back of the stereograph said was of little consequence.  Sontag notes, “photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.”[7] If one does not respect the subject of the photo why bother to describe the image accurately? Maybe the fantasy was the point.

Unsatisfied with what I found at the Smithsonian, further online sleuthing eventually led me back to the South Dakota State Historical Society. There, I located a report published in 1975 called the “Sitting Bull Collection.”[8] The document is a compellation of the images the society received from Mrs. Leona Dix Wilber in 1932. The society paid her twenty-five cents per image. Along with a reproduction of the photograph, the report includes the narrative information on the back. The report begins with a note from the editor:

They were copyrighted in 1882 by Bailey, Dix and Mead of Fort Randall, Dakota Territory. Because these views are also included in the Stanley J. Morrow photographic collection, it is possible that Morrow was the original Photographer and had sold at least twenty-four views to Bailey, Dix and Mead. The Morrow Collection as compiled and organized between 1869 and 1881. And then offered for sale in 1881, either as a set or as individuals views.[9]

Stanley J. Morrow knew W. R. Cross! They were among a small group of professionals working in the region. The puzzle pieces were falling into place…

On the second page of the report, I found an image called “Winter Quarters.” I could feel my eyes grow wide with excitement. As I looked closer, I recognized the tipis squeezed in between the baren box elders, but nothing else. There was another photo called “Sitting Bull and his favorite Wife,” the mere title of which, was implicitly insulting. Then page after page of insipid pictures of tipis and Lakota people wrapped in blankets sitting on the ground or looking away from the camera. The document I thought was answer to the mystery of my photograph appeared to be useless, and disturbing.

Sontag talks about photography as a form of colonization after the transcontinental railroad opened the West. King sees the American Indian photography craze as morbid curiosity, as if there was a sudden desire to preserve the image of beautiful creatures on the verge of extinction. There was so much more to the story than what was contained in the image and more complexity than the glib, and subtly disdainful stereograph descriptions attempted to convey. Looking through the collection of photographs made me nauseous and angry and embarrassed. It is likely I would have been as inured to the indignity thrust upon Sitting Bull and his people as every other American of the time.

In the photo on page 254 I recognized the woman with the pleated skirt and the pert black hat. The image is titled, “Sitting Bull, [s—-] and Twins,” which uses a derogatory term common in that era. The white woman is not mentioned in the title, but she is there, seated awkwardly in front of a tipi in a row with the chief’s family members. A short distance behind them the man with the polished buttons is mounted on a white horse. The little girl from my photograph is also there. She is squished between Sitting Bull’s twins and looks miserable. Later, I would come across this photograph again in an article by David Humphreys Miller published in 1964, called “Sitting Bull’s White [s—-].” Miller claims the white woman is Catherine Weldon[10] – but that is another story altogether.

The Truth Behind the Image

Finally, at the bottom of page 260, I found my photograph. There was the cluster of white people just off center. And there were the tribe members pushed to the edges of the frame like set dressing. The image was labeled “Morning Roll Call.” The caption read, “Every morning the Indians are required to sit or stand in front of their teepees, to be counted by two commissioned Officers, consisting of the old and new officers of the day.” To be counted… Sitting Bull’s people were clearly prisoners. Had the man with the polished buttons brought his family to visit the captives? To visit the zoo.

An article from the Aktá Lakota Museum and Cultural Center explained that after Sitting Bull defeated George Armstrong Custer in June of 1876, public outrage sent thousands more US troops to the area around Little Bighorn River to pursue the Lakota. The Lakota split into small groups to evade the military, yet many were forced to surrender. Sitting Bull, refusing to capitulate, took another path. In 1877, he led his people north to Canada where they stayed for four years. However, he “found it nearly impossible to feed his people in a world where the buffalo was almost extinct.”[11] Millions of buffalo were slaughtered by settlers and hired men, for that very purpose ¾ to hasten the demise of the Native populations.

In 1881, Sitting Bull surrendered. He and his people were taken to Fort Randall, Dakota Territory. Sitting Bull said, “I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle.”[12]

A Call for New Narrative

With no answer in sight, I have found myself wondering if it was possible to create a new set of descriptions for some images from the archive. What if descriptions were added by historians that pointed to the circumstances beyond the frame? Descriptions that contested the glib, canned narratives pasted on by men like W. R. Cross. What might that make possible? What might an expanded description mean to the descendants of Sitting Bull and other Native peoples of North America? Starting from a simple act of expanding the narrative, perhaps space could be created for new stories to rise.

Post contributed by Misty B. Springer, PhD student and Graduate Research Assistant in Public Humanities, Dept. of English, University of Wyoming.

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[1] Mitchell, Lynn. “William Richard Cross, Photographer on the Nebraska – South Dakota Frontier.” South Dakota Historical Society Press, 1990, p. 95.

[2] Mitchell, “William Richard Cross,” p. 83.

[3] Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Toronto, Canada, McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd, 1977, pp. 64-65.

[4] King, Thomas. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto, On, House of Anansi Press, 2003, pp. 78–79.

[5] King, The Truth about Stories, p. 68.

[6] Smithsonian Institution. “Sitting Bull’s Camp. Sectional View. Winter Quarters” | Smithsonian Institution.” Smithsonian Institution, 2024. Accessed 1 Nov. 2024.

[7] Sontag, On Photography, p. 23.

[8] Editor. “Sitting Bull Collection – Copyrighted by Bailey, Dix and Mead.” South Dakota Historical Society Press, 1975, pp. 245 – 265.

[9] “Sitting Bull Collection,” p. 245.  

[10] Miller, David Humphreys. “Sitting Bull’s White [s—-].” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, vol. 14, no. 2, Montana Historical Society, 1964, pp. 54–71.

[11] Íyotake, Tataηka . “Sitting Bull.” Aktá Lakota Museum & Cultural Center, 2024, https://aktalakota.stjo.org/american-indian-leaders/sitting-bull/. Accessed Nov. 1, 2024.

[12] ibid.

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