Civilization of the American Indian Series – serie

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains practiced an archival art—narrating war exploits in large-scale paintings executed on animal hide robes, shirts, tipi covers, and tipi liners. Essentially autobiographical, the paintings were worn and lived in by the men whose war exploits they portrayed, and were made to be “read” by the public at large. Executed in a pictorial narrative style and documenting actual events, these paintings blend visual art and history.Indigenous War Painting of the Plains is the first comprehensive look at this important North American art form, covering the full corpus of war paintings from fourteen tribes across the plains.Two impediments have previously made such a book impractical: photography alone falls short of rendering war paintings for the printed page, and only about half of the surviving works have reliable documentation on their cultural origins. Arni Brownstone surmounts these difficulties by producing precise electronic redrawings and by using well-documented paintings to inform poorly documented examples, bolstered by a careful examination of collection histories. Featuring some 300 photographs and electronic redrawings, the book focuses on 83 paintings organized into four chapters covering the paintings of tribes associated with a specific geographical sphere of artistic influence. Four appendixes feature paintings combined with “translations” by Indigenous collaborators who had intimate knowledge of the depicted events.Offering vivid access to the key works of war painting preserved in 37 museums throughout North America and Europe, Indigenous War Painting of the Plains illuminates distinctions between painting styles of different tribes, reveals how they influenced one another and changed over time, and conveys a deep understanding of how war painting developed in relation to profound social changes in Plains Indian cultures.

A sedentary fishing tribe in the plateau and mountain country of central Idaho, northeastern Oregon, and southeastern Washington, the Nez Percés were transformed by the acquisition of the horse into a tribe that hunted on the plains and assimilated much of the buffalo culture. In the mountains their traditional enemies were the Shoshonis; on the plains they fought the Sioux and were allied with the Crows. They were outstanding horsemen, and perhaps their most notable accomplishments were in horse breeding and in their development, through selective breeding, of that famous spotted horse, the Appaloosa.

The Kiowas were once, along with the fighting Cheyennes, the most feared and hated of the Native tribes of the Great Plains. In The Kiowas, Mildred P. Mayhall tells the story of their evolution from mountain dwellers to fierce Plains nomads, explains how they lived, and traces the development of their unique pictographic calendars. Finally, Mayhall relates how, after the Indian wars of the 1870s, the Kiowas were settled on a reservation in Oklahoma and integrated into American culture.

For 350 years the Chickasaws-one of the Five Civilized Tribes-made a sustained effort to preserve their tribal institutions and independence in the face of increasing encroachments by white men. This is the first book-length account of their valiant-but doomed-struggle.Against an ethnohistorical background, the author relates the story of the Chickasaws from their first recorded contacts with Europeans in the lower Mississippi Valley in 1540 to final dissolution of the Chickasaw Nation in 1906. Included are the years of alliance with the British, the dealings with the Americans, and the inevitable removal to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) in 1837 under pressure from settlers in Mississippi and Alabama. Among the significant events in Chickasaw history were the tribe's surprisingly strong alliance with the South during the Civil War and the federal actions thereafter which eventually resulted in the absorption of the Chickasaw Nation into the emerging state of Oklahoma.

The stage was set for trouble in spring 1878 when new agent Nathan C. Meeker arrived at the White River Indian Agency on the Ute Reservation. The Utes had seen agents come and go without bringing any great change, but Meeker intended to convert them to Christianity and a farming lifestyle. His efforts to alter their society drove the White River Utes to war. In The Last War Trail, Robert Emmitt details the conflict that followed, the Meeker Massacre and the Ute War of 1879.From White River Ute chief Saponise Cuch, a young warrior at the time, Emmitt heard the story of the Utes' antagonism to Meeker's plan to teach them to farm, their version of the battle at Milk River, and their attitude toward removal. Emmitt spoke with other Utes, some of them descendants of war participants, and with whites who had lived near the reservation. He also consulted congressional documents and official testimonies to craft this well-rounded account.

The Shoshoni Indians have never, until now, found their biographer. This long-overdue volume at last brings their history into focus. Perhaps it is the nature of the Shoshonis - ""a friend, always a friend"" - which has caused them to be overlooked by historians. Washakie, their great chieftain of the nineteenth century, suffered hardship, personal affront, and even loss of prestige to prove his abiding attachment to the white man.In their original habitat, the Great Basin - in Oregon and California, across Nevada, Utah, and Idaho into Wyoming - the Shoshonis had no knowledge of warfare. They were a primitive people wandering singly or in small family groups over vast areas in quest of food. When some of their number ventured into the Rockies, they found a new way of life. While buffalo hunting, they grouped together and chose tribal leaders.Together with the Comanches and Kiowas, for a time the Shoshonis dominated the Great Plains of Colorado and into Texas. Even after their allies had drifted southward, they fought creditably with the Sioux and the Blackfeet - that is, until their enemies acquired the gun and chased them back into the mountains.As sentinels of the Rockies, the Shoshonis controlled the great mountain barrier, a natural fortification which they were ill-equipped to man. Consequently, their story is less one of combat and bloodshed than it is of cultural changes brought about by the force of time and white settlers.

Sequoyah is widely celebrated as an unlettered Cherokee Indian who, entirely from the resources of his own brilliant mind, endowed his whole tribe with learning-the only man in history to conceive and perfect in its entirety an alphabet or syllabary. Soon after 1800, Sequoyah began to realize the magic of writing. He and other Indians of the time, who occasionally saw samples of writing, called these mysterious pages the white man's ""talking leaf."" He experimented aimlessly at first, but gradually his conception took practical shape. It was slow and laborious work for an untutored Cherokee. Finally, after twelve years of labor and discouragement, he completed his syllabary, composed of eighty-five symbols, each representing a sound in the Cherokee language. The simplicity of the syllabary and its easy adaptability to the speech and thought of his people enabled them to master it in a few days. The Cherokee nation was made practically literate within a few months.

Here is a thorough, and long-needed, presentation of the nature of the Pueblo gods and myths. The Pueblo Indians, which include the Hopi, Zuni, and Keres groups, and their ancestors are closely bound to the Plateau region of the United States, comprising much of the area in Utah, Colorado, and-especially in recent years-New Mexico and Arizona.The principal god of the Hopi tribe was and is Masau'u, the god of death. Masau'u is also a god of life in many of its essentials. There is an unmistakable analogy between Masau'u and the Christian Devil, and between Masau'u and the Greek god Hermes, who guided dead souls on their journey to the nether world. Mr. Tyler has drawn many useful comparisons between the religions of the Pueblos and the Greeks. ""Because there is a widespread knowledge of the Greek gods and their ways,"" the author writes, ""many people will thus be at ease with the Pueblo gods and myths.""Of utmost importance is the final chapter of the book, which relates Pueblo cosmology to contemporary Western thought.The Pueblos are men and women who have faced, and are facing, problems common to all mankind. The response of the Pueblos to their challenges has been tempered by the role of religion in their lives. This account of their epic struggle to accommodate themselves and their society to the cosmic order is ""must"" reading for historians, ethnologists, students of comparative religion, and for all who take an interest in the role of religious devotion in their own lives.

The Mayas believed the four gods, the Bacabs, held up the sky. The Bacabs were also invoked to heal disease. Ritual of the Bacabs: A Book of Maya Incantations  is the first English translation of this Maya manuscript, dating back to colonial times. Discovered in the early twentieth century, the manuscript's origins are traced to the golden period of Maya civilization. It contains incantations used to cure diseases of body and spirit, and it records the magic practiced among the Mayas - the most advanced Western civilization of antiquity. As in other ancient cultures, the Mayas believed that sickness was the manifestation of an evil spirit, which required exorcism. The shaman recited powerful incantations to banish evil spirits and cure such afflictions as asthma, fevers, skin eruptions, and seizures. Ritual of the Bacabs provides an exciting and enlightening portrait of ancient Maya religion, medicine, and magic.

It is unlikely that any single book or document will ever earn a more firmly-fixed position of respect and authority than this distinguished volume by Grant Foreman. Originally published in 1932, on the date of the hundredth anniversary of the arrival in Oklahoma of the first Indians as a result of the United States government's relocation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Indian Removal remains today the definitive book in its field.The forcible uprooting and expulsion of the 60,000 Indians comprising the Five Civilized Tribes, including the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole, unfolded a story without parallel in the history of the United States. For more than a decade thousands of tragedies and experiences of absorbing interest marked the removal over the ""Trail of Tears,"" but there were no chroniclers at hand to record them. Only occasionally did the tragedy and pathos of some phase of this history-making undertaking beguile a sympathetic officer to turn from routine and write a line or a paragraph of comment.From fragments in thousands of manuscripts and in official and unofficial reports Grant Foreman gleaned the materials for this book to provide readers with an unbiased day-by-day recital of events.

For almost fifty years George Bird Grinnell's great work The Fighting Cheyennes has stood unrevised and virtually unchallenged as the definitive account of the struggles of the Cheyenne Indians to preserve their way of life. Now Donald J. Berthrong has re-examined Grinnell's findings and searched historical records unavailable to or not used by Grinnell to verify or correct his conclusions. The result is this accurate, highly interesting account of the Cheyennes' life on the Great Plains, their system of government and religion, and their relation to the fur and hide trade during their last years of freedom.After nearly two centuries of fighting other Indians and whites for their lands, in the eighteenth century the Cheyenne's were forced to shift their range from the Minnesota River Valley to the Central and Southern Plains. From 1861 through 1875, they fought to maintain their free, nomadic existence. There were bloody wars with territorial forces and federal troops, and a few years of intermittent peace and retaliation (including the massacre at Sand Creek in 1864).Finally, after the intensive winter campaign of 1874-75, the fierce Southern Cheyenne's were brought to bay by the U.S. Army and herded onto a reservation in western Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Their turbulent, colorful history related by Berthrong will interest the general reader as well as the historian and anthropologist.

Here is the story of the Choctaws, a proud and gifted tribe among the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians. It is the record of a people whose forced migration from their ancestral homes in the South to what is now Oklahoma and whose subsequent efforts from the Civil War to the close of the century to maintain an autonomous government and institutions form a distinctive and arresting chapter in the history of the West.While the political, social, and economic customs of the Choctaws were closely circumscribed, the thread of Choctaw history was at all times closely interwoven witht he larger fabric of American history as a whole. Choctaw law was a curious combination of ancient tribal custom and Anglo-American legal practice; Choctaw churches and schools were copied almost wholly from the white man's society; and Choctaw economic institutions represented an attempt to adjust the customs of tribal control of the land to the white system of individual ownership.

This is the history of a remarkable nation, the only Indian tribe that never officially made peace with the United States. General Thomas Sidney Jesup admired the Seminoles as adversaries: ""We have, at no former period in our history, had to contend with so formidable an enemy. No Seminole proves false to his country, nor has a single instance occurred of a first rate warrior having surrendered."" Jesup made those comments in 1837, and they proved true throughout the Seminole-white confrontations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Portions of the Seminoles' story-particularly their wars-have been told, but until this book no extensive history of the tribe had been written. Here is the record of those dauntless people, who were tricked, robbed, defrauded, and abused. The origins of the tribe, the complex problems concerning their rights in Florida, the military operations against them, their forced removal to Indian Territory, their role in the Civil War, and their adjustment to life in the West are important elements of the book.

The Kickapoo Indians resisted outsiders' every attempt to settle their lands--until finally they were forced to remove west of the Mississippi River to the plains of the Southwest. There they continued to wage war and acted as traders for border captives and goods. In 1873 they reluctantly settled on a reservation in Indian Territory. There, corrupt politicians, land swindlers, gamblers, and whiskey peddlers preyed on the tribe. Not until the twentieth century did the Kickapoos received just treatment at the hands of the United States government.

Edwin Thompson Denig, for more than twenty years a fur trader on the Upper Missouri and married to an Assiniboine woman, was an acute and objective observer of Indian manners and customs. He assisted Audubon and the Culbertsons in collecting Missouri River fauna, supplied information on the Indians to Father De Smet, who encouraged him to write, and provided Henry Schoolcraft with an Assiniboine vocabulary as well as a detailed ""Report on the Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri,"" which was not published until 1930, seventy-six years after it was written, and then only in parts.Denig's writings on the Sioux, Arickaras, Assiniboines, Crees, and Crows, comprising the Denig manuscript in the Missouri Historical Society, are published together for the first time in this book. The manuscript long had been referred to as the ""Culbertson Manuscript"" because it had been purchased from a descendant of the fur-trader naturalist Alexander Culbertson. But in 1949, handwriting experts identified it as the work of Denig.

When the tide of Spanish settlement in America reached the range of the Apache nation, it was abruptly halted. For two centuries marauding Apaches baffled the defending Spanish troops and exacted a fearful toll from the terrorized colonists.This book relates how Commandant General Jacobo Ugarte faced the problem and the extent to which he was able to solve it, using a new Indian policy adopted by Spain in 1786. Political circumstances prevented Ugarte from completing the pacification of the Apaches, but it is significant that his stratagems were essentially the same as those employed with complete success by the Americans a century later.Ugarte himself was an unusual Spanish administrator, a soldier by profession but a diplomat by inclination. The courage of his convictions bordered on insubordination, but in the end history proved him right.Utilizing correspondence from officers in the field, post commanders, governors, viceroys, and royal administrators, the author reveals how the policy of 1786 worked in practice and how the Apaches reacted to it.

With the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 the United States became responsible for the administration of some 125,000 Indians in addition to those already within the national boundaries. The new tribes included many peoples known only to traders and trappers who had ventured into the trackless stretches of the West. This book considers the hundred-year record of federal relations with these Indians.The first two decades of United States control are seen as a period of large-scale humanitarian purpose, flawed in many cases by racial prejudice, official corruption, or outright cruelty and abuse. New policies, under Ulysses S. Grant, and an awakening of public conscience in the 1870s and 1880s brought a second major period, characterized by the system of reservations.Later chapters of the book deal with twentieth-century changes, particularly with agents, schools, and medical services, all carefully analyzed by the author, who was a member of the Meriam Commission in 1926-27. The record reveals in realistic detail the problems of the government and the tenacity of the tribes in resisting white settlement and retaining their own culture and way of life.

More than four hundred years ago, Pedro de Cieza de León set out to conduct the readers of his time - and of subsequent generations - over the Royal Road of the Incas. His chronicles of Peru, published in 1553 and 1880, rank with Bernal Díaz del Castillo's account of the conquest of Mexico.While previous English translations have been much abridged, and for many years unavailable, this translation of the Inca materials by Harriet de Onís is not only accurate but possesses a superb literary quality of its own. Victor W. von Hagen skillfully interjoined Cieza's two chronicles to read as one, in order to bring ""Cieza together with himself after four hundred years of excision.""As a boy of thirteen, Cieza arrived in Cartagena in 1535 and traveled through South America for the next seventeen years, observing the country and its peoples and preserving the achievements of Inca civilization, even as it was being destroyed. Cieza was no fine scholar recording the conquest, but wrote that he ""saw strange and wonderful things that exist in this New World of the Indies, and there came over me a great desire to write certain of them.""  And write them he did.

Spotted Tail, the great head chief of the Brule Sioux, was an intelligent and farseeing man who realized alone of all the Sioux that the old way of life was doomed and that to war with the white soldiers was certain suicide. Although he was branded a traitor by many members of his tribe, the canny Brule, with all the skill of an accomplished diplomat, fought a delaying action over the council tables with the high officials in Washington. The only man in the tribe big enough to stand up to the whites and insist upon the rights of the Brulés under existing treaties with the U. S. government, he used every means available to him, short of a shooting war, to protect his people from being rushed into the white man's ways by government agents and eastern ""Friends of the Indians.""Thus the story of Spotted Tail is the story of the Brulé struggle against being made into imitation whites overnight, even when they were forced on the reservation, where they were expected to farm the land, raise cattle, send their children to school, and adopt Christianity-all at once.The assassination of Spotted Tail in 1881 by his political enemy, Crow Dog, ended the history of the Brulé Sioux as a tribe. With the great voice stilled, at Rosebud Agency only the voices of little men were heard, quarreling about little matters. With his death, the government effected its purpose: to break the tribal organization to bits and put the Brulés under the control of their white agent.

One truly remarkable phenomena of history is the acquisition of the horse by American Indian tribes of North America. With horses stolen from the Spanish frontier settlements (not ""strays"" found on the prairies), the Indian tribes were transformed and revitalized. Horses made Indians more mobile, enlarged their capacity as hunters, and made them awesome foes in warfare. Northward from Mexico, the horse spread through the plains and mountains, reaching central Saskatchewan 150 years later. The Cheyennes, Comanches, and Blackfeet became some of the most splendid horsemen the world has ever known. The Crows were the ""horse traders"" of the Plains.This carefully documented account brings to life the hardy Indian pony - possessing almost unbelievable speed and endurance that allowed its rider to run down the fastest buffalo or leave his cavalry pursuers far behind. Here is the story of American Indians and their relationship to the animals that broadened their horizons, and a historical record of one of the most turbulent and fascinating eras of American frontier history.A classic chronicle, The Indian and the Horse contains many superb illustrations from rare photographs and from paintings and drawings by George Catlin, Alfred Jacob Miller, Charles Wimar, Rudolph Friederich Kurz, Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, and others, along with a map of the dispersion routes of the horse in North America.

A young Chippewa Indian from Minnesota collected these legends and stories told by the Tanaina Indians of southwestern Alaska. Called suk-tus (""legend-stories"") and stemming from the seventeenth century, they are anecdotal narratives centered on a particular animal or animals common to the Tanaina country. Thus the tales are peopled with foxes, beavers, wolverines, porcupines, and other animals, some of which disguise themselves in human form for sinister purposes and all of which have human desires and weaknesses.According to the author, some embellishments in the stories certainly resulted from contact with Western civilization, particularly during the Russian and early fur-trading periods, but basically they are aboriginal Tanaina and are told as they have been handed down through oral tradition.Originally, suk-tus were related to entertain and instruct, and they are as apt to do so for today's audiences as for yesterday's, reflecting both the outlook of their originators and the nature of the environment in which they lived.

Convinced that native culture survived in its purest form in the northern portions of North America, Frank Speck devoted almost twenty years of research to the Naskapi of Canada's Labrador Peninsula during the first quarter of the twentieth century. He determined the Naskapi's lifestyles were primitive compared to those of other natives, but their spiritual culture was highly developed. The Naskapi stressed the importance of dreams and dream interpretations, of communing with the spirit world, and of rituals honoring animal spirits.

The westward drive of the warlike Sioux Indians along a thousand miles of prairie and woodland, from the upper reaches of the Mississippi to the lower Powder River in Montana, is one of the epic migrations of history. From about 1660 to the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Teton Sioux swept away all opposition: Arikaras, Ponkas, Crees, Crows, Cheyennes--all fell away and dispersed as the Sioux advanced, until the invaders ranged over a vast territory in the northwest, hunting buffalo and raiding their neighbors. During the ensuing years of heavy conflict, between 1865 and 1877, Red Cloud of the Oglalas stood out as one of the greatest of the Sioux leaders.

Two hundred years ago, when the activities of the white man in North America were dominated by clashing imperial ambitions and colonial rivalry, the great Creek Confederacy rested in savage contentment under the reign of native law. No one in their whole world could do the Creeks harm, and they welcomed the slight white man who came with gifts and promises to enjoy the hospitality of their invincible towns.Their reputation as warriors and diplomats, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, extended to the most distant reaches of the Indian country. Secure in their careless strength, friendly toward the white man until his encroachment made them resentful and desperate, they learned that they had no guile to match broken promises, and no disciplined courage to provide unity against white ruthlessness. Broken, dissembled, and their ranks depleted by the Creek and Seminole wars, they were subjected to that shameful and tragic removal which forced all the Five Civilized Tribes to a new home in the untried wilderness west of the Mississippi.There, when they found the land good, they revitalized their shattered tribal institutions and rebuilt them upon the pattern of the American constitutional republic. But contentment again was short-lived as they were encircled by the encroaching white man with his hunger for land, his herds of cattle, and his desire for lumber, minerals, and railway concessions. They were faced, moreover, with internal political strife, and split by the sectionalism of the Civil War. Yet, they still survived in native steadfastness-a trait which is characteristic of the Creek-until the final denouement produced by the Dawes Act.In The Road to Disappearance, Miss Debo tells for the first time the full Creek story from its vague anthropological beginnings to the loss by the tribe of independent political identity, when during the first decade of this century the lands of the Five Civilized Tribes were divided into severalty ownership. Her book is an absorbing narrative of a minority people, clinging against all odds to native custom, language, and institution. It is the chronicle of the internal life of the tribe - the structure of Creek society - with its folkways, religious beliefs, politics, wars, privations, and persecutions. Miss Debo's research has divulged many new sources of information, and her history of the Creeks since the Civil War is a special contribution because that period has been largely neglected by the historians of the American Indian.""The vitality of our race still persists,"" said a Creek orator. ""We have not lived for naught.... We have given to the European people on this continent our thought forces-the best blood of our ancestors having intermingled with that of their best statesmen and leading citizens. We made ourselves an indestructible element in their national history. We have shown that what they believed were arid and desert places were habitable and capable of sustaining millions of people.... The race that has rendered this service to the other nations of mankind cannot utterly perish.""

This collection of notable speeches by early-day leaders of twenty-two Indian tribes adds a new dimension to our knowledge of the original Americans and their own view of the tide of history engulfing them.Little written record of their oratory exists, although Indians made much use of publics address. Around the council fires tribal affairs were settled without benefit of the written word, and young men attended to hear the speeches, observe their delivery, and consider the weight of reasoned argument.Some of the early white men who traveled and lived among the Indians left transcriptions of tribal council meetings and speeches, and other orations were translated at treaty council meetings with delegates of the United States government. From these scattered reports and the few other existing sources this book presents a reconstruction of contemporary thought of the leading men of many tribes.Chronologically, the selections range from the days of early contact with the whites in the 1750's to a speech by Quanah Parker in 1910. Several of the orations were delivered at the famous Medicine Lodge Council in 1867.A short biography of each orator states the conditions under which the speeches were made, locates the place of the council or meeting, and includes a photograph or copy of a painting of the speaker.Speakers chosen to represent the tribes at treaty council were all orators of great natural ability, well trained in the Indian oral traditions. Acutely conscious that they were the selected representatives of their people, these men delivered eloquent, moving speeches, often using wit and sarcasm to good effect. They were well aware of all the issues involved, and they bargained with great statesmanship for survival of their traditional way of life.

Frederick Webb Hodge remarked that the Eastern Apache tribe called the Mescaleros were ""never regarded as so warlike"" as the Apaches of Arizona. But the Mescaleros' history is one of hardship and oppression alternating with wars of revenge. They were friendly to the Spaniards until victimized, and friendly to Americans until they were betrayed again. For three hundred years Mescaleros fought the Spaniards and Mexicans. They fought Americans for forty more, before subsiding into lethargy and discouragement. Only since 1930 have the Mescaleros been able to make tribal progress.C. L. Sonnichsen tells the story of the Mescalero Apaches from the earliest records to the modern day, from the Indian's point of view. In early days the Mescaleros moved about freely. Their principal range was between the Río Grande and the Pecos in New Mexico, but they hunted into the Staked Plains and southward into Mexico. They owned nothing and everything. Today the Mescaleros are American citizens and own their reservation in the Tularosa country of New Mexico. While the Mescalero Apaches still struggle to retain their traditions and bridge the gap between their old life and the new, their people have made amazing progress.

This book traces the emergency of the Cherokee system of laws from the ancient spirit decrees to the fusion of tribal law ways with Anglo-American law.The Cherokees enacted their first written law in 1808 in Georgia. In succeeding years the leaders and tribal councils of the southeastern and Oklahoma groups wrote a constitution, established courts, and enacted laws that were in accord with the old tribal values but reflected and accommodated to the whites' legal system. Thanks to the great gift of Sequoyah-his syllabary-the Cherokees were well versed in their laws, able to read and interpret them from a very early time. The system served the people well. It endured until 1898, when the federal government abolished the tribal government.The author provides a brief review of Cherokee history and explains the circumstances surrounding the stages of development of the legal system. Excerpts from editorials in the Cherokee Phoenix and the Cherokee Advocate, letters, and tribal documents give added insight into the problems the Cherokees faced and their efforts to resolve them. Of particular interest is a series of charts explaining the complex Cherokee spirit system of crimes (or ""deviations"") and the punishments meted out for them.

In the late 1880s, John A. Anderson, a young Swedish-born settler near Fort Niobrara, Nebraska, bought a camera with earnings from carpentry work. He soon became a full-fledged photographer, and in 1889 General George Crook asked him to serve as official photographer to the Crook Treaty Commission on its visit to the Brulé Sioux Indians on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Anderson agreed - and thereby moved into a poignant and oftentimes tragic era in the history of the Sioux. From 1891 until his death in 1948, Anderson lived on the Rosebud, recording the painful adjustment of the proud Brulés to life on the reservation.This was a particularly hard time for the Brulés. Nomadic warriors by nature, they had been subjugated following their greatest triumph at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876 and were living like captives on what had once been their buffalo hunting grounds. The buffaloes were dead, and the Indians had been forced to accept white men's ways and white men's provender. To help feed themselves, they were compelled to farm - to ""scratch the ground,"" as they scornfully expressed it - a way of life they regarded as shameful.Anderson became a sincere friend of the Indian, who learned to trust him and allowed him to record their daily lives and their ceremonies. Anderson photographed Sioux camps, villages, and day schools; recorded councils between whites and Indians; and portrayed the Indians as they received their beef rations and annuity payments. When Buffalo Bill Cody and Charles P. Jordan organized their wild-west shows, he photographed the Sioux who joined the shows. Anderson was afforded the rare privilege of attending and photographing the White Buffalo, Sun dance, and Omaha Dance ceremonies. Anderson gave many of the photographs to his Sioux friends, who proudly displayed them in their cabins on the Rosebud.Over the years many other photographs found their way into museums and state historical societies. Henry W. Hamilton and his wife, Jean Tyree Hamilton, first became aware of Anderson and his work through the papers of Remington Schuyler, the well-known artist and writer, who also lived on the Rosebud. The Hamiltons searched out prints and glass-plate negatives and, with the help of Indian consultants on the reservation, painstakingly dated the photographs and identified the subjects.The wealth of photographs Anderson took is represented here by more than 200 reproductions - the largest number ever published in a single collection. They are presented not as works of art (though many of them are indeed triumphs of the photographic art) but as important historical documents in the ongoing story of the American Indian.

Dispelling the clouds of romance and legend that have surrounded Pocahontas throughout the more than two centuries since her death, Grace Steele Woodward here re-creates the life of the Powhatan Indian princess. Indeed, the true story, as it emerges from these pages, is probably more dramatic and certainly more significant for American history than the legend.The story of Pocahontas coincides with the founding of Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in the New World. Her story begins with her first visit to the colony as a child of ten and ends with her journey to England with her English husband, John Rolfe, and their young son.The event which catapulted her to fame was, of course, her rescue of Captain John Smith from murder at the hands of her father, Chief Powhatan, and his warriors. But the more significant contribution she made was her almost singlehanded deliverance of the Jamestown colonists from starvation and massacre. Without her compassionate gifts of food and warnings about her father's plots against them, the Jamestown settlers would probably have met the same fate as that of the Roanoke settlers.Pocahontas' visit to London was arranged by the Virginia Company, which established the Jamestown colony, not only as a gesture of appreciation to the young princess but also as a means of stimulating further interest in New World colonization. It was Pocahontas' final act of devotion to the colonists. She was never to see her homeland again.In preparation for writing this biography, Mrs. Woodward searched out the Virginia settings where Pocahontas lived as a child and those in England which she visited in adulthood. The author studied every pertinent document of the period, from official records of the Virginia Company to letters of highborn Londoners telling about Pocahontas' visit to England and its sorrowful aftermath.