Nineteenth-century Plains Indian drawings

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1996 by Janet Catherine Berlo

The greatest concentration of drawings made by Plains Indian men dates from the last third of the century. Aside from the works collected by Prince Maximilian and Point, a series of drawings made by the Arapaho artist Little Shield before 1868 are among the earliest securely dated works known [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATES VI, VII OMITTED]. They are remarkable for their elegant simplicity of line and the economy with which much historical data is conveyed. The latest Plains drawings on paper date from the 1930s, when elderly Indians were being commissioned by historians, anthropologists, and collectors to chronicle the old ways in the old style.

Ironically, the United States military men sent to wipe out the Plains culture were intensely interested in the drawings they plundered from dead warriors and commissioned from Indian scouts as mementos. The drawings served as relics of a civilization these men had been sent to destroy.

The Summit Springs drawing book [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATES XI, XII OMITTED] was, as inscribed on the flyleaf, "captured by the 5th U.S. Cavalry on their charge through the Indian village, July 10, '69. 60 Indians killed, and many wounded." It is one of the earliest firmly dated ledger books known, and it shows that there was not a unilinear development from a simple pictographic style to a more complex narrative one, but rather that the styles coexisted.

At another military encounter a few years after the Summit Springs battle, a New York newspaper correspondent reported that he saw "books taken from the teepees, on the leaves of which had been sketched the exploits of the Cheyenne braves."(5) Captain John Gregory Bourke, who spent much of the 1870s in military campaigns in the West, took drawing books from Indian camps that his company ransacked, as well as bought books and drawings from Indians, military men, and traders. He amassed well over a thousand drawings, some of which he pasted in his diary in 1876 [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATES IX, X OMITTED]. Bourke mounted a large display of these drawings and other artifacts in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1881.(6)

What may be the first art historical evaluation of Indian drawings appeared in the Harpers Weekly Supplement in 1876 on the subject of four renderings of the Lakota chief Sitting Bull by his uncle Four Horns [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XVIII OMITTED]:

There is no attempt at shading, but the outlines are filled in with flat tints, very crudely laid on, with red and blue chalk, yellow ochre, green, and the same brown ink or pigment used in the outlines.... This coloring, however, serves to impart life and meaning to the designs, to relieve the groupings from confusion, and is sometimes so arranged so as to produce quite an artistic effect of chiaroscuro. It may be further noted that there is no attempt at foreshortening, the objects and figures being all shown in flat profile, and without exception, all looking and moving in the same direction, that is, from right to left.

Of all the objects presented by the artist, the figure of the buffalo bull is elaborated with the most intelligent and loving minuteness. The horses and mules are drawn with a free and well-assured hand, with a tendency to mannerism, relieved somewhat by distinctive character in color, markings, and details. He is least happy in his delineations of the human figure, draperies, and accouterments, although in some scenes his attitudes are spirited and his costumes sufficiently marked to enable us to identify the sex and country of those who have had the honor to sit for their portraits to this distinguished limner.(7)