March 31, 2021
Writing History with a Photograph: Fort Laramie, 1868
Martha Sandweiss
Professor of History, Princeton University
Henry Von Kohorn, Introducer, and Martha Sandweiss
Minutes of the 26th Meeting of the 79th Year
President Stephen Schreiber called the meeting to order at 10:15 AM. Bernie Shull read the minutes of the previous meeting. Victoria Ridge was proposed for membership by Daniel Shapiro, and Earlene Baumunk Cancilla was proposed for membership by Marge D’Amico.
Jean Telljohann was the guest of Henry Von Kohorn. Miles Gordon was the guest of Irving Horowitz. Maryann Belanger was the guest of Marge D’Amico. Judy Funches was the guest of Christine Danser. There were 143 members and guests at the meeting. Henry von Kohorn introduced the speaker.
Professor Margaret Sandweiss, known to many as Marni, is a historian who thinks about photographs as primary sources and as historical artifacts that can lead us to ask, “What preceded this? What followed?” These questions allow still images to take us into a dynamic world far beyond the moment caught in the camera’s lens. Professor Sandweiss describes herself as a “truffle hunter” who sniffs out the small details revealing hidden historical information. In this case, her current book focuses on a single photo.
We were presented with a July 1867 photo of a Federal Peace Commission meeting at Fort Laramie, Wyoming. The Commission’s goal was to make the assembled northern tribes accept restriction to the Great Sioux Reservation. That reservation would become a northern counterpart of the restricted plots of land that the southern tribes had been compelled to accept the year before.
With the northern and southern tribes confined to limited areas, a central corridor across the American midsection would be free of Indian threats. Then the transcontinental railroad could link the east and west as one seamless, post-Civil War nation.
Sandweiss introduced us first to the photographer, Alex Gardner, a socialist, utopian, and widely traveled observer. The photo Gardner took would touch far more than that very moment he captured.
In the photograph, six tall men, five of them generals, one a colonel, are stiffly arranged in a standing arc, three on each side of a small native girl. She is the only one who stares into the camera’s lens.
The names of the six men are handwritten on the photo’s paper frame: General Alfred Howe Terry, General William S. Harney, General William Tecumseh Sherman, General John B. Sanborn, Colonel Samuel F. Tappan, and General Christopher C. Auger. The child’s name does not appear, but the word “Arapaho” is written. It was later changed to Dakota.
The subjects of this photograph embodied nearly a century and a half of American life that included slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the westward movement. Archival research reveals how their points of view and, in some cases, their very lives were entangled and would collide in events before and long after the occasion of the photo.
Sandweiss believed that this single photo had its own particular history, especially regarding the young child at the photograph’s center. Without the photo, she would never have discovered the story of the girl in the middle.
What followed were years of research as Sandweiss, the persistent truffle hunter, sought to discover more about the girl in the middle. She eventually found that the girl was Sophie Mousseau.
Sandweiss said that Sophie “exists” because of one of the photo’s subjects, General William Harney. His murderous violence is the key to Sophie’s world.
It was General Harney and his troops who massacred a group of Lakota men, then herded Yellow Woman, who would become Sophie’s mother, along with other surviving women, into Fort Laramie. After being abandoned by her husband, Yellow Woman remained at Fort Laramie where she eventually married a French-Canadian fur trader named Mousseau. The marriage lasted for more than 25 years. Sophie, their mixed- breed, multilingual child, was a product of frontier violence and frontier love.
Sophie’s story continued as she married an Irish-born, Civil War veteran who later abandoned her for a white woman, taking Sophie’s five children away and leaving her alone at Pine Ridge Reservation. She eventually married another half-Lakota and bore him seven more children. Sophie died in a remote reservation sod house in 1936, during the Great Depression. But that was not the end of her story.
Thanks to Sandweiss’s search, Sophie has now entered our world, now known to us, no longer just an anonymous face in an old photograph.
In Sandweiss’s words, “We can learn something by looking at Gardner’s photograph, but we can learn more by following its subjects up to this moment and then by watching them walk away, trailing after them the stories that speak to some of the central issues of late 19th century American life, not just in law and in print culture, but also in the messy and sometimes self-contradictory, day-to-day, actions of individual people.
Sometimes it takes a photograph to enlarge our imaginations and help us to see that.
Sometimes it takes a photograph to show us that all the seeming simplicity is actually the messiness of those lives that gives us our holistic understanding of the past.
Sometimes it takes a photograph for us to discover the Sophie Mousseaus of the world and put them back into our larger stories.
Respectfully submitted,
Patti Daley
Jean Telljohann was the guest of Henry Von Kohorn. Miles Gordon was the guest of Irving Horowitz. Maryann Belanger was the guest of Marge D’Amico. Judy Funches was the guest of Christine Danser. There were 143 members and guests at the meeting. Henry von Kohorn introduced the speaker.
Professor Margaret Sandweiss, known to many as Marni, is a historian who thinks about photographs as primary sources and as historical artifacts that can lead us to ask, “What preceded this? What followed?” These questions allow still images to take us into a dynamic world far beyond the moment caught in the camera’s lens. Professor Sandweiss describes herself as a “truffle hunter” who sniffs out the small details revealing hidden historical information. In this case, her current book focuses on a single photo.
We were presented with a July 1867 photo of a Federal Peace Commission meeting at Fort Laramie, Wyoming. The Commission’s goal was to make the assembled northern tribes accept restriction to the Great Sioux Reservation. That reservation would become a northern counterpart of the restricted plots of land that the southern tribes had been compelled to accept the year before.
With the northern and southern tribes confined to limited areas, a central corridor across the American midsection would be free of Indian threats. Then the transcontinental railroad could link the east and west as one seamless, post-Civil War nation.
Sandweiss introduced us first to the photographer, Alex Gardner, a socialist, utopian, and widely traveled observer. The photo Gardner took would touch far more than that very moment he captured.
In the photograph, six tall men, five of them generals, one a colonel, are stiffly arranged in a standing arc, three on each side of a small native girl. She is the only one who stares into the camera’s lens.
The names of the six men are handwritten on the photo’s paper frame: General Alfred Howe Terry, General William S. Harney, General William Tecumseh Sherman, General John B. Sanborn, Colonel Samuel F. Tappan, and General Christopher C. Auger. The child’s name does not appear, but the word “Arapaho” is written. It was later changed to Dakota.
The subjects of this photograph embodied nearly a century and a half of American life that included slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the westward movement. Archival research reveals how their points of view and, in some cases, their very lives were entangled and would collide in events before and long after the occasion of the photo.
Sandweiss believed that this single photo had its own particular history, especially regarding the young child at the photograph’s center. Without the photo, she would never have discovered the story of the girl in the middle.
What followed were years of research as Sandweiss, the persistent truffle hunter, sought to discover more about the girl in the middle. She eventually found that the girl was Sophie Mousseau.
Sandweiss said that Sophie “exists” because of one of the photo’s subjects, General William Harney. His murderous violence is the key to Sophie’s world.
It was General Harney and his troops who massacred a group of Lakota men, then herded Yellow Woman, who would become Sophie’s mother, along with other surviving women, into Fort Laramie. After being abandoned by her husband, Yellow Woman remained at Fort Laramie where she eventually married a French-Canadian fur trader named Mousseau. The marriage lasted for more than 25 years. Sophie, their mixed- breed, multilingual child, was a product of frontier violence and frontier love.
Sophie’s story continued as she married an Irish-born, Civil War veteran who later abandoned her for a white woman, taking Sophie’s five children away and leaving her alone at Pine Ridge Reservation. She eventually married another half-Lakota and bore him seven more children. Sophie died in a remote reservation sod house in 1936, during the Great Depression. But that was not the end of her story.
Thanks to Sandweiss’s search, Sophie has now entered our world, now known to us, no longer just an anonymous face in an old photograph.
In Sandweiss’s words, “We can learn something by looking at Gardner’s photograph, but we can learn more by following its subjects up to this moment and then by watching them walk away, trailing after them the stories that speak to some of the central issues of late 19th century American life, not just in law and in print culture, but also in the messy and sometimes self-contradictory, day-to-day, actions of individual people.
Sometimes it takes a photograph to enlarge our imaginations and help us to see that.
Sometimes it takes a photograph to show us that all the seeming simplicity is actually the messiness of those lives that gives us our holistic understanding of the past.
Sometimes it takes a photograph for us to discover the Sophie Mousseaus of the world and put them back into our larger stories.
Respectfully submitted,
Patti Daley