The Hidden History of a Nineteenth-Century {Photograph} and the Thriller of Its Unnamed Girl

A brand new guide investigates a single Nineteenth-century {photograph} of an unnamed Native American woman surrounded by federal officers and explores what figuring out her reveals in regards to the historic context of the American West.

In The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West — revealed by Princeton University Press this 12 months — historian Martha A. Sandweiss focuses on one fastidiously staged {photograph} taken in 1868 by Alexander Gardner, probably the most celebrated photographers of the Civil War period.

Gardner, recognized for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his stark photographs of Confederate useless on the Battle of Antietam, traveled that 12 months to Fort Laramie in Dakota Territory. He was there to doc federal treaty negotiations between the United States authorities and the Lakota and different tribes of the northern Plains. Among the photographers he produced was a proper group portrait exhibiting six federal peace commissioners standing round a younger Native woman wrapped in a blanket.

The {photograph} is meticulously labeled. The males are all named in Gardner’s handwritten captions, together with General William Tecumseh Sherman, probably the most outstanding Union commanders of the Civil War, nonetheless broadly related to the burning of Atlanta and his damaging march by means of Georgia. The woman on the middle, nevertheless, is left unnamed. In surviving prints and negatives, she is recognized solely by a generic tribal label.

Despite this omission, the {photograph} has appeared repeatedly in books and exhibitions in regards to the U.S. Indian Wars, typically handled as an easy illustration of treaty-making within the West. In The Girl within the Middle, Sandweiss, an emerita professor of historical past at Princeton University who specializes within the historical past of the American West and pictures, questions that assumption. She approaches the picture not as a whole historic report however as a place to begin, asking who the woman was, why she was current, and what her life reveals in regards to the period by which the {photograph} was made.

Sandweiss follows the lives of the six males within the picture, all of whom had been highly effective navy or political figures, however she devotes specific consideration to figuring out the woman within the {photograph}. Through archival analysis spanning authorized paperwork, authorities information, memoirs, and household histories, she concludes that the woman is Sophie Mousseau, estimated to be about eight years previous when the {photograph} was taken. Mousseau’s life prolonged from the aftermath of the Civil War into the Great Depression, a interval of profound upheaval for Native communities.

In The Girl within the Middle, Sandweiss reconstructs Mousseau’s life intimately. Her first husband Posey Ryan was an Irish teamster who murdered two relations, but later emerged in native accounts as a pioneer determine. Ryan took the couple’s youngsters and raised them as white, whereas Mousseau was despatched to stay on the Great Sioux Reservation. Her second husband John Monroe got here from a mixed-race background and finally recognized as Indian. Through Mousseau’s experiences, Sandweiss traces the intersecting forces of displacement, violence, and assimilation that formed Native lives within the late Nineteenth century.

In the guide, Sandweiss explores the restrictions of images as historic proof and the necessity to deal with such photographs as beginning factors for deeper, extra trustworthy historical past.

“Photographs are historical artifacts; they are not history itself. History is dynamic, inherently about change over time. Photographs are static. They stop time dead still and focus our attention on what we can see. They suggest that what we see is somehow more important than what we can’t, that the moment fixed in the photographic image matters more than what happened just before or after. That is not always true,” Sandweiss writes in The Girl in The Middle, according to an excerpt published by Literary Hub.

While images can generally seize what Henri Cartier-Bresson known as a “decisive moment,” Sandweiss argues that Gardner’s picture doesn’t.

“Gardner’s photograph merits attention. Yet there is nothing decisive about the fleeting moment captured here,” Sandweiss writes. “Imagine the photograph as a drop of water. To better understand the past, we need to make that droplet part of a running stream; we need to make time flow.”

The Girl within the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West is revealed by Princeton University Press.