After the Civil War, government-sponsored expeditions furthered the record of the frontier West. Photographer William Henry Jackson traveled the farthest, when he joined Ferdinand Hayden’s 1870 survey. This Jackson photo of Shoshone Chief Washakie’s band and encampment near Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains is among the earliest photographs of native tribes prior to reservations.
– Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology –
Photographed in native dress during a Nez Perce delegation to Washington, D.C. in 1868, Chief Kalkalshuatash holds a feather fan and pipe. After meeting with the government to restore the provisions of an 1863 treaty, his people still fell victim to funds squandered by government officials.
– Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology –
In northeastern Arizona, this kneeling Hopi woman combed and arranged the maiden’s hair into whorls, a coiffure that represented the squash flower and symbolized that a girl was of marriageable age.
– Courtesy Library of Congress –
On the reservation in Lame Deer, Montana, Julia Tuell photographed Northern Cheyenne girls taking care of their deerskin dolls and arranging their small tipis in a circle just as their elders did in the big camp.
– Courtesy Library of Congress –
Tutored by the notorious Lola Montez, young Lotta Crabtree began her career at age eight, in 1855, dancing for gold miners in Grass Valley, California. She added a banjo and found greater success when she moved to San Francisco and on to New York City’s Broadway. The darling of the mining camps flaunted convention—here seen smoking a cigar!—much as Madonna and Miley Cyrus would do more than a century later.
– Courtesy Library of Congress –
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