Southern Plains Indian Portraits

Made at Okmulgee, Indian Territory, by John K. Hillers, 1875

Hillers' important, 1875 series of portraits of Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho and Pawnee leaders has been horribly confused and misidentified during the past 137 years, beginning with John Wesley Powell, first Director of the Bureau of American Ethnology, at whose behest the portraits were made. Powell used these elegant photographs as political bargaining chips, tendering collections of them to selected Congressmen who might influence the appropriations for his fledgling department. Neither Powell nor most of the recipients much cared about correct identifications. Powell or Hillers, who later worked under his direction at the Bureau of Ethnology, seems to have taken selections of the images, in whatever random order they came to hand, and arbitrarily assigned names from the list of those who had been present. It is a fact that identical portraits from the series exist in various archives, each with a different name assigned either by Powell or one of his clerks. The same portrait might have received half a dozen, variant identifications, all from the "official" government source. This 19th century, political ineptitude has misled scores of archivists, and the historians who have depended upon them.

It is a relatively simple matter to make the corrections, since other identified portraits---as noted with each entry--- exist of all of these famous men, with the exception of the Cheyenne, Feathered Wolf. By elimination, then, he is the one Cheyenne remaining when all of the others have been correctly recognized.

In his diary of the trip to Okmulgee, (see Don D. Fowler, Myself in the Water: the Western Photographs of John K. Hillers. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), Hillers noted that the Cheyenne and Arapaho portraits were made on the morning of May 10, on lichen-covered rocks near their campsite. On May 14th, after the Cheyenne and Arapaho had departed, Hillers returned to make portraits in the same location of several Pawnee leaders. The Pawnee were hereditary enemies of the Cheyenne and Arapaho, thus necessitating the politic delay in use of the location. In the commentary which follows, the Cheyenne names are referenced to Rodolphe Petter, English-Cheyenne Dictionary, Kettle Falls, WA, 1915.

Mike Cowdrey
San Luis Obispo, CA
August 2009