Documents in the Collection
Gertrude Käsebier's Indian Portraits
Video Transcription
There are several documents that we can point to when we begin to research Gertrude Käsebier's collection. There were letters exchanged between her and her Native American subjects, the Sioux Indian performers with the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. And they're documented in Everybody's Magazine from January 1901. I have not seen any of these original, but I have seen them in this article. No author is attributed to this article. We think it might be Käsebier herself who pens this article. It includes excerpts from many letters over the course of many years—almost a dozen years of exchanges between her and these Indians. Sometimes it's just the Indian letting her know what was going on. Sammy Lone Bear or Phillip Standing Soldier talking about something that had just happened in the show, someone being ill, or weather, or the performances. Sometimes it's an indication that they did have a strong friendship and they hadn't seen each other in a long time and they missed each other. Or a plan to bring gifts when they saw each other.
And then there's also one letter that we know was penned by Käsebier herself and that's one that discusses her photographing the children who accompanied the Sioux on their tour with the Wild West. The Lone Bear family seemed to be one that was very close with Käsebier. She photographs Chief Lone Bear, she photographs Sammy, and after many years of trying, she's able to photograph some children and that includes Mary Lone Bear. The women in camp are still very scared of this. They believe as many Indians did that your soul would be taken—captured—in that lens of the camera. So they flee and they do not want to be near this photography session.
And then weeks later she comes back to photograph the Indians and frantically the women run again. Why is that? She turns, I'm assuming, to someone like Sammy Lone Bear and says, "What happened?" And Mary Lone Bear has died. So at the very end of the Käsebier letter she pens, "What killed her?" The emotion that is represented in that moment because she, from all the research, indicates that she did care for these men and women deeply. She had developed strong relationships with them. And to convince them that it was the right thing to do to add to the very strong collection of photographs that she'd already made and photographed these beautiful children. And then to come back and feel the devastation of knowing that just weeks later Mary Lone Bear is dead. Was there something to that superstition?
The documents are very important. Whether they are printed in a magazine from a hundred years ago or whether they rest now in the archives of the Smithsonian, or the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, or the New York Public Library, they bring to life that relationship that Käsebier was working so hard to maintain with the Indians.
Video produced and edited by, Rebecca Wingo, University of Nebraska—Lincoln
Videography, Jeremy Goodman, Buffalo Bill Historical Center
Featuring, Michelle Delaney, Smithsonian Institution
The William F. Cody Archive
codyarchive.org
2013
Senior Digital Editor, Douglas Seefeldt, Ball State University
