Gertrude Käsebier's Indian Portraits

Käsebier's Outdoor Photographs


Gertrude Käsebier's Indian Portraits



Video Transcription

Käsebier's outdoor photography can really be broken down into two categories—at least for the set of one hundred images that were donated to the Smithsonian. There are a few (four) that appear to be images taken in South Dakota, possibly near Pine Ridge Reservation where the Indians were from. You see women on horseback pulling the children in travois, the tipis—so they were moving. This was an action that was happening. The Indians were traveling across the Plains seeing a landscape that Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody) tried to recreate in the scenic backdrops that he would use in the Wild West Show.

But we still don't know who took these images. There's no record of Käsebier making a trip back out into the West in 1898, 1899, 1900. So, where did they come from? Were they sent to her? If they were, who took them? I'm assuming that it could have been another photographer potentially that she became familiar with or it was her herself and we just don't know more about that trip. There are oral histories that have been done with her assistant, with her grandchildren—nothing mentions a trip out West. No letters to other friends or photographers that would mention her going out West. She did go to the 1893 Chicago World Colombian Exposition, she traveled to Europe at times and there's documentation of that. But these outdoor images are unique.

And then you have the other selections of outdoor photography that come in with this group of one hundred that show the Indians coming out of their tipis in the Wild West Camp -the village where if you were to buy a ticket to go to the show you're also able to go behind the scenes before the show begins and see where the performers live. The Indians tried to live as normally as they could while traveling with the show. The men, the chiefs and the younger men, were able to bring wives, children, family members so they could be comfortable with many months away from their own homes out West.

Here, too, they come out and I guess we could say "sit" for her in a similar way that they did in the studio where they bring out their shields, their scarves, their breastplates, and they're wearing, again, very typical clothing as they would in the show and their finery for her. This time, you see them in front of the tipi and you can see the drawings on the tipi. You can think about their own artistry—how they decorated the tipi, how they decorated the shields, and see a little more depth to who they were when you see these outdoor photographs that she was able to take.


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