"Reading" A.B. Stephenson's Album
This is unfortunate, because the album itself, as an historical artifact, is perhaps more interesting than the photographs collected in it, although the two are most certainly intimately connected. Why, for example, was the photographer for the U. S. Army during the founding and construction of Fort Sill in what is today the western part of state of Oklahoma “primarily” interested in taking studio photographs of American Indians instead of, say, operations and activities of the troops at the fort and the fort itself? Why was a popular audience, here represented by A. B. Stephenson, also so interested in photographs of American Indians, rather than, again, the founding, construction, and operations of a frontier fort? If it was as simple as a photographer correctly assuming a public interest in these subjects and producing an album that would meet that consumer need, what lies at the root of this public interest, at a time when the “Indian campaigns” were attempting to militarily subdue the Plains Indians tribes, alienate them from their traditional homelands, and constrain them onto reservations that essentially severed their long-standing cultural practices tied to place and communal land-use?
As it turns out, Fort Sill itself doesn’t figure in to the album very prominently. Of the forty photographs in the collection, only four are of the buildings at Fort Sill (two of officers quarters, one of the fort’s hospital, and one of “Post Traders at Fort Sill”), and four are landscapes of the area around Fort Sill (three of “Medicine Bluffs Pathway” and “Medicine Bluffs Fort Sill in the Distance,” and one of “Mt. Sheridan”). The remaining 32 photographs are of Indian-related subjects, with 22 studio portraits of Indian or groups of Indian subjects. The Indian subjects are variously described as Comanche, Apache, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Kiowa, and Wichita. The studio portraits depict mostly single subjects, and more male subjects than females, although 3 feature the daughters of “Chiefs” deemed to be important, and six portraits carry “Squaw” in their titles (one photo combines these two categories, titled “Cheyenne Squaw Black Kettle’s Daughter”).
Historian Jean M. O’Brien, in her book Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, describes the “emergent national literature and other cultural productions of the nineteenth century that ‘vanished’ Indians,” and argues that “(such) narratives performed the cultural and political work of purifying the landscape of Indians, using a degeneracy narrative that foreclosed Indian futures” (142-143). Looking at local histories, O’Brien ties the processes she sees in her New England evidence to a much broader phenomenon, noting that:
These texts coalesced into a master narrative that insisted on Indian extinction and that argued that Indians can never be modern. This narrative was pervasive and persuasive to non-Indians: it argued that racial mixture and culture “loss” diluted the Indianness of New England Indians to the vanishing point (202).
Soule’s portraits, I argue, aim to add to this “master narrative” of the vanishing Indian, by capturing and cataloging pseudo-ethnographic images of his Plains Indians subjects that depict them in such a way that highlights their vanishing cultures or “Indianness” while downplaying or obscuring aspects of their dress that would hint at modern adaptation.
His photo titled “Quinine Celi Quah-ah-da Comanche,” for instance, is believed to be the first photographic image of Quanah Parker. The image, described at length in my other blog on these photos, “What do we have here? On the Archival Trail at the Briscoe Center,” [insert hyperlink] shows a young man dressed in western hat, shirt, and vest, and what we may assume to be western pants. We cannot be sure, because the photographer has taken pains to cover the lower part of his subject’s body with an oddly draped striped blanket. The only reason I can imagine for doing so (the same blanket appears in others of his portraits—as does the strange, animal-fur covered prop the young man leans against), would be to make him appear more “Indian.” The photographer may have seen his subject’s western hat, shirt, vest, and pants, his relaxed and confident pose, and decided he needed to “dress up” the image in a way that would more strongly signify Indian culture.
Another photograph titled “Comanche Brave,” by contrast, shows a seated young man dressed head-to-toe in buckskin garments, from his decoratively beaded moccasins, to his long leather pants with fringe and ornamental stitching on their outside seams, to his long-sleeved buckskin jacket, decorative stitching at its cuffs and fringe around its collar. His stoic face, gazing about a full 45 degrees left of the photographer’s lens, is framed by a large headdress from which all sorts of feathers and other accoutrements fan out at all angles and trail down his lapel and back.
Two large buffalo horns ascend from the headdress at his temples, the headdress’s adornment serving to hide the fact that they don’t actually grow out of his head, as it was made to appear. His right hand rests on his right thigh and on a long leather strap, perhaps attached to something nestled in his lap. His left hand, closer to the camera as he sits in partial profile, holds a bow and several arrows perched across his left thigh, visually bisecting his seated pose at an angle that compliments the photograph’s composition. This is intended to be read as an image of a war-like, premodern person, whose one-time existence is to be wondered at, pondered, even celebrated, while at the same time lamented, as modernity and “progress” were in the process of rendering him extinct.
By the first decades of the twentieth century Fort Sill itself would become a symbol of disappearing Native American lifeways and peoples. It was often referenced as the place where Quanah Parker led his band of Quahada Comanche in to surrender, marking for many Americans the end of the trail for the Plains Indians. Soule’s photographs of the Native Americans there, along with similar images produced by Edward S. Curtis and others, helped provide a visual record of the supposedly vanishing Indian, seamlessly dovetailing with an array of degeneracy narratives that “foreclosed Indian futures” in the face of American modernity, progress, and the advance of civilization. We may not know very much about A. B. Stephenson, but we may suppose that he, like many Americans, would have used William Soule’s Indian photographs to fashion a story about themselves.
