Portraits of vanished Indian life
In 1879, three years after Gen. George Armstrong Custer died in battle at the Little Bighorn, Harvard purchased two albums of photographs that included rare images of an American Indian world that was even then vanishing rapidly. Assembled by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1877, this two-volume “descriptive catalogue,” in the words of its compilers, was intended to partially document the Indians of North America since the 1850s. Among the 1,005 images are photos of costumes, crafts, and dwellings — but especially of warriors, wives, maidens, children, and chiefs. In an email, Castle McLaughlin, associate curator of North American ethnography at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, called the photos of the chiefs “very rare and in most cases virtually unique images of some of the most important Plains leaders of their day.” “These albums constitute important primary-source materials,” Robert Burton, Harvard Library cataloger for photographs, said in an email....