Sioux

1862 · 220972 — Minnesota 1862. Hand-colored photograph mounted on card at a period date manuscript caption as above below the image. 6-1/2 x 5-1/4 inches image size. Waterstain to left side within the image soiling and staining to the mount. Hand-colored photograph mounted on card at a period date manuscript caption as above below the image. 6-1/2 x 5-1/4 inches image size. A rare image of the Ojibway chief Hole in the Day The Younger 1825-1868 chief of the Mississippi Band of the Ojibwe Chippewa of central Minnesota. During the Sioux Uprising of 1862 Hole-in-the-Day advocated joining forces with the Dakota and threatened to attack Fort Ripley. By late December 1862 US soldiers had taken captive more than a thousand Dakota including women children and elderly men in addition to warriors. After trials and sentencing by a military court 38 Dakota were hanged in the largest one-day mass execution in American history.<br/><br/>Although the photographer of the present image has not been identified a glass plate negative of the same image in reverse is located within the Edward Bromley Collection at the Minneapolis Public Library. Bromley arrived in Minnesota in 1867 and began collecting photographs and negatives of Minnesota. His first purchase of over 500 glass plate negatives was from Benjamin F. Upton. He also purchased 1600 negatives from William H. Illingworth's gallery in St. Paul as well as the negatives and plates of 30 other photographers including Pepper Jacoby Rugg and Harvey. <br/><br/>Given the timing of Hole-in-the-Day's assasination by a group of Ojibway in 1868 later revealed to have been contracted by by a group of white and mixed-blood traders it would seem likely that the present image is either by Upton or perhaps by Joel E. Whitney whose half-length portraits of Native Americans of the region are stylistically similar to the present image.<br/><br/>"The photographs of the 1862 Sioux Revolt are more than examples of early western photography; they are among the first photographs to document a conflict between Indians and white settlers in the West" Heather A. Shannon "Photographs of the 1862 Sioux Revolt: From National Sensation to Ethnographic Documentation" in The Princeton University Library Chronicle Vol. 67 No. 2 Winter 2006 pp. 290-313. unknown books