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[Album of Photographs Documenting a Portion of the American Indian Citizenship Expedition of 1913.]

[Idaho, South Dakota, Montana, 1913.]. 168 original silver print photos, approx. 1.5” x 2.5” to 7” x 11”, with the majority approx. 3.25” x 5.25”, affixed to 24 black paper album leaves; lacking covers, all leaves loose.

The American Indian Citizenship Expedition of 1913 was the third of the so-called Dixon/Wanamaker expeditions, undertaken by the photographer Joseph K. Dixon and financed by the Philadelphia department store owner Rodman Wanamaker for the purpose of documenting American Indian cultures, while simultaneously extolling the virtues of the American flag. The expedition was the counterpart of a planned memorial to American Indians, larger than the Statue of Liberty, which was never built. The expedition began in Washington with a ceremony involving tribal leaders on February 22, 1913. Dixon and his party set off soon after to visit all of the nation’s Indian Reservations, with flag ceremonies and ceremonial signings of allegiance planned at each.

This photo album documents the expedition during a portion of its visits to the Northern Plains tribes in the fall of 1913. The album shows the people and scenery surrounding the Cheyenne River Agency, Fort Hall and the Fort Hall Indian School, and several other unidentified locations. Tribes represented include the Shoshone-Bannock, Lakota, and possibly the Blackfeet. Included here are striking images of indigenous men posed in their headdresses, fur and feather bonnets, rawhide tunics and leggings, war bonnets, cowboy hats, and top hats. Indigenous women pose in ceremonial wear and are also pictured wearing blankets, riding horses, pulling a travois, hauling branches, hugging children, and so forth. Native-owned horses are proudly presented in parades and on farms; bison are pictured ranging on short-grass plains; and Hereford cattle and other farm animals are pictured. Images of Indigenous school children include a group shot of approximately eighty boys in dark suits and photos of clusters of older girls posing in white dresses with banana-curled hair styles. Other images include a baby in a decorative cradle-board, entitled “Growing in the West”; a woman standing in a doorway with a girl, captioned in the negative “No. 70, Sioux”; an unhappy looking “Shoshone Squaw” sitting beneath a blanket near a pile of lumber, and so forth. Most tellingly, a number of images document ceremonies involving the American flag.

The image quality varies widely from studio portraiture to snapshots, with several real photo postcards included as well. Joseph Dixon took several thousand pictures during his expeditions. However, we have not been able to fully check his archive or find matches with any of his published photos, though many of the portraits are of unusually high quality for this type of album. These photos were likely compiled by a member of Dixon’s party, which also included John McLaughlin, another photographer shooting with a Kodak camera, and, according to contemporary newspaper reports, several others.

Though the expedition was understandably met with skepticism by many tribes who did not want to sign any more contracts with the U.S. government, Dixon’s efforts were sincere, and his approach was notably different than that of Edward Curtis, who made no attempt to advocate on behalf of native people. Full citizenship would finally come for American Indians with the passage of the American Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, when public opinion shifted following Native American participation in World War I.

Overall a substantive and evocative archive of photos of reservation-bound native people in several Western locations, documenting tribal cultures in close contact with white settlers.

REFERENCES: Kavanagh, Thomas. North American Indian Portraits (Old Saybrook, Konecky and Konecky, 1996); Wickmann, Johanna. Touring the Reservations: The 1913 American Indian Citizenship Expedition. Wyoming Historical Society at wyohistory.org

Offered in partnership with Auger Down Books.

Item #5717

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