The Sioux of the Rosebud: A History in Pictures (Volume 111) (The Civilization of the American Indian Series),New

In the late 1880s, John A. Anderson, a young Swedishborn settler near Fort Niobrara, Nebraska, bought a camera with earnings from carpentry work. He soon became a fullfledged photographer, and in 1889 General George Crook asked him to serve as official photographer to the Crook Treaty Commission on its visit to the Brul Sioux Indians on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Anderson agreedand thereby moved into a poignant and oftentimes tragic era in the history of the Sioux. From 1891 until his death in 1948, Anderson lived on the Rosebud, recording the painful adjustment of the proud Bruls to life on the reservation.This was a particularly hard time for the Bruls. Nomadic warriors by nature, they had been subjugated following their greatest triumph at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876 and were living like captives on what had once been their buffalo hunting grounds. The buffaloes were dead, and the Indians had been forced to accept white mens ways and white mens provender. To help feed themselves, they were compelled to farmto scratch the ground, as they scornfully expressed ita way of life they regarded as shameful.Anderson became a sincere friend of the Indian, who learned to trust him and allowed him to record their daily lives and their ceremonies. Anderson photographed Sioux camps, villages, and day schools; recorded councils between whites and Indians; and portrayed the Indians as they received their beef rations and annuity payments. When Buffalo Bill Cody and Charles P. Jordan organized their wildwest shows, he photographed the Sioux who joined the shows. Anderson was afforded the rare privilege of attending and photographing the White Buffalo, Sun dance, and Omaha Dance ceremonies. Anderson gave many of the photographs to his Sioux friends, who proudly displayed them in their cabins on the Rosebud.Over the years many other photographs found their way into museums and state historical societies. Henry W. Hamilton and his wife, Jean Tyree Hamilton, first became aware of Anderson and his work through the papers of Remington Schuyler, the wellknown artist and writer, who also lived on the Rosebud. The Hamiltons searched out prints and glassplate negatives and, with the help of Indian consultants on the reservation, painstakingly dated the photographs and identified the subjects.The wealth of photographs Anderson took is represented here by more than 200 reproductionsthe largest number ever published in a single collection. They are presented not as works of art (though many of them are indeed triumphs of the photographic art) but as important historical documents in the ongoing story of the American Indian.