As a scholar of 19th-century American photography, I’ve looked at countless old photographs: the carefully labeled portraits of the powerful (always the most likely to be photographed), and the many pictures of women and children, enslaved workers and Native families, rural laborers and urban bystanders, that include no identifications at all.
Some years ago, I began to wonder whether I could identify some of the unnamed people in old photographs. Might I be able to name that gold miner, that railroad worker, that soldier lying dead on the battlefield at Antietam? Would my understanding of history shift if I knew who these people were?
My attention focused on a photograph by the celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner. Made at Fort Laramie in spring 1868, it depicts six white men standing in an oddly formal arc around a young Native girl. The men, all fresh from Civil War duty, are members of a federal peace commission sent west to this fort along the Oregon Trail to persuade the Lakota to move to a newly created reservation. The handwritten labels on the extant copies of the photograph carefully identify them: General Alfred Howe Terry, General William S. Harney, General William T. Sherman, General John B. Sanborn, Col. Samuel F. Tappan, and General Christopher C. Augur. The girl is never named. She is simply “Arapaho” on one version of the photo, “Dakota” on another. She looks straight at the camera and begs us to stare back.
Who is she?
I looked for her in other pictures made at the fort. She’s not there. I searched through the personal papers of the commissioners and the government records of the treaty negotiations. Nothing. Finally, in the archives at the Fort Laramie National Historic Site, I found a small notecard left by a visitor in 1978. He’d seen a copy of the photograph on display; the blanket-wrapped girl was his grandmother, Sophie Mousseau. The name connects an unidentified child to the historical records; it lets us find her story.
Sophie proves easier to track than most girls born on the northern plains during the years of the Indian Wars. Traces of her Oglala Lakota mother survive in the spare federal records that track reservation residents. Curious writers recorded her French Canadian father’s memories of the “old days.” Since Sophie’s father turned litigious, and her first husband became a murderer, bureaucratic records also preserve imprints of her life, even as descendants’ memories grow increasingly faint.