Chequamegon History

My last post ended up containing several musings on the nature of primary-source research and how to acknowledge mistakes and deal with uncertainty in the historical record. This was in anticipation of having to write this post.  It’s a post I’ve been putting off for years.

Amorin forced the issue with his important work on the speeches at the 1842 Treaty negotiations.  While working on it, he sent me a message that read something like, “Hey, the article quotes Chief Buffalo and describes him in a blue military coat with epaulets.  Is the world ready for that picture that Smithsonian guy sent us years ago?”

This was the image in question:

We first learned of this image from a Chequamegon History comment by Patrick Jackson of the Smithsonian asking what we knew about the image and whether or not it was Chief Buffalo from La Pointe.   

We had never seen it before.

This was our correspondence with Mr. Jackson at the time:

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July 17, 2019

 

Hello, my name is Patrick, and I am an intern at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I’m working on researching a recent acquisition: a painting which came to us identified as a Henry Inman portrait of “Big Buffalo Ke-Che-Wais-Ke, The Great Renewer (1759-1855) (Chippewa).” We have run into some confusion about the identification of the portrait, as it came to us identified as stated above, yet at Harvard Peabody Museum, who was previously the owner of the portrait, it was listed as an unidentified sitter. Seeing as you’ve written a few posts about the identification of images of the three different Chief Buffalos, I thought you might be able to give some insight into perhaps who is or isn’t in the portrait we have. Thank you for your time.

 

July 17, 2019

Hello,

I would be happy to comment.  Can you send a photo to this email?  

I am pretty sure Inman painted a copy of Charles Bird King’s portrait of Pee-che-kir.  

https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/pee-che-kir-chippewa-chief-history-indian-tribes-north-america-17136

Doe it resemble that portrait?  Pee-che-kir (Bizhiki) means Buffalo in Ojibwe (Chippewa).  From my research, I am fairly certain that King’s portrait is not of Kechewaiske, but of another chief named Buffalo who lived in the same era. 

Leon Filipczak

 

July 17, 2019

Dear Leon,

I have attached our portrait—it’s not the best scan, but hopefully there’s enough detail for you to work with. I’ve compared it with the Peechikir in McKenney & Hall, as well as to the Chief Buffalo painted ambrotype and the James Otto Lewis portrait of Pe-schick-ee. The ambrotype has a close resemblance, as does the Peecheckir, though if that is what Charles Bird King painted I have doubts that Inman would make such drastic changes in clothing and pose.

The identification as Big Buffalo/Ke-Che-Wais-Ke/The Great Renewer, as far as I understand, refers to the La Pointe Bizhiki/Buffalo rather than the St. Croix or Leech Lake Buffalos, though of course that is a questionable identification considering Kechewaiske did not (I think) visit Washington until after Inman’s death in January of 1846. McKenney, however, did visit the Ojibwe/Chippewa for the negotiations for the Treaty of Fond du Lac in 1825/1826, and could feasibly have met multiple Chief Buffalos. Perhaps a local artist there would be responsible for the original? Another possibility is, since the identification was not made at the Peabody, who had the portrait since the 1880s, is that it has been misidentified entirely and is unrelated to any of the Ojibwe/Chippewa chiefs. Though this, to me, would seem unlikely considering the strong resemblance of the figure in our portrait to the Peechikir portrait and Chief Buffalo ambrotype.

 

Thank you again for the help.

Sincerely, 

Patrick

 

July 22, 2019

Hello Patrick,

This is a head-scratcher.  Your analysis is largely what I would come up with.  My first thought when I saw it was, “Who identified it as someone named Buffalo?  When? and using what evidence?”  Whoever associated the image with the text “Ke-Che-Wais-Ke, The Great Renewer (1759-1855)” did so decades after the painting could be assumed to be created.  However, if the tag “Big Buffalo” can be attached to this image in the era it was created, then we may be onto something.  This is what I know:

1)  During his time as Superintendent of Indian Affairs (late 1820s), Thomas McKenney amassed a large collection of portraits of Indian chiefs for what he called the “Indian Gallery” in the War Department.  He sought the portraits out wherever and whenever he could.  When chiefs would come to Washington, he would have Charles Bird King do the work, but he also received portraits from the interior via artists like James Otto Lewis.

2)  In 1824, Bizhiki (Buffalo) from the St. Croix River (not Great Buffalo from La Pointe), visited Washington and was painted by King.  This painting is presumed to have been destroyed in the Smithsonian fire that took out most of the Indian Gallery.

3)  In 1825 at Prairie du Chien and in 1826 at Fond du Lac (where McKenney was present) James Otto Lewis painted several Ojibwe chiefs, and these paintings also ended up in the Indian Gallery.  Both chief Buffalos were present at these treaties.

4)  A team of artists copied each others’ work from these originals. King, for example remade several of Lewis’ portraits to make the faces less grotesque.  Inman copied several Indian Gallery portraits (mostly King’s) to be sent to other institutions.  These are the ones that survived the Smithsonian fire.

5)  In the late 1830s, 10+ years after most of the portraits were painted, Lewis and McKenney sold competing lithograph collections to the American public.  McKenney’s images were taken from the Indian Gallery.  Lewis’ were from his works (some of which were in the Indian Gallery, often redone by King).  While the images were printed with descriptions, the accuracy of the descriptions leaves something to be desired.  A chief named Bizhiki appears in both Lewis and McKenney-Hall.  In both, the chiefs are dressed in white and faced looking left, but their faces look nothing alike.  One is very “Lewis-grotesque.” and the other is not at all.  There are Lewis-based lithographs in both competing works, and they are usually easy to spot.

6)  Not every image from the Indian Gallery made it into the published lithographic collections.  Brian Finstad, a historian of the upper-St. Croix country, has shown me an image of Gaa-bimabi (Kappamappa, Gobamobi), a close friend/relative of the La Pointe Chief Buffalo, and upstream neighbor of the St. Croix Buffalo.  This image is held by Harvard and strongly resembles the one you sent me in style.  I suspect it is an Inman, based on a Lewis (possibly with a burned-up King copy somewhere in between).  

7)  “Big Buffalo” would seemingly indicate Buffalo from La Pointe.  The word gichi is frequently translated as both “great” and “big” (i.e. big in size or big in power).  Buffalo from La Pointe was both.  However, the man in the painting you sent is considerably skinnier and younger-looking than I would expect him to appear c.1826.

My sense is that unless accompanying documentation can be found, there is no way to 100% ID these pictures.  I am also starting to worry that McKenney and the Indian Gallery artists, themselves began to confuse the two chief Buffalos, and that the three originals (two showing St. Croix Buffalo, and one La Pointe Buffalo) burned.  Therefore, what we are left with are copies that at best we are unable to positively identify, and at worst are actually composites of elements of portraits of two different men.  The fact that King’s head study of Pee-chi-kir is out there makes me wonder if he put the face from his original (1824 portrait of St. Croix Buffalo?) onto the clothing from Lewis’ portrait of Pe-shick-ee when it was prepared for the lithograph publication.

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A few weeks later, Patrick sent a follow-up message that he had tracked down a second version and confirmed that Inman’s portrait was indeed a copy of a Charles Bird King portrait, based on a James Otto Lewis original.  It included some critical details.  

 

The date of 1826 makes it very likely that Lewis’ original was painted at the Treaty of Fond du Lac.  Chief Buffalo of La Pointe would have been in his 60s, which appears consistent with the image of Big Buffalo.  Big Buffalo also does not appear as thin in King’s intermediate version as he does in Inman’s copy, lessening the concerns that the image does not match written descriptions of the chief.  

Another clue is that it appears Lewis used the word Odeg to disambiguate Big Buffalo from the two other chiefs named Buffalo present at Fond du Lac in 1826.  This may be the Ojibwe word Andeg (“crow”).  Although I have not seen any other source that calls the La Pointe chief Andeg, it was a significant name in his family.  He had multiple close relatives with Andeg in their names, which may have all stemmed from the name of Buffalo’s grandfather Andeg-wiiyaas (Crow’s Meat).  As hereditary chief of the Andeg-wiiyaas band, it’s not unreasonable to think the name would stay associated with Buffalo and be used to distinguish him from the other Buffalos.  However, this is speculative.

So, there we were.  After the whole convoluted Chief Buffalo Picture Search, did we finally have an image we could say without a doubt was Chief Buffalo of La Pointe?  No.  However, we did have one we could say was “likely” or even “probably” him.  I considered posting at the time, but a few things held me back.  

In the earliest years of Chequamegon History, 2013 and 2014, many of the posts involved speculation about images and me trying to nitpick or disprove obvious research mistakes of others.  Back then, I didn’t think anyone was reading and that the site would only appeal to academic types.  Later on, however, I realized that a lot of the traffic to the site came from people looking for images, who weren’t necessarily reading all the caveats and disclaimers.  This meant we were potentially contributing to the issue of false information on the internet rather than helping clear it up.  So by 2019, I had switched my focus to archiving documents through the Chequamegon History Source Archive, or writing more overtly subjective and political posts.

So, the Smithsonian image of Big Buffalo went on the back burner, waiting to see if more information would materialize to confirm the identity of the man one way or the other.  None did, and then in 2020 something happened that gave the whole world a collective amnesia that made those years hard to remember.  When Amorin asked about using the image for his 1842 post, my first thought was “Yeah, you should, but we should probably give it its own post too.”  My second thought was, “Holy crap!  It’s been five years!”

Anyway, here is Chequamegon History’s statement on the identity of the man in Henry Inman’s 1832-33 portrait of Big Buffalo (Chippewa).       

 

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And while we’re on the subject of correcting misinformation related to images, I need to set the record straight on another one and offer my apologies to a certain Benjamin Green Armstrong.  I promise, it relates indirectly to the “Big Buffalo” painting.

An engraving of the image in question appears in Armstrong’s Early Life Among the Indians. 

 

In this post, we contested these identifications on the grounds that Ja-ge-gwa-yo (Little Buffalo) from La Pointe Reservation died in 1860 and therefore could not have been part of the delegation to President Lincoln.  In the comments on that post, readers from Michigan suggested that we had several other identities wrong, and that this was actually a group of chiefs from the Keweenaw region.  We commented that we felt most of Armstrong’s identifications were correct, but that the picture was probably taken in 1856 in St. Paul.

Since then, a document has appeared that confirms Armstrong was right all along.

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[Antoine Buffalo, Naagaanab, and six other chiefs to W.P. Dole, 6 March 1863

National Archives M234-393 slide 14

Transcribed by L. Filipczak 12 April 2024]

 

To Our Father,

Hon W P. Dole

Commissioner of Indian Affairs–

 

We the undersigned chiefs of the chippewas of Lake Superior, now present in Washington, do respectfully request that you will pay into the hands of our Agent L. E. Webb, the sum of Fifteen Hundred Dollars from any moneys found due us under the head of “Arrearages in Annuity” the said money to be expended in the purchase of useful articles to be taken by us to our people at home.

 

Antoine Buffalo His X Mark | A daw we ge zhig His X Mark

Naw gaw nab His X Mark | Obe quad His X Mark

Me zhe na way His X Mark | Aw ke wen zee His X Mark

Kish ke ta wag His X Mark | Aw monse His X Mark

 

I certify that I Interpreted the above to the chiefs and that the same was fully understood by them

Joseph Gurnoe

U.S. Interpreter

 

Witnessed the above Signed } BG Armstrong

Washington DC }

March 6th 1863 }

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There were eight Lake Superior chiefs, an interpreter, and a witness in Washington that spring, for a total of ten people.  There are ten people in the photograph.  Chequamegon History is confident that this document confirms they are the exact ten identified by Benjamin Armstrong. 

The Lac Courte Oreilles chief Ba-quas is the same person as Akiwenzii.  It was not unusual for an Ojibwe chief to have more than one name.  Chief Buffalo, Gaa-bimaabi, Zhingob the Younger, and Hole-in-the-Day the Younger are among the many examples.

The name “Sing-quak-onse (Little Pine) from La Pointe Reservation” seems to be absent from the letter, but he is there too.  Let’s look at the signature of the interpreter, Joseph Gurnoe.      

Gurnoe’s beautiful looping handwriting will be familiar to anyone who has studied the famous 1864 bilingual petition.  We see this same handwriting in an 1879 census of Red Cliff.  In this document, Gurnoe records his own Ojibwe name as  Shingwākons, The young Pine tree.   

So the man standing on the far right is Gurnoe.  This can be confirmed by looking at other known photos of him. 

Finally, it confirms that the chief seated on the bottom left is not Jechiikwii’o (Little Buffalo), but rather his son Antoine, who inherited the chieftainship of the Buffalo Band after the death of his father two years earlier.  Known to history as Chief Antoine Buffalo, in his lifetime he was often called Antoine Tchetchigwaio (or variants thereof), using his father’s name as a surname rather than his grandfather’s.

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So, now we need to address the elephant in the room that unites the Henry Inman portrait of Big Buffalo with the photograph of the 1862-63 Delegation to Washington: 

This is the “ambrotype” referenced by Patrick Jackson above.  It’s the image most associated with Chief Buffalo of La Pointe.  It’s also one for which we have the least amount of background information.  We have not been able to determine who the original photographer/painter was or when the image was created.

The resemblance to the portrait of “Big Buffalo” is undeniable.

However, if it is connected to the 1862-63 image of Chief Antoine Buffalo, it would support Hamilton Nelson Ross’s assertions on the Wisconsin Historical Society copy.

Clearly, multiple generations of the Buffalo family wore military jackets.  

We will keep looking.