Chequamegon History

The queue of Chequamegon History posts that need to be written grows much faster than my ability to write them.  Lately, I’ve been backed up with mysteries surrounding a number of photographs.  Many of these photos are from after 1860, so they are technically outside the scope of this website (though they involve people who were important in the pre-1860 era too.

Photograph posts are some of the hardest to write, so I decided to just run through all of them together with minimal commentary other than that needed to resolve the unanswered questions.  I will link all the photos back to their sources where their full descriptions can be found.  Here it goes, stream-of-consciousness style:

This whole topic started with a photo of a delegation of Lake Superior Ojibwe chiefs that sits on the windowsill of the Bayfield Public Library.  Even though it is clearly after 1860, some of the names in the caption:  Oshogay, George Warren, and Vincent Roy Jr. caught my attention.  These men, looking past their prime, were all involved in the politics of the 1850s that I had been studying, so I wanted to find out more about the picture.

As I mentioned in the Oshogay post, this photo is also part of the digital collections of the Smithsonian, but the people are identified by different names. According to the Smithsonian, the picture was taken in Washington in 1880 by the photographer C.M. Bell.

I found a second version of this photo as well.  If it wasn’t for one of the chiefs in front, you’d think it was the same picture:

While my heart wanted to believe the person, probably in the early 20th century, who labelled the Bayfield photograph, my head told me the photographer probably wouldn’t have known anything about the people of Lake Superior, and therefore could only have gotten the chiefs’ names directly from them.  Plus, Bell took individual photos:

By cross-referencing the individual photos with the names listed with the group photo, you can identify nine of the thirteen men.  They are chiefs from Bad River, Lac Courte Oreilles, and Lac du Flambeau.

According to this, the man identified by the library caption as Vincent Roy Jr., was in fact Ogimaagiizhig (Sky Chief).  He does have a resemblance to Roy, so I’ll forgive whoever it was, even if it means having to go back and correct my Vincent Roy post:

So now that we know who went on the 1880 trip, it begs the question of why they went.  The records I’ve found haven’t been overly clear, but it appears that it involved a bill in the senate for “severalty” of the Ojibwe reservations in Wisconsin.  A precursor to the 1888 Allotment Act of Senator Henry Dawes, this legislation was proposed by Senator Thaddeus C. Pound of Wisconsin.  It would divide the reservations into parcels for individual families and sell the remaining lands to the government, thereby greatly reducing the size of the reservations and opening the lands up for logging.

Pound spent a lot of time on Indian issues and while he isn’t as well known as Dawes or as Richard Henry Pratt the founder of the Carlisle Indian School, he probably should be.  Pound was a friend of Pratt’s and an early advocate of boarding schools as a way to destroy Native cultures as a way to uplift Native peoples.

I’m sure that Pound’s legislation was all written solely with the welfare of the Ojibwe in mind, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he was a wealthy lumber baron from Chippewa Falls who was advocating damming the Chippewa River (and flooding Lac Courte Oreilles decades before it actually happened).  All sarcasm aside, if any American Indian Studies students need a thesis topic, or if any L.C.O. band members need a new dartboard cover, I highly recommend targeting Senator Pound.

While we know Pound’s motivations, it doesn’t explain why the chiefs came to Washington.  According to the Indian Agent at Bayfield they were brought in to support the legislation.  We also know they toured Carlisle and visited the Ojibwe students there.  There are a number of potential explanations, but without having the chiefs’ side of the story, I hesitate to speculate.  However, it does explain the photograph.

Now, let’s look at what a couple of these men looked like two decades earlier:

Giishkitawag and Akiwenzii are seem to have aged quite a bit between the early 1860s, when these photos were taken, and 1880 but they are still easily recognized.  The earlier photos were taken in St. Paul by the photographers Joel E. Whitney and James E. Martin.  Their galleries, especially after Whitney partnered with Charles Zimmerman, produced hundreds of these images on cards and stereoviews for an American public anxious to see real images of Indian leaders.

Giishkitawag and Akiwenzii were not the only Lake Superior chiefs to end up on these souvenirs.  Aamoons (Little Bee), of Lac du Flambeau appears to have been a popular subject:

As the images were reproduced throughout the 1870s, it appears the studios stopped caring who the photos were actually depicting:

One wonders what the greater insult to Aamoons was:  reducing him to being simply “Chippewa Brave” as Whitney and Zimmerman did here, or completely misidentifying him as Na-gun-ub (Naaganab) as a later stereo reproduction as W. M. McLeish does here:

Aamoons and Naaganab don’t even look alike…

…but the Lac du Flambeau and Fond du Lac chiefs were probably photographed in St. Paul around the time they were both part of a delegation to President Lincoln in 1862.

Naaganab (seated middle) and Aamoons (back row, second from left) are pretty easy to spot, and if you look closely, you’ll see Giishkitawag, Akiwenzii, and a younger Edawi-giizhig (4th, 5th, and 6th from left, back row) were there too.  I can’t find individual photos of the other chiefs, but there is a place we can find their names.

Benjamin Armstrong, who interpreted for the delegation, included a version of the image in his memoir Early Life Among the Indians.  He identifies the men who went with him as:

Ah-moose (Little Bee) from Lac Flambeau Reservation, Kish-ke-taw-ug (Cut Ear) from Bad River Reservation, Ba-quas (He Sews) from Lac Courte O’Rielles Reservation, Ah-do-ga-zik (Last Day) from Bad River Reservation, O-be-quot (Firm) from Fond du Lac Reservation, Sing-quak-onse (Little Pine) from La Pointe Reservation, Ja-ge-gwa-yo (Can’t Tell) from La Pointe Reservation, Na-gon-ab (He Sits Ahead) from Fond du Lac Reservation, and O-ma-shin-a-way (Messenger) from Bad River Reservation.

It appears that Armstrong listed the men according to their order in the photograph.  He identifies Akiwenzii as “Ba-quas (He Sews),” which until I find otherwise, I’m going to assume the chief had two names (a common occurrence) since the village is the same.  Aamoons, Giishkitawag, Edawi-giizhig and Naaganab are all in the photograph in the places corresponding to the order in Armstrong’s list.  That means we can identify the other men in the photo.

I don’t know anything about O-be-quot from Fond du Lac (who appears to have been moved in the engraving) or S[h]ing-guak-onse from Red Cliff (who is cut out of the photo entirely) other than the fact that the latter shares a name with a famous 19th-century Sault Ste. Marie chief.  Travis Armstrong’s outstanding website, chiefbuffalo.com, has more information on these chiefs and the mission of the delegation.

Seated to the right of Naaganab, in front of Edawi-giizhig is Omizhinawe, the brother of and speaker for Blackbird of Bad River.  Finally, the broad-shouldered chief on the bottom left is “Ja-ge-gwa-yo (Can’t Tell)” from Red Cliff.  This is Jajigwyong, the son of Chief Buffalo, who signed the treaties as a chief in his own right.  Jayjigwyong, sometimes called Little Chief Buffalo, was known for being an early convert to Catholicism and for encouraging his followers to dress in European style.  Indeed, we see him and the rest of the chiefs dressed in buttoned coats and bow-ties and wearing their Lincoln medals.

Wait a minute… button coats?…  bow-ties?… medals?…. a chief identified as Buffalo…That reminds me of…

This image is generally identified as Chief Buffalo (Wikimedia Commons)

Anyway, with that mystery solved, we can move on to the next one.  It concerns a photograph that is well-known to any student of Chequamegon-area history in the mid 19th century (or any Chequamegon History reader who looks at the banners on the side of this page).Noooooo!!!!!!!  I’ve been trying to identify the person in The above “Chief Buffalo” photo for years, and the answer was in Armstrong all along!  Now I need to revise this post among others.  I had already begun to suspect it was Jayjigwyong rather than his father, but my evidence was circumstantial.  This leaves me without a doubt.  This picture of the younger Chief Buffalo, not his more-famous father.

The photo showing an annuity payment, must have been widely distributed in its day, because it has made it’s way into various formats in archives and historical societies around the world.  It has also been reproduced in several secondary works including Ronald Satz’ Chippewa Treaty Rights, Patty Loew’s Indian Nations of Wisconsin, Hamilton Ross’ La Pointe:  Village Outpost on Madeline Island, and in numerous other pamphlets, videos, and displays in the Chequamegon Region.  However, few seem to agree on the basic facts:

When was it taken?

Where was it taken?

Who was the photographer?

Who are the people in the photograph?

We’ll start with a cropped version that seems to be the most popular in reproductions:

In the next one, we see a wider version of the image turned into a souvenir card much like the ones of the chiefs further up the post:

In this version, we can see more foreground and the backs of the two men sitting in front.

The image also exists in engraved forms, both slightly modified…

…and greatly-modified.

It should also be mentioned that another image exists that was clearly taken on the same day.  We see many of the same faces in the crowd:

Scene at Indian payment, probably at Odanah, Wisconsin. c.1865 by Charles Zimmerman (more info)

We have a lot of conflicting information here.  If we exclude the Library of Congress Cherokee reference, we can be pretty sure that this is an annuity payment at La Pointe or Odanah, which means it was to the Lake Superior Ojibwe.  However, we have dates ranging from as early as 1852 up to 1900. These payments took place, interrupted from 1850-1852 by the Sandy Lake Removal, from 1837 to 1874.

Although he would have attended a number of these payments, Benjamin Armstrong’s date of 1852, is too early.  A number of secondary sources have connected this photo to dates in the early 1850s, but outside of Armstrong, there is no evidence to support it.

Charles Zimmerman, who is credited as the photographer when someone is credited, became active in St. Paul in the late 1860s, which would point to the 1870-71 dates as more likely.  However, if you scroll up the page and look at Giishkitaawag, Akiwenzii, and Aamoons again, you’ll see that these photos, (taken in the early 1860s) are credited to “Whitney & Zimmerman,” even though they predate Zimmerman’s career.

What happened was that Zimmerman partnered with Joel Whitney around 1870, eventually taking over the business, and inherited all Whitney’s negatives (and apparently those of James Martin as well).  There must have been an increase in demand for images of Indian peoples in the 1870s, because Zimmerman re-released many of the earlier Whitney images.

So, we’re left with a question.  Did Zimmerman take the photograph of the annuity payment around 1870, or did he simply reproduce a Whitney negative from a decade earlier?

I had a hard time finding any primary information that would point to an answer.  However, the Summer 1990 edition of the Minnesota History magazine includes an article by Bonnie G. Wilson called Working the Light:  Nineteenth Century Professional Photographers in Minnesota.  In this article, we find the following:

“…Zimmerman was not a stay-at-home artist.  He took some of his era’s finest landscape photos of Minnesota, specializing in stereographs of the Twin Cities area, but also traveling to Odanah, Wisconsin for an Indian annuity payment…”

In the footnotes, Wilson writes:

“The MHS has ten views in the Odanah series, which were used as a basis for engravings in Harper’s Weekly, Aug. 5, 1871.  See also Winona Republican, Oct. 12, 1869 p.3;”

Not having access to the Winona Republican, I tried to see how many of the “Odanah series” I could track down.  Zimmerman must have sold a lot of stereocards, because this task was surprisingly easy.  Not all are labelled as being in Odanah, but the backgrounds are similar enough to suggest they were all taken in the same place.  Click on them to view enlarged versions at various digital archives.

Finally…

So, if Zimmerman took the “Odanah series” in 1869, and the pay table image is part of it, then this is a picture of the 1869 payment.  To be absolutely certain, we should try to identify the men in the image.

This task is easier than ever because the New York Public Library has uploaded a high-resolution scan of the Whitney & Zimmerman stereocard version to Wikimedia Commons.  For the first time, we can really get a close look at the men and women in this photo.

They say a picture tells a thousand words.  I’m thinking I could write ten-thousand and still not say as much as the faces in this picture.

To try to date the photo, I decided to concentrate the six most conspicuous men in the photo:

1)  The chief in the fur cap whose face in the shadows.

2)  The gray-haired man standing behind him.

3)  The man sitting behind the table who is handing over a payment.

4)  The man with the long beard, cigar, and top hat.

5) The man with the goatee looking down at the money sitting to the left of the top-hat guy (to the right in our view)

6)  The man with glasses sitting at the table nearest the photographer

According to Hamilton Ross, #3 is Asaph Whittlesey, #4 is Agent Henry Gilbert, #5 is William S. Warren (son of Truman), and #6 is John W. Bell.  While all four of those men could have been found at annuity payments as various points between 1850 and 1870, this appears to be a total guess by Ross.  Three of the four men appear to be of at least partial Native descent and only one (Warren) of those identified by Ross was Ojibwe.  Chronologically, it doesn’t add up either.  Those four wouldn’t have been at the same table at the same time.  Additionally, we can cross-reference two of them with other photos.

Whittlesey and Gilbert are not in the photograph.

The man who I label as #5 is identified by Ross as William S. Warren.  This seems like a reasonable guess, though considering the others, I don’t know that it’s based on any evidence.  Warren, who shares a first name with his famous uncle William Whipple Warren, worked as a missionary in this area.

The man I label #6 is called John W. Bell by Ross and Richard Bardon by the Minnesota Historical Society.  I highly doubt either of these.  I haven’t found photos of either to confirm, but the Ireland-born Bardon and the Montreal-born Bell were both white men.  Mr. 6 appears to be Native.  I did briefly consider Bell as a suspect for #4, though.

Neither Ross nor the Minnesota Historical Society speculated on #1 or #2.

At this point, I cannot positively identify Mssrs. 1, 2, 3, 5, or 6.  I have suspicions about each, but I am not skilled at matching faces, so these are wild guesses at this point:

#1 is too covered in shadows for a clear identification.  However, the fact that he is wearing the traditional fur headwrap of an Ojibwe civil chief, along with a warrior’s feather, indicates that he is one of the traditional chiefs, probably from Bad River but possibly from Lac Courte Oreilles or Lac du Flambeau.  I can’t see his face well enough to say whether or not he’s in one of the delegation photos from the top of the post.

#2 could be Edawi-giizhig (see above), but I can’t be certain.

#3 is also tricky.  When I started to examine this photo, one of the faces I was looking for was that of Joseph Gurnoe of Red Cliff.  You can see him in a picture toward the top of the post with the Roy brothers.  Gurnoe was very active with the Indian Agency in Bayfield as a clerk, interpreter, and in other positions.  Comparing the two photos I can’t say whether or not that’s him.  Leave a comment if you think you know.

#5 could be a number of different people.

#6 I don’t have a solid guess on either.  His apparent age, and the fact that the Minnesota Historical Society’s guess was a government farmer and schoolteacher, makes me wonder about Henry Blatchford.  Blatchford took over the Odanah Mission and farm from Leonard Wheeler in the 1860s.  This was after spending decades as Rev. Sherman Hall’s interpreter, and as a teacher and missionary in La Pointe and Odanah area.  When this photo was taken, Blatchford had nearly four decades of experience as an interpreter for the Government.  I don’t have any proof that it’s him, but he is someone who is easy to imagine having a place at the pay table.

Finally, I’ll backtrack to #4, whose clearly identifiable gray-streaked beard allows us to firmly date the photo.  The man is Col. John H. Knight, who came to Bayfield as Indian Agent in 1869.

Knight oversaw a couple of annuity payments, but considering the other evidence, I’m confident that the popular image that decorates the sides of the Chequamegon History site was indeed taken at Odanah by Charles Zimmerman at the 1869 annuity payment.

Do you agree?  Do you disagree?  Have you spotted anything in any of these photos that begs for more investigation?  Leave a comment.

As for myself, it’s a relief to finally get all these photo mysteries out of my post backlog.  The 1870 date on the Zimmerman photo reminds me that I’m spending too much time in the later 19th century.  After all, the subtitle of this website says it’s history before 1860.  I think it might be time to go back for a while to the days of the old North West Company or maybe even to Pontiac.  Stay tuned, and thanks for reading,