What is shown in the painting by George Catlin. The Plains Indians are a symbol of the North American Indians. An outcast in his homeland, a genius in a foreign land

Summer day 1945. I'm at a fair in Great Falls, northern Montana. In front of me is a lively medical salesman extolling the healing powers of his bottled products. From time to time he points to the living advertisement standing in front of him - a tall, straight, young white youth, whose painted face is framed by a beautiful, flowing headdress of feathers. Body young man was dressed in a cloth shirt, leggings and loincloth, painted the color of deerskin. The audience consisted mainly of Indians from the Montana reservations, dressed in ordinary European clothing: trousers and shirts. I was interested in the fact that the pale-faced symbol of the American Indian stood before us in a costume that closely resembled those in which his Blackfeet, Cree and Crow audiences perform for tourists at Indian shows.

How did this picturesque costume become a symbol of “Indianness” for both the Indians themselves and the whites? How did the popular image of the Indian emerge from Plains culture? Why do people in both Europe and America, when they think of Indians, picture wearers of flowing feather headdresses, inhabitants of conical tipis, mounted warriors and buffalo hunters? It is certain that among our Founding Fathers, in the days when the frontier settlements were not much west of the Allegheny Mountains and the people of the frontier were acquainted only with the Indians - forest dwellers, who lived in bark-covered dwellings, traveled in birch bark canoes or canoes, hunted and fought on foot, and did not wear flowing headdresses, such an idea did not exist. How and when did it arise?

Looking into history, we find that the creation and formation of this image was a long process, influenced by many factors. We will try to trace the development of the image from the moment that seems to be the most initial.

It is obvious that before non-Indians began to portray the Indian as a Plains Indian, they did not have a clear understanding of the Great Plains Indians and those aspects of their culture that typified their way of life. In the two and a half centuries between Coronado's voyage to the fabled city of Quivira on the Kansas grasslands in 1541 and the U.S. Purchase of Louisiana in 1803, European explorers and traders traversed large portions of the Plains. However, these Spaniards, French and English did not create popular literature or paint famous paintings about the Indians of the Plains - no portraits, no scenes of life. Until the Louisiana Purchase, these Indians remained essentially unknown to either Europeans or the United States (although some reports from early explorers and traders had already been published).

The first famous portraits of Plains Indians were taken in eastern cities in the first decade of the 19th century. They depicted the Indians whom Lewis and Clark, following the instructions of President Jefferson, sent to Washington. The drawings were done in profile by highly competent artists who used a mechanical technique known as "physionotrace" to accurately outline the contours of their clients' heads. French artist Charles Balthazier Ferguet de Saint-Menin painted portraits of the 12 men and two boys who made up the first delegation of Indians to come from across the Mississippi. Thomas Jefferson welcomed these Indians to the Presidential Palace in the summer of 1804 and enthusiastically called them "giants and the best people we have ever met."

Charles Willson Peale, a prominent Philadelphia artist and museum owner, carved miniature silhouettes of ten members of the second delegation of Western Indians. On February 8, 1806, he sent several profiles to President Jefferson with the comment: "The lines of the faces of some of these Indians are very interesting."

After his return from the Pacific coast, M. Lewis bought several originals and copies of Indian portraits of Saint-Menin. There is no doubt that he intended to include reproductions made from them in a richly illustrated account of the explorations of Lewis and Clark, which was not realized due to his untimely death in 1809. There is no doubt that it would have included accurate sketches of the costumes and other objects of art of the Plains Indians, sent or brought by Lewis and Clark, which Peale displayed in his popular Philadelphia Museum.

More important in the early spread of the Plains Indian image were the oil portraits of several members of a delegation of Indians from the Lower Missouri and Platte Valley that arrived in Washington in late 1821. Although Charles Bed King painted portraits of these Indians for Thomas McKenney, superintendent of Indian trade, he did and several duplicates of his portraits, which were distributed more widely - one was sent to Denmark, the other to London. The original portraits formed the core of the National Indian Portrait Gallery, which has become one of Washington's most beloved tourist attractions. In 1865, it was almost completely destroyed during a fire at the Smithsonian Institution.

The most popular Indian in the 1821 delegation was Petalesharro, a young Pawnee warrior. During his journey to the East, he was hailed as a hero for his courageous rescue of a Comanche girl who was about to be sacrificed to the Morning Star during the annual Pawnee ceremony. Petalesharo's portrait was painted in Philadelphia by John Neagle as well as King, and Samuel F. B. Morse placed her in front of the visitors' gallery on his popular picture"The Old House of Representatives", painted in 1822. All three paintings depict this Indian hero wearing a flowing feather headdress. To my knowledge, they are the first of millions of images by artists and photographers of this picturesque Indian headdress.

During this eastern Indian journey, popular writer James Fenimore Cooper met Petalecharro. This meeting was the inspiration for The Prairie, the only Leatherstocking novel with a Great Plains setting. In the Indians of the Plains Cooper found virtues with which he endowed his heroes - the Woodland Indians ( Lesov, - approx. trans.) of the early period in "The Last of the Mohicans". Writing about the Indians two years after the publication of this popular novel, he notes: "The majority of them, living in or near the settlements, are a humiliated and much degraded race. As they move away from the Mississippi, the healthier sides of the life of savages will become visible."

Cooper thought that the Plains Indian chiefs had "greatness of spirit, perseverance and wild heroism..." and cited Petalesharro as the first example.

Before 1840, some of the distinctive characteristics of the Plains Indians were presented in illustrated books and magazines. The first published image of the conical leather tipi of nomadic Indian tribes was a rough engraving from a field sketch by Titian Peale during Major Long's expedition of 1819-20, which appeared in Edwin James' account of these explorations.

We are also indebted to T. Peale for the first publication of an image of a mounted Plains Indian killing a buffalo with a bow. It appeared as a color lithograph in the Cabinet of Natural History and Rural Sports, Philadelphia, 1832.

The first depiction of a mounted Plains warrior appears to have been a lithograph of Peter Rindesbacher's "Attack of a Sioux Warrior," published in October 1829 in the American Turf Register and Sporting Magazin to accompany the article "Horse Breeding among the Indians of North America." Rindisbacher had many opportunities to observe Plains warriors and buffalo hunters during his nearly five years of residence at Lord Selcreek's settlement on the Red River North from 1821-26. There is no doubt that Peale and Rindisbacher fueled a growing interest among army officers, horsemen and sportsmen in the remarkable skill of the Plains Indians as mounted warriors and buffalo hunters.

Rindisbacher's sketch of mounted Indians chasing buffalo was offered as a color lithograph for the cover of the second volume of Thomas McKenney and James Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of North America. However, only a small portion of the work's 120 beautifully printed color lithographs actually depicted Plains Indians. And almost all of them were portraits of members of Western delegations to Washington, the originals of which were painted by Saint-Menin, King or his student, George Cook.

In 1839, Samuel George Morton of Philadelphia, considered the father of physical anthropology in America, published his main job"Crania Americana" The cover features a lithograph of John Neagle's portrait of Omaha High Chief Big Elk, a prominent member of the Great Plains delegation of 1821. Morton explained his choice as follows: "Among the many Indian portraits I have studied, there is not one that depicts more characteristic features: sloping forehead, low eyebrows, big aquiline nose, high cheekbones, wide forehead and chin, and an angular face.

The first illustrated textbook on American history was A History of the United States by Charles A. Goodrich. First published in 1823, by 1843 it had been reprinted 150 times. However, Noah Webster's History of the United States, which appeared in 1832, became its popular competitor. Small and sometimes illegible engravings were not numerous in this book. However, some of them depict Indians. In Webster's history, some scenes were copied from John White's 16th-century sketches of Indians along the Northern California coast. But scenes depicting early explorers' encounters with Indians, Indian treaties, and Indian wars were based primarily on the work of anonymous authors. The Plains Indians were absent. They had not yet left a bright mark on the history of America with their stubborn resistance to the invasion of white settlements into their native steppes.

But the greatest influence on the spread of the image of the Plains Indian and his formation as a symbol of the American Indian was exerted by the books of the American artist J. Catlin and the German scientist, Prince Alexander Philip Maximilian, as well as paintings by Catlin and the Swedish artist Karl Bodmer, who accompanied the prince on an expedition to the Upper Missouri in 1833 -44 years

Inspired by the sight of a delegation of Western Indians passing through Philadelphia on the way to Washington, and by his own conclusion that the picturesque Plains Indians were doomed to cultural destruction as the frontier moved west, Catlin decided to save these Indians from oblivion and, before it was too late, "become their historian". During the summer of 1832 and the summer of 1834 he traveled among the tribes of the Upper Missouri and southern Plains, collecting information and preparing paintings for the Indian Gallery, which delighted spectators in the great cities of America. In 1840, the exhibition was shown for 4 years in England, in London. She then moved to Paris and was specially presented at the Louvre to King Louis Philippe. In addition to paintings, the exhibition featured mannequins dressed in costumes, a Crow teepee, and regalia of Indian dances and ceremonies (Chippewa and Iowa). It was Catlin who introduced the "Wild West" to civilization, and the exhibition made an indelible impression on Europeans and Americans.

However, Catlin's books were even more influential. His two-volume Manners, Customs and Conditions north American Indians", published in 1841 in London, included both a lively description of his travels and observations, and 312 reproductions from metal engravings of his sketches. The work aroused enthusiastic responses both in the United States and abroad and was reprinted 5 times in 5 years. Although Kathleen included brief descriptions and illustrations, mainly portraits of some of the half-civilized tribes of the Woodlands, he concentrated mainly on the wild tribes of the Great Plains. It can be said that the Indians of the Plains were often, if not constantly, his favorites. that the Upper Missouri tribes were "the finest specimens of the Indians of the continent... in a state of utter rudeness and savagery, and therefore picturesque and beautiful beyond description". The Crows were "beautiful and well-built people by the standards of any part of the world". Assiniboine - "beautiful and proud race". "The Sioux look just as beautiful" and almost the same words are used to describe the Cheyenne. He devoted several chapters of the book to Four Bears, the second Mandan chief, whom he named "the most extraordinary man living today among Pristine Nature".

Prince Maximilian's Reise in das Innere Nord Amerika in der Jahren 1832 bis 1834, first published at Koblenz (1839-41), was a more restrained scholarly account of the Indians of the Upper Missouri. However, within a few years it was reissued in Paris and London, and demand for it exceeded supply. It owes much of its popularity to the excellent reproductions of Karl Bodmer's incomparable field sketches of the Plains Indians, which appeared in the accompanying Atlas.

The works of Catlin and Maximilian-Bodmer, which appeared almost simultaneously, influenced external image Indians, which developed in the middle of the 19th century, in two directions. First, the example of these explorers encouraged other artists to travel to the West and paint Plains Indians in the field. Among such artists, the most famous are the American John Meeks Stanley, the American German Charles Wimar, the Canadian Paul Kane, and the Swede Rudolf Frederick Kertz.

Secondly, the most capable illustrators who had not been to the West began to draw, using the works of Catlin and Bodmer for reference. In 1843, two years after the first publication of Catlin's popular book, an enterprising Philadelphia publisher offered Scenes of Indian Life: A Series of Original Drawings Depicting Events in the Life of an Indian Chief, Drawn and Carved in Stone by Felix O. S. Darley. The work depicted episodes from the life of a fictional Sioux chief. The artist was then a completely unknown “local guy”, 20 years old; but he possessed remarkable draftsmanship. Darley became a prominent book and magazine illustrator. Although most of his illustrations do not depict Indians, he did depict buffalo hunts and other aspects of life among the Plains Indians on several occasions. He produced the cover and illustrated front page for the first edition of The Road to California and Oregon by Francis Parkman. At the end of his life, he made a color lithograph, “Return from the Hunt,” characterized by false realism, which, with complete ignorance of the subject, can only be achieved by a very skilled artist. In the foreground there is a birch bark canoe, in the middle - a tipi, a village, in the background - high mountains. Darley seems to have compressed into a single scene the geography and culture that characterized the entire region from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains.

Darley was closer to the truth when he followed Catlin and Bodmer more closely. Some of his illustrations for books are honestly accompanied by the note “After Kathleen.”

Some of the most popular prints by Carrier and Ives (1850s-60s) were Western scenes lithographed from highly realistic drawings made jointly by the German-born Louis Maurer and the English-born Arthur Fitzwilliam Teit. Neither of them had personally seen the Plains Indians. Maurer admitted that they gained their knowledge of the Indians by looking at reproductions of the works of Bodmer and Catlin in the Estor Library in New York.

Finally, Kathleen and Bodmer greatly influenced those lesser, cheaply paid artists who illustrated many popular books about Indians, as well as school textbooks; they began to appear a few years after the publication of the works of Catlin and Bodmer. One can see the degeneration of realism in the illustrations of the copies of these once popular books now housed in the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress.

In the 1840-50s. A prolific creator of popular books was Samuel Griswold Goodrich, who usually used the pen name "Peter Parley." In 1856 he claimed to have written 170 books total circulation in several million copies. By 1844, Goodrich had discovered Catlin when he published History of the Indians of the North and South America"; he quoted Catlin in the text and copied the "Four Bears" in one of the illustrations. Goodrich's book Manners, Customs and Antiquities of the Indians of North America, published two years later, borrowed all of its 35 illustrations of Indians from Catlin. Twenty-eight of them represented the Plains Indians. Finally, in Goodrich's A Pictorial History of the United States for Children, first published in 1860 and adopted five years later as a textbook for the public schools of Maryland, the Indians of New England, Virginia, and Roanoke Island are depicted living in tipis and wearing flowing ones. Plains-style headdresses, and 17th-century Virginia Indians are shown wrapped in painted buffalo robes and performing a buffalo dance in front of their tipis.

Impressionable young readers of popular Indian war histories published in the 1850s also saw common features of Plains culture in the Woodland tribes. In John Frost's The Indian Wars of the United States from the Earliest Period to the Present Day, mounted buffalo hunting is depicted in the chapter on the French and Indian Wars, Catlin's mounted Crow warrior is depicted in the chapter on the War of 1812, and Catlin's portrait of Eagle Ribs, a Blackfeet warrior - in the chapter on the war with the screams.

Catlin's and Bodmer's depictions of the Plains Indians were further developed in William W. Moore's The Indian Wars of the United States from Discovery to the Present Time. In this book, the Four Bears became the Pontiac, the Crow mounted warrior became the Creek warrior, and the Mandan ceremony became the Seminole village. Bodmer's well-identified portraits of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Sioux leaders became "Saturiowa," a 16th-century Florida chief and two leaders of the Indian Wars of colonial New England.

In 1856, the first illustrated edition of “The Song of Hiawatha” by G. Longfellow was published in England. John Gilbert, his illustrator, did not copy Catlin meticulously, but was largely based on him and presented the heroes of the poem of the ancient Ojibway of Lake Superior as typical Indians of the Upper Missouri. For example, his portrait of "Po-pok-kiwisa" is only a slightly different version of Catlin's Mandan hero, "The Four Bears."

The appearance of such Woodland Indians in Plains Indian garb did not stop there. John Meeks Stanley knew the Plains tribes well, however, when he tried to paint Young Uncas (a 17th-century Mohegan) and The Trial of the Red Jacket (Seneca), he dressed them in the costumes of the tribes of the western steppes. And when Karl Bodmer, along with the French artist Jean F. Millet, created a series of realistic but richly poetic scenes of frontier warfare in the Ohio Valley during the Revolutionary War, it is quite understandable that the images depicted were Plains Indians in headdresses.

In 1860, a new means of capturing the imagination of American boys with the image of an Indian warrior appeared. The number and circulation of cheap novels increased. A favorite theme of this sensational literature was the Indian War on the Western Plains, during which the wild Comanche, Kiowa, Blackfeet, or Sioux were "turned to the dust" during the dangerous adventures of the hero. Bunches of these cheap books were sent to the soldiers' camps or to the fields during Civil War and the reading of them enabled the youths in the gray or blue uniform to forget, at least for a time, their own misfortunes and sufferings.

The threat of the Plains Indian Wars became very real when, after the Civil War, settlers, prospectors, stagecoaches, and telegraph lines streamed across the Plains, and the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche began to defend their hunting lands from this invasion. Newspaper and magazine reporters were sent to the West to report on the results of the Indian wars. Theodore R. Davis, artist and reporter for Harper's Weekly, was traveling on the stagecoach Butterfield Overland Dispatch, which was attacked by the Cheyenne on November 24, 1865 (near Smoky Hills Spring Station). bright picture experiences from his own real life, published on April 21, 1866, became the prototype for one of the most enduring symbols of the Wild West - the Indian attack on the stagecoach.

In an effort to inform the civilized world of the nature and progress of the wars with the Plains Indians, illustrated magazines sent reporters and cartoonists into the field depicting Indian life, treaty councils, and all the events of the rapidly changing military situation that they witnessed or learned about from participants in these events. In 1867, T. Davis covered General Hancock's campaign against the hostile Cheyenne, Sioux and Kiowa in Kansas for Harper's Weekle. J. Taylor sketched the Medicine Lodge Treaty, concluded the same year, for the Illustrated Weekly Newspaper Frank Leslie." Artists and reporters came from as far away as Germany, and our wars with the West Indians were reflected in Canadian and English magazines such as the Canadian Illustrated News and the London Illustrated News.

Desperately resisting the US Army, the Plains Indians demonstrated their courage and martial skill again and again. On June 26, 1876, at the Little Big Horn, they destroyed Custer's detachment, inflicting the most severe defeat on the US Army in its long history. Many artists, based mainly on their own imagination, have tried to depict this dramatic action. One artistic reconstruction of the final stage of the battle, lithograph by Otto Becker" Last Stand Custer", based on the painting by Cassilly Adams, became one of the most famous American paintings. More than 150 thousand copies of this large lithograph were distributed (copied by Anheuser-Buch in 1896). They gave millions of bar patrons across the country something to talk about.

Four years before his death, George Armstrong Custer serialized “My Life on the Plains” in Galaxy, a respectable middle-class magazine, in which he admired the “fearless hunter, peerless horseman and warrior of the Plains.” Many army officers who fought against these Indians expressed similar opinions, which were disseminated in best-selling books, some of which were richly illustrated with reproductions of drawings and photographs, including portraits of many of the leading chiefs and warriors of the hostile Indians - Red Cloud, Satanta, Gallus, Sitting Bull and others. The military exploits of these leaders became better known to 19th-century readers than those of forest heroes such as King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola, and Black Hawk.

July 20, 1881 Sitting Bull, the last of the prominent leaders of the Plains Indian Wars, returned from Canada and surrendered his rifle to U.S. authorities. But within the next 2 years, William F. Cody, a Pony Express rider, scout, Indian fighter and hero of hundreds of pulp novels, who received the nickname "Buffalo Bill" for his hunting skills, organized a performance on the theme of the dying life of the Old West, which was so realistic, that no one who saw him has forgotten him. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show opened in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 17, 1883. It lasted for more than 3 decades and performed in front of wide-eyed audiences in the United States, Canada, England and Europe. In 1885 Sitting Bull himself traveled with the show. It always included a series of performances with real Plains Indians - Pawnee, Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho - hunting a small herd of buffalo, dancing war dances, staging horse races, and attacking a settler's cabin or a train crossing the Plains. The culmination of each performance was the Indian attack on the Deadwood stagecoach, the passengers were rescued by Buffalo Bill himself and his dashing cowboy riders. This scene was commonly depicted on the cover of the program and on posters promoting the show.

In 1877 The show was a hit at the American Exhibition during England's celebration of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, performed in front of a packed stand of 40,000 spectators in a large arena. April 16, 1887 The London Illustrated News tried to explain it: "Wonderful show, "Wild West" caused a sensation in America, and this is easy to explain. After all, this is not a circus, and not at all a performance in the theatrical sense, but an accurate depiction of everyday scenes of frontier life, experienced and portrayed by the people of the Wild West company."

Except in Spain, where no street performance could compete with bullfighting, Buffalo Bill's show received unrivaled recognition throughout the continent. During a seven-month stop at the Paris Exhibition (1899) it attracted many famous artists. The famous French animal painter Rose Boneyu depicted the Indians participating in the show chasing bison. Moreover, the Indians inspired Cyrus Dallin, an American sculptor then studying in Paris, to create the first series of heroic statues depicting the Plains Indians. The Peace Sign, completed just in time to win a medal at the 1890 Paris Salon, now stands in Lincoln Park, Chicago. The second work, "Shaman" (1899) is located in Feemount Park, Philadelphia. The famous sculptor Lorado Taft considered her "greatest achievement" Dallina and "one of the most remarkable and significant fruits of American sculpture". In "Address to the Great Spirit," winner of the gold medal at the 1909 Paris Salon, an Indian sits on horseback in front of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. And the fourth work, "Scout", can be seen on a hill in Kansas City. Taft named realistic Dallin horse Indians "one of the most interesting public monuments in the country".

The phenomenal success of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show inspired others to organize similar shows, which, along with small Indian medicine shows, traveled throughout the United States and Canada in the early years of this century, providing employment to many Indians who were not members of the Plains tribes. These shows played a role in the spread of such features of the Plains culture as the flowing feather headdress, tipi, and war dances of the Plains tribes among the Indians who lived at a considerable distance from them. Already in the 1890s, a Cheyenne traveling with a medicine show introduced the “military headdress” among the Indians of Cape Breton Island. Through contact with Native American exhibitors at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo (1901), the Senecas of New York State replaced their traditional feathered crown with a Plains-type headdress and learned to ride and dance like the Plains Indians in order to obtain work. on popular Indian shows of this period. Carl Standing Deer, a professional circus Indian, introduced the Plains Indian headdress among his people, the Cherokee of North Carolina (fall 1911).

The adoption of the typical Plains Indian costume, teepee, and several other cultural characteristics as standard show equipment by Indians from other cultural areas is evident from the study of 20th-century photographs. My collection of photographs, postcards, and newspaper illustrations dating back to the turn of the century includes images of Maine Penobscots (both women and men) wearing typical Plains clothing, dancing in front of their tipis at a festival in Bangor; the Yuma brass community of Arizona, each member of which wears a full Plains Indian costume; dancing Zia Pueblos of New Mexico in flowing feather headdresses; Oregon Cayuses posing in typical Plains costume in front of a tipi; and a Native American youth standing in front of a tipi in a Cherokee settlement, attracting tourists and luring them into a curios store.

In 1958 I spoke with a Mattaponi Indian on the Virginia coast about a beautiful Sioux-type feathered headdress he wore when greeting visitors to the small Indian museum located on his reservation. He was proud that he made it himself, even embroidering the headband. With the simple and irrefutable logic often found in Indian commentary on American culture, he explained: "Your women copy their hats from Parisian ones because they like them. We Indians also use the styles of other tribes because we like them.".

The tendency to standardize Indian costume, based on the designs of the Plains Indians, was reflected in the art of some talented Tao artists from New Mexico, for whom the sensual interpretation of "Indianness" was more important than the authenticity of tribal affiliation. Likewise, this manifests itself in outstanding paintings dedicated to significant historical events colonial period of the East. The costumes of the Plains Indians are easily recognizable in Robert Reid's Boston Tea Party fresco (State House, Boston) or William Penn's Indian Treaty in the Congress House in Harrisburg, both of which were created in the first quarter of this century. And it probably comes as no surprise to see 19th-century Indians sitting at the feast depicted in Jenny Brownscombe's painting "The First Thanksgiving," hanging in Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth, Massachusetts.

All American coins that depict Indians are closely associated with the Plains Indians. Both the Indian Head penny, issued in 1856, and the gold ten dollar note, prepared by Auguste St. Gaudens for issue in 1907, represent artistic concepts of Divine Liberty in a feathered headdress. Several Indians claim that they were the models of the five Indian heads on the famous "buffalo nickel." But its creator, James Eli Fraser, in a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, dated June 10, 1931, stated: “I used three heads and remember two people, one was Iron Tail, the best Indian type I know, the other was Two Moons, but I don’t remember the name of the third.

It is noteworthy that the two models the author remembers were Plains Indians. Two Moons, a Cheyenne leader, helped sweep Custer's force off the Little Big Horn. Iron Tail, who had pronounced facial features, led the Sioux attack on the Deadwood stagecoach in the Buffalo Bill show. For 25 years after the coin's introduction in 1913—when a nickel could buy you a ride on the New York subway, a cigar, or an ice cream cone—the impressive Indian head, along with the buffalo depicted on the opposite side of the coin, reminded Americans of the Plains Indians.

The only continuously issued American stamp bearing the portrait of an Indian is the 14-cent stamp, first issued on May 30, 1923. Titled "American Indian," it depicts Hollow Horn Bear, a handsome Sioux from the Rosebud Reservation, South Dakota, who died in Washington after participating in the parade following the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson.

In a solemn ceremony marking the funeral of the Unknown Soldier of World War I, a special person was chosen to perform the ceremonial placement of a feather headdress on his helmet - as a gift from all the American Indians to the Unknown Soldier who gave his life for their country. This man was Many Feats, an elderly, stately war chief of the Crows of Montana. This occurred 100 years, down to a coincidence of months, after the young Pawnian hero, Petalesharro, first appeared in the capital, adorned with a picturesque flowing headdress of feathers. Over the past century, the Plains Indian war headdress has become a universally recognized symbol of the North American Indian.

J. Ewers
Translation by Shchetko A.,
Ewers J.C., Indian life on the Upper Missouri. Norman, 1968, p. 187-203.