Sometimes discovering a photograph in an archive leads to an avalanche of unexpected information worth knowing. This week’s offering began with the cyanotype print of Waiting in the Forest—Cheyenne by Edward S. Curtis, 1910 (above, center) from the Samuel J. Wagstaff Collection at The Getty Center. The Wagstaff collection was recently celebrated in an exhibition, The Thrill of the Chase, at the Getty. In a single decade, with the collaboration of his lover, Robert Mapplethorpe, Wagstaff assembled a collection that spans the history of photography, from neglected French photographers of the 1850s to modernists Man Ray and Edward Weston to late 20th-century photographers Larry Clark, Joel-Peter Witkin, and Peter Hujar.

The only information accompanying this cyanotype of the Curtis photograph reads, “Native American man wrapped from head to toe in white fabric, with only his eyes and nose visible, standing in a forest.” 

Left: Edward S. Curtis, Self-Portrait, 1899, courtesy Cardozo Gallery, Minneapolis.

In keeping with the thrill of the chase, I then searched the archive of the Amon Carter Museum, which owns a complete set of Edward S. Curtis’s 20-volume work, The North American Indian. There was a photogravure plate with the same image (above left), but with a slightly different cropping. The only information included was the title, and the date of the publication, 1915.

By now I was fixed on the idea of finding out more about the photograph, so the logical next step was to the Library of Congress. There was a black-and-white print made from a copy negative of the original photograph, uncropped (above right). My request for info about the picture was returned the same day by a librarian in the Prints and Photographs Department, who included a paragraph from The North American Indian that reads, "At dusk in the neighborhood of the large encampments young men, closely wrapped in non-committal blankets or white cotton sheets, may be seen gliding about the tipis or standing motionless in the shadow of the trees, each one alert for the opportunity to steal a meeting with his sweetheart."

The librarian also wrote that one of the leading experts on Cheyenne life and culture was George Grinnell, whose book,The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Lifeways should be available at the New York Public Library. The book indeed includes three pages on courtship rituals of the Cheyenne, which describes the people as being modest in their marriage customs, with courtship taking place in public under constant adult scrutiny. For this reason, young men would appear wrapped from head to toe in a blanket (not always white as seen here) so they could communicate with their future bride, enclosed together in a cocoon. He mentions that if a woman was particularly desirable, she could step outside of her tipi and find several men in blankets lined up to spend time with her. Then she would spend a few minutes talking under the blanket of each man before going on with her duties.

Grinnell also  wrote that the young men, wrapped in their blankets, would often seek out their sweethearts in the forest to escape the constant surveillance they had to endure in the village (as depicted in the Curtis photograph here), serenading them on carved wooden flutes that were part of the courtship ritual, not least because of their phallic connotation.

There are many Cheyenne ledger drawings of the blanket courtship ritual, which show young men and women surrounded by parents, grandparents, children, and animals while advancing their engagement, which often lasted for several years before the marriage.

Courting: 2 Men and 4 Women (in Blue, Black, Red, 2nd Phase Chief’s Blanket); Man on White-and-gray pinto Carries a Lance, courtesy Kansas State Historical Society/Plains Indian Ledger Art. Info

But one of the great takeaways of this episode of Archive Fever was learning something about George Bird Grinnell, without whom Edward S. Curtis would have not taken the North American Indians as his life-long subject. How they met is detailed on the Smithsonian Institution’s Edward S. Curtis website. The story of their remarkable association can be read on the Cardozo Gallery website, here and here. Christopher Cardozo is widely acknowledged as a leading authority on Edward S. Curtis. [more] CV19.FEAT.PHOTO

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