The Girl In The Middle: US History Revisited.

I came across this powerful commentary through a post on X but can’t remember the source. So I googled Martha Sandweiss and she is a professor of History at Princeton University whose interests include Western and Native American history. She wrote a book about the Native American woman in the photograph titled; The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West. It’s a moving account of one woman’s life in the brutal history of the creation of the United States.  I am assuming the text below might be an introduction to the book. Richard Mellor.

 

By Martha Sandweiss

 

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. Taken at Fort Laramie, in what is now Wyoming, 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 these men: General Alfred Howe Terry, General William S. Harney, General William Tecumseh Sherman, General John B. Sanborn, Colonel 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...

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 of 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.

Sophie’s life leads us into a sprawling Western world. Born in the Dakota Territory shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, she died on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, one of the very poorest parts of a Great Depression-riddled nation, in 1936. Her first husband, a white Civil War veteran, effectively kidnapped their five children after he fell in love with another woman. He married her and banished Sophie to the newly created Great Sioux Reservation.

Sophie was working as a laundress at a federal boarding school in Pine Ridge when federal troops massacred some 250 Native people at nearby Wounded Knee in 1890. She later married a mixed-race Lakota who gave up his career as a circus juggler to become a much-valued translator for some of the country’s leading anthropologists. With him, Sophie had another eight children, for a total of 13.

Sophie experienced domestic violence, observed the consequences of military violence, and saw firsthand the consequences of the political and legal violence that denied rights to people like her.

 

Indeed, she was born of violence. Thirteen years before the photograph was made, Harney, the general who stands with Sophie in the photograph, attacked a Lakota village at a place called Blue Water Creek in western Nebraska. His men wounded a young mother named Yellow Woman and used her infant for target practice. Then they rounded her up and marched her to Fort Laramie. 

At the same time, Harney ordered all the traders in the area into the fort. There, Yellow Woman met the trader Magloire Alexis Mousseau, who later went by the name M.A. They married, became Sophie’s parents and stayed married for over half a century. The general was an accidental matchmaker.

When Sophie’s parents ushered her into Gardner’s photograph, they saw two men they knew: Harney, whom they’d met more than a decade earlier, and Sanborn, whom they’d just hired as their attorney. Sophie and her family had their place in a West that was both a big place and a small world.

Neither the photographer nor government officials saw fit to record Sophie’s name 157 years ago. But Sophie’s name transforms a banal photograph into a picture that leads us into a world of families and the complicated racial politics of the 19th-century West. Her story transforms a picture ostensibly about men negotiating a peace treaty into a meditation on the endemic violence that shaped so many American lives. When we know who Sophie is, the photograph becomes a different kind of evidence altogether.