Collecting Indian Portraits: Governor Kirkwood, William Henry Jackson, and the Nineteenth-Century Photographic Album

The past few decades have brought increased scholarly attention to issues surrounding the photography of the nineteenth-century Indian population.¹ So, too, the academic eye has turned toward the methods by which these images were collected. For instance, Gerald Vizenor observed that “Cultural pageantry, dioramas, and museum presentations pictured the fugitive Indian in the archives of dominance.”² Many methods of collecting, housing, and displaying images exist, but perhaps one of the most intriguing types is the nineteenth-century photo album.

The University of Iowa Libraries’ Special Collection Department has such an artifact—one of a two-volume set that originally had matching album bindings containing images of Native American portraits and locales. These impressively large volumes (approximately 17 ¾ × 24 inches), presumably made between 1877 and 1885, contained several hundred photographs taken between ca. 1858 and 1885 (Figs. 1, 2).³ While they resemble typical ledger books, they were almost certainly constructed to be scrapbooks because of the heavyweight paper and the guarding in the binding that would have made the albums lie flat when filled with inserted materials. While William Henry Jackson, John K. Hillers, and more recently Zeno Shindler are credited as the main photographers of the collection, the images come from a variety of sources. The albums were initially the property of Jane and Samuel J. Kirkwood, Iowa governor (1860–64, 1876–77), US senator (1866–67, 1877–81), and secretary of the interior (1881–82). A dedicatory inscription on a frontispiece suggests Mrs. Jane Clark Kirkwood (1821–1921) gave the albums to Josiah Little Pickard (1824–1914, president of the University of Iowa from 1878 to 1887 and of the State Historical Society of Iowa from 1881 to 1900), who in turn gave them to

Fig. 1.

Kirkwood album. William Henry Jackson Photographs, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.

Fig. 2.

Kirkwood album clasps. William Henry Jackson Photographs, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.

the university in the early 1900s. In the 1990s, the deteriorating albums were disassembled and preserved so the photographs could be better stored and more easily accessed.

The vast majority of the images are 5 × 7 ¼ inches with a few toward the end of volume 2 that measure 17 × 19 inches. Volume 1 of the Kirkwood albums contained six hundred photographs divided by language groups and then tribes within those group according to William Henry Jackson’s United States Geological Survey catalog of photographs.⁴ Language groups in the first volume correspond to those titled “Algonkins,” “Athabascas,” “Dakotas,” “Pawnees,” and “Shoshones” in Jackson’s catalog. Volume 2 contained 355 photographs that correspond to Jackson’s headings “Sahaptins,” “Kalmaths,” “Pimas,” “Muskogees,” and other “Independent and unclassified tribes,” which included the Arapahoe, Caddo, Cherokee, pueblo groups, and others. Furthermore, printed text from the Jackson catalog provided the pasted-in captions for the photographs in the albums. In fact, the Kirkwood albums mimic Jackson’s catalog almost identically, with the most notable exception of 145 images that are included at the end of volume 2.

Both the albums and the photographs they contain are rich sources of information about late nineteenth-century America in general and about Euro-American attitudes toward the Native American population and territory of the West. They point specifically to the immense public interest and great consumer demand for Native American imagery, widely distributed as stereo views, cartes de visite, postcards, cabinet cards, and sometimes as large-format photographs. What is more, the albums are also relics of the era’s rage for collecting. Despite the wide circulation of the photographic prints and the many forms of scrapbooks and albums that existed, however, the Iowa collection is unusual; the large volumes contained tipped-in photographs and pasted-in captions, and indicate a level of interest and effort that went beyond homemade scrapbooks yet didn’t quite reach the level of a professional publication.

The photographs certainly record superficial facts about...