Ledger Narratives: The Plains Indian Drawings of the Lansburgh Collection at Dartmouth College ed. by Colin Calloway (review)

In 2010 Joyce M. Szabo, author of three major books on ledger art, was invited to direct a series of weekly seminars at Dartmouth's Hood Museum, working with more than 140 ledger drawings in their Lansburgh Collection. This large collection provided an ideal opportunity for five young scholars to join with Szabo in reframing and expanding our knowledge of the picture-narratives in ledger art. Two years later Dartmouth's Colin Calloway, author of One Vast Winter Count, edited the product of these seminars in Ledger Narratives: The Plains Indian Drawings of the Lansburgh Collection at Dartmouth College, where he introduces us to the rich history of ledger art as well as exemplary drawings in the Lansburgh Collection.

Joyce Szabo follows with her chapter, "Battles, Courting, and Changing Lives: The Mark Lansburgh Collection." She explains that the unique and important Mark Lansburgh Collection was the result of many years of collecting and lecturing about medieval art—particularly illuminated manuscripts. Then she traces the evolution of warriors drawing an individual's brave deeds on hide to picturing them in more detail in books of paper, particularly those used by accountants. During the reservation period, when men could no longer play their traditional roles, images of war deeds were replaced by scenes of hunting and courtship. And in the transitional period between 1875 and 1878 drawings by warriors imprisoned in Fort Marion formed a pictorial record of their journey from Fort Sill in Indian Territory to St. Augustine and of their lives in prison. During each of these periods, Szabo points out, the drawings had a different meaning or function. In the pre-reservation period they established a warrior's status in his warrior society and tribe. At Fort Marion they not only established his status in prison, but they also served as a means of communicating with prisoners from five different tribes and the tourists in St. Augustine. And on the reservations they served as a way of preserving their history of daily life. Szabo finally brings both her vast knowledge and analytic power to bear on ten representative drawings.

In "Striving for Recognition," Michael Paul Jordan expands on the role of ledger drawings in establishing and maintaining social status during the reservation period. He examines seventeen drawings of coups, which continued to be recited in meetings of warrior societies on the southern plains, even during the reservation period. And he shows that status was achieved not only by bravery but also by wealth and access to powerful spiritual forces. Wealth is reflected in the many ledgers where warriors' elaborate regalia and weapons are drawn in detail. For example, in the "Old White Woman's Ledger," a Cheyenne artist portrays himself literally surrounded by his possessions—his horse with its silver-decorated bridle, buckskin leggings, breastplate, beaded blanket strip, eagle-feather fan, and a bonnet. And access to spiritual forces is reflected in three drawings of warriors holding a shield and emerging unscathed from a shower of bullets or arrows. It is also reflected in two drawings of a Sun Dance ceremony, a quest for spiritual power. Two facing pages picture a Sun Dance camp and a close-up of the crowd bearing witness to a warrior with his body pierced and bleeding as he dances away from the Sun Dance pole.

Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote illuminates the role of intercultural connections in "Illustrating Encounters: Trade, Travel, and Warfare in Southern Plains Ledger Drawing, 1875-1880." These connections resulted from warfare, trade, and intertribal visiting, which Tone-Pah-Hote explains in historic detail and substantiates through analysis. She begins with "Osage War Dance," by an unknown Kiowa artist, where the five dancers are identified not only by their dress and objects they carry, but by labels, which they learned to write at Fort Marion: Osage, Pawnee, and Kiowa. In another drawing the Cheyenne artist Chief Killer...