Inspired by Plains Indian Drawings: The Mystery of Lieutenant Adolphus von Luettwitz’s Drawings of the Plains Indian War

The Becker Collection of Civil War–era drawings contains approximately 650 eye-witness sketches of newsworthy events from the 1860s to the 1890s sent to Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in the hope that they would be published. The numerous artist-reporters in Leslie’s employ and a few freelance draftsmen, including soldiers, had differing drawing styles, but they all generally conformed to a detailed representational approach consistent with their wish to convey visual information. The exception was five drawings by 1st Lt. Adolphus von Luettwitz of the US Army Third Cavalry during the Plains Indian War. These drawings, created in a flattened, simplified, and almost cartoon-like style that contrasts with all the other reportorial images, present a mystery.¹ Why would von Luettwitz, a career military officer who had been in the army since 1862, make these drawings and send them to Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper to be published for all to see?²

The evidence uncovered to solve the mystery leads to the conclusion that von Luettwitz, with some bitter irony, adopted and adapted the form-language and the transgressive approach of Native artists to express his own frustrations with his military superiors and with the government whose decisions resulted in the suffering of so many people, including von Luettwitz himself. Ultimately, the revelation of the connections between the drawings made by a US soldier and by Native warrior artists leads to more nuanced characterizations of these artists—both European American and Native American—and perhaps to more meaningful dialogue among their modern-day descendants, and it concretizes the discourse on critical views of the Plains Indian War within the military and public arenas.

Deciphering von Luettwitz’s motives and message required investigating the context of the conflict between the Plains tribes and the US government, the specific events of Crook’s campaign, the attitudes of soldiers toward their commanding officers and toward their Native opponents, the purposes of Native ledger drawings and animal hide paintings, and the availability of these drawings and paintings to a soldier in the Third Cavalry during the Plains Indian War. The captions von Luettwitz provided on his drawings refer to “[General George] Crook’s Campaign” of 1876 against the northern Sioux and Cheyenne, but the commentary and drawing style seem to criticize and even satirize the US Army and government. Most significantly, the images, oriented horizontally on lined paper so that the lines run vertically, resemble most closely in style contemporary Native American ledger drawings (Fig. 1). Furthermore, their generally ovoid compositions of many small, flat stylized figures echo the format of paintings on animal hides made by warrior-artists of the same groups that the US Army was pursuing across the Northern Plains at that very time (Fig. 2). Unraveling the mystery of the von Luettwitz drawings began with the images themselves.

Fig 1.

Unknown artist, “Last Bull Captures a Horse” ca. 1870, graphite, colored pencil on lined paper, John Gregory Bourke Collection, United States Military Academy, West Point, New York.

Von Luettwitz’s Drawings and the Battle of Slim Buttes

The most complex of the five drawings reveals the ambiguity of von Luettwitz’s approach to depicting the US Army’s campaign against the Plains Indians. He drew a Native village of thirty tepees set against an irregular, generally oval, textured background outlined with a rough, zigzagging edge (Fig. 3). Diagonal lines that converge at their tops define the conical tepees. The lines are denser and cross-hatched to the right sides, suggesting volumes modeled in light and shade, in the European American style of representation, an approach that von Luettwitz would have seen in Prussia where he was born and where he graduated from the Artillery and Engineering School in Berlin.³ In contrast, he drew the figures of Native warriors, their families, and horses, scattered between the tepees, as flattened, stylized shapes in side view, with...