Comanches in the New West, 1895-1908: Historic Photographs (review)

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Plains Indians were wards of a government determined to stamp out all vestiges of Indianness. With Indians facing changes both overt and subtle, many Americans came to see them as a "vanishing race." Photographers now fanned out to capture their images before the last Indian disappeared. Alice Snearly and Lon Kelley of Henrietta, Texas, turned their cameras toward their Indian neighbors in Oklahoma and caught the Comanches in transition between the old and the new.

Author Stanley Noyes, with the assistance of anthropologist Daniel J. Gelo, both of whom have written on the Comanche, discovered Snearly's and Kelley's cache of negatives. Here they provide a selection of thirty-two photographs, which, along with accompanying text for each photo, a good introduction on Comanche history, and a foreword by acclaimed author Larry McMurtry, offer a rare glimpse of a "blended" turn-of-the-century Comanche society.

These are great pictures! Snearly and Kelley managed to capture the Comanche as they were first trying to adapt to an American way of life. Younger Comanches now looked like cowboys, showing off ten-gallon hats and boots. An Indian policeman, badge and pistol in full view, stands proudly behind his seated wife, who is dressed in traditional attire. The photographs provide a good mix of people. Some men and women posed for the camera with leggings and blankets, while others appear in modern American clothing. Nevertheless, no matter what their garb or age, all men wore their hair in long braids reaching down past their shoulders.

Most of the photos here are "grip-and-grins" in which subjects are posed in front of a faded backdrop. There is Comanche chief Quanah Parker with two of his many wives. Ironically, Quanah's rival, Frank Moetah, a noted "traditionalist," wears earrings as well as a three-piece suit complete with watch fob and stickpin. There is prisoner-of-war Geronimo posing with his pistol but with an out-of-place Plains Indian war bonnet perched atop his head. My favorite shows a group of Comanches, cowboys, and soldiers watching in rapt fascination the demonstration of a kerosene lamp.

In all, it is a thin book but with powerful pictures of everyday Comanche life in which American adaptations coexist with Plains Indian characteristics.