The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 76, July 1972 - April, 1973 Page: 232

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

would have been of greater value had correspondence from the entire
Civil War period been included.
San Antonio College THOMAS M. SETTLES
American Indian Portraits: From the Wanamaker Expedition of 1gr3.
Edited by Charles R. Reynolds, Jr. (Brattleboro, Vt.: Stephen
Greene Press, 1971. Pp. 123. Notes. $12.50.)
American Indian Portraits is above all an album of portrait photo-
graphs and is presented as such. The brief introduction by Charles
R. Reynolds, Jr., tells the history of the glass plates from which these
prints were taken. That story had remained obscure from the time of
their making in 1913 until their rediscovery in 1965 in the files of the
American Museum of Natural History. Even the name of the pho-
tographer is uncertain, though he may have been Joseph Kossuth
Dixon, who led all three of the expeditions to the American Indians
financed by Rodman Wanamaker. The image is paramount, however.
The o20 plates represent Indian men and women of all ages, but the
collection concentrates on portraits of elderly Indian men. The sub-
jects pictured were from cultural groups spanning the country geo-
graphically. These faces were photographed at close range, so that
they fill the picture space with an intimacy so compelling that it at
times virtually presses beyond the frame. An extraordinary range of
character is recorded, from a few heads benign or humor-filled to the
far more frequent faces that-cragged by time, weather, and the real-
ized destruction of their entire way of life-flicker between pride, hurt,
and disdainful puzzlement. These photographs do not contain factual
information of life being lived; instead, they often project something
far more elusive that one can only call the soul of a people.

Southern Methodist University

232

JOHN LUNSFORD