Frank A. Rinehart Photograph of Sioux Indian “Sleeping Bear” [SOLD]

Frank A. Rinehart, a commercial photographer in Omaha, Nebraska, was commissioned to photograph the 1898 Indian Congress, part of the Trans-Mississippi International Exposition. More than five hundred Native Americans from thirty-five tribes attended the conference, providing the gifted photographer and artist an opportunity to create a stunning visual document of Native American life and culture at the dawn of the 20th century.

The Indian Congress occurred from August 4 to October 31, 1898 in Omaha, Nebraska, in conjunction with the Trans-Mississippi International Exposition. Occurring within a decade of the end of the Indian Wars, the Indian Congress was the largest gathering of American Indian tribes of its kind to that date. Over 500 members of 35 different tribes attended, including the Apache chief Geronimo, who was being held at Fort Sill as a United States prisoner of war. The tribes in attendance included the Apache, Arapaho,Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Chippewa, Crow, Flathead, Fox, Iowa, Kiowa, Omaha, Otoe, Ponca, Pottawatomie, Sauk and Fox, Lakota, Southern Arapaho, Tonkawa, Wichita, and the Winnebago, as well as Santa Clara Pueblo.

Frank A. Rinehart's photographs of the Indian Congress participants are regarded as one of the best photographic documentations of American Indian leaders around the start of the 20th century.

Sleeping Bear –Sioux

In researching information about Sleeping Bear I found the following information about the image which had been superimposed on a piece of Rookwood Pottery from the book Rookwood and the American Indian: Masterpieces of American Art Pottery from the James J. Gardner Collection. (Ohio University Press, 2007). The description of a pitcher bearing Sleeping Bear’s image says:

The hair pipe neck ornament, with the pipes strung vertically around the neck, tells us that Sleeping Bear may be a woman. Plains men did not usually wear this configuration of hair pipes; they wore breastplates with hair pipes strung horizontally across the chest. However it is also unusual to see an Indian woman wearing a neck scarf and an eagle feather war bonnet. Another photo taken by Rinehart at the Exposition, that of Susie Shot in the Eye, also portrays a woman in an eagle-feather war bonnet.  The book Face of Courage, (1972) features some of Rinehart’s images, both men and women wearing hair pipes strung in a variety of ways. Indians wore their hair pipes as hair ornaments, ear pendants, close fitting chokers and bandoliers.  Men wore breastplates and women wore simple or complex neck ornaments.

The original photograph is stamped in lower left: Copyright 1899, F. A. Rinehart, Omaha.  In lower center is written Sleeping Bear—Sioux and in lower right No. 876. The photograph is matted with a single cream-colored acid-free mat and framed in a beautiful burl wood frame with UV glass.

Condition: original condition

Provenance: from the collection of a gentleman from Washington