Three Ledger Drawings of Tom Bird & Katie Hard Robe [SOLD]

For thousands of years throughout the Great Plains, Indian artists left pictographs (paintings or drawings) and petroglyphs (carved pictures) on boulders and rock walls. Plains Indian warriors drew and painted various images on buffalo robes, teepees, and paper. Warrior art was a unique combination of art, communication tool, and record to pass down to future generations.

Pictures were based upon standard styles taught to young males for simplicity and better understanding by many tribes. Rather than copy what they saw, these artists captured what was important to the story by drawing the main elements, one example being an image of a warrior on his horse.

Warrior-artists found ledger books easy to obtain and carry with them during and after the Indian Wars of the 1870s when tribes were relocated to reservations. Paper was a better drawing material and new items such as colored pencils and watercolors were quickly accepted by the artists.  Kansas Historical Society website

The three pages of ledger art are labeled Tom Bird / Katie Hard Robe (On far left); Untitled (center); and Tom Bird / Imya (far right).  There is a ledger drawing of Tom Bird and Katie Hard Robe in the Eugene and Clara Thaw Collection of American Indian Art that is dated 1901 by Robert Ridge Walker (1860-1965) of the Cheyenne Nation.

Condition: very good condition

Provenance: From the estate of a Santa Fe resident who had purchased it from Morning Star Gallery

Recommended Reading: Colin G. Calloway, Editor, Ledger Narratives, The Plains Indian Drawings of the Lansburgh Collection at Dartmouth College, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman (published in cooperation with the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire), 2012