![]() Another source of income for them was the creation of drawings as souvenirs for the burgeoning tourist trade that was making the area around Jacksonville and St. ![]() They also worked at various jobs that allowed them to earn money, in addition to acquiring new skills. During their three-year captivity, the prisoners were taught to read and write. He accompanied them from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Fort Marion, a journey that took twenty-four days. Although there were a few noted leaders among the prisoners, the majority were young men, who, in the traditional life-style of the Plains, would have been just beginning their careers as warriors.Ĭaptain Richard Henry Pratt was the army officer charged with the care of the prisoners of war. Augustine, Florida, where they were to remain prisoners of war for three years until 1878. “Matches on the Warpath”Īfter their defeat in 1875, in order to insure the compliance of the native population on the reservations, seventy-two prisoners were selected to be taken to Fort Marion in St. On the Southern Plains in Texas and Oklahoma, this struggle culminated in the Red River War (also called the Buffalo War, 1874-1875), a last and desperate attempt by the Arapaho, Southern Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa, with their force of seven hundred warriors, to resist the end of their nomadic existence. government for control of the west was played out. It was in the twenty-five years between 18 (Wounded Knee) - which saw the opening of the transcontinental railroads, decimation of the bison herds, and confinement of nomadic hunters/warriors to reservations - that the final struggle between Native Americans and the U.S. With the end of the Civil War in 1865, the United States was able to commit a large number of well-trained and battle-seasoned troops, along with the most technologically advanced weaponry, to the implementation of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. It contains within it the histories of the demise of traditional high Plains culture, the change of an art tradition, the beginnings of a new tourist culture, the genesis of a Native American educational enterprise: a multiplicity of histories, both native and non-native, linked and intertwined. Each reflects the society, the time and the place of its creation, encoding within itself multiple histories. While incarcerated, most of the prisoners created drawings (generically known as “ledger drawings”), as generations of warriors on the Plains had done before them, with some traditional scenes of battles and raids, but here tempered with quieter imagery of camp life and hunting.Įach work of art, every piece of material culture, is a historic document, no less important because it is visual rather than written. Matches was part of a group of seventy-two Native Americans who had been brought as prisoners of war to Fort Marion. The book was purchased from Matches, a young Southern Cheyenne man at Fort Marion in St. In 1891, a small sketchbook with thirty-one drawings entered the collection of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (then the Free Museum of Science and Art). Fig.1 Portrait of Carl Matches, Student in School Uniform 1879. ![]()
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