INDIAN SWORDS
119
FIG. 31 (far left):
Home of Chief Red
Cloud, by Clarence Grant
Morledge.
Pine Ridge Agency, South
Dakota, 1890.
See fi g. 1 for details.
FIG. 32 (left):
Chief Red Cloud’s
bedroom, by Clarence
Grant Morledge.
Pine Ridge Agency, South
Dakota, 1891.
From a glass plate negative. 13 x
21 cm.
Morledge negative number
1540/143.
Ex Louise Stegner, Omaha, Nebraska,
1951.
Collection of the Denver Public
Library, call number X-31433.
Another view of Red Cloud’s
bedroom at the Pine Ridge Agency,
taken after the massacre at
Wounded Knee. Compared to fi g. 1,
there are more U.S. fl ags hanging on
the wall as well as other objects seen
in the earlier photo. The katana is
nowhere to be seen.
FIG. 33 (right):
Home of Chief Red Cloud,
by William R. Cross.
Pine Ridge Agency, South
Dakota, c. 1891.
From a black-and-white copy
negative. 4 x 5”.
Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division, Washington,
D.C., call number LOT 12756.
Exterior view of Red Cloud’s frame
cabin at the Pine Ridge Agency with
Red Cloud, Pretty Owl, and another
woman standing in front. Note that
Pretty Owl appears to be wearing
the Navajo blanket seen in fi gure 1.
ing originally Red Cloud’s plank house, became
a tipi and likewise the original “old image,” the
Morledge photograph, became a painting. Combining
these elements with the foremost popular
painter of Indians, George Catlin, it is possible
that a new story arose. Hartley and Buttweiler
did try to verify the unsubstantiated references to
this alleged Catlin painting, but not being able to
locate that image, they passed on to readers the
information just as they had it. Hartley and Buttweiler’s
unpaginated publication, produced by a
Japanese sword-collecting club in California, contains
valuable historical and technical information
not available elsewhere, and it also suggests many
leads for further research. If indeed a Catlin painting
showing the interior of a Sioux lodge with a
Japanese sword hanging on one of the tipi poles
should ever be found, it would represent a major
artistic and historically important fi nd. So we, the
authors of this speculative explanation for its rumored
existence, will unanimously be delighted if
our speculation is proven incorrect.
CONCLUSIONS ON
DOG CHILD’S KATANA
Similar issues of provenance, use, and later
whereabouts surround the only other known
case of a Japanese samurai sword owned by
a nineteenth-century Indian of the Northern
Plains, that of Dog Child, who was also known
as Winnipeg Jack (fi g. 2 and 35).
A proud and fi ercely independent Native nation
of buffalo hunters, like other tribes of the
great Northern Plains in the historic period, the
Blackfoot greatly benefi ted from the acquisition
of horses and guns, developing a powerful and
elaborate military complex.21 And, like other
American Indians, the historic Blackfoot also
valued the shining and sharp Euro-American
“long knives,” both as weapons and as status
symbols (fi g. 35).22
As in the Red Cloud case, nothing is known
of the katana’s exact provenance or the circumstances
that brought the sword into the hands
of a Siksika Indian. The intriguing photograph
of the Blackfoot holding an unsheathed katana
was fi rst discussed in print by Daryl W. Drew in
a short article titled “Dog Child and the Samurai
Sword” (Drew 1980).23 The Dog Child katana
was revisited some years after Drew’s article by
Peter Bleed, who postulated that, perhaps, the
Japanese sword in Winnipeg Jack’s hand was a
gift from English-born missionary Harry William
Gibbon Stocken and his wife, who had both
spent time in Japan.24 Bleed acknowledged that
“there is no proof, but it is tempting to speculate
whether either the Reverend Stocken or his wife
could have brought Dog Child’s sword to the
New World” (Bleed 1987:115). Unfortunately,
Stocken’s own published autobiography (Stocken
1976) recalling his work among the Sarcee from
1885 to 1892 (with his fi rst wife), and among the
Blackfoot from 1895 to 1906 (with his second
wife), and then alone until his retirement in 1923
makes no mention of the samurai sword, Dog
Child, or Winnipeg Jack. One of the authors of
this paper, Cesare Marino, has also made extensive
inquiries in Canada among descendants of
Dog Child, but neither the sword nor any further
information about its provenance was located
among them.
We can conclude from this reassessment of
these two Japanese swords on the Northern
Great Plains of the 1890s that they appear to
have come there from unrelated sources. Furthermore,
both these katana apparently had become
well integrated into an indigenous interpretive
framework for a prized form of externally produced—
but by then fully “indigenized”—item of
American Indian material heritage: the sword.
The authors thank Jonathan Fogel at Tribal Art for his
professional editorial assistance and help. They also
thank former Smithsonian archivist Paula Fleming
and gratefully acknowledge the support of the
Smithsonian’s Mary E. Maxwell Fund. Dr. Pontsioen’s
research was supported by a Japan Foundation Longterm
Japanese Studies Fellowship.