A Note on Stieffel's Indians

In seven of his nine paintings Stieffel has executed his Indian subjects in colorful detail and with some care. Although he apparently did not know his subjects well enough to distinguish them by tribe, he does depict them in typical dress of the period. Many of them are wearing German silver ornaments of various designs about their necks, on strips of flannel attached to their hair pigtail-like, or as arm bands. At least four are wearing hair-pipe breast plates, a fact of interest to ethnologists,[40] and several wear the comical, Puritan style, tall black hats issued as annuity goods. The red and blue robes are of trades-good flannel, as probably are the leggings. Two wear buffalo robes with the skin side out and the hair side rolled over at the shoulder.[41] Two, in the Fort Keogh picture (fig. 8) and the Yellowstone River landscape (fig. 10), wear robes of the familiar, colorfully striped Hudson Bay blanketing material. Arms are conventional—bows, quivered arrows, and pipe tomahawks, with a scattering of firearms. In the Yellowstone River landscape one discrepancy should be pointed out—the canoe; the Northern Plains Indians seldom used water transport, and then generally only in the form of rafts.