I was thinking “Wow” as I flipped through each of the stereoview cards of Native American photos from the 1870s. The cards showed the country’s native people making blankets, sitting with family, posing alone and standing proudly as warriors in a land that they had once been all theirs.
On the front left of each card were the dates of four expeditions (1871-1874); on the right, the name of the man leading them: 1st Lieut. Geo. M. Wheeler, Corps of Engineers Commanding.
The inscription and eagle seal on the back were even more intriguing: “War Department Corps of Engineers, U.S.A. Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian. T. O’Sullivan, Photo.” The group of cards from 1872 were done by photographer William Bell. Click on photo below for full view.
None of this was familiar to me, but I knew that what I had in my hand was historical. I recognized the stereoview or stereographic cards because I had bought a set of cards at auction with images of African Americans in the South.
This set contained four cards from 1871, nine cards from 1872, 13 cards from 1873 and 16 cards from 1874. The lot also included 12 non-photographic cards from a series called “World Tours of Original Views” that included scenes from the United States, Russia and Japan.
Stereoview cards were made to be viewed on a stereoscope, a long-handled apparatus with a face plate on the end that resembled a pair of binoculars. The cards were slipped between wires in front of thick glass and viewed in 3-D.
Stereoscopes (or stereo viewers) and their cards were a big hit during the 19th and early 20th century. They allowed people to see things and places they’d never see in their own country and around the world. They became the rage in Great Britain in the mid-1800s when Queen Victoria took a liking to them. And they became popular around the same time in this country after Oliver Wendell Holmes and Joseph L. Bates came up with their own version of the stereoscope.
At auction, this was the first time I’d seen a group of cards on Native Americans peoples, including the Navajo, Zuni, Ute, Apache and Mojave. This was exciting because I had in my hand black and white photos of them from the late 19th century.
They showed Native Americans weaving blankets, a Navajo warrior and his mother, men posing in front of their pueblos, the land they lived on (Black Canon, Grand Canon, Marble Canon with its gray limestone and red sandstone), a couple “lately wedded,” the corralling of native people on farms (“The Navajo were a warlike tribe until subdued by U.S. Troops in 1859-60. Many of them now have fine flocks, and herds of horses, sheep and goats,” noted the back of that card).
There was one card of two Mojave warriors – tall, erect, their bodies a picture of perfection: “Physically, they are the finest specimens in all the west, many of the males attaining to the height of 6 feet.” Another was a photo of a naked white man – likely one of the survey team members – headed to what was described as one of the Paganos Hot Springs: “Much prized by the Indians and miners on account of supposed healing qualities. Principal mineral element, sulphate of soda.”
All were taken during an expedition led by Gen. George Wheeler starting in 1871 and sponsored by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Wheeler, a Southwest surveyor, was chosen to lead this fourth official trek to map the American West in states that are now New Mexico, California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho and Colorado. He tapped Timothy H. O’Sullivan, both a photographer and surveyor, to join him.
They charted the people, the land, the minerals, climate and the potential for roads, railroads and military installations, and more, according to the University of Reno Libraries, which has 42 notebooks in its collection. The team traveled through “mountains, plains and desert,” as one site noted. It consisted of 40 people, including a New York artist named Alexander Wyant (who recorded the route in drawings and entries in his diary), a U.S. Calvary escort, two mule teams, hospital stewards, a cook and geologist.
This was not O’Sullivan’s first expedition. He was there for the first official one – called the King Survey – that combed the area from western Nevada to eastern Wyoming from 1867-1869 and the Panama expedition in 1870. He was with the Wheeler Survey in 1871 and 1873-1874, temporarily replaced by photographer Bell in 1872. O’Sullivan left the expedition in 1874 and returned to Washington.
Each year of the expedition, 50 images were taken from the photographers’ prints for the stereographic cards, which were handed out to members of Congress in what one site characterized as a publicity campaign. I can only assume that my individual sets are missing many of their images.
Even before the expedition, O’Sullivan had made a name for himself as a Civil War photographer. For a while, he had worked for Mathew Brady, considered the father of photography who sent photographers like O’Sullivan to the Civil War battlefields, but decided to stretch out on his own. He headed back to the war, continuing to photograph it in all its goriness.
The Smithsonian held an exhibition of his photography in 2010, including this video of some of his Civil War shots from the Battle of Gettysburg that are both visually disturbing but emotionally captivating.
O’Sullivan’s photos of the West and the Civil War are heralded for their historical and artistic value. His photos of the land on the stereoview cards at auction were desolate and barren, the terrain appearing uncharted, untouched, uninviting.
“Working alongside geologists, naturalists, and surveyors, O’Sullivan produced some of the earliest and most influential photographs of the American frontier,” according to an exhibition of his King Survey photos at the Art Institute of Chicago earlier this year.
