The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West by Martha A. Sandweiss; Princeton University Press, 368 pp., $32
Few periods grip the American imagination like the bloody “Indian Wars” of the latter half of the 19th century. The Library of Congress contains nearly 80,000 titles on the subject, 800 of them from this century alone, and nearly all of them focus on bloodshed from the European perspective. Only starting in the late 1960s did scholars such as Vine Deloria Jr., Dee Brown, James Welch, and later Ned Blackhawk begin to present the Native American side of the story, and not until the 2010s did we see the first major titles—Anne Hyde’s Empires, Nations, and Families and Born of Lakes and Plains—on the polyglot, mixed-race society created by the collision of European and Indigenous peoples.
To that corpus we may now add Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West by Martha A. Sandweiss, professor emerita of history at Princeton University and former photography curator at Texas’s Amon Carter Museum. Sandweiss’s forensic investigation of a single photograph widens the aperture to depict an astonishingly intertwined frontier society where everyone—soldier, trader, photographer, man, woman, Native, mixed-race, or white—was connected to most everyone else. The result is a fascinating snapshot of this “oddly intimate” world, a bubbling cauldron of people constantly on the move, in contact or in conflict, their lives beset by unremitting public and familial violence.
Her story centers on the Native tribes of the Great Plains and the government Peace Commission charged to broker peace with them in 1867. But that story echoes across the continent. Some of her characters, in fact, show up in my own family’s experience in the 19th- century fur trade in the Rocky Mountain Northwest: notably the Civil War generals William S. Harney and George McClellan, along with photographs documenting American negotiations with the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose last chief trader on American soil was my ancestor’s brother, Angus McDonald. Like Sandweiss, I too am curious not just about such people’s professional lives, but their more intimate spheres: whom they knew and answered to and married, befriended and fought. In this sense, her book, like the photograph on which it is based, is indeed “a portal into a world of families.”
The image in question, taken in May 1868 by photographer Alexander Gardner, is a formal portrait of six white men—part of the Peace Commission—and an unidentified Indigenous girl at Fort Laramie in Dakota Territory. Piece by piece, Sandweiss unravels three of their histories, starting with Gardner and Harney, withholding until last the central character, the previously unnamed Arapaho or Lakota “girl in the middle.” The facts behind this photograph, part of Gardner’s Scenes in the Indian Country series, have long been known, but Sandweiss uses it as “a springboard into a sprawling century.”
Sandweiss describes Gardner as a Scottish utopian who arrives in America in the late 1850s and invents himself as a photographer, Harney as an outsize military man with a violent temper known to Native people as “Woman Killer.” He not only abandons a Native woman and their child but also beats an African-American slave to death, all the while leading horrific attacks on the Native tribes. Gardner, meanwhile, is one of the first to photograph the Civil War battlefields, takes some of the last known portraits of Abraham Lincoln, and is hired to photograph the body of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth (that photo has never been found). Yet it is the dark-faced girl, carefully posed between the ranks of white men and wrapped in a blanket in the center of the frame, whose story truly grabs the reader.
Sandweiss, relying on a grandson’s identification, names the girl as Sophie Mousseau, age eight, daughter of a French-Canadian “Indian” trader, M. A. Mousseau, and his Lakota wife, Yellow Woman. From here, the plot swiftly thickens. Yellow Woman, it happens, is one of scores of people wounded decades before in General Harney’s brutal attack at Blue Water Creek, in which 86 Lakota were killed. Other bizarre coincidences connect the young girl with the men who flank her: One commissioner has just been hired as a lawyer for her father, who also knows Harney; both Sophie’s father and the man she later marries rescue other photographers from separate Native attacks. Bizarre relatives also abound among the photographed; one of the commissioners married a famous mesmerist, and Sophie’s future ex-husband would go on to murder his second wife and stepdaughter.
Buried in the dizzying and meticulous reporting of all these people, however, is the central question of why Sophie is in the photograph at all. Sandweiss speculates only briefly, and Gardner has left precious few words to explain his thinking. Perhaps Sophie’s father wanted his daughter there to remind his lawyer (and peace commissioner), John Sanborn, of Mousseau’s claims to compensation for ranches destroyed by so-called “Indian depredations.” Perhaps her mother was on the sidelines, too, and recognized Harney as the man who caused her wounds and the death of her infant child. Perhaps the commissioners wanted to suggest the generation to be helped by the peace negotiations, or Gardner a sense of scale and place.
Curiously, the only aesthetic judgment Sandweiss renders of this photo is that it differs in its “stiff formality” from others Gardner shot at the fort. Look closer, though, at the composition, staged carefully by a socially minded photographer. The small Indian girl is dwarfed by the representatives of white military power. They mirror her on either side, uniforms and hats artfully balanced. Yet paradoxically, it is the girl’s insistence, her unwavering gaze, and her triangular shape that draw the eye to the center of the frame. The life of this one child, unfolding into the 20th century on the Pine Ridge Reservation, illuminates the entire tragic sweep of American policy toward Native Americans. A small, still object, one might say, easily overlooked yet somehow inextinguishable, like the world she represents in the imagined empty country all around.
