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tion with Touch the Clouds, Little Wound, and Billy Garnett in various individual and
group portraits. Finally, an eagle-feather bonnet, with full-length trailer, was worn
by Red Cloud, He Dog (in this image), and Touch the Clouds, respectively, in at least
three Brady photographs.
On the other hand, He Dog wields a wicked and classic Lakota weapon, one that
would have given him a fighting chance in hand-to-hand combat with a grizzly. Pos-
sibly a post-Civil War development, knife clubs were apparently used only by the
Sioux. Most examples with known collection histories are specifically attributed to
the Lakota. Typically armed with three blades, knife clubs were usually more than
three feet in length and commonly decorated with brass tacks. As this photograph
indicates, two-row hairpipe breastplates and large German-silver crosses had, by the
mid-1870s, become fashionable accessories among Lakota men.
The shirt worn by American Horse is often identified as the "Red Cloud shirt;" its
exquisite craftsmanship is more clearly illustrated in a half-length, individual portrait
of American Horse, which is credited to Daniel S. Mitchell, a frontier photographer
in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Unquestionably one of the finest examples of 19th-centu-
ry Plains Indian art in existence, few pieces from this era have been studied more
thoroughly than this shirt, thanks to the dissertation research of Colin Taylor, who
eloquently describes it, as well as the shirt attributed to Crazy Horse, as "classic silent
memorials to the Lakota people who produced them." Indeed, the Brady photographs
of the 1877 Lakota delegation provide spectacular glimpses of a people at their artis-
tic zenith, just before the tide of assimilationist forces swept over them.
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American Horse, Oglala Lakota,
wearing the "Red Cloud" shirt,
1877. Photograph by Daniel S.
Mitchell, Cheyenne, Wyoming.
National Anthropological Archives,
Smithsonian Institution, Negative
No. 3214-C.
