After their release from Fort Marion, a number of warriors eventually returned to their respective reservations. By that time, Native American material culture had become the subject of many Western collections and works on paper were in high demand. In ledger drawings from this period, artists tackled new subject matter by depicting life on the reservation while keeping with tradition by continuing to create historical scenes.

If there is any one indicator that at the time of their creation these works existed outside a dominant culture it would be the English annotations sometimes found on these drawings. Usually inscribed by the first non-Indigenous collector, these notes describe with varying degrees of accuracy the scene represented in the drawing. The histories and strains implied by these points of contact are significant, and part of a dominant colonial system that has kept these historically significant works on the sidelines of the broader art world. In showcasing these drawings and the artists who created them, this exhibition seeks to reposition Plains Indian Ledger Drawings as profoundly significant works of American art.  

Read more on the history of Ledger Art

Ledger Art and the Fort Marion Period

Although ledger drawings had occasionally been sold or traded with locally stationed members of the U.S. Army between 1860-1870, a comprehensive commercialization of Ledger Art was fully realized with a group of exceptional drawings created between 1875-1878 at Fort Marion, in St. Augustine, Florida. Following a massive military defeat of the Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne in the Red River War of 1874-1875, over seventy young warriors were incarcerated, without trial, for three years at Fort Marion. Provided with paper, crayon, watercolor and ink, approximately twenty-six of the prisoners were encouraged to create drawings of their traditional lives on the Plains. This was partially to satisfy the appetite of tourists frequenting Fort Marion for mementos of their travels, but also to promote the government’s efforts to assimilate Native warriors into the Euro-American way of life.

The works created during this three-year incarceration are among the rare instances where individual artists can be identified. In some cases the artist signed their names on their drawings, and in others complete  books of ledger drawings were annotated by their owners with the name(s) of the artists who created them. Most of the prisoners engaged in drawing were young men in their early twenties who had not yet achieved significant social standing in their respective Nations. In contrast to personal records of military feats which had dominated earlier Ledger Art, drawings from Fort Marion frequently depict memories of recent events, such as the arduous journey from Oklahoma Territory to Florida by horse cart, train, and sailboat. Recurring portrayals of hunting and courting scenes as well as entirely new subject matter such as sacred ceremonies also distinguish these drawings from pre-reservation graphic art from the Great Plains. Rather than focusing on the accumulation of power and prestige, drawings from Fort Marion evoke an emotional landscape that is at once traumatic, nostalgic, proud and celebratory. These remarkable drawings constitute unique records of a pivotal time in American history, and serve to greatly expand our understanding and appreciation of life as it was lived by these young warrior artists, whose world had been left behind.

Koba (Wild Horse, 1848-1880), Kiowa

Koba (Wild Horse) was a twenty-seven-year-old Kiowa man who was imprisoned along with seventy-two other Native American warriors in 1875 at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. Koba and his band surrendered to the US cavalry during the Red River War in February of the same year. He was charged with stealing horses and mules in Texas, as well as participating in a skirmish at the Wichita Agency in 1874 in Wichita, Kansas. Born in 1846, he had not yet obtained a prominent position in Kiowa society at the time of his arrest.

Provided with art supplies by Richard Pratt, the commander at Fort Marion, Koba made a number of remarkable drawings during his three year confinement. Marked by the experiences and sights during the long journey from Oklahoma Territory to St. Augustine, Koba recorded his memories of this eventful trip by horse cart, train, and sailboat. His drawings appear to capture the duration of the trip and the anguish the prisoners would have undoubtedly experienced during their journey towards an uncertain future. While extensive depictions of landscape are almost completely absent in previous Ledger art, Koba rendered both his changing environment and his memories of pre-reservation cultural activities with great care for detail. Other depictions of hunting and courting scenes as well as the entirely new subject of sacred ceremonies sharply distinguishes his work from pre-reservation Plains Indian graphic art, which had primarily focused on warrior exploits.

After three years under the acculturation program at Fort Marion, Koba spent two more years at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, originally a school for newly freed African-Americans. He went on to assist farmers in Lee, Massachusetts, for the fall harvest, before enrolling at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania from October 1879 to September 1880. Considered the flagship of Native American boarding schools in the US, Koba trained to become a tinsmith. However, like many following his trajectory, Koba contracted tuberculosis and died only two months after returning to his people in Anadarko, Kiowa Agency, Oklahoma, in 1880. A number of individual works and a few complete books by Koba survive, including those in the collections of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Cedar Tree, Southern Arapaho, ca. 1880

Not much is known about Cedar Tree, a Southern Arapaho warrior artist that this ledger book is named after. Around 1882, the year the Cedar Tree Ledger Book was first collected, he likely resided nearby the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency in Darlington, Oklahoma. Cedar Tree’s autobiographical drawings describe a man of great accomplishment who possessed an extraordinary visual memory and demonstrated a remarkable attention to detail. Contrary to the conventions of Ledger Art, and most Plains pictographic traditions, Cedar Tree’s mounted warriors enter the composition from the left hand side of the page. The consistent depiction of himself holding a lance in his left hand, along with the characteristic left-to-right orientation of his drawings suggests that Cedar Tree was left-handed.

The fifty-six drawings comprising the Cedar Tree Ledger are the result of a collaborative effort between five or six Native American artists from the Kiowa, Southern Arapaho and Southern Cheyenne nations. The last page of the book contains a list, handwritten in English, likely by its first non-Indigenous owner, that briefly describes the content of each drawing as well as the tribal identity of its artist, an uncommon feature in ledger books. “Big Tree” is the first name listed in the inventory. A comparison with the US census from the years corresponding to the collection of the book indicates that the same warrior likely went by the name Cedar Tree. This instance illustrates a common issue arising from the transliteration of Native American names to the English language for government use.

Julian Scott Ledger Book, Kiowa, ca. 1880

The Julian Scott Ledger consists of fifty drawings created by two, possibly three Native American warriors of the Kiowa nation. First collected in the vicinity of Fort Sill, Oklahoma, it has tentatively been dated ca. 1880. Each drawing in the ledger relates to life on the Southern Plains before and during the early reservation period — a time characterized by sweeping political change that was marked by the displacement of Native Americans across the entire Great Plains. While the names of the Kiowa artists who drew the compositions in this book remain unknown to us, we are able to identify at least two distinct artists’ hands. Following convention, the artist of the pair of drawings included in this exhibition has come to be known as Julian Scott Artist A, referencing the name of the first non Indigenous owner of this ledger book. Each work depicts a detailed battle scene between the Kiowa and the Pawnee. The images are annotated with inscriptions dating to the 19th century, attempts to distinguish the identity of the two warring peoples in each scene. One caption, appearing on page 91, accompanies the image of a spider in the top corner of a ceremonial dance scene. It reads: 'This is in imitation of a bug that was crawling across the page, while the Indian was drawing.' The inscription predates the acquisition of the ledger book by the American artist Julian Scott at Fort Sill by almost a decade. For now, it remains unknown exactly who made these annotations except that they were certainly made by a non-Indigenous person that came in contact with one the ledger’s artists in 1880.

The second recognizable artist, known as Julian Scott Artist B, contributed only four drawings to this ledger. Despite the sparsity of this output, one of the drawings, an extraordinary depiction a group of twelve Kiowa men in ceremonial dress, is now in the Charles and Valerie Diker Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.