A Lakota War Book from the Little Bighorn: The Pictographic “Autobiography of Half Moon.” by Castle McLaughlin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Lakota War Book from the Little Bighorn: The Pictographic “Autobiography of Half Moon.” by Castle McLaughlin Colin G. Calloway A Lakota War Book from the Little Bighorn: The Pictographic “Autobiography of Half Moon.” By Castle McLaughlin. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2013. vi + 355 pp. Illustrations, maps, glossary, references, index. $50.00 paper. A few days after the Lakota and Cheyenne victory at the Little Bighorn in 1876, soldiers took a ledger containing seventy-seven pictographic drawings from a funerary tipi on the battlefield. James W. “Phocion” Howard, a newspaper reporter traveling with the US cavalry, acquired the book; he rearranged the pages, wrote an introduction, and had the manuscript made into a handsome leather-bound volume entitled “The Pictorial Autobiography of Half Moon, an Uncpapa Sioux Chief.” Howard apparently inferred the chief’s name from the crescent moon symbol on one of the shields in the drawings. But Plains shield iconography invoked supernatural entities, not personal names, and the collection was likely the work of a half dozen warrior-artists. In 1930 the manuscript was part of a bequest to Harvard University, and in 2005 it came to the attention of Castle McLaughlin, curator of North American ethnography at the university’s Peabody Museum. Peabody staged an exhibition of the drawings in 2009. A Lakota War Book presents a full-color facsimile of the “Half Moon” manuscript and summarizes the research and analysis conducted by museum staff, scholarly consultants, and members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Ledger art is a rich resource for understanding Plains Indian history and culture, and if this were just another book about another collection of ledger art it would be welcome enough. But McLaughlin gives us more, arguing that the Half Moon drawings constitute a “war book” and that war books should be distinguished from ledger art in general. War books had a significant role in the practice as well as the representation of war. For the warriors who inscribed depictions of their victories on objects captured from Americans, these books expressed their dominance and appropriated their enemies’ power. Most surviving ledger art dates from the reservation period when drawings that showed killing white men might provide incriminating evidence. The Half Moon drawings were done earlier and evidently depict fighting in the Red Cloud War of 1866–68. A war book containing the combat exploits of multiple warriors reflected and reinforced the shared resistance of new intertribal coalitions that developed in response to the American invasion of the Plains. Tracing the life story of the Half Moon manuscript reveals that the manuscript itself was a site of contestation and changing meanings. Indians captured an accountant’s ledger and transformed it into a record of resistance; a Chicago newspaperman repossessed it and transformed it again into a popular narrative [End Page 309] form and a fictional autobiography. McLaughlin’s remarkable book adds another chapter to the Half Moon story and a further layer to the study of Plains Indian ledger art. Colin G. Calloway Native American Studies Dartmouth College Copyright © 2015 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln