Last Days of Red Cloud Agency: Peter T. Buckley’s Photograph Collection, 1876–1877. By Thomas R. Buecker. Foreword by R. Eli Paul

Abstract

Last Days of Red Cloud Agency is a gorgeous book with full spreads of Peter Buckley’s collection of stereo view photographs that he assembled through purchase during his two years at Camp (later Fort) Robinson in northwest Nebraska. As scholars, we often like to think that our sources are unique, but in this case it happens to be true. As Thomas Buecker states, Buckley’s collection “greatly adds to our knowledge of the western experience and the events and places recorded by the work of early photographers” (p. 219). Looking through the images, one can almost sense what it would have been like for Buckley to stand in one place and witness history as it swirled around him: the construction, establishment, and movement of army cantonments and permanent camps; the end of the Great Sioux War; the convergence of thousands of people from bands of Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Lakota; the Black Hills Gold Rush; and Crazy Horse’s surrender and subsequent death, to name a few events. Buckley’s collection is emblematic of the deluge of photographers capturing Indian Country in the 1870s, largely for sale to easterners hungry for western paraphernalia, but also (and less often) for local soldiers and Native Americans wanting to commemorate their lives. An active consumer of these images, Buckley curated a gallery of views that reflected his experiences at a tumultuous moment in time.