Making Images on the Indian Frontier

Abstract

This study examines the pictorial journalism of Theodore Davis, a Harper's Weekly illustrator who traveled west in late 1865. After becoming prominent as a battlefield artist during the Civil War, he provided first-hand reports and illustrations of Indian-white violence in the West. The article argues that his images of a stagecoach attack in western Kansas, his vivid depiction of soldiers’ arrow-pierced bodies on the plains, and his fictional renderings of George Custer's infamous attack on Black Kettle's winter camp on the Washita River in 1868 were significant sources of Indian imagery in the post-bellum period. His pictorial journalism in Harper's Weekly and Harper's New Monthly Magazine influenced popular ideas about Indians and Indian warfare for the remainder of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century.