Chin-Chin-Wet

Chin-Chin-Wet was a Warm Springs woman, from the reservation community in central Oregon, and the English gloss on her name — “Alone” — followed her through the records. Her husband was Wey-a-tat-han, called Owl, one of the Warm Springs scouts who served with the U.S. Army in the Modoc War of 1872–73 among the lava beds on the California-Oregon border. A period inscription on his portrait notes that he was wounded in the lava beds, and that he was “the married man of the party, his wife accompanying him on his travels.”

Those travels are why her photograph exists. In the mid-1870s the couple sat for Charles Milton Bell, the Washington, D.C. portraitist whose studio photographed visiting Native delegations and touring parties. Her albumen print, mounted on a Hayden Survey card inscribed “Chin Chin Wet. Warm Spring,” is now in the Denver Art Museum; her husband's portrait is at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. Copies circulating online usually carry the caption “Alone aka Chin Chin Wet — wife of Wey-a-tat-han — Warm Springs 1877,” the form this painting's title honors.

Beyond the war record kept under her husband's name, the archive preserves little of her own life — no dates, no children's names, no word of what she made of the capital. But the portrait is unusually direct evidence of a Plateau woman present at the edge of a famous war and its aftermath, traveling farther from home than most of her generation, wife of a man the Army owed its victory to. Her image is kept today not only in museums but on the Plateau Peoples' Web Portal, where the region's tribes steward such records themselves.