Cheyenne Girl

In December 1879 a young photographer named Laton Alton Huffman took over the post photographer's studio at Fort Keogh, where the Tongue River meets the Yellowstone in Montana Territory. The fort had been built in the wake of the Little Bighorn; by the time Huffman arrived, hundreds of Northern Cheyenne people who had surrendered with Two Moons lived camped nearby, and Cheyenne men were serving the army as scouts. Huffman photographed his neighbors steadily in those years, and around 1880 a Cheyenne girl sat for the portrait behind this painting, dressed in a garment few families could assemble: a dress hung with rows of dentalium shells.

Dentalium — slender white tusk shells harvested off the Pacific Northwest coast — traveled more than a thousand miles by trade to reach the northern plains, where they served as currency and treasured adornment. A yoke or cape sewn with row upon row of shells represented real wealth, gathered shell by shell, and dressing a daughter in one announced how greatly her family valued her. Whatever the girl in Huffman's studio was called at home, the women who made that dress meant for the world to see her worth. The camera, at least, recorded that much faithfully.

Her name, though, is missing. Huffman's ledgers preserved a few — Pretty Nose, whose portrait Victoria has also painted, and Spotted Fawn, 'a Cheyenne girl of 13 years' — but most of the women and children who faced his camera were filed under captions like 'Cheyenne girl,' and this sitter is one of them. The omission was ordinary practice for frontier photographers, and it is its own quiet erasure: the Montana Historical Society holds the glass negatives, and the record does not say who she was. The Northern Cheyenne Nation endures at Lame Deer, not far from the old fort; the archive kept her face, and her people keep the rest.