Gertrude Three Finger

Gertrude Three Finger is one of the few women in this series whose name survives exactly as the photographer recorded it: 'Gertrude Threefinger (Cheyenne),' written on the mount of her portrait. She was Southern Cheyenne, photographed at Chickasha in the Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory, in the years around 1895–1900. Three Finger — also written Three Fingers — was a respected Southern Cheyenne family name of the era: a Chief Three Fingers farmed near Cement, Oklahoma, and traveled with a Cheyenne and Arapaho delegation received by President Wilson. How Gertrude was related to him, the record does not say.

Her photographer, William E. 'Ed' Irwin, born in Missouri in 1871, opened a studio at Chickasha in the mid-1890s and spent a decade photographing Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache people before moving on to Arizona in 1904. Gertrude came to him dressed formally: a fringed hide dress sewn with rows of elk teeth, a beaded strike-a-light case at her belt, boot moccasins. Irwin's caption added 'value $500' — a merchant's aside for his Eastern print buyers, but an accurate register of prestige. An elk yields only two of the ivory teeth; a dress carrying hundreds of them held a family's accumulated wealth and care, worn on a daughter's shoulders.

Of Gertrude's own life — her birth, her family, what became of her after the sitting — accessible records are silent, though her portrait is preserved in at least three archives: the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma, the Richard Pohrt Jr. Collection at the University of Michigan, and the Dickinson Research Center at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Life dates sometimes attached to her name online appear to be borrowed from the title of a study of Oklahoma portrait photography, not from any record of her life. She lived through the allotment era, when Cheyenne and Arapaho lands were being divided; her steady, level gaze is her testimony.