Mattie Tom

The name Mattie Tom travels with this portrait of a young Southern Ute woman, together with an attribution to Horace S. Poley, the Colorado Springs photographer, around 1899. Poley ran his studio from 1892 to 1935 and made repeated trips to the Southern Ute agency lands around Ignacio in the 1890s, photographing families, camps, ceremonies and daily work; the Denver Public Library now holds his collection and has digitized more than 2,500 items from it. His Ute portraits are among the most substantial photographic records of Southern Ute people in the reservation's early decades.

Honesty requires saying what the archive does not show. A search of the Denver Public Library's digitized catalog surfaces no item under the name Mattie Tom, and no institutional record confirming her identity was found in this research. The trail is tangled further by a famous near-namesake: Frank A. Rinehart's 1899 portrait of Hattie Tom, a young Chiricahua Apache woman photographed in Omaha, which circulates online frequently mislabeled “Mattie.” The Southern Ute attribution here may rest on an undigitized Poley print, and it deserves confirmation from the Poley files or from Southern Ute community memory in Ignacio.

None of that uncertainty diminishes the woman in the picture. She sat for a portrait at a hard hinge in Southern Ute history — the decade of allotment pressure, land cessions and the campaign to open the reservation to settlers — and she did so dressed with evident care. Thousands of Native women of her generation survive in archives under thinned-out names or none at all; stating plainly what is known, and what is not, is part of restoring her dignity. If Southern Ute descendants recognize her, theirs is the account that should stand.