HISTORY INTO ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY - Snite Museum of Art ...

The Relationship between Myth, Native American and
Western Material Culture, and American Identity in
Father Lindesmith’s Collection
BETHANY MONTAGANO
On August 14, 1882, U.S. Army chaplain Eli Washington John Lindesmith left
Fort Keogh to “hunt” for an Indian skeleton 1 . He knew where to look, walking his
Indian pony along the north side of the Yellowstone River in Montana Territory
to a sacred site that the Lakota dubbed Big Cooley. Later, Father Lindesmith
wrote, “On the west side about half-way up, under a cedar tree, whereon had been
placed the dead body, but now scattered on the ground, I found this jaw bone and
two other bones, and this piece of board [on] which the body had been placed.” 2
He made off with a jawbone and a forearm bone still tethered to the burial plank
belonging to an infant. 3
Lindesmith recorded this as a singular find; it represented the 644th object in his
collection of Western, Native American, military, natural history, personal, and
religious artifacts and samples, most of which he amassed during his 1880 to 1891
tenure as the first Catholic chaplain in the U.S. Army commissioned during peacetime.
4 Although he acquired many items legitimately—ones given to him by friends,
paid for in cash, or traded for with luxury items such as bacon 5 —he also obtained
other items illegitimately. 6
Father Lindesmith left behind fastidious notes about how, when, why, and from
whom he obtained his items, what he considered their historical and/or cultural
significance, and exactly what he paid for the ones he purchased. A close examination
of those notes and various objects in the collection reveals something about
the extent to which cultural stereotypes, romantic appraisals of the American West,
identity, race, religion, Native participation, and the market for Native American
cultural goods affected the practice of misappropriation in the West during the late
nineteenth century (fig. 5, opposite).
Through the prism of misappropriation, it appears that Lindesmith was not simply
participating in benign forms of curiosity collecting; indeed, he was purposely
accumulating a vast array of disparate objects to validate his Western experience.
Among these were beaver and grizzly-bear fur coats, arms and swords (fig. 6)
associated with several famous Indian battles, George Armstrong Custer’s field
trunk, one of Captain Myles Keogh’s rib bones, saddles, lariats, Indian guns,
scalping knives, war clubs, tin cans, and even coveredwagon tarps. His cataloguing
notes reveal the degree to which he regarded these artifacts as a means of
authenticating not just the makers’ identities but also his own identity (fig. 7). As a
U.S. Army chaplain, collector, and museum benefactor, Lindesmith contributed to
and helped perpetuate the myth of the American West. 7
Fig. 5: Father Lindesmith in his leather outfit and broad brim hat from Montana Territory; CHCUSPCA
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