1860 Camp Red River Hunters
DESCRIPTION
The great camp of the Red River hunters appears in this tinted lithograph excerpted from the general report of Isaac Stevens's Pacific Railroad Survey of the 47th and 49th parallels.
Hundreds of conical lodges stretch across the open plain in long rows beneath a wide sky, many painted with designs and a few flying small pennants from their poles. In the foreground, a canvas wall tent and a covered wagon mark a smaller camp where men sit on the ground beside the wagon and others rest in the grass by the tent. Between the two camps, pairs of figures cross the open ground, one of them with a rifle on his shoulder, while a cart stands at the far left edge of the lodges.
The Red River hunters were the Métis buffalo hunters of the Red River settlements, who went out onto the plains in large organized hunts with hundreds of two-wheeled carts. Stevens's party came upon their camp in July 1853 near the Sheyenne River in present-day North Dakota. The plate is credited "Stanley del." at lower left and to Sarony, Major & Knapp of 449 Broadway, New York, at lower right.
The Pacific Railroad Surveys
In 1853 Congress funded the War Department, then under Jefferson Davis, to survey possible routes for a railroad to the Pacific. Isaac Ingalls Stevens, the newly appointed governor of Washington Territory, led the northernmost of these surveys that year, between the 47th and 49th parallels from St. Paul to Puget Sound. His narrative and final report filled the twelfth volume of the government's Reports of Explorations and Surveys, the series known as the Pacific Railroad Surveys, with plates by the expedition artist John Mix Stanley (1814–1872), a painter of Native American life whose earlier gallery of Indian portraits was largely lost in the Smithsonian fire of 1865.
CONDITION
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