1856 Comanche Camp on Shady Creek
DESCRIPTION
A Comanche camp of domed lodges appears in this tinted lithograph, excerpted from the Indian report of Lieutenant Amiel Whipple's Pacific Railroad Survey along the 35th parallel.
Domed lodges thatched with grass cluster on a meadow above a creek while more dot the slope toward a wooded valley closed by flat-topped bluffs. At right, a gnarled tree leans out over the bank, its branches heavy with foliage. In the foreground, a few upright stakes stand at the edge of a shallow pool beside two faint rings in the grass. The caption names the scene as a Comanche camp on Shady Creek but does not say where the creek lay. The plate carries no artist's or lithographer's credit, only the running heads of the 35th parallel survey and its Indian report.
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. Lieutenant Amiel Weeks Whipple led the survey along the 35th parallel from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to southern California in 1853 and 1854, and its findings appeared in the third volume of the government's Reports of Explorations and Surveys, the twelve-volume series known as the Pacific Railroad Surveys. Most of the plates in its report on the Indian tribes were drawn by Heinrich Balduin Möllhausen (1825–1905), a young Prussian artist and naturalist with the expedition who later became one of Germany's most popular novelists of the American West.
CONDITION
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