1856 Mojave
DESCRIPTION
Three Mojave people of the lower Colorado River appear in this tinted lithograph excerpted from the Indian report of Lieutenant Amiel Whipple's Pacific Railroad Survey along the 35th parallel.
Three Mojave figures stand side by side on a bare plain. At left, a man painted in broad white stripes from head to foot wears a white plume in his hair and a short apron, a bow in one hand and an arrow held out in the other. Beside him, a man whose body is covered in dark painted lines wears three feathers in his hair and a white apron, one hand on his hip and the other gripping a tall staff. At right, a woman in a fringed skirt balances a wide shallow basket on her head, her chin, breast, and belly marked with lines and spirals. The plate is credited to H. B. Möllhausen at lower left and to T. Sinclair's lithography shop in Philadelphia at lower right, beneath 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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