1856 Navajos
DESCRIPTION
Two mounted Navajo men appear in this tinted lithograph excerpted from the Indian report of Lieutenant Amiel Whipple's Pacific Railroad Survey along the 35th parallel.
The men sit their horses side by side on a sandy plain, both wielding long lances. At left, a man in a robe with broad dark stripes and a white headband rides a dark horse, a quiver and bow case hanging at his side and his lance raised behind him. At right, a man in a pale shirt and a headband topped with two feathers leans forward with his chin on his hand, a knife at his belt and his lance angled down past his horse's head. Both saddles are padded with shaggy fleece, and pale bluffs rise at right beyond the scrub. The plate is credited to H. B. Möllhausen at lower left and to T. Sinclair's lithography shop in Philadelphia at lower right, with the running heads of the 35th parallel survey and its Indian report above.
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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