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Painted Buffalo Robe During 1804-1805, the Corps of Discovery established winter quarters near Mandan and Hidatsa villages along the Knife River in what is now west-central North Dakota. They christened their stockaded barracks "Fort Mandan." During their stay, the explorers were given several buffalo robes by their Mandan hosts. The following April, before continuing west, Lewis and Clark prepared a shipment of materials which were sent down the Missouri River and east to Thomas Jefferson. An invoice accompanying the shipment described "1 Buffalow robe painted by a Mandan man representing a battle which was faught 8 years since, by the Sioux & Ricaras, against the Mandans, Minitarras & Ahwahharways" (the "Minitarras" and "Ahwahharways" were two of three former divisions of the people now known as "Hidatsa"). Like the other objects in the Peabody's "Lewis and Clark collection," this robe was acquired from the Boston Museum in 1899 and is believed to have originated in the Peale Museum. Since Thomas Jefferson and Lewis and Clark donated expedition objects to Peale, and because the painting on the robe depicts a battle, Charles Willoughby, a curator at the Peabody in 1899, believed that this was the "Fort Mandan" robe. Since that time it has become perhaps the most famous artifact of the expedition. It is also possible, however, that the robe was given to Peale by Lt. George C. Hutter, Clark's nephew by marriage. As a young military officer stationed in St. Louis, Hutter participated in the Atkinson-O'Fallon expedition up the Missouri River in 1825-1826. Two years later, his father delivered to Peale a number of Native American objects, including a pictographic battle robe attributed to the Sioux. A number of those artifacts are now at the Peabody. The complex iconography painted on the robe represents a tradition known
as Plains Biographical Art or Warrior art. Biographical artists painted
stories of their war exploits on their tipis, garments, and robes. Sixty-four
separate figures of horses and men in combat are pictured on this robe.
Stylistic variation in the pictographs suggests that at least two separate
artists worked on the painting. Because tribal styles were similar in
1800, it is difficult to tell whether a Sioux artist or a Mandan artist
painted this robe. The pigments used to paint this robe (brown, red, red-orange, green, and yellow) were identified in a study conducted by the Canadian Conservation Institute. Most of the paint materials employed were made from resources available in the Plains environment. The brown and orange-red paints contain iron oxide, commonly called hematite, or red ochre. Hematite is an earth (mineral) pigment that has been used in North America for thousands of years. It was widely used on the Plains and was not displaced by the introduction of commercial pigments during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The yellow paint on this robe is also thought to contain iron oxide. The vivid greens contain copper salts, which may have been derived from corrosion on copper objects. Vermilion, one of the earliest available trade pigments (and which Lewis and Clark used as a trade and gift item), was used to produce the reds. |
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Native American Objects and the American Quest for Commerce and Science Peabody Museum of Archaeology and
Ethnology, Harvard University |
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