Damn, what a nice face this guy’s got!

Photographer, Aja Dawn

One day while having lunch ittel took this with the blackberry. Not a rainbow, not even a bow, a glass-trapezoid? Proof of technological spirit entities? Building fairies? Another sighting of the Virgin?

Nice sight though.

James Mouat, photographer photographs 1 and 2

peardg, photographer

Oh the oddity of memory. I remember taking this picture and I remember being captivated by the tree’s shadow, I just don’t remember where I was. Anyone recognize the building and can tell me what city I was in?

I like what’s known as ledger art. It represents a period of American Indian history, specifically on the plains and primarily between the years of 1860 and 1930. What they mostly document is the large scale arrival of Europeans, their soldiers, the life ways of those tribes who produced the artists, and the contact between the two. Probably the most famous ledger books come from the Indian prisoners that were held at Fort Marion in St Augustine, Florida. Captain Pratt, their supervisor, gave them the paper, colored pencils and paints and presumably, retained at least some of the completed books. The Indians, having time on their hands, used their own experience with art (tanned hide, mineral and fat based paints, representational topics of note in Indian Country) and translated them into the new medium made available by Pratt.

There’s a contemporary collectors market for ledger books and some of them are available to the public through places like the Smithsonian and the Nebraska State Historical Society. I came across this picture on the net, which had an attached provenance.

The provenance reads:

Keeling Ledger Book, Nebraska State Historical Society (11310-55), is from the collection of William Henry Keeling of Falls City, NE. Major Keeling served with the Army in Montana in the 1860s. It is likely that the ledger book was collected at Camp Cooke, Montana in 1866-67. The William H. Keeling was received by the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission staff at Arbor Lodge in 1925. The inventory entry appears as “Book of Indian Drawings, history of the Nez Perces Indians”.

“collected at Camp Cooke, Montana in 1866-67…”

“collected…”

Sort of like Lord Elgin “collected” the loose stones at the Parthenon?

Camp Cooke was the first permanent military base in Montana.  It was deemed necessary because in 1862 gold was discovered at Bannack in what was then Idaho territory but is now Montana. By 1863 President Lincoln had appointed Sidney Edgerton as the Chief Justice of the Territory. He arrived with his wife and kids. She and her husband’s niece set up a school.  He tried to deal with the increasing violence that sudden wealth so often seems to inspire.

And of course there was the Indian problem. Prior to the discovery of gold there weren’t so many whites as far out as the Idaho Territory. In the two years following the announcement at Bannack there were some 16,000 of the suckers and because of that things began moving along. Montana Territory was created in 1864 out of the eastern part of Idaho Territory. Edgerton was its first governor. By 1866 there were numerous Indian raids against the influx of white settlers. Indians burned white-owned buildings, ran off stock, and occasionally killed people. Edgerton, and then later Thomas Meagher, were tasked with getting up a local response. It didn’t work that well, and to a large degree, the policies, historical accidents, and attitudes generated during those years ended up being the genesis of the militia mindset that still pervades the region.

As winter burned itself out during those years between 1862 and 1866, the rumors of Indian attacks would predictably surface sort of like the black-boogey men stories white parents told their kids in South Africa before the end of apartheid. There’s a particularly funny Indian War of 1867 in which an attack (as it turned out by four or so Indian men) was anticipated and met with a million dollar military response. The thing is that the rumor mill of the time, the conspiracy theorists who predicted an uber-Indian alliance against the whites, had, in their late-winter by-the-fire-stories, 11,000 warriors pounding at white doors come one dark spring night. One of the things that makes this so funny is that the fact that it turned out to be four dudes didn’t stop the rumor mills any more than continual human and societal survival stops apocalyptic religions.

But I get ahead of the story here. The year before this happened this ledger book was “collected” by Major Keeling at Camp Cooke. So now what do you think “collected” means given the tenor of the times?

I don’t know much about Major Keeling. There is a newspaper mention of him in The Washington Critic dated December 3 1885. It describes him as the “post-trader” at Fort Leavenworth. So he survived the 1860s and ended up running the trading post? I wonder, all those years later, if he sold stuff to the Indian from whom he’d collected the ledger?

There’s another mention of Keeling in a text that recounts the history of the churches and schools in Fort Leavenworth. In recounting the somewhat meager situation of Father Kinsella as he tried to minister to a rather large area, the report has him taking up a room (when not otherwise occupied) in the hotel/military residence managed by Major Keeling. This is sometime around or after 1884. Keeling provided the Father board at $15 a month. The room, though, turned out to be a brief reprise from Kinsella’s homelessness because pretty soon there were so many young military trainees on the frontier that there just weren’t empty rooms in which the Father could kip.

Anyway, all these years later, the Keeling Ledger is taken care of by the Nebraska State Historical Society. It looks like Keeling’s family presented it to the Nebraska Parks and Game Commission in 1925, although I could be wrong about that.

You can buy a limited reproduction of ledger pages for between $250 and $5000 a pop.

by peardg

Yesterday I spent most of the daylight hours walking through the fog, resting for a while with hot tea, Hedgehog and Deleuze, and then walking again.

Not long before twilight I went to see a film called A Single Man. It was a deeply beautiful movie centering on a man (played by Colin Firth) bound by grief and loss. After a day in the fog, a day in which the intimacy of beauty was a constant companion, I came out of the theatre to the fog Peardg has caught in her photo below.  I walked the few blocks to my car, the round towers that are so common here were like fluted pillars in a moonlit cathedral or perhaps more inline with my atheism, walking to my car was like moving through a vast and toplit cavern, one that opens up into a sense of infinity, where the buildings were luminescent stone fingers fluttering against the dark. A thoroughly beautiful day.

Peardg’s photosite