Framing the West at Monticello

In every encounter Lewis and Clark had with Indigenous people, material goods played a significant role. Jefferson and Lewis recognized that large quantities of "Indian presents" were extremely important to the success of the mission. Many relations between Indigenous and white people on the American frontier were based on the mechanism of gift exchange, the idea being that the relationship would falter unless both sides demonstrated their commitment to alliance through the exchange of material goods. The trade items that Lewis and Clark distributed and received along the trail were designed to symbolize the opening of relations between western Tribal Nations and the new American republic.

The items Lewis & Clark received from the Tribal leaders they met provided members of the Corps of Discovery with examples of Indigenous art and culture, but they did not systematically "collect" Native American objects as they did plant and animal specimens. As important research conducted by Dr. Castle McLaughlin at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University suggests, the Native American expedition objects that ended up in Jefferson's "Indian Hall" at Monticello and in Charles Willson Peale's museum in Philadelphia (the surviving examples from the Peale Museum are today in the Peabody Museum) should be understood as results of exchanges made in diplomatic and social contexts rather than as products of collecting in an anthropological sense. In this way, the objects represent the choices of their makers rather than those of explorers unfamiliar with the material culture of native people.

A letter Jefferson wrote to Lewis at the end of the expedition signals his understanding that the goods received by Lewis and Clark were diplomatic gifts, and not simply examples of the arts of Northern Plains Native Americans gathered by the explorers. When Lewis returned to the east in the last days of 1806, his party included Sheheke (Big White), a chief of the Mandan Nation. As their route to Washington would take him through central Virginia, Jefferson wrote Lewis before their arrival in the capital, "Perhaps while in our neighborhood, it may be gratifying to him [Sheheke], & not otherwise to yourself to take a ride to Monticello and see in what manner I have arranged the tokens of friendship I have received from his country particularly as well as from other Indian friends: that I am in fact preparing a kind of Indian hall."

Before they left Ft. Mandan in April 1805, Lewis and Clark packed up a shipment to send President Jefferson. It included trade items from indigenous people; animal skins, bones, and antlers; a live prairie dog, four magpies, and a grouse; and plant, soil, and mineral samples. The captains listed the contents on a packing list that they sent ahead of the shipment. The four boxes, two large trunks, and three cages arrived at the President's House in Washington in August while Jefferson was at Monticello; Etienne Lemaire, Jefferson's butler, wrote him that the shipment had come. Having eagerly anticipated its arrival, Jefferson sent instructions for unpacking and caring for the objects.

• Read a transcription of the Packing List »

When Jefferson returned to Washington from Monticello in early October 1805, he annotated the packing list, noting which objects had come. Although we do not know the final destination of every object that arrived in Washington from Ft. Mandan, Jefferson sent material from the shipment to at least three different places: the Peale Museum, the American Philosophical Society, and Monticello.

A Live Prairie Dog and Magpie, and Skins and Bones

Jefferson sent a live prairie dog and magpie and some of the animal skins, skeletons, and horns to Charles Willson Peale, the Philadelphia artist and museum impresario, for the Peale Museum, his public gallery of art and natural history. Peale would also receive later donations directly from Lewis and Clark. Jefferson included with Peale's shipment plant, soil, and mineral specimens for the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

Jefferson sent a third group of the objects from Lewis and Clark's shipment to Monticello in March 1806. This included elk, deer, antelope, and mountain sheep horns; otter and weasel skins; and objects from indigenous peoples of the west, including pipes, leggings, bows, arrows, pottery, and notably, a painted buffalo robe depicting a battle scene. A map drawn on a bison calf hide by an Indigenous mapmaker representing the Missouri River and its tributaries between the Platte and the Yellowstone Rivers, was also was sent to Jefferson by General James Wilkinson, governor of the Louisiana Territory.

The Corps of Discovery's expedition was central to Jefferson's acquisition of his important collection of Native American objects. Jefferson showcased these and the natural history specimens that Lewis and Clark sent him in his newly completed double-story Entrance Hall at Monticello, which he called his "Indian Hall." Placed among the other goods Jefferson collected -- European paintings and sculptures, works of art from eastern Indians, a model of an Egyptian pyramid, mastodon bones excavated by William Clark in Kentucky following the Expedition, and maps of the vicinity and the world -- the western objects contributed to the mélange of objects that Jefferson hoped would demonstrate to his family and visitors the diversity of the world beyond Monticello. His objective in creating his museum was to place himself and Monticello within the context of this larger world.

In assembling such a "cabinet of curiosities," Jefferson was in good company, both historically and intellectually. Since the sixteenth century, European collections of animal specimens, ethnographic material, antiquities, and man-made items displaying great technical skill had been accumulated by people ranging from kings and aristocrats to scholars of modest means.

As a product of the Enlightenment, Jefferson's display represented not simply a desire to showcase the marvelous and bizarre, but to work towards a scientific understanding of the world through observation and study. In the "Indian Hall," Jefferson sought to demonstrate, visually, that the man-made and natural products of North America could take their places alongside those of the Old World.

Despite extensive research over many years, the present whereabouts of Jefferson's original Native American collections are unknown today. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, in collaboration with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, has turned this mystery into an opportunity to involve Native Americans in a contemporary arts project. Indian artists preserving traditional media were commissioned to create new pieces for the Indian Hall exhibition, based on primary source documentation of the room and study of surviving historical objects, most notably the Lewis and Clark collection at the Peabody Museum, which facilitated the artists’ examination of these important pieces. The artists involved in the project were Mary Elk (Mandan-Hidatsa), Dennis Fox (Mandan-Hidatsa), Mark McBride (Blackfeet), JoEsther Parshall (Cheyenne River Lakota), Joel Queen (Cherokee), and Butch Thunder Hawk (Hunkpapa Lakota).

Weaponry
Visitors to Jefferson's "Indian Hall" reported seeing "offensive and defensive weapons" among the Native American collections. Clubs with wooden handles and heads made from stones or horns were traditional weapons on the Northern Plains. They later became important ceremonial objects as other types of weapons, such as bows, arrows, lances, and clubs with metal blades became more common. Clubs at the time of the Expedition were decorated simply with feathers and horsehair. Round shields made from the thick hide of a buffalo's hump were painted with stylized symbols derived from dreams or visions that protected warriors in battle. An honored warrior would decorate a shield with eagle feathers representing great deeds of bravery.

Hide Painting
The art of hide painting is used to create the painted hide robes that were traditionally a common garment for the Native men and woman of the Great Plains. Painted robes also became customary diplomatic gifts and articles of trade. Robes could contain figurative or abstract designs. Men's robes often contained representations of battles in which they had distinguished themselves. Lewis and Clark recorded receiving a robe from the Mandan chief Black Cat. The Ft. Mandan shipment to Jefferson contained seven buffalo robes, including the battle robe that he sent to Monticello. This robe depicted a conflict in which the Mandan and their Hidatsa allies fought the Lakota and the Arikara. To make a painted robe, a buffalo, elk, deer, cow, or horse hide was stretched, scraped, and tanned in a solution containing the animal's brain. After being tanned, the surface to be painted was stretched further to render it smooth and flat. Natural pigments were mixed with water and a hide glue binding agent and applied with a porous buffalo bone.

Pipes
The ritual use of tobacco is central to many Native American cultures. On the American frontier pipe ceremonies became a means through which peaceful intentions were expressed. Pipes and smoking played an important role in the diplomatic encounters Lewis and Clark had with native people along the trail. Clark described the ritual of smoking as "the greatest mark of friendship and attention." Pipes were also important diplomatic gifts symbolizing the relationships that smoking together cemented. A pipe consists of a long hollow wooden stem sometimes decorated with eagle feathers, horsehair, or quillwork, and a separate carved stone bowl that held the tobacco. Jefferson sent two pipes to Monticello in March 1806.

Quillwork
Traditionally practiced by Native women in the Eastern Woodlands, Great Lakes and Plains regions, quillworking is an intricate form of embroidery that employs dyed porcupine quills that are wrapped, plaited, sewn, and woven using a wide range of techniques. Quillwork is used to embellish many different types of clothing and domestic and ceremonial objects,  including leggings, moccasins, shirts, dresses, buffalo robes, bags, knife sheaths, baskets, baby cradles, wooden handles, tipis and pipe stems. On the Northern Plains a young woman must earn the right to do quillwork within a quillwork society by offering gifts to an elder woman in exchange for instruction in the techniques and rituals. Through quillwork societies the art has been guarded, preserved, and passed down through the generations; it survives today in many contemporary forms.

Artists

Mandan-Hidatsa hide painter Dennis Fox is the Director of the Independence Program for the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara) of Fort Berthold in New Town, North Dakota. He studied at the University of Maryland and worked for the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Program in Washington, D.C. His interest in traditional Northern Plains hide painting developed during his youth in South Dakota and later in New Town. He realized that he wanted to know how to paint in the manner of his forebears and researched painting techniques at the North Dakota Heritage Center. His work is also in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

For "Framing the West at Monticello," Dennis recreated two well-documented pieces from Jefferson's collection that are no longer at Monticello: a pictographic battle robe that William Clark described in 1805 as "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," and a Native American map painted on a hide that represented the Missouri River and its tributaries between the Platte and Yellowstone Rivers. In preparation for painting the battle robe, Dennis studied the famous pictographic battle robe in the collection of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard. He also studied Indigenous cartographic techniques in books and learned about them from his tribal elders.

The hides Dennis painted were brain-tanned by Ken Woody, Director of Interpretation at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Crow Agency, Montana. In this traditional manner for preparing hides for painting, the skin is soaked in a solution that includes the animal's brain.

The quillwork of JoEsther Parshall has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Best in Show at the Northern Plains Tribal Arts Exposition. Parshall, a Cheyenne River Lakota, earned her quillworking rights from Mandan-Hidatsa quillworker Carrie Brady on the Ft. Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. She is also a highly accomplished seamstress. Her quillwork is in several museum and private collections, including the South Dakota Historical Society, the Northern Plains Tribal Arts Museum, the National Museum of Scotland, and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard.

JoEsther used porcupine quills dyed by Jan Zender and Rochelle Dale using madder root (red), bloodroot (yellow-orange), and indigo (blue). Zender and Dale are non-Native artists who replicate early frontier arts including quillwork, silverwork, and canoe-making. They live in the woods of northern Michigan where they gather many of their materials in nature and are preserving important techniques like the natural dying of porcupine quills for traditional quillwork.

Butch Thunder Hawk is a Hunkpapa Lakota artist originally from Cannonball, North Dakota on the Standing Rock Reservation. He graduated from Dickinson State University in North Dakota and attended the California College of Art and Crafts in Oakland, California. Thunder Hawk also studied tribal arts, including pipemaking, with elders at Standing Rock. He has taught tribal arts at United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, North Dakota, since the late 1970s. Many of the pieces for Monticello were created during a special summer session held in 2001 in which Butch and his students studied historic objects in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University and the North Dakota Heritage Center, gathered wood, rocks, earth pigments and other materials, and made clubs, lances, and arrows. Butch also created shields, two pipes, and a quiver and bowcase for the project.

Butch and his students used mane and tail hair from Nokota horses to embellish the objects they created. Nokota horses formerly ran wild in the Little Missouri badlands of western North Dakota and are descended from early Native and ranch stock. They have been designated North Dakota’s “honorary equine” or state horse. For more information on the Nokota horses, including Target, whose tail hair hangs from the green shield in the Indian Hall, see www.nokotahorse.org.