Image and Imagination: Art of the American West
Collage of Artwork
Documenting Westward Expansion Link Revealing an Unseen Landscape Portraying the Native American


Russell Counting Coup

Charles M. Russell, Counting Coup, bronze, 1905.
Courtesy the Woodcock Foundation for the Appreciation of the Arts
I am tired of fighting. The old men are all dead. [My brother] who led the young men is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills. No one knows where they are. I want to have some time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe, after surrendering to troops under the command of General Oliver O. Howard, 1877 in Allen Weinstein and Raymond Jackson Wilson, Freedom and Crisis: An American History, 1978

Gardner photograph

Alexander Gardner, photograph from series Scenes in the Indian Country, 1868.
Collection of the Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri - St. Louis

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