For too long, pictorial narratives like the one Little Fingernail ( see “Bullet in a Bible”) took into battle have been labeled “ledger art”—with an emphasis on art—thereby obscuring their fundamental role as books in the evolving life of Native men during the Plains Wars of the 1870s.
The Curator of North American Ethnography at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, Castle McLaughlin, has restored and published one of these books, mislabeled and languishing in the archive under the title “Autobiography of Half Moon.” Through painstaking collaborative research with the late Byron Wilson, tribal archaeologist of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, she has determined the identities of many of the text’s collaborative authors, including Thunder Hawk and Buffalo Tongue (whose name glyphs appear with their drawings), and several others for whom McLaughlin has plausibly described tribal and band affiliation through careful reading of stylistic and material culture details provided by the artists in their images.
Castle McLaughlin, A Lakota War Book from the Little Big Horn: The Pictographic ‘Autobiography of Half Moon.’ Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press, 2013. 368p. ISBN-10: 0981885861; ISBN-13: 9780981885865. $41.28. [Paper]
Like most examples of its genre, this Lakota war book is inscribed within a memorandum ledger of linen and cotton rag pages allegedly taken from the body of one J.S. Moore, who was killed by a Lakota warrior in 1868. It is filled with ink and colored pencil sketches of important events in the lives of several warriors who fought at the Little Big Horn in 1876.
As was the case with the Spotted Tail banner and Little Fingernail’s book, it lingered overlooked in the Peabody’s collections partly because its Euro-American owner had it rebound and prefaced it with a handwritten fictional autobiography of an imaginary author, a warrior named Half Moon. McLaughlin explores how Phocian Howard,
Phocian Howard’s title page.
the Chicago Tribune reporter who found it in a funerary tipi at Little Big Horn, shaped the war book into a nostalgic throwback to popular culture representations of America Indian peoples that circulated before the Plains Wars. She shows how Howard reorganized the original images into a sequence he thought made more narrative sense, and he hired an artist to pen a prefatory framing section in a calligraphic style reminiscent of the pre-Civil War antiquarian documents, peppered with fanciful sketches of Indian life drawn from sources like Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, and not the work of the war book artists themselves.
Using evidence drawn from the book’s circuit of ownership, its paratextual materials, and its Plains culture significance, McLaughlin traces the ledger’s physical movements and its shifts in meaning as it passed through different hands and different historical times.
Facsimile image from “A Lakota War Book from Little Big Horn.”
McLaughlin explains the significance of the book’s “discovery” in a burial tipi, pointing out that this suggests the work was both associated with the traditional burial rites of a Lakota warrior society and (having been discovered with a bag of intercepted U.S. mail) with the Native community’s growing awareness of the importance of literacy in their battles with the colonizers. Finally, she discusses the way that narrative worked against the conventions of the rectilinear ledger format,
with Native artists often telling stories from right to left, employing the book’s gutter as a “groundline” (a traditional artistic practice in Plains pictorial art), and freely mingling different people’s stories of significant personal and “national” events into a material object that had been captured in battle and overwritten with their exploits in order to dramatize their power over their American enemies.
Archives across America no doubt contain more such War Books, and their provenance is probably similar to the one drawn by Little Fingernail, and this Cheyenne ledger described in an entry in the Colorado Historical Society’s online catalog:
Collection consists of a sketchbook captured by an American soldier during the 1869 Battle of Summit Springs. On July 11, 1869, troops of the 5th United States Regiment of Cavalry and approximately 50 members of a Pawnee scout battalion attacked the camp of the Cheyenne chief Tall Bull near present-day Sterling, Colorado. During the battle a group of Cheyenne warriors broke away from the main camp and sheltered in a nearby ravine; armed only with bows and arrows, they managed to hold off the Pawnee scouts for hours before eventually dying in battle. It is believed that the sketchbook was found among the bodies of the Cheyenne warriors in the ravine.
Even Sitting Bull made one. Currently housed in the National Anthropological archives, the war book was drawn on the leaves of an Army ledger book by Sitting Bull “while he was held prisoner at Fort Randall, Dakota Territory in 1882. They were acquired at that time by Lt. Wallace Tear together with explanations from Sitting Bull of each image. Tear sent them to Gen. John C. Smith, and they were donated to the BAE by the general’s son Robert A. Smith in 1923.” Lt. Tear wrote an explanatory letter to Gen. Smith, describing the book’s original production: “I furnished the book which contains the paintings and from time to time saw him at work on them. These notes were taken down by me after the paintings were completed in Sitting Bull’s tipi in the same outlines as given by himself (by an interpreter of course) Bull having the picture before him while giving a description.”
Like the Lakota war book, this ledger has been edited by others, and opens with a series of newspaper clippings describing Sitting Bull’s death. These are pasted into the flyleaves of the army ledger. In the latter pages of the book, Gen. Smith pasted Lt. Tear’s letter and the curators of the Bureau of Ethnology have appended to it a letter granting them its use.
Because its author was so “notorious” in the popular press, Sitting Bull’s war book soon made it into the pages of the New York Herald in a special triple-sheet edition. 
Calling him “the Napoleon of the Sioux,” the Herald reported “that nothing can be more interesting than the account this savage warrior has given of himself . . . when everybody is anxious to know anything about him.” The reporter then makes a bold claim for his paper’s scoop: “[This is] the only extant autobiography of an American Indian ever prepared.” The date was July 16, 1876, just a few days after word of the Little Bighorn battle had reached eastern readers. Castle McLaughlin argues that this reporting, and other articles like it, represent the way “print capitalism gave Sitting Bull’s enemies a power far greater than than of the Plains warriors assembled at Little Bighorn” (12). I agree it did—at least for a time.
All these years later, their stories repatriated to a more nuanced history of the Plains Wars and re-edited to give voice to those warriors who carried such books into battle, the war books of the 1870s may now give some power back to the communities for whom those men fought and died in the cause of sovereignty.
