By Edgar M. Howell 



zi Stieffel, 



Soldier Artist 

 of the West 



A number of gifted artists painted the West and the colorful 

 Indian-fighting army of the post-Civil-War period, but since none 

 of these were military men their work lacked the viewpoint that only 

 a soldier could provide. 



German-born Hermann Stieffel, for 24 years a private in the 

 U.S. Infantry, painted a series of water colors while serving in 

 the Indian country in the 1860's and 1870' s. Although Stieffel 

 could never be called talented, and certainly was untutored as an 

 artist, his unusually canny eye for the colorful and graphic and 

 his meticulous attention to detail have given us valuable pictorial 

 documentaries on the West during the Indian wars. 



The Author: Edgar M. Howell is curator of military history 

 in the United States National Museum, Smithsonian luslilulian. 



[FfnlHE AMERICAN WEST has never wanted lor 

 artists with a high sense of the documentary. 

 Through the talented hands of men Hke George 

 Cathn, Carl Bodmer and Alfred Jacob Miller, 

 Frederick Remington, and the cowboy painter Charles 

 M. Russell the trans-Mississippi regions have been 

 pictured as have few other areas on earth.' From 



' For George Catlin, Gustavus Sohon, and George Gibbs, see: 

 John C. Ewers, "Gustavus Sohon's Portraits of Flathead and 

 Pend d'Oreille Indians, 1854," Smithsonian Miscellaneous Col- 

 lections, vol. 1 10, no. 7, 1948; "George Catlin, Painter of Indians 

 and the West," in Annual Report of the . . . Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion . . . 1955, 1956, pp. 483-528; Marvin C. Ross, George 

 Catlin, Episodes from Life Among the Indians and Last Rambles, 

 Norman, Okla., Univ. Oklahoma Press, 1959; Harold Mc- 

 Cracken, George Catlm and the Old Frontier, New York, Dial 

 Press, 1959; David I. Bushnell, Jr., "Drawings by George 



historical and ethnological standpoints these men 

 made tremendous and timeless contributions to our 

 American heritage. But the West held an esthetic 

 fascination for the untutored and less talented as well, 

 and not a few soldiers, miners, stage drivers, and just 

 plain adventurers recorded their impressions on paper 



Gibbs in the Far Northwest, 1849-1851," Smithsonian .Miscel- 

 laneous Collections, vol. 97, no. 8, 1938. 



For Alfred Jacob Miller, see: Bernard DeVoto, Across the 

 Wide Missouri, Boston, Little, Brown and Co., 1947; Marvin C. 

 Ross, editor, The West oj Alfred Jacob .Miller, Norman, Okla., 

 Univ. Oklahoma Press, 1951. 



For Frederick Remington and Charles Russell, see: Harold 

 McCracken, Frederick Remington, Artist of the Old ()'«(, Phila- 

 delphia, Lippincott, 1947, and The Charles M. Russell Book; the 

 Life and Work oJ the Cowboy Artist, Garden City, Doubleday, 

 1957. 



PAPER 1 2 : HERMANN STIEFFEL, SOLDIER ARTIST OF THE WEST 



