The Emergence of the Plains Indian as the 

 Symbol of the North American Indian 



By John C. Ewers 



Director, Museum of History and Technology 

 Smithsonian Institution 



[With 18 plates] 



One summer's day in 1941 I stood on the North Montana Fair- 

 ground in Great Falls. From a stand in front of me a fast-talking 

 patent medicine salesman was vigorously extolling the curative powers 

 of his bottled wares. From time to time he pointed to the living 

 advertisement standing beside him — a tall, erect, young White man 

 whose paint-streaked face was framed by a beautiful, flowing-feather 

 bonnet. The young man's body was clothed in a cloth sliirt, leggings, 

 and a breechclout dyed to resemble buckskin. His feet were clad in 

 beaded moccasins. The audience, for the most part, was composed 

 of Indians from Montana reservations wearing common Wliite men's 

 clothes — shirts and trousers. I was intrigued by the fact that this 

 pale-faced symbol of an American Indian standing before us was 

 wearing a close approximation of the same costume the Blackfeet, 

 Crees, and Crows in the audience would put on when they staged an 

 Indian show for the enjoyment of tourists. 



How did this picturesque costume come to symbolize "Indianness" 

 to the minds of Indians and "Wliites alike? How did the popular 

 image of the Indian come to be formed in a Plains Indian mold? 

 Wliy do people in Europe and America, when they think of Indians, 

 tend to think of them as wearers of backswept feather bonnets, as 

 dwellers in conical tipis, and as mounted warriors and buffalo hunters ? 

 Surely our founding fathers had no such conception of the Indian in 

 the days when the frontier of settlement extended only a short distance 

 west of the Alleghenies, and the only Indians the remote frontiersmen 

 knew were forest dwellers who lived in bark-covered houses, traveled 

 in bark canoes or dugouts, hunted and fought on foot, and wore no 

 flowing-feather bonnets. Nor was the prevailing popular image of 

 the Indian an original creation of the motion pictures during the 20th 

 century. Plow and when, then, did this image emerge? 



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