62 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. IIO 



Charles and his brother were of the party of lo lodges of Flathead 

 who went to meet Father De Smet on his return to the West in July 

 1841. (Chittenden and Richardson, 1905, vol. i, p. 30.) 



Unless this man was the "Charles" who accompanied Father 

 De Smet on many of his travels in the northwest as interpreter, his 

 name was not mentioned in the later literature. Baptiste Finley said 

 Charles Lamoose died in the Bitterroot Valley prior to 1891. His 

 brother Francis Lamoose, also known as Francis Saxa, lived to old 

 age among the Flathead and was a well-known and respected in- 

 formant on Flathead cultural history. 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SOHON PORTRAITS 



The white man's penetration of the northwestern interior of our 

 country came late. It advanced rapidly. The period of transition 

 from first exploration to extensive white settlement, which in some 

 sections of the country required centuries, was a matter of decades 

 in the Northwest. The explorer, the fur trader, the missionary, the 

 Indian agent, the gold seeker, and the farmer-settler, met and left 

 their impress on the lives and customs of the Indians of the Northwest 

 in a little more than a half century. Indians born into a Stone Age 

 aboriginal culture lived to witness the extermination of the buffalo, 

 the filling up of their land with settlers, and their confinement on 

 reservations. 



In the face of this rapid extension of white civilization, the relatively 

 small native tribes of the Northwest struggled to retain their political, 

 social, and economic independence. Two of those tribes were the 

 Flathead and the Upper Pend d'Oreille. Major responsibility for 

 working out an adjustment to the changed conditions of life and 

 solving the many knotty problems posed by the extension of the white 

 man's culture to their country was assumed by the elected chiefs 

 of these tribes. Although these leaders differed markedly in their 

 opinions of what was best for their people, they acted with such 

 courage, sincerity, and friendliness as to win the admiration and 

 respect of the white men with whom they dealt. Probably no group 

 of Indian leaders in American history have been so extravagantly 

 praised by the whites as were the Flathead and Pend d'Oreille chiefs 

 of the middle of the nineteenth century. Mr, Sohon's portraits depict 

 the majority of those chiefs as they appeared in the year of 1854. 

 His portraits have given form and substance to some of the strongest 

 Indian characters in western history. 



The appearance of the subjects of Sohon's portraits illustrates the 

 Indians' selective adaptation of traits of the white man's culture. 



