A Cheyenne Sketchbook

Cohoe or Nohnicas (Lame), whose 12 colored sketches are the focus of this painstakingly researched and handsomely printed little book, was one of some 70 Plains Indians imprisoned at Fort Marion in Florida between 1875 and 1878. He took part in a number of forays and escapades in the last desperate days of Southern Cheyenne resistance in 1873-74, and was only 20 at at his surrender. With encouragement by Lt. R. H. Pratt, “the Red Man’s Moses,” who had been assigned their charge, many of the Marion captives sketched and painted to while away the time, earn small sums, or, as in the case of Cohoe, out of nostalgia, as reported by a Cheyenne informant: “When he got lonesome, he drew pictures about relatives and the things he would remember” (p. 3). When Cohoe returned to the Oklahoma reservation after five years and three months as a captive and as a student at Hampton and Carlisle, he ceased to draw. The original notebook from which these examples of his work were drawn was sent by Pratt to another champion of native Americans, Bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple of Minnesota, following the latter’s visit to the fort in 1876. Both are identified in the drawings. The first four sketches portray hunts on the Plains, the next five tribal and military society ceremonials, and the last three prisoners’ diversions at Fort Marion - a cookout, catching a shark (“Water Buffalo”), and a war dance before assembled whites. There is an informative and sympathetic introductory chapter, and each of the colored sketches is followed by two to a half dozen pages of ethnographic identification and context and some lesser attention to Cohoe’s style. Hoebel and Petersen leave us in their debt for this attractively presented, if brief, segment of the record. --Reviewed by Roberta Anderson, University of Utah. (American Anthropologist, Vol.67, No.3, 1965, pp.800-801.)