Red Cloud’s Bedroom, 1891
Taken on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota by photographer C. G. Morledge, this photograph shows the bedroom of Red Cloud, a distinguished Oglala Lakota leader. Red Cloud had won a war against the U.S. Army just after the Civil War. He negotiated so tenaciously and shrewdly, afterward, with what he saw as meddlesome Indian agents, that his people nicknamed Pine Ridge “The Place Where Everything Is Disputed.” Some of the contents of Red Cloud’s bedroom may surprise you. How do you interpret the presence of five American flags? The visual images on the walls? What strategies and ways of life, blending old and new, does the photograph suggest? Compare it to Edward S. Curtis, “Little Plume and Yellow Kidney.” In what ways did Morledge and Curtis craft different representations of Indian life? Denver Public Library/Bridgeman Art Library.