To find the girl’s identity, I plunged into the historical records documenting the work of the commissioners sent to Ft. Laramie in 1868 to persuade the Lakotas to sign a peace treaty that would confine them to a newly designated reservation. Gardner encountered the child while documenting those treaty discussions. Might she be the daughter of one of the Native leaders present at the negotiations? A (very young) translator? The official and unofficial papers of the peace commissioners yielded no clues.
But then, in the archives of the Ft. Laramie National Historic Site, I found a small notecard left behind by a visitor in 1978 who had seen a copy of the photograph there. He recognized the girl. It was his grandmother, born Sophie Mousseau. Names are what connect people to the historical archives. And with only that name, scribbled on a notecard more than a century after Gardner made his photograph, it became possible to recover the broad outlines of a life.
It is not surprising that Sophie is never named in the extant prints of Gardner’s photograph, while the men consistently are. The names of people like Sophie – a child, a female, a person of Native ancestry – often get omitted from the historical records that focus on those with more political or social power. Nonetheless, Sophie proves easier to track than most girl born on the northern plains during the years of the Indian Wars, in part because her father lived long enough to become one of those wizened old-timers that folks tracked down to hear stories about the old days. He narrated his life for writers and told his stories to government agents. Sophie’s story also survives because her father turned litigious, and her first husband committed a notorious crime. The voracious demands of the legal bureaucracy assured their actions would leave a paper trail, including the evidence that Sophie and her family were at Ft. Laramie when Gardner took his photograph.
My search for Sophie’s story led me not just to her, her immediate family, and some living descendants, but also to the little-known stories of other women and children connected to the men standing in the photograph: an orphaned Native child adopted and sent back East, a famous mesmerist channeling the spirits of the dead, and an enslaved woman murdered by an enraged master. The search led me to a bilingual juggler in a Wild West show, an angry wife who fled to Paris, and an angry husband who murdered his wife in a Wyoming restaurant. My search also unearthed some astonishing connections among Sophie, the photographer, and the men in the photograph. Some of those connections they knew. Others they did not. They become evident with historical hindsight.
