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ANIMALS, ELK: Bull; COURTING, TWO COUPLES: Men Wear Beaded-Strip Blankets; Women Wear 2nd Phase Navajo Chief's Blanket and Red Blanket

Ethnographic Notes

40 ANIMAL, ELK. A bull elk runs from right to left across the page (extended legs show motion). He has dark shoulders and yellow body. He has a small rack of antlers (three by three points), and his round eye is created by an outlined circle of unpigmented paper, contrasting with the dark hide around it. Penciled details include antlers, ears, beard, split hooves, dewclaws, genitalia, midsection (ribs ?), and tail. Composition of the drawing resembles the same right-to-left, full-page orientation of human warrior portraits. Twelve nearly identical images of this male elk appear in this ledger (plates 19-23; 30, 32, 37-41). See further discussion for plate 19. Media: p. 41 COURTSHIP, TWO COUPLES. Two men and a woman face a second woman at the edge of the left page. The two men both wear Lakota courtship blankets, one dark (pencil fill) and one blue. Both men have red cloth wrapping their visible braids, and both wear long, dark (pencil fill) breechclouts with undyed selvedge edging. The clouts touch the ground, in front and behind the men. Both wear leggings with beaded strips: the first man's design is "Sacred Mountain" (Powell, 1981: 564), and the other is alternating blocks of dark and white, a war design. The middle man is crowded into the page so that his feet do not show. The woman between the men wears a second-phase Navajo chief�s blanket, obtained through trade. Her leggings have four small silver or brass buttons, and her ankles are drawn with four bands (see plate 1 for discussion). These three face a woman in a solid orange blanket. Her dress panels, sewn under the arms and between front and back dress fabric, are red trade cloth with undyed selvedge edges. Her leggings are blue, and her ankles also have four bands. This one of a sequence of drawings with similar composition (plates 19-25). See plate 1 for further discussion of courtship conventions, including the beaded medicine wheel strip of the courtship blankets. Media: Lead pencil outlines & details, fill; blue and orange crayon, red watercolor


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Drawn in 1879 by one or more Northern Cheyenne prisoners in the Dodge City jail held for trial after breaking ...

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Document Info
Plate No: 22
Page No: Pages 40-41
Media: Lead pencil outline, detail, and fill, yellow crayon;
Dimensions: 3.25 x 5 in (8.5 x 12.75 cm)
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