This public domain image of the famed Geronimo is a bit different from most you see, here he is an old man, looking worn rather than fierce. Twenty years earlier he was harassing both United States and Mexican armies with his little band of followers. Never considered a chief among his people, he was as ruthless as he was cunning, and a brilliant military strategist. It was only with the help of Apache trackers that the U.S. army was finally able to find and capture him.

This photo was taken at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo New York in 1901 by Charles Dudley Arnold. We profiled Arnold in a post last October from that same Exposition, Temple of Music.

Here is a dramatic image of an Eskimo man, his face framed by the fur of his parka. A studio portrait, the picture alone gives no clues to the date it was taken. This is the traditional style of winter clothing for Eskimos, used from prehistoric times to the present. There is no background, just a cloudy amorphous blotchiness, that has been used in photography from the 1860s to present.

As it happens, though, this image was published, and the copyright date of the publication was 1926, so it was probably taken that year or within a year or two previously. The image comes from the Cann Studio in Fairbanks, Alaska. That studio was open from the 1920s through at least 1939, and probably later. It was owned by Charles F Cann, a native of Estonia, born 15 May 1885, he died in Fairbanks 14 April 1970.

This little schoolhouse provided education (of a sort) to all those Native American students, all the youngsters from the Havasupai tribe. Today the tribe numbers around 600 persons, but there were fewer in 1901 when this picture was taken, the only figures I’ve found suggest about 200 in 1882, and say that only 106 survived the epidemics of the early 1900s. The Havasupai are the only people living inside the Grand Canyon. They still all speak their native language, also called Havasupai. The reservation is the Havasupai Reservation. But the single town, though sometimes mistakenly called Havasupai, is actually Supai, or in the Havasupai language Havasuuw.

This public domain image was taken by Henry Greenwood Peabody, born in Saint Louis Missouri 27 Apr 1855, he married Dora Crocker Phelps 23 Dec 1880 in Evanston Illinois and had one daughter. Peabody took up photography in the late 1870s, and though he lived in Evanston, probably worked in Chicago. By 1890 he was working in Boston Massachusetts for Allen & Rowell Co., a photographic supply company. During this time he became known as a marine photographer, and published photo books on The Coast of Maine (1889) and Representative American Yachts (1891). Later Peabody went to work for the Detroit Publishing Company and began to travel widely, taking photographs like this one in Arizona, and others as far flung as California, New York, and British Columbia in Canada. In 1905 he quit working for Detroit Publishing, and began touring the country with his ‘magic lantern’ slide-shows on National Parks, Monuments and Native American subjects. Although one biographical sketch claims he continued in photography until shortly before his death, he is listed as a salesman in the 1930 census in Pasadena California, and we have found no photos attributed to him late than about 1920. He died in Los Angeles on March 25th 1951.

Here we have a wonderful image of a tearful-looking Sioux toddler, with a man crouched down beside him, as two women stand by, next to a child in a wicker baby-carriage who is peaking out at the toddler. The photographer has identified this as a Sioux village near Rushville Nebraska. If the women’s clothes weren’t enough to convince us this is a post-1900 photo, then the fact the Sioux are living in canvas tents, rather than teepees, should give us a clue.

This image, which is in the public domain because the copyright has expired, was copyrighted in May 1908, and probably taken shortly before that. The women’s heavy coats and the lack of vegetation, but no snow, suggests early Spring, probably March of that year. The photograph was printed as a real-photo postcard. The photographer is identified as S D Butcher & Son. That is Solomon Devore Butcher, whom we profiled under his image of Broken Bow Hardware. But that image credit didn’t mention the son. Solomon and his wife Lillie had two children, one son and one daughter. The son was Lynn J, born March 1883 in Nebraska. Lynn is listed in the 1900 census with his parents, in 1910 as a photographer with a wife and seven-month old son, and in 1920 as a salesman.

This image shows nine men dressed in traditional Native-American costume, in front and on top of a reconstruction of a Six-Nations Long House. There is also a gentleman in the background wearing a sheriff’s badge. The image is captioned ‘Indians from N.Y. State Reservation’. It was taken in 1901 at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo New York.

The photographer was Charles Dudley Arnold, whom we profiled in an earlier post on the Temple of Music building at this same exposition.