Hermann Stieffel,

Soldier Artist
of the West

The American West has never wanted for artists with a high sense of the documentary. Through the talented hands of men like George Catlin, Carl Bodmer and Alfred Jacob Miller, Frederick Remington, and the cowboy painter Charles M. Russell the trans-Mississippi regions have been pictured as have few other areas on earth.[1] From historical and ethnological standpoints these men made tremendous and timeless contributions to our American heritage. But the West held an esthetic fascination for the untutored and less talented as well, and not a few soldiers, miners, stage drivers, and just plain adventurers recorded their impressions on paper and canvas. Crude though many of these works are, they are nonetheless significant, for they are a graphic record of what these men saw, where they lived, and what they did, in many cases the only record of particular places and events, for the camera of L. A. Huffman and his colleagues did not come into its own until the late 1870's.[2] Without them we would have no description, graphic or otherwise, of much of the West both before and after the Civil War—the early trading posts and forts, the Oregon, Santa Fe, and Overland Trails, the Bozeman Trail, the stage stations, all of which played a part in the opening and development of the West.[3]

Figure 2.—Attack on General Marcy's train near Pawnee Fort, Kansas, September 23, 1867. The train was escorted by Company K, 5th U.S. Infantry, Brevet Major D. H. Brotherton commanding. (USNM 384185; Smithsonian photo 38986-A.)

In 1946 the heirs of Lt. Col. David H. Brotherton, U.S. Army, an Indian-fighting officer of many years experience on the frontier, donated to the United States National Museum a collection[4] comprising a number of Sioux Indian specimens, including a Model 1866 Winchester carbine said to have been surrendered in 1881 to Colonel Brotherton by the Sioux chief, Sitting Bull, and ten water colors by a German-born private soldier, Hermann Stieffel of Company K, 5th U.S. Infantry. Nine of these paintings (the tenth being a view of Rattenberg in the Tyrol Alps) are photographically reproduced herein. They constitute an unusually graphic and colorful, if somewhat unartistic, series of documentaries on the West of the post-Civil-War Indian fighting period.

It can be surmised that Brotherton obtained the paintings from Stieffel, for from 1861 to 1879 he commanded the infantry company in which the latter spent the entire 24 years of his Army career. Brotherton's career itself is an interesting sidelight on the West of the period and an excellent if somewhat sad commentary on the promotion system in the Army during a period when the development of the West was so heavily dependent on the Army's curbing Indian depredations.

Brotherton was graduated from the U.S. Military Academy with the class of 1854 along with several officers who later distinguished themselves in the Confederate States Army, including George Washington Custis Lee, son of Robert E. Lee, John Pegram, J. E. B. Stuart, Stephen D. Lee, and William Dorsey Pender.[5] Assigned to the 5th Infantry, Brotherton by 1861 had risen to the rank of captain and had acquired considerable experience against the Comanches and Apaches in the Southwest, the Seminoles in Florida, and the Mormons in Utah. Electing to remain with his regiment at the outbreak of the Civil War rather than resign and enter a volunteer or militia unit where he easily might have risen to general rank as did so many of his contemporaries, he remained a captain in the Army until 1879 when a vacancy occurred and he was promoted to major. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1883 after 29 years of service, but only at the expense of transferring from his old regiment to the 7th Infantry, where there was a vacancy at that rank. He retired for disability in 1885 after 30 years of almost constant service in the field.

We know little of Stieffel the man. He was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1826, and became a printer by trade, indicating a fair amount of education. He emigrated to this country at an unknown date and in December 1857 at New York City enlisted in the Army as a private of infantry. He was 31 years old at the time, and was described as being five feet five and one-half inches tall with blue eyes, sandy hair, and a fair complexion.[6] He remained a private for the entire time of his military service. After recruit training at a general depot, he was assigned to Company K, 5th Infantry, joining that unit late in August 1858 at Camp Floyd (later Fort Crittenden), Utah Territory, where the regiment was an element of Col. Albert Sidney Johnston's "Army of Utah" sent westward to police the recalcitrant Mormons.[7]

Stieffel's record shows nothing of note until December 1859 when he was court-martialed and fined.[8] This court-martial seemed to set the pace for him.