href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@36066@[email protected]#fig10" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">10) fall in the period of Stieffel's service at Fort Keogh in the Department of Dakota. The fort, named for Captain Miles Keogh (who died with Custer in the Little Big Horn massacre) and originally called Cantonment Tongue River, was located at the confluence of the Tongue and Yellowstone Rivers near present-day Miles City, Montana.

The pictures of both the fort (fig. 8) and Miles City (fig. 9) are subject to check against extant photographs; they are amazing in their detail and accuracy. The over-all layout of the fort conforms, and such minute details as the gable windows and chimneys of the officers' quarters on the left of the parade ground and the two-story verandas on the enlisted barracks opposite are absolutely correct.[36] The familiar stables, corral, wood piles, and hay piles—the latter surrounded by a stone wall as protection against grass fire in the dry months—are readily discernible (fig. 8). The low stone buildings and corral in the right centerground probably are part of the original structures of Cantonment Tongue River. The small shacks to the left of them probably are the homes of the civilian hangers-on who founded Miles City in 1876 after being ejected from the post by Col. Nelson Miles, the commander of the 5th Infantry. The first site of Miles City can be seen in the upper right corner on the banks of the Tongue. The town was moved across the river in 1877. The mounted drill in the foreground is difficult to explain in a period when and in an area where the troops were almost constantly in the field under combat conditions. Perhaps it is mere window dressing by the artist. It is entirely possible, however, that Stieffel has pictured elements of his own regiment, which was mounted from 1877 until after the surrender of Sitting Bull in 1881. Being basically infantry they would be most in need of training in mounted tactics. Then again, these could be legitimate cavalry whose commander thought had wandered too far from regulation movements during the unorthodox winter warfare they had been waging against the Indians.

The view of Miles City (fig. 9) has little importance in a military sense, but it is a fine contemporary view of a frontier town of the period. It is probably the product of a spring afternoon Stieffel spent along the banks of the Tongue. It was painted before 1880—a wooden bridge had replaced the ferry by that year[37]—and probably as early as 1878, for the town grew rapidly and Stieffel pictures only two streets, Main and Park, running at right angles. The town is correctly placed in a grove of cottonwoods, and low to the river as evidenced by the almost annual flooding of the streets.[38] Structures which can be readily identified, reading from left to right on Main Street, are the Diamond D corral visible near the ferry landing; the town stockade which Stieffel has either misplaced or which was later moved; Major Bochardt's store, the white two-story building; Broadwater, Hubbel and Co., the brown two-story structure next right; the Cottage Saloon at the corner of Main and Park Streets, just to the right of the flag pole; and Morris Cahn's drygoods emporium on Park Street, in the right centerground, that can be identified by Cahn's name on the false front.[39]

A Note on Stieffel's Indians

In seven of his nine paintings Stieffel has executed his Indian subjects in colorful detail and with some care. Although he apparently did not know his subjects well enough to distinguish them by tribe, he does depict them in typical dress of the period. Many of them are wearing German silver ornaments of various designs about their necks, on strips of flannel attached to their hair pigtail-like, or as arm bands. At least four are wearing hair-pipe breast plates, a fact of interest to ethnologists,[40] and several wear the comical, Puritan style, tall black hats issued as annuity goods. The red and blue robes are of trades-good flannel, as probably are the leggings. Two wear buffalo robes with the skin side out and the hair side rolled over at the shoulder.[41] Two, in the Fort Keogh picture (fig. 8) and the Yellowstone River landscape (fig. 10), wear robes of the familiar, colorfully striped Hudson Bay blanketing material. Arms are conventional—bows, quivered arrows, and pipe tomahawks, with a scattering of firearms. In the Yellowstone River landscape one discrepancy should be pointed out—the canoe; the Northern Plains Indians seldom used water transport, and then generally only in the form of rafts.

FOOTNOTES: