(AMERICAN INDIANS) Photograph of the venerable Crow chief Pl

Sale 2675 - Lot 9

Price Realized: $ 1,000

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500

(AMERICAN INDIANS.) Photograph of the venerable Crow chief Plenty Coups with French general Ferdinand Foch. Hand-colored silver print, 7½ x 9¼ inches to sight, laid into original 11 x 13 mat, with period manuscript captions in French on mat recto and verso; minor wear and soiling to mat. [Crow Agency, MT, 28 November 1921]

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Additional Details

Plenty Coups (1848-1932) was the principal chief of the Crows for most of his life. He is shown here with an unlikely acquaintance, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the French general who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces on the western front during World War One. Foch traveled widely through the United States in 1921 as part of war commemorations. He first met Plenty Coups at a ceremony for the burial of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery on 10 November 1921. On 28 November he visited Plenty Coups at the Crow Agency, where this photograph was taken. Foch toured the Little Bighorn battlefield and was made an honorary member of the Crows on this date.

The French-language captions are dated February 1922; they identify Foch and the "Chef de la tribu des Crows"; it also notes that the Western States Oil & Land Co. was drilling on the reservation. On verso, it is inscribed "Souvenir de l'amitie Franco-Americain avec toute l'emotion."

The photograph was published in Frederick C. Krieg, "Chief Plenty Coups: The Final Dignity," in Montana: The Magazine of Western History 16:4 (Autumn 1966), page 35, where it is misdated as March 1921.