(WEST) Soule William S; photographer A Kansas Episode

Sale 2253 - Lot 340

Unsold

Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,500

THE FAMOUS SCALPING ON THE PLAINS (WEST.) Soule, William S.; photographer. A Kansas Episode. Albumen photograph, 5 x 7 1/2 inches, on original mat, signed "Soule" in negative; mat-toned with inked title and two early number stickers in margins, faint dampstaining in right part of image. Near Fort Dodge, KS, December 1868

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Additional Details

The scalped corpse shown here is of Ralph Morrison, a hunter who was killed by Cheyennes just a mile from the safety of Fort Dodge. Lieutenant Philip Reade, the officer to the left, later recalled the event for the magazine Recreation: "Looking eastward Scout Austin and I saw a white man pursued, shot and scalped, by a small party of mounted Indians. Of course, at the first shot we started for the hostiles, leaving troopers to follow later. Morrison did not fire a shot. His right arm had been disabled by the first volley from the ambushed Indians and they swooped down on him, completed their barbarous work, remounted and were in retreat before we reached the still warm body of Morrison."
Soule was a clerk at a nearby trading company when he took this picture. An engraving of it appeared in Harper's Weekly a month later, which was his first published work. Most of Soule's later work was in the field of Indian portraiture. Nye notes in "Plains Indian Raiders" that "he took only one picture of a dead man . . . and apparently he took that picture only to prove that it could be done." Only one other copy known at auction, at Cowan's in 2007. Captioned as "Scalped Hunter near Fort Dodge" in Belous and Weinstein, Will Soule, pages 112-113.