Sophie’s life leads us into a sprawling Western world. Born in the Dakota Territory shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, she died on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, one of the very poorest parts of a Great Depression-riddled nation, in 1936. Her first husband, a white Civil War veteran, effectively kidnapped their five children after he fell in love with another woman. He married her and banished Sophie to the newly created Great Sioux Reservation.
When a Historian Saw This Haunting Photograph of a Nameless Native Girl, She Decided She Had to Identify Her
In 1868, Sophie Mousseau was photographed at Fort Laramie alongside six white Army officers. But her identity—and her life story—remained unknown for more than a century
But Sophie’s name transforms a banal photograph into a picture that leads us into a world of families and the complicated racial politics of the 19th-century West.
Her story transforms a picture ostensibly about men negotiating a peace treaty into a meditation on the endemic violence that shaped so many American lives.
When we know who Sophie is, the photograph becomes a different kind of evidence altogether.
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