Captive warriors' eloquent sketches.

• Author: Werner, Louis
• Position: Ledger drawings by Plains Indians

"I saw seventy-two big Indians yesterday, proper men and tau as one would wish to behold. They were weary and greatly worn; but as they stepped out of the train cars and folded their ample blankets around them, there was a large dignity and majestic sweep about their movements that made me much desire to salute their grave excellencies."

So wrote journalist Sidney Lanier, as he witnessed arrival of these unlikely visitors to Saint Augustine, Florida, the former Spanish outpost and then booming beach to East Coast tourists, on May 21, 1875. But these were not vacationers destined for a grand hotel. They were prisoners, herded at gunpoint across a drawbridge and into Fort Marion, the oldest masonry fort in the U.S., built by the Spaniards in 1675 as the Castillo San Marcos.

The Indians were war captives from the Southern Plains, and this was to be their place of incarceration for the next three years. But the fort, also became an art studio, and during their confinement twenty-six inmates created at least 750 known sketches, rendered on paper in colored and lead pencil, which, as an original and outstanding body of work, have become known collectively as the Fort Marion drawings.

The first traveling exhibition of ledger drawings, including many from Fort Marion, was organized in the U.S. just last year. Significantly, the show was mounted in major art museums and not in the lesser known historical societies to which Native American artwork has usually been relegated. This has given contemporary Native Americans a jolt of artistic recognition. As Lakota painter Colleen Cutschall wrote in the exhibition catalog, "Historical arts of this kind are important to Native people who have lost their sacred traditions and are in the process of recovering them today. The fact that these drawings can bring so much meaning to ordinary lives has become the primary motivation of my work."

The drawings made at Fort Marion--by way of their draftsmanship, coloring, subject matter, and the way they were sold and acquired--revolutionized the way Native North Americans described their personal exploits and tribal History both to themselves and to white people. The sketchbooks were an instant success as $2 collector's items, and they remain popular today. In a recent auction at Christies in New York, one such book sold for $74,000.

More poignantly, the drawings still echo the cry emanating from each heart during years in captivity. Loss and sadness underlie even the most neutral scenes of their journey into exile and everyday prison life. Just months earlier, these warriors had waged battle on the open plains. For the next three years they would be confined to quarters even more restricting than the reservation world against which they had rebelled.

The Indians were allied tribesmen and one tribeswoman--Buffalo Calf, charged with splitting a white man's head with an ax--who dared defy the white men intruding upon an area of rich hunting grounds comprising...