Beaded Otter­skin Bag, 19th Cen­tury, Gift of Huguette Hoguet. Museum Objects Collection.

Sev­eral items from Princeton’s col­lec­tions of West­ern Amer­i­cana are cur­rently on dis­play in the Fire­stone Library Main Gallery exhi­bi­tion, “A Repub­lic in the Wilder­ness: Trea­sures of Amer­i­can His­tory from Jamestown to Appo­mat­tox.”  The exhi­bi­tion begins with early Eng­lish set­tle­ment, includ­ing con­tact with the native peo­ples, and then traces the growth of the Amer­i­can nation to the end of the Civil War.  For more about the exhi­bi­tion and related lec­tures and events, includ­ing an online exhi­bi­tion, see the Man­u­scripts Divi­sion announce­ment, A Repub­lic in the Wilder­ness.

The exhi­bi­tion includes sev­eral works by lead­ing fig­ures of the Amer­i­can West, includ­ing art­work by George Catlin, William Henry Jack­son pho­tographs of Native Amer­i­cans, a Brigham Young Let­ter and the first edi­tion of the Book of Mor­mon (Palmyra, N.Y., 1830), and mul­ti­ple man­u­scripts and other printed works high­light­ing the West­ward expan­sion.  Below are a hand­ful of items cur­rently on dis­play with labels pro­vided by the exhi­bi­tion cura­tors, Don Ske­mer, Cura­tor of Man­u­scripts, and Anna Chen, Assis­tant Cura­tor of Manuscripts.

Pho­tographs of North Amer­i­can Indi­ans, 1847–1865. Clock­wise from upper left: Op-Po-Noos (pho­to­graph by Thomas M. East­erly, 1847); Cut Nose (pho­to­graph by Joel E. Whit­ney, ca. 1862); Uniden­ti­fied Dakota Man (pho­to­graph by James McClees Stu­dio, ca. 1858); Med­i­cine Bot­tle (pho­to­graph by Joel E. Whit­ney, 1865); Bum-Be-Sun (pho­to­graph by Thomas M. East­erly, 1847); Ma-Za-Ka-Te-Mani (pho­to­graph by James McClees Stu­dio, 1858). West­ern Amer­i­cana Pho­tographs Collection.

These pho­tographs of Sac and Fox and Dakota Indi­ans belong to one of two albums con­tain­ing more than 1,000 mounted albu­men prints, includ­ing por­traits of del­e­gates to Wash­ing­ton, D.C., expe­di­tion pho­tographs, and early West­ern stu­dio por­traits. They were prob­a­bly com­piled by renowned pho­tog­ra­pher William Henry Jack­son (1843–1942), who may also have writ­ten the num­bers in the cor­ner of each photograph.

The William Henry Jack­son Albums are included as part of the nearly 7,000 West­ern Amer­i­cana pho­tographs dig­i­tized for the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Dig­i­tal Library. To view the entire albums, see Pho­tographs of North Amer­i­can Indi­ans.

Car­leton Watkins (1829–1916), Lake Ah-Wi-Yah, Yosemite Val­ley, Cal­i­for­nia, 1861. Gift of Thomas Lange. West­ern Amer­i­cana Pho­tographs Collection.

After emi­grat­ing from his home­town of Oneonta, New York, in 1851, Car­leton Watkins found work as a photographer’s aide in San Fran­cisco. Once in busi­ness for him­self, he began pho­tograph­ing the Yosemite Val­ley and Cal­i­for­nia min­ing scenes. His stere­oviews and mam­moth pho­tographs of Yosemite made him famous and helped to influ­ence fed­eral leg­is­la­tion to pro­tect the val­ley, which Pres­i­dent Abra­ham Lin­coln (1809–1865) signed on June 30, 1864.

Lake Ah-Wi-Yah and sev­enty other pho­tographs by Car­leton Watkins are also avail­able in the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Dig­i­tal Library.  See Car­leton Watkins

Brigham Young (1801–1877), Let­ter to Har­riet Cook Young, June 23, 1846. Gift of Edith Young Booth. Brigham Young Collection.

After Joseph Smith (1805–1844), the founder of the Mor­mon faith, was killed by a mob in 1844, Brigham Young took over the lead­er­ship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. To escape anti-Mormon per­se­cu­tion, he led a van­guard west­ward, reach­ing the Salt Lake Val­ley in July 1847. Dur­ing the jour­ney, he wrote this let­ter to his fourth wife, Har­riet Cook Young (1824–1898), whom he had secretly mar­ried and left in Nau­voo, Illi­nois, urg­ing her to come west. She arrived in Salt Lake City in Sep­tem­ber 1848.

In 2012, Princeton’s Brigham Young Col­lec­tion was dig­i­tized for an under­grad­u­ate his­tory course on the Amer­i­can West.  See Brigham Young Col­lec­tion.

Detail of bead­work on Princeton’s “Woompa” bag. Beaded Otter­skin Bag, 19th Cen­tury, Gift of Huguette Hoguet. Museum Objects Collection.

Beaded otter­skin bags like this one were made by Great Lakes Indian groups to hold med­i­cine and rit­ual objects. This bag belonged to Ram­say Crooks (1787–1859), a fur trader, explorer, and even­tual pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Fur Com­pany, founded by John Jacob Astor (1763–1848), which became one of the largest busi­nesses in the United States in the 1830s and opened the way for the set­tle­ment and eco­nomic devel­op­ment of the Amer­i­can West.

For more on the his­tory of otter­skin bags in tribal cul­ture, see Anton Treuer’s “Full Cir­cle: From Dis­in­te­gra­tion to Revi­tal­iza­tion of Otter­skin Bag Use in Great Lakes Tribal Cul­ture,” Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library Chron­i­cle (67:2, 2006): 359–365.

To view these and other West­ern Amer­i­cana high­lights cur­rently on dis­play, visit the Main Gallery of the Fire­stone Library now through August 4, 2013. For hours and infor­ma­tion, see Infor­ma­tion for Vis­i­tors.  The Fire­stone Library is located on the cor­ner of Nas­sau Street and Wash­ing­ton Road (#5 on the cam­pus map) and the address for GPS direc­tions is One Wash­ing­ton Road, Prince­ton, NJ, 08544.

 Dur­ing the fall term of 2011, Pro­fes­sor Martha Sandweiss, His­tory Depart­ment, and Brian Just, Art Museum Cura­tor of the Art of the Ancient Amer­i­cas, co-taught a course enti­tled “Arti­facts, Images, and His­tory: The Amer­i­can South­west.” The course explored Native arts of the Amer­i­can South­west by ana­lyz­ing Princeton’s own col­lec­tions in the hold­ings of the Art Museum, the Depart­ment of Geo­sciences, and the Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions. The Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Art Museum mag­a­zine high­lighted the course in its Win­ter 2012 issue, also avail­able on the museum’s news page: The Museum in the Class­room.

Pro­fes­sor Sandwiess’s spring course, “His­tory of the Amer­i­can West,” will make use of the department’s strong hold­ings of gold rush and over­land jour­ney mate­r­ial.  Six­teen man­u­script over­land nar­ra­tive collections con­sist­ing of let­ters, jour­nals, diaries, and scrap­books were recently dig­i­tized and placed in the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Dig­i­tal Library, allow­ing stu­dents (and schol­ars world­wide) online access to pri­mary doc­u­ments from the period.

While many of the col­lec­tions are recent addi­tions to the depart­ment, such as the Daniel Gano Gold Rush Scrap­book (C1398) and the David Starr Hoyt Man­u­scripts (C1407) that were acquired by the Man­u­scripts Divi­sion in 2011, over­land nar­ra­tives were a par­tic­u­lar inter­est to Philip Ash­ton Rollins, Class of 1889. While Rollins focused more on printed works, man­u­scripts were often selected as well, such as a forty-miner’s jour­nal writ­ten by M. A. Vio­lette, “Man­u­script Jour­nal of Over­land Jour­ney to Sleepy Hol­low,” 1849 (C0199, no. 1092).

Thorn­ton, Ore­gon and Cal­i­for­nia in 1848 … (Harper & Broth­ers, 1849). Philip Ash­ton Rollins Collection

Rollins early col­lect­ing of printed works was guided by Henry R. Wagner’s  bib­li­og­ra­phy of over­land jour­neys, The Plains and the Rock­ies: A Bib­li­og­ra­phy of Orig­i­nal Nar­ra­tives of Travel and Adven­ture, 1808–1865 (first pub­lished in the 1920s and revised and expanded many times since).  Rollins’ col­lec­tion of over­land nar­ra­tives nat­u­rally cap­tured the Cal­i­for­nia Gold Rush era (1848–53) and marks the begin­ning of the depart­ment’s gold rush col­lec­tions. Many of the printed works col­lected by Rollins can be found online via Google Books or the Hathi Trust Dig­i­tal Library, such as J. Quinn Thornton’s Ore­gon and Cal­i­for­nia in 1848: With an Appen­dix, Includ­ing Recent and Authen­tic Infor­ma­tion on the Sub­ject of the Gold Mines of Cal­i­for­nia, and Other Valu­able Mat­ter of Inter­est to the Emi­grant, Etc. (New York: Harper & Broth­ers, 1849). Rollins, how­ever, soon ven­tured well beyond Wagner’s cut-off point, the close of the Civil War in 1865, which allowed him to con­tinue col­lect­ing over­land nar­ra­tives through­out the rail­road years.