The Hidden History of a 19th-Century Photograph and the Mystery of Its Unnamed Girl

A new book investigates a single 19th-century photograph of an unnamed Native American girl surrounded by federal officials and explores what identifying her reveals about the historical context of the American West.

In The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West — published by Princeton University Press this year — historian Martha A. Sandweiss focuses on one carefully staged photograph taken in 1868 by Alexander Gardner, one of the most celebrated photographers of the Civil War era.

Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his stark images of Confederate dead at the Battle of Antietam, traveled that year to Fort Laramie in Dakota Territory. He was there to document federal treaty negotiations between the United States government and the Lakota and other tribes of the northern Plains. Among the photographers he produced was a formal group portrait showing six federal peace commissioners standing around a young Native girl wrapped in a blanket.

The photograph is meticulously labeled. The men are all named in Gardner’s handwritten captions, including General William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the most prominent Union commanders of the Civil War, still widely associated with the burning of Atlanta and his destructive march through Georgia. The girl at the center, however, is left unnamed. In surviving prints and negatives, she is identified only by a generic tribal label.

Despite this omission, the photograph has appeared repeatedly in books and exhibitions about the U.S. Indian Wars, often treated as a straightforward illustration of treaty-making in the West. In The Girl in the Middle, Sandweiss, an emerita professor of history at Princeton University who specializes in the history of the American West and photography, questions that assumption. She approaches the image not as a complete historical record but as a starting point, asking who the girl was, why she was present, and what her life reveals about the era in which the photograph was made.

Sandweiss follows the lives of the six men in the image, all of whom were powerful military or political figures, but she devotes particular attention to identifying the girl in the photograph. Through archival research spanning legal documents, government records, memoirs, and family histories, she concludes that the girl is Sophie Mousseau, estimated to be about eight years old when the photograph was taken. Mousseau’s life extended from the aftermath of the Civil War into the Great Depression, a period of profound upheaval for Native communities.

In The Girl in the Middle, Sandweiss reconstructs Mousseau’s life in detail. Her first husband Posey Ryan was an Irish teamster who murdered two family members, yet later emerged in local accounts as a pioneer figure. Ryan took the couple’s children and raised them as white, while Mousseau was sent to live on the Great Sioux Reservation. Her second husband John Monroe came from a mixed-race background and ultimately identified as Indian. Through Mousseau’s experiences, Sandweiss traces the intersecting forces of displacement, violence, and assimilation that shaped Native lives in the late 19th century.

In the book, Sandweiss explores the limitations of photographs as historical evidence and the need to treat such images as starting points for deeper, more honest history.

“Photographs are historical artifacts; they are not history itself. History is dynamic, inherently about change over time. Photographs are static. They stop time dead still and focus our attention on what we can see. They suggest that what we see is somehow more important than what we can’t, that the moment fixed in the photographic image matters more than what happened just before or after. That is not always true,” Sandweiss writes in The Girl in The Middle, according to an excerpt published by Literary Hub.

While photographs can sometimes capture what Henri Cartier-Bresson called a “decisive moment,” Sandweiss argues that Gardner’s image does not.

“Gardner’s photograph merits attention. Yet there is nothing decisive about the fleeting moment captured here,” Sandweiss writes. “Imagine the photograph as a drop of water. To better understand the past, we need to make that droplet part of a running stream; we need to make time flow.”

The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West is published by Princeton University Press.