Peah-Mas-Ka: A Musquawkee Chief

Philadelphia: E.C. Biddle, 1837. unbound. very good. Lehman and Duval. Portrait. Lithograph with original hand coloring. Page measures 21.25" x 14.75".<br/><br/> Beautiful portrait from the folio edition of McKenney and Hall's "History of the Indian Tribes of North America". As Superintendent of the Indian Trade Bureau, Thomas McKenney wanted to document the rapidly disappearing culture of the American natives. He activated the project, sponsored by the War Department, by commissioning writer James Hall and Charles Bird King, a renowned American portraitist. King painted the prominent Indians while they visited Washington D.C. as treaty delegates. Most of the original oil paintings were destroyed by fire in the Smithsonian Museum in 1865. These lithographs, published 1842-58, are all that remain and are still hailed as one of the best visual records of influential Native Americans of the nineteenth century. Peah-mas-ka was a peaceful chief of the Sauk and Fox tribe, also known as the Musquawkee, whose ambushed death ignited a tribal war against the Menominee and the Sioux. Chipping and tears to edges, minor aging and offsetting. One of many Native American portraits in our collection.<br/><br/>