Mary Colter’s Collection of Lakota Ledger Drawings

When future decorator and architect Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) was a child in St. Paul, Minnesota, a relative gave her family what she later described as “gifts from the Indians.” When word of a smallpox outbreak at the reservation reached the family, Colter’s mother feared the objects could communicate the disease to her children so she burned all the gifts. All that she found, that is.

All images are from Colter’s collection at Bighorn Battlefield National Monument

Colter hid a group of drawings on lined paper under her mattress. “[I]t was not until many years later that my mother learned I still had them,” Colter later wrote. Colter remembered being told that these small drawings (approximately 3” x 5”) were made by (Lakota) Sioux prisoners at Fort Koegh in Montana. They were likely imprisoned for resisting the forcible taking of their lands by the US government, perhaps by fighting in the Battle of Little Bighorn.  

Colter retained her interest in the art and cultures of Indigenous people throughout her life. As an art teacher and lecturer in the early 1900s, she brought examples of Indigenous crafts to her talks on the Arts and Crafts movement. After she began her career as an artist, decorator, and architect with hospitality company Fred Harvey, Colter integrated elements of the Southwestern region’s cultural history into her building decorations and designs.

Over her lifetime, Colter assembled collections of baskets, pots, and jewelry made by tribal members. The author Frank Waters wrote of Colter, “Her collections of old baskets, and Navaho and Zuñi silver, are the best I have ever seen.” Recognizing the cultural value of her collection and wishing it to be preserved after her passing, in 1947 Colter began arranging the donation of these objects to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.

Colter did not part with the drawings she had saved since childhood for nine more years. In 1956 when she was about 87 years old, she wrote a letter to the superintendent of Custer [now Little Bighorn] Battlefield National Monument in which she described the drawings as her “most priceless and precious possessions.” Colter donated them to the national monument less than two years before her death.

The images shown here are from Colter’s collection of ledger drawings at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Read a brief history of ledger drawings such as these.

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Sources:

Matilda McQuaid with Karen Bartlett, “Building an Image of the Southwest: Mary Colter, Fred Harvey Company Architect,” in The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway, Marta Weigle and Barbara Babcock, Eds. (Phoenix: The Heard Museum, 1996): 24 – 35.

Frank Waters, Masked Gods: Navaho and Pueblo Ceremonialism, 2nd Edition (Athens: Swallow Press / Ohio University Press, 1950).

Virginia Grattan Collection, Special Collections, University of Arizona Libraries, Tucson.