The Tr ans-Mississippi

and International
Expositions of
1898–1899
The Trans-Mississippi
and International
Expositions of
1898–1899
Art, Anthropology, and Popular
Culture at the Fin de Siècle
Edited by Wendy Jean Katz

University of Nebraska Press

lincoln & lond on
© 2018 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Publication of this volume was assisted by the Virginia Faulkner

Fund, established in memory of Virginia Faulkner, editor in chief of
the University of Nebraska Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Katz, Wendy Jean, editor.
Title: The Trans-Mississippi and International Expositions of 1898–
1899: art, anthropology, and popular culture at the fin de siècle /
edited by Wendy Jean Katz.
Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2018]
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2017026651 (print)
lccn 2017027882 (ebook)
isbn 9781496204363 (epub)
isbn 9781496204370 (mobi)
isbn 9781496204387 (pdf)
isbn 9780803278806 (cloth: alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition (1898: Omaha, Neb.)
Greater America Exposition (1899: Omaha, Neb.)
Popular culture—United States—19th century.
United States—Social life and customs—19th century.
Classification: lcc t796.b1 (ebook)
lcc t796.b1 t73 2018 (print)
ddc 907.4/782254—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026651

Set in Minion Pro.

 Contents

List of Illustrations vii

List of Tables x

Introduction: America’s Jewel in the Crown 1

robert w. rydell

1. “The Great American Desert Is No More” 23

sarah j. moore

2. The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition

Commemorative Stamp Issue 59
bonnie m. miller

3. Women and Art in the Passing Show 105

wendy jean katz

4. Trilby Goes Naked and Native on the Midway 161

emily godbey

5. Condensed Loveliness 195

tracey jean boisseau

6. Indigenous Identities in the Imperialist Imagination 257

akim reinhardt

7. Exposition Anthropology 299

nancy j. parezo

8. Hawai‘i and the Philippines at the Omaha Expositions 377

stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

Afterword: The Art of the Historian 441

timothy schaffert

Selected Bibliography 455

Contributors 461
Index 463
 Illustrations

1. Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition souvenir spoon 2

2. F. A. Rinehart, Bird’s-Eye View—Grand Court 6
3. F. A. Rinehart, Indian Congress—Parade, Aug. 4th, ’98 12
4. Greater America Exposition: First Colonial Exhibit 16
5. E. J. Austen, Modern Woodman Day at the Trans-Mississippi
Exposition 32
6. C. Howard Walker, Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition at Omaha 34
7. Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition stock certificate 36
8. Map of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition 38
9. John Ross Key, Entrance Arch (Bird’s-Eye View) 42
10. F. A. Rinehart, Arch of the States 44
11. “Those New Postage Stamps,” Chicago Daily News 68
12. U.S. Post Office, $1 stamp 69
13. U.S. Post Office, 50¢ and 8¢ stamps 72
14. U.S. Post Office, 1¢ stamp 73
15. U.S. Post Office, $2 stamp; Republican National
Convention Ticket 75
16. U.S. Post Office, 5¢ stamp 77
17. U.S. Post Office, 2¢ stamp 80
18. U.S. Post Office, 10¢ and 4¢ stamps 84
19. Envelope with 2¢ stamp from the Omaha issue 97
20. Ethel Evans, “Art,” Omaha Bee 107
21. Trans-Mississippi International Exposition 109
22. Map of Omaha, Official Guide Book to Omaha 114
23. “Vandalism,” Omaha World-Herald 118
24. Ethel Evans, The Lesson (La Leçon) 136
25. George du Maurier, Trilby 165
26. Astley D. M. Cooper, Pygmalion’s Galatee 172
27. Trilby advertisement, Omaha Bee 173
28. F. A. Rinehart, Trilby Temple 175
29. F. A. Rinehart, The Great Trilby 176
30. F. A. Rinehart, Fine Arts Building 180
31. Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition souvenir coin 196
32. Lewis Wickes Hine, Composite Photograph of Child Laborers 205
33. Caroline C. Peddle, sketch for the Queen Isabella souvenir
quarter; U. S. Mint, Queen Isabella souvenir quarter 211
34. Caroline Lovell, Annie Helen Reese from Alabama 217
35. Emblem of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo,
New York 219
36. F. A. Rinehart, Flower Parade 226
37. Bessie Potter Vonnoh, American Girl 229
38. F. A. Rinehart, Waitresses and Band, German Village 234
39. F. A. Rinehart and Adolph F. Muhr, Katherine Antoine 235
40. F. A. Rinehart, Dancing Girls—Streets of Cairo 237
41. F. A. Rinehart, Entrance to Hagenback’s 239
42. Alphonse Mucha, Exposition Universelle; George B. Petty,
A Century of Progress 245
43. Bathing Beauty Contest, New York World’s Fair 248
44. F. A. Rinehart, Sham Battle 268
45. Thomas Rogers Kimball, sketch for the Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition 286
46. William Allen Rogers, Scene from the Indian Congress 288
47. F. A. Rinehart and Adolph F. Muhr, Mrs. Sarah Whistler,
Sac & Fox 291
48. F. A. Rinehart, The Wigwam: Pottawattamie County (Iowa)
Building 307
49. Kiowa Camp Circle, Tennessee International Exposition,
Nashville 310
50. F. A. Rinehart, U.S. Government Building, Interior 319
51. F. A. Rinehart, Interior of Government Building 331
52. F. A. Rinehart, Ponca Camp 344

viii illustrations
53. F. A. Rinehart, Wichita Men Constructing Thatched Ramada 349
54. F. A. Rinehart, James Mooney’s Kiowa Camp Circle 351
55. “Map showing the routes and distances between the United
States, Hawaiian Islands, Philippine Islands, China, etc.” 379
56. F. A. Rinehart, Hawaiian Exhibit, International Building 385
57. Wailuku Mill (Maui), Our New Colonies 387
58. Kamehameha School, Hawaiian Students, and
Hawaiian School Children 389
59. School Children 391
60. Frank Davey, Representative Men of Honolulu, hi 399
61. Native Grass House and Feast 402
62. A Native Picnic Group, hi 404
63. The Hawaiian Village at the Greater America Exposition,
Omaha 406
64. F. A. Rinehart, Scenic Railway 410
65. F. A. Rinehart, Grand Plaza—Peace Jubilee (Night) 412
66. Louis Bostwick, Philippine Village on Midway 416
67. Louis Bostwick, Philippine Village Decorated for “Fighting
First Nebraska Day” 420
68. A High-Caste Philippine Belle 423
69. Puente de Espana, Manila, Philippine Islands 425
70. A Native Village of the Better Class, Philippine Islands 426
71. William Allen Rogers, Illumination of the Grounds at Night 443

illustrations ix
Tables

1. Ethnology and archaeology award categories 305

2. Arts of Industry section themes 325
3. Case 1a. Costume case: bows, quivers, and shields 327
4. Decorated material culture cases including manufacturing tools 329
5. Life figures illustrating manufacturing processes 330
6. Participants and actual housing in the Indian Congress 338
The Tr ans-Mississippi
and International
Expositions of
1898–1899
Introduction
America’s Jewel in the Crown
robert w. rydell

In 1898 my grandmother, Ivy Pearl Snyder, was a twelve-year-old

farm girl from Waverly, Nebraska, when she traveled forty miles
with her parents to Omaha’s Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition. Her experiences and memories got distilled into a small
keepsake, a souvenir spoon (fig. 1). When she attended the fair,
she was about the same age as Ma Joad, the central figure in John
Steinbeck’s novel Grapes of Wrath, who, in the course of culling
her family’s belongings before embarking on their Depression-era
trip to California, refused to jettison a small soapstone carving she
had acquired as a keepsake from her girlhood visit to the 1904 St.
Louis fair.1 Like Ma Joad, my grandmother kept her souvenir from
the 1898 fair through the thickness and thinness of her life before
passing it along to my mother. For reasons Steinbeck would have
understood, the Omaha fair mattered as much to my grandmother
as the St. Louis fair mattered to the woman who held the Joad
family together during the darkest days of the Great Depression.
Today it is difficult to understand and explain the importance of
world’s fairs for the tens of millions of Americans who saw them.
After all, the last such event held in the United States was in New
Orleans in 1984, and it was not successful. In 2001 the U.S. gov-
ernment withdrew from the international convention governing
world’s fairs, now called world expos, making it highly unlikely

1
Fig. 1. Spoon, Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, 1898, sterling
silver, 5¼ inches. Souvenir spoons became popular in the United States in
the 1890s, with impetus from the 1893 Chicago fair and a drop in the price
of silver. The Agriculture Building (pictured on the bowl), by architect
Cass Gilbert, evokes nostalgia, even as the souvenir validates the fairgoer’s
experience.
that another world’s fair will be held in the United States anytime
soon, although the U.S. government still establishes official pavil-
ions at the many foreign expositions still being held, notably at the
2010 Shanghai World Exposition, which attracted some 70 mil-
lion visitors. Now a generation of Americans has come of age that
has had no direct experience with world’s fairs. Explaining the sig-
nificance of a souvenir spoon—a what?—from a world’s fair—a
what?—held in the nineteenth century is not an easy assignment.
It’s one made more difficult when the fair in question was not one
of those “great exhibitions” held in London, Paris, Chicago, or New
York, but took place in, of all places, Omaha.
Yes, Omaha. Sandwiched between the 1889 Paris Universal Expo-
sition and the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition on one
hand and the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition and 1904 St. Louis
Louisiana Purchase Exposition on the other, the Omaha fair, with
its grandiose name and global intentions, joined San Francisco,
Atlanta, Nashville, and Buffalo in holding sparkling international
expositions during an era of deepening anxiety about the future.
Like the other fairs, the Omaha exposition was a planned response
to the boom-and-bust cycle of the United States—indeed of the
global—economy. In England, growing concerns about the social
consequences of industrialization had formed the backdrop for
the British government’s support for the first world’s fair, the 1851
Crystal Palace Exhibition. On the European continent, political
and social upheaval, culminating with the 1871 Paris Commune,
spurred governments and private individuals to finance major
expositions like the 1889 Paris exposition that featured as its iconic
exhibit the spanking new Eiffel Tower.2
The economic and political landscape in the United States was
hardly a model of serenity either. Between 1861 and 1865, the Civil
War had left nearly 700,000 dead and countless casualties who
would be honored in Memorial Day parades well into the twentieth
century. How did the United States recover from the war? World’s
fairs offer an important explanation. Between 1876, with Philadel-
phia’s Centennial Exposition, and 1916, with the San Francisco and
San Diego world’s fairs, expositions would spread coast to coast.
Adding urgency to the project historians call Reconstruction were

introduction 3
economic shocks evidenced by the Panic of 1873, the Depression
of 1893, and the Panic of 1907. Sequential waves of industrial vio-
lence swept the nation: the railroad strikes of 1877, the Homestead
and Pullman strikes of the early 1890s, and violent protests in the
mining towns and cities of the American West in the early twen-
tieth century. Like Europe, where anarchists assassinated mul-
tiple heads of state, the United States witnessed, after Lincoln’s
assassination, the murders of Presidents James Garfield and Wil-
liam McKinley, the last of whom was killed by a suspected anar-
chist. Violence and economic uncertainty characterized America’s
Gilded Age and the transatlantic Victorian world more generally.3
Nebraskans, as any farmer knew, were hardly removed from
these global currents of economic, political, and social unrest.
The 1893 Depression hit Nebraska hard. Market prices collapsed,
and railroad monopolies seemed to dominate state and national
legislative bodies. No matter how hard one worked, there seemed
no way to get ahead. For more than a decade, a loose coalition of
disaffected silver miners in the West and farmers in the South and
Midwest had been organizing under the banner of populism to
demand political and economic reform. They insisted on making
silver the basis of currency (thereby increasing the supply of money
and allowing farmers to repay their original debts with inflated
currency); on using the secret ballot for elections (undercutting
the control of the electoral process by dominant political parties);
on passing a constitutional amendment to allow for the direct elec-
tion of U.S. senators (rather than by state legislatures dominated by
railroad interests); and on federal government support for storing
crop surpluses that led to depressed commodity prices. To make
this package of reforms appealing to urban workers who would
likely see the cost of food increase, Populists supported demands
from industrial workers for an eight-hour workday.4
However reasonable these demands might seem today (espe-
cially since several of these reforms were enacted before World
War II), they challenged the power of corporations and, from the
vantage point of the controllers of capital, seemed part and par-
cel of even more radical efforts by Socialists to make fundamen-
tal alterations in the structure of the American economy. This was

4 robert w. rydell
the immediate backdrop to urgent efforts by civic and business
authorities in Nebraska to counter the swelling tide of protest and
to build popular support for their vision of progress—one that
centered less on government regulation of railroads and federal
price support of crops and more on pushing for market expan-
sion both at home and abroad.
How could this best be accomplished? The answer was crystal
clear. Building on the model of the Chicago World’s Columbian
Exposition (1893), San Francisco’s Midwinter Exposition (1894),
Atlanta’s Cotton States and International Exposition (1895), and
Nashville’s Tennessee Centennial Exposition (1897), and the expo-
sition fever that was building in Buffalo and St. Louis, some of
Omaha’s most influential citizens determined they could raise
sufficient private capital and gain financial support from the state
and federal government to enable Omaha to host a world’s fair
that would restore popular faith in the basic soundness and right-
ness of the American economic system if only its future direction
were left in the hands of large-scale owners of capital. The result
of their efforts was a gem of a fair, a small-scale version of Chica-
go’s fabled White City, with exhibition palaces designed in a neo-
classical style (fig. 2).5
Of the many willing hands who shaped this exposition, two sets
guided the rest. The first belonged to the exposition’s president, Gur-
don Wattles, a local banking executive and shrewd investor. Wattles
was one of the first to understand the value of film for advertis-
ing and become an early backer of Hollywood movies; indeed, he
would build a summer home in Hollywood. He saw the fair as a
boon to local and regional economic development as well as a coun-
terweight to radical populism. The second set of hands belonged
to Edward Rosewater, the founder and editor of the Omaha Bee,
who, like Wattles, served as a Republican national committeeman.
From the get-go, Rosewater used his newspaper to win support for
the exposition, and, not surprisingly, he became the fair’s nimble-
minded director of publicity. It was Rosewater who sounded the
drumbeats of support for the fair during its darkest days when it
appeared that the war with Spain would utterly torpedo federal par-
ticipation in the exposition. And it was Rosewater who deserves the

introduction 5
Fig. 2. F. A. Rinehart, Bird’s-Eye View—Grand Court, Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition, Omaha, 1898. From the collections of the
Omaha Public Library. View from Twin Tower restaurant, toward domed
U.S. Government Building at far west end of court and lagoon. Artwork in
the public domain, scan courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
lion’s share of the credit for transforming what, at best, was antic-
ipated to be a regional exposition promoting the economic devel-
opment of the Trans-Mississippi region with Omaha as its hub,
into an international exposition celebrating America’s victory over
Spain and occupation of the Philippine Islands. He also came up
with the idea for the main attraction: the Indian Congress (fig. 46).
The Indigenous people of the Americas had been front and cen-
ter as attractions at exhibitions and shows since the earliest voyages
of “discovery” by Europeans who often returned with Indians to
display before European audiences. By the early nineteenth cen-
tury, exhibits of Indians were becoming increasingly commonplace.
Exhibition venues, like the outdoor exhibition grounds of the Jar-
din d’Acclimatation in Paris, were becoming ethnological show-
cases, often referred to by scholars today as “human zoos,” that
helped ethnologists advance their ideas about measuring human
differences in terms of race.6 So central had ethnology become
to the international exposition that the directors of the 1893 Chi-
cago fair made ethnology into one of the fair’s main departments
and featured an Anthropology Building along with outdoor eth-
nological representations along the exposition’s fabled Midway
Plaisance—a mile-long strip of land that included George Ferris’s
giant revolving wheel as well as villages of Africans, Asians, and
people from the Middle East deemed “Orientals.”
The American fairs that followed in Chicago’s wake all included
ethnological representations that sometimes expanded to include
representations of Latin Americans living in “villages” and Afri-
can Americans living in “old plantation” settings. As plans for
the 1898 fair developed, Rosewater and the other directors had to
worry about making their fair distinctive—an especially import-
ant issue, since they had already made the decision to copy, albeit
on a reduced scale, Chicago’s beaux-arts buildings and white col-
oration. Knowing the popularity of ethnological exhibits at previ-
ous fairs and the centrality of Native Americans to the narrative of
American “progress” in the Midwest, Rosewater decided to make
the representation of Native Americans the major attraction. Paris
had its Eiffel Tower; Chicago had its Ferris wheel; Omaha would
have its Indians.7

introduction 7
 The Indian Congress took form both as a money-making prop-
osition and as a serious educational effort. The money-making
side of the operation originated with memories of Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West at Chicago’s exposition. When the showman, William
F. Cody, and Chicago exposition managers failed to reach agree-
ment on including the show in the fair, Cody set up his produc-
tion on land immediately adjacent to the exposition where it drew
enormous crowds and drew dollars away from the exposition.
Rosewater did not want to repeat that experience, so he insisted
right from the start that the Indian Congress be embedded in the
Omaha fair. Because he envisioned this production as the larg-
est gathering of Indians ever seen at a world’s fair, he realized he
would need the support of the federal government to help secure
Indians and oversee their presence. The Smithsonian Institution’s
Bureau of American Ethnology eagerly complied, detailing pro-
fessional ethnologists and former military officers to help with
the endeavor.
Three other ideas animated Rosewater’s thinking about the
Indian Congress. One was the precedent of European colonial
exhibits, featuring colonial subjects on display at Belgian, British,
Dutch, and French expositions. These had been used to build pop-
ular support for imperial policies among European populations
and to shape colonial cultures within the colonies themselves. His
second idea was to educate the public about how science, especially
the new field of anthropology, could help inform public policy
toward Native Americans. To this end, Rosewater worked closely
with agents of the Bureau of American Ethnology to help secure
Indians and their artifacts for the exhibit. Third, to heighten the
authenticity of this endeavor and to suggest that it was no mere
show, Rosewater called his production the Indian Congress. The
brand mattered. One of the little-appreciated facets of interna-
tional expositions is that they had nurtured the rise of a “world’s
congress” movement that brought authorities, often from around
the globe, to address topics ranging from health care and social
reform to philosophy and religion. Several European expositions,
notably the 1889 Paris fair, had hosted congresses on problems
associated with colonialism. By calling this assemblage of Indians

8 robert w. rydell
a Congress, Rosewater elevated its significance from the realm of
amusement to education.
This was a distinction with a difference. In the context of argu-
ments swirling around America about the treatment of “show
Indians” who traveled with various Wild West shows, support
from government ethnologists mattered, especially when it came
to securing permission for Indians to leave their reservations to
perform at the fair. The issue boiled down to this: with the federal
government, especially in the aftermath of the Dawes Act, com-
mitted to inculcating Indians with dominant white social and eco-
nomic values and to eradicating traditional cultural values, critics
of Indian shows claimed that showmen degraded Indians by forcing
them to perform as “savages.” Defenders of Indian shows claimed,
to the contrary, that Indians who performed in shows could earn
more money than they could on reservations and thereby improve
their own economic well-being (fig. 44).8
Scholars have added their insights to this debate, broadening its
subjects to include people of color more generally who performed
in ethnological villages at world’s fairs. Were these shows exploit-
ative? Almost none of the people who performed were physically
coerced into so doing. A growing body of scholarship has stressed
that Indigenous people from around the world joined these shows
to see the world, to increase their status within their own com-
munities, and to inform “others” (here meaning Euro-American
audiences) about their own cultures. Far from being mere objects
or colonial subjects, these performers had agency, even to the
point of using their performances to resist their colonial masters.
A good example comes from the 1893 Chicago fair where African
women from the Midway’s Dahomeyan Village participated in a
daily pageant called the Ethnological Parade. They seized the occa-
sion to shout in their own languages to throngs lining the parade
route: “We have come from a far country to a land where all men
are white. If you will come to our country, we will take pleasure
in cutting your white throats.” On the other side of the debate are
scholars who point to the concession contracts that obliged “per-
formers” to act as “savages” and gave white showmen the right
to hold payments in trust. Furthermore, village performers were

introduction 9
exposed to smallpox and measles. Sometimes performers died.
Of the twelve hundred Filipinos transported to the St. Louis fair
as part of the War Department’s Philippines Reservation, at least
two died en route and three died on the fairgrounds. Their skulls
and brains were then removed for study by anthropologists, and
they were generally perceived as racial “types” or “objects” whose
performances, despite their intentions to the contrary, cemented
views of human difference into taxonomies of race.9
The essays in this volume do not resolve this debate. But they
do reinforce the position that it would be a mistake to regard the
Omaha fair, or any of these fin-de-siècle fairs, as landscapes of
pure fun and pleasure, devoid of ideas and ideologies that both
reinforced and challenged racist ways of thinking about the world.
It would also be a mistake to treat these fairs as mere tools of
propaganda. The Omaha fair afforded ample opportunities for
enjoyment, and it would have been possible for a visitor to avoid
the Midway and the Indian Congress. The fair itself was a pleasure
ground where fairgoers, often wearing their Sunday-best clothes,
strolled among flower gardens, fountains, and public sculpture as
they made their way through massive buildings representing dif-
ferent states and the federal government as well as palaces with
the latest innovations in machinery and agriculture. More than a
century later, it is easy to forget these pivotal years in the late nine-
teenth century when the outdoor use of electricity was on display
for the first time. Thousands of incandescent lights illuminated
buildings at night, while the glow from an electrically illuminated
silhouette of President William McKinley reportedly could be seen
from miles away. The way people thought about nightfall and night
itself changed dramatically as people who had never encountered
electrical illuminations in any form stood transfixed by what they
saw on the Omaha fairgrounds (fig. 71).10
And there were the amusements. Every American fair since the
Chicago exposition and its fabled Midway Plaisance had included
an amusement strip of mechanical entertainments (Chicago had
debuted the Ferris wheel) and ethnological shows. Omaha fol-
lowed suit, but with this difference: the fair’s L-shaped entertain-
ment avenue included the East Midway (fig. 3) with its Street of

10 robert w. rydell
Cairo, Mirror Maze, Trilby Temple, and a German Village, and the
North Midway with its Chinese Village, a re-creation of the bat-
tle between the Civil War ironclads Merrimac and Monitor, Edi-
son’s Vitascope, and a show featuring a small woman from Cuba,
Chiquita.
No less important, the North Midway also included an Old
Plantation show with African Americans hired to perform as min-
strels illustrating the “joys” of life under slavery.11 As evidence of
the fair’s—and Midway’s—ability to adapt to current events, in
this case the American occupation of the Philippines, the Midway,
days before the close of the fair, according to one report featured a
“party of Manila warriors,” some with “cannibalistic proclivities.”12
In time for President McKinley’s visit to the fair, a cyclorama pro-
duction about the sinking of the Maine off the coast of Cuba and
the ensuing war with Spain was hastily installed. On the Midway,
the Maine sank multiple times every day, blending entertainment
and news in ways that seem utterly prescient of the early twenty-
first century. In short, this was a thoroughly modern affair, one
intended to overwhelm the senses.
In addition to sight, the exposition played on all of the other
senses to drive home its lessons about material and alleged racial
“progress.”13 One cannot actually taste anything one sees on a com-
puter screen. At the fair, by contrast, visitors could get a taste of
“progress.” In the Home Kitchen exhibit in the Manufacturers
Building, an African American woman played the role of Aunt
Jemima and served pancakes from the pancake mix produced by
General Mills. The exhibit suggested both that there was no need
to start pancake batter from scratch and that every box of the
product seemed to come with a “slave in a box” to make break-
fast preparation easier.14
In addition, fairgoers could hear the sounds of “progress” that
ranged from the grinding of machines to contrasting musical styles
of symphonic orchestras on the main exposition grounds and the
cacophony of sounds emanating from the villages along the Mid-
way. Take, for example, this story from the Omaha Bee about the
Chinese Village on the Midway. The newspaper assured readers
that the “ear-splitting music and alleged singing of the almond-eyed

introduction 11
Fig. 3. F. A. Rinehart, Indian Congress—Parade, Aug. 4th, ’98, Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition, Omaha, 1898. From the collections
of the Omaha Public Library. View of East Midway: at right the German
Village, at left Rider Haggard’s She and Dancing Girls of the Seraglio next to
the domed Moorish Palace and Twin Tower restaurant. The Trilby concession
subleased space from the Moorish Palace. Artwork in the public domain,
scan courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Archive,
trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
beauties from the Flowery Kingdom will attract great attention”
and that “opportunities for witnessing the sly tricks of the ‘heathen
Chinee’ would not be lacking.”15 Octave Thanet, writing for Cos-
mopolitan, made the contrast between the “white city” portion of
the exposition and the Midway even more explicit in her descrip-
tion of nightfall at the fair: “The lagoon is gemmed with light. The
music of the band playing in the Plaza floats ‘like sweet sounds in
a dream’; the barbarous cymbals of the Midway are softened into
a far-away hum.” Quietly, it seemed, the “sweet sounds” of civili-
zation silenced the cacophony of barbarism along the Midway.16
The exposition also played on fairgoers’ sense of smell and touch.
Concessionaires along the Midway avenues and in the main expo-
sition grounds cooked and sold varieties of food from around the
world. These aromas were joined by the smell of “exotic” animal
excrement in Hagenback’s Wild Animal Show and from camels in
the Streets of Nations, underscoring the wildness of the Midway
(fig. 41). And we should not forget that we learn about the world
through touch. Fairgoers could often touch things, and in the case
of Midway villagers, visitors could touch performers themselves.
It was common practice at all expositions for visitors to wander
around exhibits of people “deemed” savages, to gawk at them, to
poke them to see how they would react, and to have their pictures
taken with performers who all too often were depicted as ethno-
logical objects or anthropological specimens.
How should we read this sensory environment of the world’s
fairs? Did these sensory experiences underscore the importance
of world’s fairs as staging grounds for a broad-minded cosmo-
politanism, bonding human beings together, giving them a sense
of their common humanity? Perhaps, and there is some evidence
that this was the reaction of some visitors. But the preponderance
of evidence suggests that fairs, viewed as “sensoriums,” had the
effect of structuring sensory responses in ways that would build
emotional bonds between some people at the expense of “others.”17
It is precisely at this juncture between intellect and emotions
where the ethnologists mattered so much. What the ethnologists
added to people’s already existing beliefs and feelings about racial
hierarchies were the insights from the new science of anthropol-

introduction 13
ogy. Presented to the public with endorsements from Smithsonian-
based scientists, Indian performers found themselves exhibited
as trophies (in the case of the Apache leader Geronimo) and as
specimens of a nearly extinct race. To be sure, some of the eth-
nologists like James Mooney decried the entertainment aspects
of the Indian Congress, but they played crucial roles in helping
to organize it as a potential source for learning the “facts” about
American Indians.
Adding grist to the mill of the “authenticity” of the fair’s rep-
resentations of so-called primitive people was the arrival in late
August of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. This was a popular piece of out-
door entertainment that was rarely billed as a “show” and more
commonly was advertised as a representative and authentic “con-
gress” of people from around the world. Cody’s show—yes, it was
that, too—attracted some of the largest crowds of the exposition
season, and Cody himself was honored with a “special day” at
the fair. One newspaper exclaimed about how Cody’s “savages in
war paint emphasized the steps of progress from their wigwams
of the wilderness to the sculptured architecture of the wonderful
white city.” No less important, his show now included performers
from Japan, Mexico, and the Middle East, mirroring the ethnolog-
ical shows along the midways at world’s fairs. In the buildup for
his show’s stint at the Omaha fair, ads announced that the show
would feature “20 Cuban heroes” who had fought against Span-
ish rule in Cuba.”18
Cody’s timing was perfect—both for his own profits and for
the exposition’s turn toward becoming the site for a national jubi-
lee celebration of America’s victory in the war with Spain. Cody’s
show made clear the seamless connection between America’s con-
tinental and transcontinental expansion. Empire, his show sug-
gested, was inevitable and, not incidentally, could be a source of
great amusement. This paved the way for President McKinley’s
arrival on the exposition grounds as part of the fair’s Peace Jubilee,
an event that became at once a celebration of America’s triumph
in the war with Spain and an artful dodge of the many questions
that would follow from the U.S. military occupation of the Phil-
ippine Islands.19 What did it mean to have overseas possessions?

14 robert w. rydell
Would the Philippines become territories of the United States and
therefore, like the territories carved out of the Louisiana Purchase,
become eligible for statehood and their residents eligible for citi-
zenship? Had the United States, through the war with Spain, estab-
lished an empire and, if so, as writer Mark Twain, suffragist Susan
B. Anthony, and others argued, had it become an imperial repub-
lic like Rome and the antithesis of the democratic aspirations of
America’s founders? McKinley, in his speech at the fair, scorned
the doubters and heaped praise on America’s soldiers all the while
asking Americans to be patient when it came to concerns about
the future. “Right action,” he told some 100,000 in the audience,
“follows right purpose.”
The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition more than
lived up to its name. Originally conceived as a fair about domestic
markets and resources, the exposition made the Trans-Mississippi
region seem positively trans-oceanic in scope. But, in the eyes of
some exposition enthusiasts, the 1898 fair ended too soon, just when
crowds were growing and when public attention was focused on
the future of America’s new overseas possessions. Why not reopen
the fair in 1899 and concentrate its message even more precisely
on advancing American imperialism?
Less than two weeks after the close of the Trans-Mississippi
spectacle, Dr. George Miller, a physician and former editor of the
Omaha World-Herald, and local distiller Peter E. Iler launched
a campaign for reopening the fair. With the pages of the World-
Herald at their disposal, they had initial success raising private
funds. By December the backers launched an exposition corpo-
ration under the name of the Greater America Exposition. By the
spring they were billing their event as “America’s First Colonial
Exhibit.” In so doing, it seemed as if they were answering British
imperialist Rudyard Kipling’s appeal to the United States to “Take
Up the White Man’s Burden,” which had appeared in the Febru-
ary 1899 issue of McClure’s Magazine. In fact, the 1899 exposition
publicists featured Kipling’s admonition in promotional materi-
als, depicting Uncle Sam proudly pointing to America’s newest
possessions in Cuba and the Philippines (fig. 4).
With the fair’s July opening only months away, exposition man-

introduction 15
Fig. 4. Greater America Exposition: First Colonial Exhibit (Omaha:
Baker Bros. Eng. Co., 1899), cover. Guidebooks for the Greater America
Exposition typically recycled Rinehart’s 1898 photographs. Work in the
public domain, scan courtesy of the Donald G. Larson Collection on
International Expositions and Fairs, Department of Special Collections,
California State University, Fresno.
agers raced to persuade Midway show operators to reopen their
concessions in 1899. The U.S. government agreed to leave some of
its exhibits in exposition buildings and to provide free transport
for exhibits, including human beings, from the Philippines, Cuba,
and Puerto Rico for village displays along the Midway. A privately
sponsored village also materialized from Hawai‘i (fig. 63).20 One
local newspaper tried to build excitement for the “live” exhibits
by distinguishing them from the living ethnological shows at the
1893 Chicago fair. “The trouble with the World’s Fair in Chicago
was that [villagers] promptly Americanized themselves. . . . This
kind of thing is distinctly the reverse of ethnological, and will
be painstakingly avoided in the exhibition at Omaha.”21 An early
publicity release forecast that “more than a thousand natives of
the West Indian and Pacific Islands” would be put on exhibit at
the fair and that it would feature a Colonial Exhibits Building.22
Despite the enthusiasm for this endeavor, the Greater America
show ran into difficulties from the start. Reopening a fair on such
short notice raised innumerable contractual problems. Some Mid-
way exhibits had lost money in 1898 and could not be reopened,
leaving 1899 planners with the task of finding new concession-
aires on very short notice. More menacingly, Rosewater, who had
been initially supportive of the 1899 proposal and even served as
a member of the 1899 exposition board, got cold feet about the
enterprise as he saw his rival editor of the Democratic-leaning
World-Herald taking a leadership role in the publicity. Adding to
the difficulties were delays in transporting the centerpieces of the
show, the “colonial cousins” from America’s far-flung empire, to
the fair. It is unclear whether the exhibits from Puerto Rico actu-
ally arrived.23 In the Philippines, Gen. Elwell S. Otis, still fight-
ing the Philippine-American War, balked at the request to allow
Filipinos to leave the islands; only a direct order from President
McKinley allowed thirty-five Filipinos to come to the United States.
Once in San Francisco Bay, an Omaha showman, John De Renville
“Pony” Moore, who along with local businessman Henry F. Daily,
had charge of the Filipinos on the trip, encountered a thicket of
red tape. U.S. immigration authorities determined that the Fili-
pinos, since they seemed to have no performing talent, were con-

introduction 17
tract laborers and therefore subject to exclusion. Only the direct
intervention of Assistant Secretary of War George de Rue Meikle-
john, a former Nebraska lieutenant governor, made it possible for
the Filipinos to disembark. It would be mid-August before they
arrived on the fairgrounds. These delays did nothing to help the
exposition draw crowds. Always on shaky financial ground, the
exposition was essentially bankrupt by October.24
Leaving matters there, however, paints too grim a picture of
America’s First Colonial Exhibit. Before its gates closed, the Greater
America Exposition attracted about 800,000 visitors by the fair’s
own, no doubt inflated, estimates. More important, despite its
management and financial problems, far from deterring exposi-
tion planners in Buffalo and St. Louis from their dreams of mak-
ing colonial exhibits leading attractions at their fairs, the mistakes
made in Omaha in 1899 only inspired them to take the time to work
in careful consort with the U.S. government not only to transport
exhibits but to secure them in the first place. These efforts would
result in a major government exhibit of the Philippine Islands at
the Buffalo exposition and culminate at the St. Louis fair when
the War Department, ironically, given its opposition to allowing
Filipinos to go the 1899 fair, took the lead in organizing the so-
called Philippines Reservation with 1,200 Filipinos on exhibit to
prove the value of America’s imperial endeavors.25
Clearly the two fairs held in Omaha took place under an impe-
rial umbrella. Many of the essays that follow in this volume under-
score this point, but they do so in ways that reveal the complexities
of America’s imperial project. Akim Reinhardt takes up the impe-
rial iconography of the fair and how its tropes of “savagery” and
“civilization” reinforced the fair’s empire-building themes. Stacy
Kamehiro and Danielle Crawford look under the fair’s imperial
canopy and investigate how exhibits from Hawai‘i and the Philip-
pines struck different points of emphasis, with the former insisting
on Hawai‘i’s potential for tourism and white settlement, whereas
the exhibits from the Philippines insisted on the necessity of tam-
ing the “savagery” of Filipinos. Nancy Parezo’s essay about the
Indian Congress reminds us that America’s expansion overseas
followed from America’s “manifest destiny” to occupy the lower

18 robert w. rydell
forty-eight states at the expense of Native Americans who found
themselves caught at the fair between the rock of anthropology
and the hard place of entertainment.
What about the visitors to the fair? The theme of empire was
hard to miss. Indeed, it was at once aestheticized and domesti-
cated. This is clear from other essays in this volume. Sarah J. Moore
examines the exposition grounds and structures as a map—a visual
“scape” guiding visitors’ experiences of “progress” as they moved
about the fair.26 Bonnie M. Miller offers an analysis of another
visual representation of the fair, the special issue of stamps by the
U.S. Post Office to commemorate the “progress” of the United
States across the Trans-Mississippi region. These artistic images
circulated widely as a growing number of stamp-collector hobby-
ists brought images produced for the fair into their homes. That
these representations and experiences of progress and race were
highly engendered and linked to ideas about female beauty is the
subject of T. J. Boisseau’s fascinating analysis of the exposition’s
official medal, which, on one side, depicted the “perfect flower of
womanhood” and, on the other, an image of “vanishing” Indians
chasing bison. Revealing juxtapositions also played a role in the
“Trilby Temple,” the subject of Emily Godbey’s chapter, a Mid-
way show featuring a painting of a nude woman that was located
immediately adjacent to another show featuring exotic “hootchy-
kootchy” dancers allegedly from the Middle East. Visitors could
hardly fail to notice the contrast.
There is always a risk in essentializing our readings of exposi-
tions, leaving out the nuances and exceptions that make the study
of history so interesting. Neither the editor of this volume, Wendy
Katz, nor the author of its afterword, Timothy Schaffert, allows for
this outcome. Katz reminds us that not everyone in Nebraska sup-
ported the 1898 fair or approved of its drive to absorb islands in the
Pacific and Caribbean into the Trans-Mississippi story. Many Pop-
ulists opposed both the fair’s cost and its focus on empire. Other
Nebraskans approached the exposition through the lens of local
concerns about racial and gender discrimination, about the role
of art in civic society, and about the rapid pace of commercial-
ization and inequalities in wealth distribution. In his afterword,

introduction 19
novelist Timothy Schaffert does what every good fiction writer
does: he reminds us of the contingent possibilities of any histori-
cal situation and that to appreciate fully an event as complex as the
Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, we need to imag-
ine ourselves at once in and removed from the fair. Sometimes
we get lucky and we have a family keepsake, a souvenir spoon or
a medal or a postage stamp, that allows us to travel the paths of
memory into history—and from there, into the future.

Notes
I am grateful to Wendy Katz and the external readers of this essay for their valuable
suggestions. I am also grateful to Tammy Lau and Adam Wallace in the Depart-
ment of Special Collections, Henry Madden Library, California State University,
Fresno, and Mary Guthmiller, interlibrary loan librarian at Montana State Univer-
sity, for their help with my research. Finally, grateful acknowledgment is made to
the Montana State University Center for Western Lands and People for its support.
1. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking, 1939), 120. See John
Zachman, “The Legacy and Meanings of World’s Fair Souvenirs,” in Fair Represen-
tations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World, ed. Robert W. Rydell and Nancy E.
Gwinn (Amsterdam: vu University Press, 1994), 199–217.
2. There is a vibrant and growing literature on international expositions. Two
useful starting points are Paul Greenhalgh’s Fair World (Berkshire: Papadakis, 2011)
and John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle, eds., Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and
Expositions (Jefferson nc: McFarland, 2008). For an overview, see Robert W. Rydell,
“The Literature of International Expositions,” in The Books of the Fairs (Chicago:
American Library Association, 1992), 1–62; and Rydell, “New Directions for Schol-
arship about World Expos,” in Seize the Day, ed. Kate Darian-Smith et al. (Clayton,
Australia: Monash University Press, 2008), 21.1–21.13.
3. On the turbulence of the late nineteenth century, see Alan Trachtenberg, The
Incorporation of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), Eric Hobsbawm, Age
of Capital (New York: Vintage, 1996), and Hobsbawm, Age of Empire (New York:
Vintage, 1989).
4. Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
5. Information about the fair’s organization and exhibits is from my All the World’s
a Fair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 105–25.
6. Pascal Blanchard et al., Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage (Arles, France:
Actes-Sud, 2012).
7. Planners had also initially come up with an icon of technological prowess for
the exposition, a Giant Umbrella. It revised Chicago’s Ferris wheel into a more dec-
orous bumbershoot by turning the “wheel” on its side, so it looked like the spokes of
an umbrella, and instead of spinning in space, it raised and lowered the cars. When
this proved too difficult, the signature ride became the Giant See-Saw, borrowed from

20 robert w. rydell
the Nashville Exposition, which preserved the sense of mobility gained from elevat-
ing and dropping the rider’s position, but tied it to a nostalgic reliving of childhood.
8. Lester G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883–
1983 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).
9. In addition to Moses’s Wild West Shows, see James G. Gilbert, Whose Fair?
Experience, Memory, and the History of the Great St. Louis Exposition (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2009). Regarding the African women in the Dahomeyan
Village, see Gertrude M. Scott, “Village Performance: Villages of the Chicago World’s
Columbian Exposition of 1893” (PhD diss., New York University, 1990), 297–98. On
the Philippines at the St. Louis fair, see my All the World’s a Fair, 169–79.
10. Amanda Johnson, “Illuminating the West: The Wonder of Electric Lighting at
Omaha’s Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898,” Nebraska History
93, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 182–91; George Starr, “Truth Unveiled,” in The Anthropol-
ogy of World’s Fairs, ed. Burton Benedict (Berkeley ca: Lowie Museum of Anthro-
pology, 1983), 134–75.
11. David J. Peavler, “African Americans in Omaha and the 1898 Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition,” Journal of African American History 93, no. 3 (Sum-
mer 2008): 337–61.
12. “Glimpses of the Midway,” Omaha World-Herald, October 26, 1898, 2. The
promoter for the group was George D. Steele, a Decatur, Illinois, insurance adjuster
for circuses, including the Forepaugh and Sells show, which traveled through
Nebraska in 1898. Circuses, like the Buffalo Bill and Wild West shows and the fair
midways, promoted expansionist ideology through the “authentic” re-creation
of American military victories, and cast Filipinos, Cubans, and African Ameri-
cans as participants. See also Danielle Crawford’s discussion of the Filipino vil-
lages in this volume.
13. I develop these ideas about the impact of the fair on the senses in “La vue, l’ouïe
et les autres sense: hierarchies raciales dans les expositions universelles américaines,”
in L’invention de la race, ed. Nicolas Bancel et al. (Paris: La Découverte, 2014), 233–46.
14. M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottes-
ville: University of Virginia Press, 1998).
15. “Features of the Midway,” Omaha Daily Bee, February 21, 1898, 8.
16. See Grace Carey, “Music at the Fair! The Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition: An Interactive Website,” Digital Commons @ University of Nebraska–
Lincoln, 2006; Octave Thanet (Alice French), “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition,”
Cosmopolitan, October 1898, 611–12.
17. On the concept of the sensorium, see Caroline A. Jones, Sensorium: Embodied
Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (Boston: mit Press, 2006).
18. Advertisement, Omaha Bee, August 28, 1898, 17; unidentified clipping, Buf-
falo Bill Scrapbooks, 1875–1903, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, McCracken Library,
ms 6: William F. Cody, microfilm, roll 1.
19. Robert W. Rydell, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: The Racialization of the Cosmo-
politan Imagination,” in Colonial Advertising and Commodity Racism, ed. Wulf D.
Hund et al. (Zurich and Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2013), 97–118.
20. “Llewellyn at Washington,” Omaha World-Herald, April 13, 1899, 6. C. E.
Llewellyn was an agent for Cuba and Puerto Rico.

introduction 21
 21. Rene Bache, “Expansion in Miniature: Western Scheme for a “Colonial Great-
est Show, for the Boston Transcript,” Omaha World-Herald, December 25, 1898, p. 16.
22. Map of the Grounds, Diagram of Buildings: Greater America Exposition, July
1st to November 1st, 1899, Omaha, U.S.A. (Omaha: Klopp & Bartlett, 1899), 5.
23. On the Cuban village, see Bonnie M. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest: The
Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898 (Amherst: Univer-
sity of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 240–47.
24. Michael C. Hawkins, “Undecided Empire: The Travails of Imperial Represen-
tation of Filipinos at the Greater America Exposition, 1899,” Philippine Studies 63, no.
3 (2015): 341–63. I am grateful to Wendy Katz for information about Moore and Daily.
25. Hawkins, “Undecided Empire,” makes the point about the importance of the
1899 fair for ensuing expositions.
26. On the reading of landscapes and other “scapes,” see David Brody, Visualiz-
ing American Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

22 robert w. rydell
 1
“The Great American Desert Is No More”
sarah j. moore

A Fair Sight
In an overview of the recently opened Trans-Mississippi and Inter-
national Exposition, Iowan William S. Harwood told readers of
Harper’s Weekly: “Stand here this rare first day of June, beneath
this cloudless sky of the West, and look far down this noble court,
with its great buildings, massive and magnificent, classic in their
architecture and rich in ornament, their snowy facades mirrored
in the long lagoon that stretches away two thousand and more
feet to the fountain playing before the splendid public building
erected by the general government in recognition of the progress
and the power of the great West. It is indeed a fair sight” (fig. 2).
Noting the important precedent of the 1893 World’s Columbian
Exposition, he assured his readers that Omaha would be the next
Chicago in advancing the march of civilization westward, and
continued, “Just a moment ago the President of the United States
touched a tiny electric button in the capital city of the nation, and
now the machinery of a great exposition is in play. Turning from
the toil of war to the noble pursuits of peace, he has set in motion
the energies of one of the most important expositions of any day.”1
The author’s comments calibrate many of the primary metrics that
informed the Omaha fair—the great American West, technology
and engineering, the war with Spain, national identity, progress,

23
and spectacle—and are marked by a rhetorical enthusiasm that
was shared by many contemporary observers.
Indeed, world’s fairs were events that inspired the most fulsome
praise, and the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposi-
tion was no exception. John N. Baldwin, an Iowa chair of the state
Republican convention and general attorney for Union Pacific
Railroad, set a high standard when he addressed the crowd assem-
bled before the Arch of the States on the fair’s opening day, June 1,
1898: “The Exposition has become the instrument of civilization.
Being a concomitant to empire, westward it takes its way.”2 Bald-
win tracks this instrumentation of civilization along a westward
trajectory, citing London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, the 1876 Phil-
adelphia Centennial, and Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposi-
tion as the precursors to the manifestation of national progress on
the western shore of the Missouri River. Baldwin’s often-repeated
declaration is embedded with many contemporary assumptions
about world’s fairs, progress, the American West, the frontier,
national identity, and empire building. The immediate backdrop
of the war with Spain was implicit in Baldwin’s assessment, as was
the current financial depression. John L. Webster, one of the fair’s
organizers and in 1899 a Republican aspirant for the Senate, pro-
claimed on opening day, “A month ago it was a serious question
whether the war with Spain would not injure this exposition; but
within a month it has become an accentuation of the expansive
power of the American nation.”3 That the fair opened on time, on
budget, and while America was at war led an East Coast observer
to compare the Omaha exposition with the heroic feats of Admi-
ral Dewey in Manila Bay. He continued,
Rarely have the distinctive Western qualities of enthusiasm, pluck,
audacity, and undaunted perseverance been so strikingly displayed.
The very conception and consummation of this great fair at such a time
of business depression is a more enduring monument to the trans-
Mississippi country than any architect in wood or stone could devise.4

That the war of 1898 and its consequences for American empire
building informed the Omaha fair is no surprise given the coinci-
dence of the two events. In fact, when the United States’ battleship

24 sarah j. moore
Maine exploded under mysterious circumstances in Havana Har-
bor on the night of February 15, followed by the declaration of war
with Spain a few weeks later, many feared the Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition would be delayed or, worse, canceled.
More significantly, however, was the extent to which prevailing
assumptions about empire building and the fluid and expansive
contours of U.S. borders that defined America’s engagement in the
war underscored the fair’s organization, exhibitions, and official,
as well as critical, discourse. Much as the taming of the western
frontier in the nineteenth century served as a model for extra-
continental expansion in the twentieth, so the Omaha exposition
and others that followed the Spanish-American War marked the
course of America’s empire building along a trajectory of impe-
rial desires and acquisitions.
However, the empire to which Baldwin referred had as much to
do with the past as the present. It is the history of the United States
as resting on the broad shoulders of intrepid pioneers who wres-
tled a nation out of the chaos of wilderness that Baldwin evokes,
as do other observers of the fair at the time, and it alludes to the
foundational national narratives that fueled westward expansion
and belief in manifest destiny throughout the nineteenth century.
That Baldwin’s opening day remarks invoke the famous closing
lines of Bishop George Berkeley’s “Verses on the Prospect of Plant-
ing Arts and Learning in America,” published in the late 1720s
and expressive of his plans to open a university in Bermuda for
Native Americans, argues the logic of reading this exposition at
the nexus of discourses of the frontier, progress, and imperialism.
The privileged and commanding view from above, which com-
pressed time and space within a single image, and its accompa-
nying heady optimism, were ubiquitous in images of westward
expansion in the nineteenth century and invoked deeply embed-
ded assumptions regarding Manifest Destiny, while providing
the spectator with the soothing reassurance that the horizon of
national progress and expansion was virtually limitless.5 Pioneers
and other figures in nineteenth-century landscape paintings and
prints that adopted such an elevated view functioned as coordi-
nates on a map that visually etched progress across the American

“ the great american desert is no more ” 25

west. A wagon train of would-be settlers moving across a rugged
terrain or a pioneer family pausing at a promontory to gaze over a
great expanse of land functioned as historical players in the march
of progress and as allegories of the nation on the move westward.
Much like the surveyor’s grid that imposes rational, mathematical
coordinates on a heterogeneous plot of land, so these views from
above positioned pioneers/settlers/Anglo Americans as the right-
ful players in the calculus of national progress.6 Just as the map’s
conventions and mode of thinking made it possible for European
explorers to navigate to and claim the New World for colonies,
so painted and printed landscapes (and survey photographs) of
the Trans-Mississippi region assured nineteenth-century viewers
that the potential for progress existed in the unknown American
West even before they set foot upon it.
It was this dynamic “map” of progress to which Baldwin referred
when he noted the astonishing speed within which the Trans-
Mississippi region went from a “wilderness into twenty-four states
and territories. . . [with] nearly one-half of the wealth and one-
third of the population of our country.”7 Harwood pointed to the
borders of the Trans-Mississippi region, encompassing some 2.6
million square miles of territory—“the vast and noble domain”—to
emphasize territorial expansion as progress, while exposition board
of directors president Gurdon Wattles described the Omaha expo-
sition as nothing less than a miracle of industrial development.
Underscoring the stunning transformation of the region from
an unsurveyed territory to one of national coherence, he orated:
“Fifty years ago the larger part of the country west of the Missis-
sippi River was unorganized territory, and was indicated on the
map as the Great American Desert. Its arid plains and unexplored
mountains were occupied by savage tribes, and there herds of ante-
lope and buffalo roamed, unmolested by the white man, in solitude
unbroken by the implements of civilization.”8 That the so-called
unorganized territory was occupied by Native Americans under-
scores the prevailing racial assumptions of the fair itself, including
the Indian Congress, which were framed on the assertion that the
end of the frontier equated the demise of Native Americans, and
offered a retrospective view of what a former Iowan called “a great

26 sarah j. moore
meeting of the vanishing race.”9 By June 1, 1898, many would share
Wattles’s confidence when he declared at the exposition’s open-
ing day ceremonies that “the Great American Desert is no more,”
asserting that unsettled land and the traditional culture of Native
Americans had no part in the post-Turnerian nation.10

Mapping the Great Desert

Many contemporary scholars have posited maps as technologies of
social ordering and discipline, akin to museums and world’s fairs
at the turn of the twentieth century, and argue that cartographic
practices are neither neutral nor self-evident but rather are par-
tial, ideological, and driven by desires and longings as much as by
the quest for knowledge.11 The Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition, in part because of its location in the “Great American
Desert,” singularly fits the discourse of mapping and representa-
tional technologies of progress that pervaded public discourse at
the turn of the twentieth century. These concepts formed funda-
mental narratives to the organization, layout, and critical discus-
sion of the Omaha exposition.
Wattles’s reference in his opening day speech to the Great Ameri-
can Desert was not gratuitous, especially given the region’s droughts,
but it also evoked the geographical history of the region as one
defined by its many blank spaces. As early as 1790, Scottish printer
Thomas Dobson published the first American edition of the Encyclo-
pedia Britannica in Philadelphia that contained “A General Map of
North America,” in which there were vast empty spaces west of the
Mississippi River; the overall map included sections of present-day
Canada and Mexico.12 In 1793, Jedidiah Morse, a noted geographer
and contributor to Dobson’s Encyclopedia, published an expanded
version of his 1789 American Geography in which he expressed con-
fidence in the developing state of the young nation and its shift-
ing geography. Acknowledging the widely held assumption that
the Trans-Mississippi West—the vast stretch of land between the
Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains—was “uninhabitable
by civilized men” and “that all settlers who go beyond the Missis-
sippi will be forever lost to the United States,” he countered with
a bold prediction. “We cannot but anticipate the period, as not far

“ the great american desert is no more ” 27

distant, when the American Empire will comprehend millions of
souls west of the Mississippi.”13 Maps of North America included
in the 1793 and subsequent volumes by Morse, however, showed
very little settlement in the West.
The term “Great Desert” was featured across a vast swath of
the Great Plains in the 1823 map that accompanied the narrative
account of Maj. Stephen H. Long’s 1819–20 expedition on behalf of
the U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers. The map was intended
to show current settlements, legitimize the role of the peacetime
army as a government tool for discovery and exploration, and less
overtly, serve as a first step to encourage future frontier settlement.
It showed the principal and secondary waterways drained by the
Mississippi River in the territory from the Rocky Mountains to
the Ozarks, in a sense refuting the idea of a desert.14 The map also
included the following discursive note: “The Great Desert is fre-
quented by roving bands of Indians who have no fixed places of
residence but roam from place to place in quest of game.” Towns
were indicated with visual shorthand as well as written text, and
Indian villages were graphically indicated with upside-down Vs
to suggest teepees; places of encampment of the expedition were
noted, as were astronomical observations, boundary lines, and
sites of Army posts. Mapping and thus rendering legible the “Great
American Desert” began the process of recovering the Plains for
yeoman farming and for developing the American empire.
Long’s accompanying text on the Great Desert, however, noted,
“in regard to this extensive section of country, I do not hesitate
in giving the opinion that it is almost wholly unfit for cultivation,
and of course uninhabitable by a people depending on agricul-
ture for their subsistence.” Though this sounds pessimistic, Long’s
text and map in fact support colonization. He evokes the logic
of English philosopher John Locke’s Second Treatise of Govern-
ment (1689), in which Locke declared, “Thus in the beginning
all the world was America.” Steeped in British Enlightenment
ideas and colonial ambitions, Locke argued that the productive
capacities of labor are what transform inert nature into prop-
erty of value. According to Locke, Native Americans—who Long
referred to as the “roving band of Indians who had no fixed places

28 sarah j. moore
of residence”—did not transform the land through their labor,
that is through agrarian settlement, and so could not claim own-
ership of it. Long would not be alone in his allusion to Locke’s
foundational argument regarding the colonization of America
and Native Americans; many thinkers in the early years of the
American Republic, including Thomas Jefferson, argued that the
natural state of civil society was based on the settled farmer in
contrast to nomadic Indians.15
Though the blank spaces of the Great Plains would eventually
find articulation as a visual cartographic field and grid expressive
of national progress and Manifest Destiny, Long’s initial assess-
ment of the Trans-Mississippi region as unfit for settlement may
have also served as a potential barrier to expansion. As late as 1849,
when the Gold Rush would draw settlers to California—most trav-
eled there via a sea route; those who crossed the plains conceived
it as a place to get through rather than to settle—a geography text-
book designed for schools, Olney’s Quarto Geography: For Families
and Schools, continued to label the geographical section from the
Missouri to the Rocky Mountains the “Great American Desert.”16
However, most texts and maps by midcentury had dispensed
with the desert terminology in order to emphasize and promote
the rapid expansion of settlement in the American West and the
shifting borders of the nation following the Mexican War of 1848
and the temporary resolution of the question of slavery in the newly
acquired territories in the Compromise of 1850. Spurred by the
conflict over slavery, the opening for settlement of the territories
of Kansas and Nebraska in 1854 brought a wave of development
and efforts to organize territorial governments. John Hutchins
Colton, one of the most prolific mapmakers of the time—between
1850 and 1890, his firm created dozens of railroad maps, tourist
guides, wall maps, folding pocket maps, and atlases with elabo-
rate, hand-colored decorative borders—spoke for his generation
when he optimistically noted in an 1854 guide for the western tour-
ist and emigrant that, in contrast to its former status as the out-
skirts of civilization, the Far West was populated and productive
thanks to its fertile land. He plotted the rapid transformation of the
once barren American desert along a technological trajectory—

“ the great american desert is no more ” 29

“the steamboat, railroad car, and telegraph have become its great
movers”—and looked forward to the promise of further settle-
ment and statehood, achievements which would be celebrated as
an accomplished fact at the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and Interna-
tional Exposition.17 In the post–Civil War years, the Homestead
Act and federal support of the railroads created an explosion of
settlement, despite the ongoing Indian wars. Colton’s optimism
for the future in 1854 became the history lesson of the present, as
expressed in the words of James B. Haynes, an exposition chron-
icler and editor at the Omaha Bee: the former Great American
Desert is now “nature’s storehouse,” and it “facilitated the march
of progress of its people.”18

Mapping and Viewing the Exposition

As a discursive map of progress, the Trans-Mississippi Exposition
as a whole—the layout of the fairgrounds and the Arch of the States
(fig. 10), in particular, a massive triumphal arch that served as the
physical and ideological entryway to the exposition—was a site
where meaning was proposed along a hierarchical and directional
trajectory of progress and civilization that assumed the authority,
transparency, and neutrality of the map. The cartographic layout
of the exposition (fig. 8) functioned as a visual agent of regulation
and meaning, fixing peoples and displays along visual and spatial
coordinates of power and authority. Maps and maplike bird’s-eye
views were a crucial part not only of the planning of the expo-
sition and its national publicity but also a key feature of almost
every souvenir booklet published by the exposition corporation
or its business sponsors.19
In addition to maps of the fairgrounds, many of the official guide-
books, as well as those produced by local hotels and stationers,
included maps of the Trans-Mississippi region, lists of distances
from Omaha to cities across the nation, and street directories of
Omaha designed to aid the visitor in locating hotels, libraries, and
train stations.20 The exposition’s publicity department commissioned
a bird’s-eye view of the exposition, for insertion in newspapers and
magazines, which also served as an independent poster that could
be displayed by businesses or kept as a souvenir. The maplike genre

30 sarah j. moore
of bird’s-eye views had been popular with city boosters for most
of the nineteenth century, thanks to its ability to highlight a town’s
prospects for growth and its prominent businesses. Lithographed
bird’s-eye views of the city of Omaha, usually subsidized by sub-
scriptions from local boosters, businessmen, and railroads, had
promoted immigration; neat grids of streets, prominent buildings,
and busy waterfronts all promised potential settlers that urban
services, jobs, and access to markets were in place.21 Views of the
open land framing the city promised room for expansion and for
farms. And it was these largely undeveloped areas to the north of
the city proper (the city was bounded to the east by the Missouri
River, the boundary with Iowa) that became the fairgrounds. In
the official bird’s-eye view of the exposition, here used as a promo-
tion by the Burlington Route (fig. 5), which had invested $30,000
in exposition stock and had its own “day” at the Fair, the empha-
sis is on the alignment of the formal Grand Court (around the
lagoon) with the grid system of the city, effectively expanding the
boundaries of civilization and urban progress—Omaha—into the
former blank space. Though not much of the river is visible, the
railroad along the bluffs is given prominent place. And the effect
of flat, treeless plains, which for European emigrants would have
been a marker of infertile land, is contrasted with the landscaped
grounds and their new plantings.
Although Nebraska and the Plains had been laid out in a grid
by surveyors for farms, by 1898 imperial progress was increas-
ingly defined by urban development, and the exposition plan-
ners, in their adaptation of Daniel Burnham’s design for Chicago’s
fair, emphasize urban character. The City Beautiful ideal, which
served as the basis of architects Thomas R. Kimball and C. How-
ard Walker’s plan of the exposition, broke with the rigid practi-
cality of the grid. Its grand classicized public spaces, marked with
allegorical sculpture, were intended to promote civic virtue and
a modern utopian city of order, honesty, and cleanliness. Indeed,
one of the features of their plan was to connect exhibition build-
ings with colonnades and trees that screened out the actual city
beyond. No private buildings or grounds outside the main court
were to be visible. And Walker, the Boston-based partner of Omaha

“ the great american desert is no more ” 31

Fig. 5. E. J. Austen, Modern Woodman Day at the Trans-Mississippi
Exposition, September 22, 1898, 29" × 23½", print. From the collections of
the Omaha Public Library. The Modern Woodmen are a fraternal benefit
(insurance) society. The Burlington exhibit, in the Agriculture Building,
featured framed landscapes made of agricultural products (corn husks,
tassels, grasses, leaves, mosses, weeds), illustrating a homesteader’s
transformation of the “American Desert” into the “Tree-Planter’s State.”
Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of the Omaha Public Library.
architect Kimball (they had met at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology), initially drew a very different bird’s-eye view (fig.
6), one that gave full emphasis to the great triumphal entry of
Kimball’s Arch of the States, but that showed it seemingly dis-
connected from trolleys, railroad depots, or the city itself. With
the river (and the Midway, which was on the tract of land nearest
the bluffs) now in the far distance, full attention could be placed
on the festive details of the architecture, which towered over the
shrunken and seemingly unimportant city beyond. The drawing
appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1897 as an early promotion of the
fair. Harper’s, the “Journal of Civilization” and a backer of Theo-
dore Roosevelt, was a staunch exposition supporter, running three
additional stories on it in 1898.22
Edward Rosewater, the fair’s publicity director, condemned
this early version of the promotional bird’s-eye view of the fair-
grounds. He had been critical of Kimball’s appointment as expo-
sition architect, perhaps in part because of political rivalries. For
Rosewater, Walker’s view “belittles the enterprise and magnifies
the architects,” by failing to show the progress of the region, the
typical function of a bird’s-eye view.23 In contrasting the exposi-
tion’s urban spectacle with a flattened Omaha, Walker gave vision
to Progressive city planning with its emphasis on grand public
spaces, but did not promote the region’s or city’s expansive poten-
tial. In Rosewater’s approved (official) version of the view (fig. 5),
the exposition is a natural outgrowth of the city’s northern sub-
urbs, which is part of the foreground, not in contrast to it. And
Kimball’s Arch of the States is almost lost to view.
Many sculptural ensembles, displays, and other official symbols
and documents of the exposition likewise evoked the ostensible
neutrality of the map to chart progress from territory to civiliza-
tion. The stock certificate (fig. 7) issued by the Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition Corporation, for example, visually
plotted the transformation of the region with foliate border dec-
orations that featured vignettes of Agriculture, Mining, Com-
merce, and Manufacturing, in which working men are shown
prominently in action, as well as machines, in the four corners.
Electricity appeared at the top center of the certificate in a figure

“ the great american desert is no more ” 33

Fig. 6. C. Howard Walker, Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition at
Omaha, from Harper’s Weekly 41 (October 30, 1897): 1080–81. Artwork in
the public domain; scan courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
of glowing filaments that strangely resembles two eyes, and at the
bottom is an official symbol of the fair: a seated young woman, an
allegory of Omaha, is surrounded by various “evidences” of prog-
ress including an electric dynamo, a factory billowing smoke, and
a speeding locomotive. The remainder of the border included the
names of the twenty-four states and territories that made up the
Trans-Mississippi West. Variations of the iconography used in the
stock certificate appeared in other published forms including guide-
book covers and postcards. Such popular imagery, whose didac-
ticism was as important as its mobility, visually encapsulated the
fair and its themes of progress and civilization for a broad audi-
ence and enjoyed a circulation beyond the structures and displays
on the fairgrounds.
Omaha was not the only city to imagine itself as the rightful
heir to the splendor of Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition
of 1893. In fact, when the Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress
met in St. Louis in 1894 to discuss an exposition devoted to this
region of the country, other cities had their sights set on being the
host as well. However, with the second meeting of the Congress
convening in Omaha in November 1895 and the support of Wil-
liam Jennings Bryan, plans for Omaha moved forward quickly. By
early 1896, articles of incorporation of the Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition Association were filed and the board of
directors had been elected.24
The location of the fair in Omaha was contentious and debates
stalled any final decision during the winter of 1896–97. Price and
location were of primary concern in finding a suitable plot of land
reasonably close to the city center. However, in March 1897, Her-
man Kountze offered property just at the northern and eastern
edge of the city—the so-called Kountze Tract—with the condi-
tion that it would be deeded to Omaha at the completion of the
fair and be thereafter maintained as a city park to be known as
Kountze Park.25 Kountze also served as treasurer for the board of
directors for the exposition; Thomas R. Kimball designed his man-
sion as well as that of Gurdon Wattles. Kountze had established a
pioneer bank in Omaha in the late 1850s, acquired large tracts of
land, and had holdings in the Union Pacific Railroad. This con-

“ the great american desert is no more ” 35

Fig. 7. Stock certificate, Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, 1898.
18¾" × 15¼", green and black ink, gold embossed seal, red ribbon. From
the collections of the Omaha Public Library. Elaborate designs and seals
made the certificate harder to counterfeit. State names frame the document,
suggesting a unified region, interrupted by abstract vignettes, allegorical
(Omaha), symbolic (Electricity), or realistic (Mining). Work in the public
domain, scan courtesy of Omaha Public Library.
stellation of landowning, banking, and interest in the railroad was
a common denominator for many of the powerful men in west-
ern towns and cities during the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury and, like the railroad’s government-subsidized sale of lands,
was arguably one of the primary forces behind the transformation
of the Great American Desert as well as the Omaha exposition.26
The transformation of 186 acres of undeveloped land into the
fairgrounds of the exposition was no small task, and the local
papers carried regular updates about the construction under way.
Official photographs of crowds watching the spectacle of wage
(union rate) laborers engaged in constructing structures such as
the Arch of the States underscored the fact that labor was essen-
tial to the exposition’s success. The land was divided into three
tracts: the Kountze Tract would house the Grand Court and the
principal exhibition buildings; the Bluff Tract to the east along the
banks of the Missouri River would house the Horticulture Build-
ing, state buildings, and the East Midway; the North Tract would
house part of the Midway, livestock exhibits, and at the northern
extreme the Indian Congress (fig. 8). The excavations included
leveling the roughly eighteen-foot difference between the eastern
and western edge of the Kountze Tract—grading for the lagoon
alone required the removal of 80,000 tons of earth—while the
infrastructure included sewage and water systems, electricity, rail
transportation across the site, and the preparation of adequate
facilities for the 4,000-plus exhibits that would stretch across 108
city blocks. Under admired landscape architect Rudolph Ulrich,
the largely grassland was transformed into a lush and more famil-
iar garden—13,500 trees, more than 100,000 plants and flowers,
and 21 acres of sod and grass varieties were planted on the expo-
sition grounds—that served as an aesthetic accent to the archi-
tecture as well as the utilitarian purpose of providing visitors with
shade and a respite.27
The exposition was physically as well as ideologically modeled
on the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. There, the
fairgrounds literally embodied the progress of civilization from the
east to the west, with a peristyle—a feature that would be turned
into the Arch of the States in Omaha—marking the eastern passage

“ the great american desert is no more ” 37

Fig. 8. Map of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, Omaha,
1898. Katie Nieland, 2016. Based on a map made for Leonard M. Owen,
Douglas County Historical Society, Nebraska, originally published by
Osgood and Co., Chicago, 1898.
between Lake Michigan and the Court of Honor, between nature
and art, or in Omaha’s case, between the city and art. Omaha’s
Grand Court (fig. 2), like the one in Chicago, ran east to west and
its artificial lagoon, replenished every day by an estimated one
million gallons of water pumped from the nearby Missouri River,
stretched nearly half a mile and was surrounded by the prominent
buildings of the fair: the Administrative Arch across the bridge
directly to the north of the Arch of the States, Manufacturers, Mines
and Mining, Liberal Arts, Machinery and Electricity, Agriculture,
and Fine Arts, across the bridge from the Arch of the States.28 The
inclusion of the Fine Arts within the Grand Court was a marked
departure from Chicago, where the Fine Arts Palace was nestled
to the north of the Court of Honor amidst a miniature wilderness
setting, physically aligning the arts with nature.
The U.S. Government building, the only building permitted
a truly prominent (golden) dome, anchored the western end of
the lagoon and fairgrounds, and photographs and posters of the
Grand Court, including the official photographic Bird’s-Eye View
(fig. 2), often looked toward it. But if a message of national unity
had been similarly intended by the creation of the Arch of the
States as an entryway to the exhibition, that symbolism was lost,
as a view through the Arch from the city led instead to the bridge
across the lagoon and to the exposition’s own administration build-
ing, a second arch, in the style of a medieval city gate (fig. 10). The
bridge spanned the Grand Canal at its longitudinal center, creating
an avenue from north to south, allowing pedestrians an elevated
view from which to peruse the Grand Court in both directions.
The fair’s official photographer, Frank Albert Rinehart, had
worked with his brother in Denver, a portrait photographer and
partner of William H. Jackson. Jackson had owned a prominent
portrait studio in Omaha in the late 1860s, and his work there
included a series of portraits of members of local tribes, something
that Rinehart would tackle in 1898. But Jackson is best known for
his landscapes, done for commercial firms, the railroads, and the
government’s Geological Survey, and he produced and sold land-
scapes at his photographic and publishing company in Denver,
which for a few years was known as Jackson and Rinehart. In 1893

“ the great american desert is no more ” 39

Jackson was invited to photograph the Chicago fair, and though
by that time Frank Rinehart had married Jackson’s Denver recep-
tionist and moved to Omaha (in 1885) to set up his own por-
trait studio in the Brandeis building downtown, Rinehart would
have undoubtedly been aware of both Jackson’s and Charles D.
Arnold’s approach to depicting the Chicago fair.29 Rinehart’s own
views of Omaha’s exposition often follow the conventions of land-
scape, relying on the layout and architecture of the exposition to
construct bounded vistas rather than monumentalizing views of
buildings and specific sights. His view of the Arch of the States
(fig. 10) departs from this, probably because this view from out-
side the exposition, though it excludes any vistas, allowed him to
neatly frame Kimball’s Administration Arch as well.
Rinehart’s Book of Views, a fairly extensive and so relatively
expensive souvenir collection of photographs—Rinehart sold indi-
vidual views on the grounds, and smaller souvenir books, as well
as postcards—for example, has multiple views of the U.S. Govern-
ment Building, but almost all incorporate it into a view of a whole
or part of the Grand Court, often from a raised and usually a dis-
tant viewpoint. The effect is, as Margaretta Lovell writes of the
landscapes of the Chicago fair, of the spectator being instructed in
the “basic message of the fair’s architecture: transplantation—by
importation, immigration, and mimicry—of the grandest aspects
of European experience.”30 In Rinehart’s Bird’s-Eye View—Grand
Court (fig. 2), which was reproduced in his Book of Views, the grid
of the official bird’s-eye view is replaced by a pristine oval whose
very emptiness of life and unity of form signals its stagelike qual-
ity. The sweep of metal lines in the foreground, the lattice for the
colonnade’s plantings, adds a certain dynamism. Perhaps it’s no
accident that an official history’s description of the architecture of
the fair, titled a “Bird’s-Eye View of Completed Exposition (Map),”
an account that concluded with the Government Building, praised
the mechanical Giant See-Saw on the Midway for taking a crowd
of people two hundred feet from the ground, from which point
another “bird’s-eye view of the three cities and the surrounding
country” could be had.31
Rinehart’s photographs, like the paintings of the exposition pro-

40 sarah j. moore
duced by John Ross Key for sale as prints and posters, often have
people in them, genteelly dressed and appreciative of—enjoying—
the artificial environment created for them; the viewer in turn is
made aware of and perhaps nostalgic for their holiday experi-
ence. Key’s Entrance Arch (fig. 9) was titled a Bird’s-Eye View of the
exposition when it was published in the Omaha Bee’s Snap Shots
of the Exposition.32 Key’s pictures typically preserved the compo-
sition of Rinehart’s photographs, a practice that like the title Snap
Shots emphasizes their common style. Key often places fashion-
ably dressed women in the foreground, here descending steps
at the viewer’s right or pausing after walking through the Arch
of the States. The effect is to draw the viewer into the vista, too,
encouraging him or her to imaginatively enter the grounds, with
the Court’s strong perspective reinforced by the enclosing line of
white buildings and rows of trees. In photographs and posters like
these, the pictured fairgoers, strolling, peering over railings, almost
always in social groups, help the viewer to physically remember
the experience of seeing American progress made material. The
Fine Arts Building (on the left, just beyond the Arch of the States,
with Robert Bringhurst’s winged sculptures highlighted) is promi-
nent, but Key has the Government Building’s golden dome topped
by the Statue of Liberty as the culminating focus. Like the seem-
ingly random scattering of people, the slightly off-center angle of
vision positions the federal building not as a towering monument
(indeed, the Arch of the States, which might fit that description,
is sidelined) but as naturally bringing the Grand Court to a close.

The Arch of the States and the U.S. Government Building

The imposing Arch of the States (fig. 10) was the official if not
always used entryway of the exposition, on the southern side of
the Grand Court, because the streetcars dropped visitors at the
Twentieth Street or Sherman Street entrances, rather than at the
Arch. Like the majority of the fair’s architecture, it evoked Roman
imperial iconography and history. Colossal in scale—fifty feet in
width, twenty-five feet in depth, and sixty feet high at the top of
the parapet—the stately arch was joined on either side by curved
exedras that partially enclosed the south plaza in front of the entry-

“ the great american desert is no more ” 41

Fig. 9. John Ross Key, Entrance Arch (Bird’s-Eye View), Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition, Omaha, lithograph, 13" × 9" (Omaha: Taber-Prang
Art, Bee Publishing, 1898). The Bee sold a portfolio of six of Key’s prints for
$1.52. Some, including this one, were available in Snap Shots of the Trans-
Mississippi Exposition (Omaha: Bee, 1898). Key’s lithographs would also be
reused for the Greater America Exposition in 1899. From the collections of
the Omaha Public Library. Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of
Omaha Public Library.
way. These wings contained the main ticket offices, and sculptural
groups—crouching nude women holding torches of knowledge—
crowned them. Despite these allegories, the utilitarian function of
the wings was acknowledged in the “mean and common” unpainted
pine buildings erected as check stands, stables, and restaurants
around the arch like “barnacles.”33
In contrast with the unembellished piers of the arch, the richly
decorated entablature featured a double arcade of twenty-four
arches containing shields decorated in color with the coat of arms
of the twenty-four Trans-Mississippi states and territories. Above
the frieze was a band with the inscription: “Arch of the States.” Sur-
mounting the cornice was a high parapet in front of which was a
sculptural ensemble featuring two standing young men holding a
large shield of the United States on which is perched a golden eagle
with spread wings. Each figure holds a mast from which flies the
national flag. The decorated frieze is repeated on the other side of
the arch, although the inscription on the exposition side is “Trans-
Mississippi & International Exposition.” The two ends of the arch
were decorated with a double arcade of twelve arches with the coat
of arms of the remaining twelve states of the nation.34
The Arch was originally planned to be the one permanent struc-
ture that would remain after the close of the fair and serve as a
memorial to the exposition and as the future entryway to Koun-
tze Park. Moreover, Kimball proposed each of the coat of arms be
constructed from stone native of the particular state or territory
that it commemorated. Such physical embodiments (the native
stone) of the transformation of Native land into a magnificent tri-
umphal arch commemorating the achievement of political nation-
hood can be read as one of the many, albeit in this case vertical,
maps of progress (the “civilizing” of the American West) that per-
meated the 1898 fair. That the Arch of the States was the first edi-
fice of the fair to be dedicated with the laying of its cornerstone,
sanctified with wine and oil brought from Jerusalem in a nod to
the spread of Christian civilization, underscores the logic of read-
ing the fairgrounds and its buildings, courts, and displays as a map
in which to plot the coordinates of the transformation of the “des-
ert” of the American West into, as a Bee editor and publicist noted,

“ the great american desert is no more ” 43

Fig. 10. F. A. Rinehart, Arch of the States, Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition, Omaha, 1898, 35 mm slide. Jeffrey Spencer Collection. View
from outside the exposition, looking north toward the Administration Arch.
Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
“a colossal object lesson of the marvelous development of the nat-
ural resources of the country.”35
Not coincidentally, the ceremony was held on Arbor Day, April
22, 1897. Arbor Day held particular significance for Nebraskans,
as it was founded by J. Sterling Morton, a prominent citizen of the
state; he had served as Nebraska’s governor as well as former U.S.
secretary of agriculture. Morton was a Democrat, but his hard
money economics, laissez-faire policies, and antagonism to Bryan
made him an ally of the bankers and the railroads. The motto “plant
trees” was the rallying cry of the Arbor Day movement and sym-
bolically referenced the transformation of the American West from
wilderness to garden.36 Indeed, Morton’s words at the dedication
of the Arch highlighted the civilizing mission of the “pioneers of
Nebraska [who] made the first lodgement of modern civilization
upon the . . . remote frontier portions of the commonwealth . . .
which stretched in solitude from the west bank of the Mississippi
River toward the Rocky Mountains.”37
Much as the American bald eagle represents an ideologically
charged domestication of imperial iconography, the triumphal arch’s
adaptation of imperial Roman and French Napoleonic monuments
domesticates and naturalizes American expansion as an inevita-
ble expression of the progress of civilization, while the magnifi-
cent fairgrounds re-create the evidence of such progress in gigantic
miniature. The transformation of the “gigantic” American desert
into a unified region (and a stand-in for the nation) was symbol-
ized in miniature by the Arch. Presumably, the goal was for the
two million visitors to the fair to symbolically participate in the
transformative procession from downtown Omaha to a progres-
sive and imperialist civilization as they passed through the Arch
of the States.38 As one Republican journal commented, in a lengthy
critique on what the editor considered the unsatisfying, fragmen-
tary quality of Kimball’s other arch, the Administration Arch, the
purpose of an arch “is to make more significant and spectacular
a triumph. It is of the earth, earthy” and begins and ends with the
occasion it memorializes—the “pluck and victories” of our fore-
fathers. Kimball replied to the criticism that the Arch of the States
with its Roman severity served this purpose; the Administration

“ the great american desert is no more ” 45

Arch, resembling a medieval city gate, was intended to be festive.39
But perhaps the way in which the Arch of the States framed this
more feudal gateway rather than a pacified neoclassical and urbane
future hindered that narrative.
The U.S. Government Building was the focal point of the central
court of the exposition (fig. 9), as indeed federal support for the
exposition had been crucial to its success. It was situated at the far
western edge of the lagoon and surmounted by an elegant dome
that was higher than that of any other building in the fairgrounds.
As one contemporary observer noted, the gilded dome “lifts itself
up like a crown on the head of the exposition.”40 Its graceful pro-
portions were compared to the work of architectural luminaries
of the past and their famous domes—Brunelleschi, Michelangelo,
and Wren. It was designed by the office of the new supervising
architect of the treasury (a McKinley administration appointee),
James Knox Taylor, who like Kimball, Walker, and Cass Gilbert
(who designed the Agriculture Building) was an mit graduate
and, unlike civil engineering candidates for the treasury office, was
approved of by the American Institute of Architects, which moved
its headquarters to Washington in 1899 to further its influence on
federal projects. Indeed, Taylor helped standardize the classicism
made so popular in Chicago for all government-building designs.41
A figure of liberty, sculpted by Washington dc artist James F.
Earley and based on Frédéric Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty in New
York, perched atop the lantern that surmounted the dome. Her
electric torch, held aloft, shone a light brighter than all others in the
fairgrounds at night.42 Earley was not among the French-trained
sculptors who had dominated the Chicago world’s fair; he was a
master stone carver, whose studio in Washington had produced
ornamental sculptures for several churches and government build-
ings, as well as the design for the “buffalo nickel” for the U.S. mint.
He won the commission for the statue and for the other ornamen-
tal plaster work for the building with a low bid of $3,120. Perhaps
as a result, though the Omaha Bee’s art critic admired the build-
ing itself, she dismissed its statuary groups as lacking a pleasing
silhouette—Liberty was too ragged. But at night (fig. 71), she was
a “pearl in a sapphire setting.”43

46 sarah j. moore
 The proportions of the building were as impressive as its many
displays—more than 46,000 feet of floor space—for which Con-
gress appropriated nearly a quarter of a million dollars. The prom-
inent position of the U.S. Government Building at the western end
of the Grand Canal expressed in spatial and material terms the
degree to which the Omaha fair was engaged in a dual construc-
tion of empire as contained within and extending beyond the geo-
political boundaries of the United States. The internal colonization
of Native Americans, made manifest at the Indian Congress (also
sponsored by the U.S. government), and external colonization, as
represented by colonial displays within the Government Build-
ing, provide tangible evidence of this. Coming only five years after
Frederick Jackson Turner’s bold declaration that the western fron-
tier was closed—not coincidentally at the 1893 fair in Chicago—the
1898 exposition tried to institutionalize the still-debated question
of territorial expansion and relegation of Indigenous populations
to an anthropological past as an accomplished fact.
The displays within the Government Building served pedagogi-
cal and patriotic functions and can be understood as a kind of spa-
tial map of the history of the nation. For example, upon entering,
the visitor was greeted with an immense hall filled with objects
arranged according to the various government departments. Near-
est the main entrance a State Department display traced the early
history of the nation with artifacts including an imprint of the
Great Seal of the United States, adopted by the visionary Founders
in 1772, a case with the sword and army belt used by Gen. George
Washington, and a small writing desk upon which Thomas Jef-
ferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.
Such nationally resonant displays were immediately followed by
that of the Treasury Department, in which an electric-powered
coining mint struck the exposition souvenir coin medal (fig. 31)
on a daily basis to be sold throughout the course of the exposi-
tion, as discussed by T. J. Boisseau in another essay in this vol-
ume. The obverse side of the medal featured a composite image of
“Trans-Mississippi womanhood,” obtained by “collecting the pho-
tographs of the handsomest women of the states and territories of
the Trans-Mississippi country.” The reverse was drawn by archi-

“ the great american desert is no more ” 47

tect-in-chief of the exposition, Thomas R. Kimball, of an Indian
on horseback spearing a buffalo so as to evoke “the period when
the Trans-Mississippi region was new and unknown.” The fair’s
official historian described the coin as “indicative of the strides
civilization and culture had made in the West in fifty years.”44

The Spanish-American War and the Laws of Progress

Unsurprisingly, the War Department displayed numerous arti-
facts related directly to the Spanish-American War, including a
model of the battleship Maine in its pristine state prior to the
explosion in Havana Harbor. Bedecked with the Stars and Stripes,
the model had a banner above it with the ubiquitous and nation-
ally resonant phrase: “Remember the Maine.” The Maine disaster
enjoyed tremendous popularity and longevity in material culture
and the popular imagination with the admonition to remember
the incident appearing everywhere from advertisements, car-
toons, posters, stereopticon images, short films, matchbook cov-
ers, department store window displays, and the Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition itself. As Bonnie M. Miller has argued,
“The mythification of the Maine occurred almost immediately; its
tragic elements, though always present, gradually receded as the
incident blended into the martial spirit of patriotism consuming
the nation.”45 Military maps in the U.S. Government Building of
Cuba—Havana Harbor was of particular interest—and the Phil-
ippine Islands oriented viewers to the largely unfamiliar locations
of the war and included such details as complete lists of garri-
soned posts and their quota of troops. As Stacy Kamehiro and
Danielle Crawford discuss in another essay in this volume, these
maps of the Pacific (fig. 55) were designed to emphasize the stra-
tegic and military value of Hawai‘i and the Philippines, as well as
their commercial promise. An historical exhibition of Army officer
and enlisted men uniforms provided another kind of map, inexo-
rably linking the nation-building enterprise of the Revolutionary
War, through the Mexican-American War in the 1840s, the Civil
War, and finally to present-day uniforms. Following the surren-
der of the Spanish army in late July, relics of the war with Spain
were soon added to the War Department’s exhibits. Such displays

48 sarah j. moore
posited a trajectory of nation-building along the ever-expanding
American border, and in collapsing the distinction between the
continental and imperial frontier, the latter becomes a logical and
natural extension of the former.
The conflation of emotions, spectacle, and patriotism was even
more pronounced in the regular reenactment of the explosion of
the Maine in the lagoon in the Grand Court of the fairgrounds.
A writer for the Omaha World-Herald described the attraction as
“one of the most realistic reproductions ever presented to the pub-
lic. It is not a picture, nor an illusion, but simply a miniature real-
ity.”46 Although the spectacle attracted great crowds and served
the pedagogical function of retelling the story of the disaster—
stereopticon views of the ship before sailing from New York har-
bor, wreckage following the explosion, search and recovery efforts,
and even funeral ceremonies of the fallen sailors attended by high-
ranking military officers and President McKinley were available
to spectators—there was little “reality” to be seen. As Miller notes,
“The ship’s miniature scale, the lack of casualties, the minimal fall-
out, and the palatial backdrop of the White City grossly distorted
perceptions of the actual disaster.”47
The link between the Spanish-American War and the exposi-
tion was indelibly marked during so-called Jubilee Week, Octo-
ber 10–15, when the nation celebrated its triumph in the war and
resumption of peace (fig. 65). High-ranking government officials
from the cabinet, Army and Navy Departments, and the diplo-
matic corps traveled from Washington dc to Omaha on specially
appointed trains as did President McKinley, whose presence at
the exposition marked a high point in spectacle and attendance;
total admissions for President’s Day, October 12, were just shy of
100,000. One newspaper account noted, “At an early hour, before
the gates of the exposition were opened, thousands of visitors had
made their way by every possible means of conveyance to the
exposition grounds.”48
Following Gurdon Wattles’s fulsome welcome, President McKin-
ley addressed the crowds, applauding the Trans-Mississippi West
for its remarkable progress, in general, and the Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition, in particular, as an indication of the

“ the great american desert is no more ” 49

nation’s profile as a whole. He noted, “One of the great laws of life
is progress, and nowhere have the principles of this law been so
strikingly illustrated as in the United States.” While much of his
speech addressed the heroism and rightness of the nation to meet
the challenge of the Spanish-American War and to win it decisively
and swiftly, he alluded to the emerging public debate regarding
the role and function of formerly Spanish imperial holdings fol-
lowing the war. He referred to “this solemn hour of our history”
and that the nation “must avoid the temptation of undue aggres-
sion, and aim to secure only such results as will promote our own
good and the general good.”
Following his speech, President McKinley gave to exposition
president Wattles the original manuscript from his telegraphed
address at the opening of the exposition, in which the president
described the “magnificent enterprise” in Omaha as a microcosm
of the nation’s accomplishments in the last half century. Parallel-
ing the exposition’s re-creation of the unexploited Kountze tract
into a veritable garden, McKinley’s words celebrate the transfor-
mation of the Great American Desert into a unified nation: “The
mighty West affords striking evidences of the splendid achieve-
ments and possibilities of our people. It is a matchless tribute to
the energy and endurance of the pioneer, while its vast agricul-
tural development, its progress in manufactures, its advancement
in the arts and sciences, and in all departments of education and
endeavor, have been inestimable contributions to the civilization
and wealth of the world.”49
Omahans awoke on the morning of October 31 to “a match-
less Western sunrise: another typical Nebraska autumn day, with
faultless sky and balmy, invigorating air.”50 The closing day of the
exposition, unsurprisingly dubbed “Omaha Day,” had been widely
anticipated and every effort was made to make it a banner day in
attendance, number of speeches, and general fanfare. To ensure
the former, the mayor of Omaha issued a proclamation declaring
Omaha Day an official holiday, urging businesses to close, order-
ing schools closed, and praising charitable citizens for distribut-
ing hundreds of tickets to Omaha’s poor. Indeed, it seemed every
citizen of the city was in attendance that day—entrance turnstiles

50 sarah j. moore
tallied more than 60,000 attendees, second only to President’s Day
of nearly 100,000—to enjoy the final spectacle and hear speeches
by many prominent local and fair administrators including Mayor
Frank E. Moores, the fair’s publicity director Rosewater, and Wat-
tles. Each in his own way applauded the many successes of the
exposition and the important position Omaha played in its reali-
zation. That the fair was financially sound provided tangible evi-
dence of the material prosperity and vigor of the American West,
according to exposition secretary John A. Wakefield, who noted
with justifiable pride: “It is pertinent to state that this exposition
is the only one in America to promptly open its gates to the public
on a completed show on the day and hour originally designated—
the first to open free of mortgage or pledge of all or some of its
gate receipts, the first to make money each and every month of
the exposition, and the first to repay its stockholders any consid-
erable portion of the funds advanced by them, upon which to base
and build the enterprise. In these respects the Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition stands without rival.”51
Perhaps more than any recurring theme in the many speeches
and spectacles of the closing day of the fair was that of the rapid
and seemingly miraculous transformation of the fairgrounds, and
by extension the American West, from the Great American Des-
ert to Omaha’s White City. Wattles eloquently captured this sen-
timent when he noted:
The caravan of prairie schooners, requiring six months of hardship
and danger to travel from the Mississippi to the Pacific coast, has been
displaced by the overland express, with palace cars provided with
all the conveniences of home, which travel the distance in 33 hours.
No less than 80,000 miles of railroad have been constructed in the
Trans-Mississippi country during the last 50 years, at the fabulous
cost of more than two thousand million dollars. Towns and villages
have sprung into existence along these roads as if by magic. Great cit-
ies have been built, commercial relations established with all parts of
the world, and manufacturing has assumed enormous proportions.52

Zachary T. Lindsey, chair of the Department of Ways and Means,

shared Wattles’s sense of amazement at the speed and extent of

“ the great american desert is no more ” 51

the transformation within the fairgrounds themselves: “To trans-
fer an irregular cornfield into a fairy land, with magnificent build-
ings, stately domes, graceful colonnades, beautiful flower gardens,
tracery of brilliant light—to do all this in less than two years does
indeed seem a feat worthy of Aladdin and his lamp.”53 It was not
Aladdin or his lamp, or the land speculator or the railroad, how-
ever, to which Omahans and the nation turned to account for the
splendor of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition as
a microcosm of the transformation of the plains of the American
West into a garden. Rather, it was to the pioneer and farmer of a
half century earlier who “fought the desperate fight” and whose
tenacity of purpose and intelligence matched those of the Amer-
ican Army surmounting the heights of San Juan Hill during the
course of the exposition itself.54
The splendor of the fair’s architecture devoted to the arts, sci-
ences, and industry led another contemporary observer to look
back to the Louisiana Purchase in the first decade of the nineteenth
century when “there were many thousands of people who thought
the ‘Great American Desert’ but a poor equivalent for the millions
paid to France for it.”55 Albert Shaw, a prominent editor and jour-
nalist of the time, succinctly summarized the assumptions embed-
ded in the exposition and its implications about progress and the
American West: “The Omaha Exposition signalizes the triumph
of the Anglo-Saxon pioneers, first over the aborigines, and sec-
ond, over the forces of nature. . . . Omaha was no longer a city in
the wilderness.”56 One and all seemed to agree, the “Great Amer-
ican Desert” was no more. What Shaw and other contemporar-
ies failed to mention was that the pioneer of the American West
was both real and imagined and could equally represent settlers
and squatters in the territorial period, such as J. Sterling Morton
and Herman Kountze, and homesteaders supported by the rail-
roads which had a vested interest in settlements along their routes.
Progress and the triumph of civilization over the chaos of wilder-
ness were the primary measure of the Trans-Mississippi and Inter-
national Exposition and could be seen everywhere one turned: the
layout of the fairgrounds, the magnificent architecture, countless
displays, allegorical sculpture, official documents, photographs,

52 sarah j. moore
critical discourse, and maps. Compressing time, space, and prog-
ress within its frames, the exposition proposed a discourse of con-
trol and dominion—an ideological equivalent to the formal view
from above—not only of the Trans-Mississippi West but of the
nation’s place within a global context. However, much as a map is
neither neutral nor static, world’s fairs are not ideologically closed
systems, no matter the strenuous efforts of their organizers, but
are rather representational technologies through which conflict-
ing ideas and debates about culture, nation, progress, empire, race,
gender, among others, are produced, performed, and disseminated.
The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898 imag-
ined an imperial nation whose prowess in the international arena
was matched by the national coherence of the Trans-Mississippi
West. The contours of that imperial profile, however, would con-
tinue to be debated and performed at subsequent world’s fairs in
the next two decades.

Notes
Thank you to my research assistant, John-Michael Warner, PhD.
1. William S. Harwood, “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition,” Harper’s Weekly 42
(June 18, 1898): 591.
2. James N. Baldwin, cited in James B. Haynes, History of the Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition of 1898 (St. Louis: Woodward and Tiernan Printing, 1910), 347.
3. “Pride of the West,” Nebraska State Journal, June 2, 1898, 2.
4. Henry Wysham Lanier, “The Great Fair at Omaha: The Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition, June 1 to November 1, 1898,” American Monthly Review of
Reviews 18, no. 1 (July 1898): 53.
5. See Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: American Landscape Painting, 1830–
1865 (Washington dc: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), and Alan Wallach, “Mak-
ing a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of
Arts 66 (November 1990): 34–45.
6. William Boelhower, “Inventing America: The Culture of the Map,” Revue fran-
caise d’etudes americaines (April 1988): 211, discusses the role of the map in turning
land into territory available for acquisition, noting “by means of the map the Euro-
peans had a bird’s-eye view of the world.”
7. Gurdon Wattles, president of the exposition’s board of directors, quoted in
Haynes, History, 59.
8. William S. Harwood, “The Omaha Exposition,” Harper’s Weekly, August 20,
1898, 822; Wattles, quoted in Haynes, History, 338.

“ the great american desert is no more ” 53

 9. Octave Thanet [Alice French], “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition,” Cosmopol-
itan, October 1898, 612. On the Indian Congress, see the essays by Akim Reinhardt
and Nancy Parezo in this volume.
10. Wattles, quoted in Haynes, History, 338. See also Lawrence H. Larsen and Bar-
bara J. Cottrell, The Gate City: A History of Omaha (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1997), 87.
11. See James R. Akerman, ed., Cartographies of Travel and Navigation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006), Denis E. Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing,
Imagining, and Representing the World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), Renato Rosaldo,
“Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 107–22, and Susan Schul-
ten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
12. Thomas Dobson, The History of America in Two Books Extracted from the
American Edition of the Encyclopedia (Philadelphia: Dobson in the Stone House,
1790). See also Robert D. Arner, Dobson’s Encyclopedia: The Publisher, Text, and Pub-
lication of America’s First Britannica, 1789–1803 (Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 1991).
13. Jedidiah Morse, The American Universal Geography (Boston: Isaiah Thomas
and Ebenezer R. Andrews, 1793), 79. See also Henry Turner Davis, Solitary Places
Made Glad: Being Observations and Experiences for Thirty-Two Years in Nebraska
(Cincinnati: Cranston Stowe, 1890), 7. Dobson and Morse shared with other printers
in the United States a sense of nationalism and desire to wrest the American mar-
ket from the British; Arner, Dobson’s Encyclopedia, x.
14. Along the bottom register of the map was a schematic of the region in profile
which indicated relative levels of water at the present moment and historically. This
horizontal section provided another “view” of the land and its natural resources,
particularly its water, or lack thereof. Roger L. Nichols, “Stephen Long and Scien-
tific Exploration on the Plains,” Nebraska History 52 (1971): 50–64.
15. See Morag Barbara Arneil, “All the World Was America: John Locke and the
American Indian,” PhD diss., University College London, 1992, and Herman Lebo-
vics, “The Uses of America in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government,” Journal of
the History of Ideas 47 (October–December 1986): 567–81.
16. Stephen Harriman Long’s commentary and notes are from a report he pre-
sented to the Hon. J. C. Calhoun, secretary of war, on January 20, 1821, and with
the “Map of the Country drained by the Mississippi” are included in Edwin James,
comp., An Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, Per-
formed in the Years 1819, 1820 (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1823). William
H. Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West 1803–1863 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1959), 4, characterizes the Corps of Engineers as “a central insti-
tution of Manifest Destiny.” See also Lucile M. Kane, June D. Holmquist, and Caro-
lyn Gilman, eds., The Northern Expeditions of Stephen H. Long: The Journals of 1817
and 1823 and Related Documents (Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society Press,
1978), and J. Olney, Olney’s Quarto Geography: For Families and Schools (New York:
Pratt, Woodford, 1849).
17. J. H. Colton, Colton’s Western Tourist and Emigrant’s Guide (New York: J. H.
Colton, 1854), 3.

54 sarah j. moore
 18. Haynes, History, 15.
19. For example, “Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, Omaha, June
to November, 1898,” American Architect and Building News 58 (November 1897): 58;
Charles Howard Walker, “The Great Exposition at Omaha,” Century 55, no. 4 (Feb-
ruary 1898): 518–21.
20. For example, Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, Official Guide
Book to Omaha and the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition (Omaha:
Megeath Stationery Company, 1898).
21. John W. Reps, Views and Viewmakers of Urban America (Columbia: Univer-
sity of Missouri Press, 1984), 4.
22. Sylvester Baxter, “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha,” Harper’s
Weekly, October 30, 1897, 1082. The view was given as a double page centerfold on
pp. 1080–81. Harwood’s articles for Harper’s Weekly, “Trans-Mississippi Exposition”
and “The Omaha Exposition,” were illustrated with Rinehart photographs. William
A. Rogers, “The Exposition at Omaha,” Harper’s Weekly, October 8, 1898, 985–87,
was illustrated by Rogers.
23. Rosewater opposed the railroad monopolies, and Kimball was from a prom-
inent railroad family. Edward Rosewater, “Turn on the Searchlight,” Omaha Bee,
November 7, 1897, 12. See also November 16, 1897, for Kimball’s reply. On Kimball, see
David L. Batie, “Thomas Rogers Kimball: Was He a Nebraska Architect?” (Master’s
thesis, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 1977), and William Steele, “Thomas Rogers
Kimball—An Appreciation,” Octagon 6 (October 1934): 3–4.
24. Kenneth G. Alfers, “Triumph of the West: The Trans-Mississippi Exposition,”
Nebraska History 53 (1972): 313–17.
25. John A. Wakefield, “Locating the Exposition,” in “A History of the Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition” (Omaha, 1903, transcribed by the Omaha
Public Library), available at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition
Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu. Wakefield was secretary for the exposition cor-
poration’s board of directors.
26. See Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Mod-
ern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
27. Courtney L. Cope Ziska, “Omaha, Nebraska’s Costly Signaling at the Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898” (Master’s thesis, University of
Nebraska–Lincoln, 2012), 56.
28. Patrice Kay Beam, “The Last Victorian Fair: The Trans-Mississippi Interna-
tional Exposition,” Journal of the American West 33, no. 1 (January 1994): 13.
29. Royal Sutton, On the Edge of Extinction (Bloomington in: AuthorHouse,
2013), who inherited the Rinehart studio in Omaha, identifies Rinehart as born in
Lodi, Illinois, in 1862, originally named Franze Reinehardt, and dying in 1928. The
obituary in the World-Herald, December 18, 1928, gives his death on December 17, in
Springfield, Massachusetts, at age seventy-two, and notes he left Omaha about 1913.
Alfred Edward Rinehart, the Denver photographer, seems to be his older brother
(1851–1915); he moved to Denver in 1875 (Frank may have joined him in 1878), and
in March 1880 A. E. Rinehart partnered with Jackson to open a joint studio (it dis-
solved in December of the same year). Jackson’s Time Exposure: The Autobiography
of William H. Jackson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 258, seems to misname

“ the great american desert is no more ” 55

Alfred as Albert and misstate the year of the partnership as 1881 rather than 1880. A
Denver city directory for 1882 lists A. E. Rinehart and Frank A. Rinehart as sharing
a studio at 413 Larimer Street, which is the address of Jackson’s first studio, which
Rinehart inherited; Jackson moved across the street. Jackson also photographed the
Trans-Mississippi Exposition for the Detroit Photographic Company. Peter B. Hales,
William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape (Philadel-
phia: Temple University Press, 1988); Hales, Silver Cities: Photographing American
Urbanization, 1839–1939 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984).
30. Rinehart’s Book of Views: Photogravures of the Trans-Mississippi and Interna-
tional Exposition (Omaha: F. A. Rinehart, 1898), Omaha Public Library, available
at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi
.unl.edu. Margaretta Lovell, “‘Picturing a City for a Single Summer’: Paintings of
the World’s Columbian Exposition,” Art Bulletin 78, no. 1 (March 1996): 40–55, 41.
31. Haynes, History, 51. The city of Council Bluffs, just across the Missouri River,
could be seen, along with Omaha and South Omaha, which at the time was a sep-
arate city.
32. Snap Shots of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition (Omaha: Bee, 1898), Omaha
Public Library.
33. Ethel Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha Bee, August 30, 1898, 5.
34. Haynes, History, 11–12. Numerous newspaper accounts followed the construc-
tion of the arch as well as the ultimate economically based decision to construct it
of impermanent materials like the other exposition buildings.
35. Haynes, History, 13.
36. Haynes, History, 8–9.
37. Morton’s speech given in Haynes, History, 332.
38. The triumphal arch proved a durable and potent symbol of American impe-
rial ambitions and accomplishments in the post-frontier period, including the ill-
fated but much feted Admiral Dewey Arch (1899–1900) in New York City, celebrating
his victory in the Battle of Manila, and its most bombastic iteration as dual arches
representing the nations of the east and the west in the Court of the Universe at the
1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. See Bonnie M. Miller, From Libera-
tion to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of
1898 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), and Sarah J. Moore, Empire
on Display: San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2013).
39. Sarah B. Harris (editor and publisher), “Observations,” Lincoln Courier, July
31, 1897, 1; “Observations,” Lincoln Courier, August 14, 1897, 1; Sojourner (Thomas R.
Kimball?), “To the Editor of the Courier,” Lincoln Courier, August 14, 1897, 2; “Obser-
vations,” Lincoln Courier, October 15, 1898, 1.
40. Ethel Evans, “Art of the Exposition,” Omaha Daily Bee, July 18, 1898, 5.
41. Antoinette J. Lee, Architects to the Nation: The Rise and Decline of the Super-
vising Architect’s Office (Oxford University Press, 2000).
42. Ethel Evans, “Art of the Exposition,” Omaha Daily Bee, June 13, 1898, 5.
43. Ethel Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha Daily Bee, July 18, 1898, and Ethel
Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha Daily Bee, June 13, 1898.

56 sarah j. moore
 44. Haynes, History, 142–55. See also Wakefield, “War Department” and “Bureau
of Souvenir Coins” (“History of the Trans-Mississippi,” 1903).
45. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest, 77.
46. “Glimpses of the Midway,” Omaha World-Herald, September 23, 1898, 2.
47. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest, 82. Reports about the spectacle of the Maine
explosion appear in many newspaper accounts. For example, “Spanish-American
Fantasie,” Omaha Bee, September 20, 1898, 4, and “Battle Fantasie Very Popular,”
Omaha Bee, September 24, 1898, 5.
48. Cited in Haynes, History, 89.
49. For President’s Day speeches, see Wakefield, “President’s Day” (“History of
the Trans-Mississippi,” 1903).
50. Haynes, History, 11.
51. Report of the General Secretary of the Trans-Mississippi and International Expo-
sition, June 26, 1899, 22, pamphlet, Omaha Public Library, available at the Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
52. Wattles, cited in Haynes, History, 339.
53. Cited in Wakefield, “Omaha Day” (“History of the Trans-Mississippi,” 1903).
54. Rogers, “The Exposition at Omaha,” 987.
55. Lanier, “Great Fair,” 53.
56. Albert Shaw, “The Trans-Mississippians and Their Fair at Omaha,” Century
56, no. 6 (October 1898): 847.

“ the great american desert is no more ” 57

 2
The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition
Commemorative Stamp Issue
bonnie m. miller

The business community in the 1890s recognized the value of

world’s fairs as venues for mass advertising. “In many respects,
advertising by exhibit is very excellent advertising,” wrote Charles
Austin Bates in 1898. Fairgoers, he claimed, “have come to see and
to learn. They are anxious to see everything there is to be seen,
and to accumulate all the information possible. There would be
no better time to attract and hold their attention.”1 With over two
million visitors, the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposi-
tion held in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1898 was, in essence, an adver-
tisement for investment and settlement in the Trans-Mississippi
region. Promoters sought to exploit nostalgia for the pioneers of
the West as well as to counter stereotypes of western coarseness and
rusticity with a vision of the “New West,” having achieved social,
cultural, and economic maturity. One relatively novel platform
for disseminating this view on a national and international scale
was the issuance of a commemorative stamp issue, facilitating the
spread of visual advertising for the exposition and the region into
homes and communities across the country.
It was no coincidence that three cultural phenomena arose in
tandem in the second half of the nineteenth century: (1) the pop-
ularity of the world’s fair, an emblem of mass tourism and spec-
tacular display, (2) the rise of department stores that used new
aesthetics and merchandising methods to foment consumer desire,

59
and (3) the rise of collecting as a distinct form of leisure practice.2
Stamp-collecting in that period was generally practiced by the mid-
dle class, a demographic who could afford the expense of traveling
to world’s fairs and whose identities were shaped by participation
in this growing consumer economy: as consumers, collectors, and
tourists. While the U.S. government issued the first official post-
age stamp in 1847, it took about twenty years before the pastime
caught on, thanks in part to the enticement of the trade of stamps
as commodities possessing market value.
Remarkably, the same man who claimed to have “revolutionized
retailing” brought to fruition the first commemorative stamp issue
in our nation’s history, designed for the World’s Columbian Expo-
sition in Chicago in 1893. John Wanamaker, a successful depart-
ment store owner in Philadelphia, served as postmaster general
from 1889 to 1893, and he used his tenure to affect postal policy in
ways that would enhance access and circulation of goods.3 Inspired
by the U.S. Post Office’s issuance of “commemorative envelopes”
for the Centennial Exhibition in 1876 and the Treasury’s creation
of a souvenir coin for the Chicago fair, Wanamaker saw an oppor-
tunity in 1893 to capitalize on growing public interest in philately
by envisioning collectors as potential consumers of government-
issued products.4 Five years later, the Trans-Mississippi and Interna-
tional Exposition provided occasion for the second commemorative
stamp issue to see print, commonly called the Omaha issue.
Though women were consumers of stamps just as they were a
significant patron for Wanamaker’s department stores, stamp col-
lecting as a leisure activity was largely gendered male because of its
market orientation as well as its association with masculine val-
ues: education, connoisseurship, science, rationality, militarism,
and empire.5 By the 1860s most collectors were boys and men, at
least as the hobby manifested publicly, such as in participation in
philatelic organizations. “Philately teaches geography and history.
It develops a taste for art and science and stimulates research in
nearly every branch of learning,” wrote one collector in the 1890s.
The “science of philately” involved a set of rules that shaped collec-
tive expectations of how to organize, preserve, and display stamps.
Trading stamps entailed precise attention to these rules, as stamps

60 bonnie m. miller
that were doctored or repaired lost market value. Through the pro-
cess of acquiring and organizing stamps into albums, philatelists
were not only consumers but also producers, and in this ongoing
act of production, they internalized and recapitulated nationalis-
tic, and often imperialistic, narratives advanced by the U.S. Post
Office in their vision of the nation’s history.6 That same collector
noted, “The collector can trace the changes of government, king-
doms, and empires.” Published stamp albums, such as those of
Scott’s Stamp and Coin Company and Mekeel’s Stamp Company,
provided a standardized philatelic organization (first by continent,
then region, then country, as well as by market criteria) to struc-
ture such collecting practices.7
Contributing to the rise in philatelic consumerism were gov-
ernment and corporate policies strongly favoring the extension of
U.S. political, economic, and diplomatic interests beyond Amer-
ican borders. World’s fairs helped to advance these objectives by
showcasing American technological and territorial progress in areas
such as manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, and mining. In
1895, the Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress, with William
Jennings Bryan as president, unanimously approved a resolution
in support of an exposition. This resolution stated: “We believe
that an exposition of all the products, industries and civilization
of the States west of the Mississippi River, made at some central
gateway where the world can behold the wonderful capabilities of
these great wealth-producing states, would be of great value, not
only to the Trans-Mississippi States, but to all the home-seekers
of the world.”8 The Congress enthusiastically pursued the expo-
sition idea in order to boost regional commercial interests as the
nation struggled to recover from financial depression. In so doing,
delegates of the Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress aligned
the exposition idea with their foreign policy aspirations for U.S.
intervention in Cuba, Hawaiian annexation, and the building of
a canal in Nicaragua. Constructing a world’s fair, as they saw it,
was an ideal platform to advance the expansion of U.S. commer-
cial interests at the local, regional, and national levels.
Indeed, numerous railroads, banks, insurance companies, news-
papers, and local businesses of all sorts invested in the fair, and

the commemorative stamp issue 61

the vice president of the Union National Bank, Gurdon Wattles,
assumed the role of president of the exposition corporation. The
Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben, a fraternal organization of Omaha’s elite
white businessmen, strongly endorsed the enterprise. Fair public-
ity touted its successful fund-raising efforts as validation for the
project: “Several million dollars have been expended. Private and
corporate capital has helped the national government to make this
show in a small measure worthy of the civilization which produced
it,” wrote William Allen White in McClure’s Magazine.9
Still, support for the exposition was not unanimous. Despite
Bryan’s leadership in the Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress,
some local members of the Populist Party, including one of its lead-
ers, Charles Wooster, avidly opposed the idea, asserting that state
funds would better serve Nebraskan farmers by paying off state
debts rather than financing fair exhibits.10 While these voices of
dissent resulted in a smaller state appropriation for the fair, they
failed to stem support for utilizing regional resources to ensure
that the Omaha exposition would impress upon the nation and
the world a portrait of western progress, affluence, and cultivation.
The timing of the fair (in simultaneous occurrence with the
Spanish-American War of 1898) was particularly fitting for the
ideological convergence of domestic and overseas imperial ide-
ologies in the fair’s vision, as well as for its successor on the same
grounds the following year, the Greater America Exposition of
1899. The Spanish-American War began two months before the
Omaha fair opened its gates and ended with the acquisition of
the nation’s first colonial possessions: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam,
and the Philippines. The Omaha fairs celebrated American mili-
tary and imperial achievements against Spain and marketed the
perceived superiority of American politics, culture, and technol-
ogy to an international audience.
The national imperial debate arising from U.S. victory in the war
with Spain in turn had an effect on local politics. The 1890s saw the
rise of Populism in Nebraska, and in 1896 a major realignment had
occurred when the fusion of Populists and Democrats unhinged
the Republican Party’s stronghold in the state. Although some Pop-
ulists like Wooster opposed the use of state funds for the Omaha

62 bonnie m. miller
world’s fairs, most local Democrats and Republicans joined in favor
of the fair, recognizing its potential benefits to regional commerce.
Exemplifying this unified spirit was the joint endorsement of the
Omaha fairs by the Republican editor of the Omaha Bee, Edward
Rosewater, and the Democratic editor of the Omaha World-Herald,
Gilbert Hitchcock. Once the controversy over American imperi-
alism came to a head in national politics, support for acquisition
largely divided along partisan lines. But the anti-imperialistic lean-
ings of local Nebraska Democrats did not seem to diminish their
outspoken support of the Omaha fairs, despite the fair’s promo-
tion of American expansion as a natural and inevitable course.
Perhaps to local politicians, the fair’s commercial prospects for the
region outweighed other ideological concerns. Nevertheless, the
pro-imperialist apparatus of the Omaha fairs boosted support for
the Republican Party by diverting the focus away from Populist/
Democratic issues, constituting an important factor in helping the
Republican Party regain political control in the state.11
As one writer put it in 1898, world’s fairs represent “a colossal
sort of advertising” that function on multiple levels: promoting
regional, national, and imperial agendas, celebrating technological
and industrial innovation, and glorifying consumerism.12 Promot-
ers of the Omaha exposition utilized an array of visual and mate-
rial objects for and at the fair to articulate the ideological agenda
of the fair’s backers and organizers. The processes of selecting and
designing these items and exhibits, which included the commemo-
rative stamp issue, postal cards, souvenirs and art on display, sheds
light on the struggles of fair organizers and promoters to dissemi-
nate and recalibrate the myth of the West to appeal to an increas-
ingly consumer-conscious society. In selecting visual material for
the stamps, government officials, fair organizers, promoters, and
collectors engaged in larger conversations about regional, national,
and imperial identities through their production and consump-
tion of a variety of visual texts.

The Iconography of the Omaha Issue

In a lecture delivered before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and
Sciences in 1899, the well-known philatelist John Luff promoted

the commemorative stamp issue 63

stamp collecting as an instructive tool to expose young people to
global history, culture, and art. He stated, “Philately embraces the
whole earth and likewise the whole earth is sometimes embraced
within the limits of a postage stamp.” He explained that the sci-
ence of philately “trains our powers of observation, enlarges our
perceptions, broadens our views, and adds to our knowledge of
history, art, languages, geography, botany, mythology and many
kindred branches of learning.”13
The didactic function of stamps as tools to understand history
and culture positioned consumers of stamps as receptors of what
Jack Child referred to as the signs or “miniature messages” pro-
duced and put into circulation by governments. In selecting certain
images to appear on government-issued stamps at the expense of
others, the Post Office Department acted as a national historian,
framing interpretations of the nation’s history, identity, and culture
through emphasis on particular figures, events, places, or pieces
of art. U.S. postal iconography, in its first 100 years, most often
depicted past presidents, prominent statesmen, military leaders,
and explorers—thus encapsulating a triumphant vision of American
nationalism and progress. In this regard, Kristi S. Evans’s concept
of “semantic density” is particularly instructive, as it captures the
extent of meaning packed into these compact visual statements.14
The original idea for the “Omaha issue” came in December
1897 from Edward Rosewater, one of the visionaries of the Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition, who was also editor of
the Omaha Bee and head of the Department of Publicity and Pro-
motion at the fair. As an appointed delegate to the Universal Postal
Congress and outspoken advocate for government control of the
telegraph, Rosewater had many contacts within the Post Office
Department.15 He had also assisted President William McKin-
ley’s presidential campaign, gaining him some powerful allies in
the Republican administration, including Theodore Roosevelt,
then assistant secretary of the Navy. Rosewater had enough polit-
ical capital to persuade Postmaster General James Gary to create
the series, and after some quibbling about whether or not the fair
would attract sufficient international attention, Gary agreed to
a five-stamp issue, later increased to nine (in denominations of

64 bonnie m. miller
1¢, 2¢, 4¢, 5¢, 8¢, 10¢, 50¢, $1, and $2). John Wakefield, secretary
of the fair, saw this decision as a major triumph, writing to the
Department of Publicity, “In my judgment we will get ten times
the advertising from a series of Exposition postage stamps than
from any other advertising medium or device.”16
Rosewater hoped that the series would signify the U.S. govern-
ment’s endorsement of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition as a major
national event on par with the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. The Omaha
Bee claimed that the approval of the stamp issue “fixes more firmly
in the public mind the importance of the exposition as a national
and international affair, and the widespread effect on the exposi-
tion of the action of the Post office department is almost incalcula-
ble.”17 To be sure, other government agencies, like the Departments
of State, War, and Navy, lent their support by contributing exhibit
material to the fair, but the stamps would be sold at the roughly
70,000 post offices nationwide, creating a national advertising net-
work for the exposition. Gary initially approved the printing of the
set in bicolor designs, but the onset of the Spanish-American War
stretched the resources of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving
[bep], resulting in the last-minute decision to limit the issue to a
single color. Cut twice as large as the World’s Columbian Exposi-
tion commemorative stamps, the nine stamps of the Omaha issue
contained the same ornate frame designs, with borders of corn and
wheat, to symbolize the agricultural bedrock of the West. It should
be noted, though, that Gary only served in the appointed position
of postmaster general for a year. He officially left the position for
health reasons, but perhaps his opposition to President McKin-
ley’s war with Spain also contributed to his decision.
Third Assistant Postmaster General John A. Merritt, also a
McKinley appointee, represented the public face of the decision-
making process of image selection. Behind the scenes, he outlined
his larger vision for the series to Claude Johnson, the director of
the bep, who selected the sources and designed the stamps in con-
sultation with his staff of engravers. Johnson, a Kentuckian whose
affiliation with Democratic Secretary of the Treasury John Car-
lisle helped him get the job, was a hard money Democrat. The bep
submitted the proof designs back to Merritt, and the Congressio-

the commemorative stamp issue 65

nal Postal Committee gave final approval based on Merritt’s rec-
ommendations. A number of suggested subjects in Merritt’s initial
memo to Johnson did not make the cut, including Emanuel Leut-
ze’s famous painting, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way;
scenery from Yellowstone and Yosemite; images of flour mills and
fields of grain; a statue of Thomas H. Benton, Democratic senator
from Missouri; portraits of Kit Carson, La Salle, Hennepin, and
Lewis and Clark; and a drawing of the Rock Island Bridge across
the Mississippi River, connecting Rock Island, Illinois, to Daven-
port, Iowa.18
To spark interest in the Omaha issue, Merritt invited the pub-
lic, and particularly philatelic organizations, to contribute stamp
ideas. He circulated a memo to the press soliciting suggestions in
three general categories: portraits of distinguished statesmen, illus-
trations of appropriate historical events, and images of national
scenery and life in the Trans-Mississippi region. Theodore Roos-
evelt, who fancied himself an authority on the subject, responded
to the call with suggestions of a Cheyenne warrior in full rega-
lia, a typical cowboy, an emigrant wagon crossing the plains, and
the vanishing buffalo. For portraits, he suggested Kit Carson or
General Custer. Merritt soon left his position for another political
appointment under Roosevelt, so his ties to Roosevelt’s patronage
gave Roosevelt’s suggestions, in all likelihood, significant clout.
Most of Roosevelt’s ideas made Merritt’s list of suggestions to the
Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and although many were not
used, Roosevelt’s vision of the West certainly calibrated with the
one put forth by the issue. More than one hundred suggestions
came from local residents, such as one man’s submission to have
a 5-stamp series depicting the five successive epochs of western
history, progressing from a 1¢ of an Indian hunt of a bison, a 2¢ of
an emigrant traveling by covered wagon, a 5¢ of a farmer at work
with his plow, a 10¢ of the railroad traversing the landscape, and
the final scene, the $1, of a city with factories and street cars.19 What
did not see print can sometimes be as revealing as what did; the
contribution of these ideas, taken or not, speaks to the internal-
ization of the westward expansionist narrative in the American
cultural consciousness.

66 bonnie m. miller
 Merritt intended for the commemorative stamp issue, like the
exposition itself, to celebrate the pioneering, exploring, and settling
of the Trans-Mississippi West. The official press release claimed:
“They are illustrative of the conditions, promoters, and accom-
plishments of the great west from its discovery to our own day.”20
This iconographic direction validated one strain of historical myth-
making of the West, which underscored themes of inevitability,
entitlement, and progress at the expense of chronicling the actual
negotiations and displacement transpiring there. The mugwump-
ish Chicago News poked fun at this idealization by suggesting their
own design template for the series, featuring hold-ups, public hang-
ings, cyclones, and gold rushing (fig. 11). These images facetiously
countered the bep’s construction of the West as a center for civi-
lization, justice, and industry, instead summoning an alternative
brand of western lore: avarice, lawlessness, and severity.
Framing the stamps as visual illustrations of westward settlement
and progress, the bep, in effect, was selling a fictionalized narra-
tive of the West so pervasive in American visual culture that for
many Americans it had become their sense of historical reality.21
A great example of this inaccurate historical recording was the $1
stamp in the series, a quintessential ranching scene titled West-
ern Cattle in Storm (fig. 12). It depicted a cattle herd based on an
engraving of The Vanguard circulating in the United States. Unbe-
knownst to the Bureau, The Vanguard was a painting that British
artist John MacWhirter exhibited at the Royal Academy in Lon-
don in 1878.22 The Post Office Department incorrectly labeled the
setting as the American West, but it came out later that the image
was actually of cattle in the Scottish highlands. The Post Office
formally apologized for the misrepresentation to the owner of the
painting, Lord Blythswood of Scotland.23
This mistake demonstrates that image selection was not about
documenting an authentic Trans-Mississippi regional experience;
rather, Merritt and his staff organized the series to tell the mythic
story of westward migration. The 1¢ stamp of Father Jacques Mar-
quette on a boat on the Mississippi River preaching to local Natives,
the 4¢ stamp of an Indian buffalo hunt, and the 5¢ showing John C.
Frémont’s exploration of the Rocky Mountains depicted the West

the commemorative stamp issue 67

Fig. 11. “Those New Postage Stamps,” Chicago Daily News, January 15, 1898, p. 5.
Fig. 12. U.S. $1 stamp, “Western Cattle in Storm,” Post Office, Omaha issue,
1898. From Charles O. Murray’s engraving of British artist John MacWhirter’s
ca. 1878 painting The Vanguard. Raymond Ostrander Smith, designer, Marcus
W. Baldwin, engraver, 56,900 issued.
prior to and in the early stages of exploration and development.
The 8¢ stamp featuring troops guarding a train, the 10¢ showing
emigrants moving across the country, the 50¢ scene of a pros-
pector searching for gold, the $1 featuring a cattle herd seeking
safety from a storm, and the $2 plowing scene illustrated Ameri-
can prosperity and progress. If consumers were not privy to see-
ing the whole series in totality, stamp/fair publicity did the work of
constructing this narrative for them: “For the past there are Mar-
quette, Frémont, the Indian, the buffalo and the plainsman; for the
present there are the representations of the agricultural pursuits
and commerce which have already rendered the section rich and
prosperous,” printed the Omaha Excelsior.24 Most published stamp
albums arranged the issue in chronological order, thus displaying
the collection to be read in this narrative sequence. The exposi-
tion itself sought to communicate this same story to visitors on
a much larger scale; as Albert Shaw put it in Century magazine,
“The Omaha Exposition signalizes the triumph of the Anglo-Saxon
pioneers, first, over the aborigines, and, second, over the forces of
nature.”25 Like the Omaha world’s fair, the goal of the series was to
promote a picture of settlement that would boost incentives for
tourism and economic development of the region.
Merritt’s plan for the stamp issue was to strike a visual bal-
ance between images of industrial advancement in the region
and reminiscence of frontier days. The 50¢ stamp in the series,
for example, represented western mining with a Frederic Rem-
ington drawing of early gold hunting: a prospector at work with
basic mining implements and pack mules. A suggestion was made
during the selection process to portray some of the technological
advances of the western mining industry, such as improvements
in the use of hydraulic mining, but this idea was discarded.26 Mer-
ritt and the Bureau instead shaped an ethos of nostalgia in their
image selections. The incorporation of multiple Remington works
in the series is quite telling; educated at Yale and having settled
in New York, Remington spent only a brief period of his life in
the Trans-Mississippi region, but much of his art evinced a sen-
timental longing for western agrarianism in contrast to the rap-
idly industrializing, immigrant-filled eastern cities.27 The multiple

70 bonnie m. miller
Remington drawings in the series may also have stemmed from
his close personal ties to Theodore Roosevelt, who as noted had
significant influence in shaping the visual narrative of the series
(fig. 13). Celebrations of exploration, the search for gold, and the
buffalo hunt were all meant to capture the aura of the “Old West,”
which, Merritt hoped to convey, would continue to shape the char-
acter of life in the Trans-Mississippi states.
The cultural significance of the “miniature messages” offered by
the stamp selections is apparent in the struggle for meaning that
ensued. Not all Americans were receptive to the chosen figures
and scenes, as in the case of picturing Father Marquette on the 1¢
stamp (fig. 14), the second most circulated stamp of the series (ful-
filling the 1¢ postcard rate). A number of letters of protest came
into the Post Office urging its replacement because they opposed
the glorification of a Jesuit priest and a foreigner. The image selec-
tion touched a nerve in local politics, too, given the considerable
anti-Catholic feeling in the state. Nebraska’s Republican Party,
which claimed to be the guardian of American virtue, generally
sanctioned anti-Catholicism, so much so that the anti-Catholic
American Protective Association operated freely outside Repub-
lican Party conventions.28 Despite the dissent, Merritt refused to
pull the image, responding that Marquette’s faith “never entered
into or influenced the selection of the device one way or the other.”
He reasoned that he should not be disqualified for being a “for-
eigner” either, because “he performed services enough as a pio-
neer to earn his citizenship,” and besides, “Columbus was also a
foreigner, for that matter.”29 One New Hampshire attorney wrote
in response to Merritt’s refusal, “What shall be done to suppress
this growing Catholic sentiment in the United States?”30
While some spurned the selection, the local Jesuit community
welcomed the inclusion of Marquette as endorsement of their reli-
gious and educational institutions. Omaha was home to Creigh-
ton University, a Jesuit university founded in 1878, and its founder,
Edward Creighton, had close connections to world’s fair promoter
Edward Rosewater, who worked previously for Creighton’s Pacific
Telegraph Company. Moreover, William Lamprecht, whose painting
Marquette and the Indians (c. 1869) was the source for the image

the commemorative stamp issue 71

Fig. 13. U.S. 50¢ stamp, “Western Mining Prospector,” and 8¢ stamp, “Troops
Guarding Train,” Post Office, Omaha issue, 1898. From Drawings by Frederic
Remington (New York: Robert Howard Russell, 1897). Raymond Ostrander
Smith, designer; George F. C. Smillie engraved the 50¢ stamp, 530,400 issued,
and Robert Ponickau the 8¢ stamp, 2,927,200 issued.
Fig. 14. U.S. 1¢ stamp, “Marquette on the Mississippi,” Post Office, Omaha
issue, 1898. From William Lamprecht’s painting Marquette and the Indians,
c. 1869. Raymond Ostrander Smith, designer, George F. C. Smillie, engraver,
70,993,400 issued.
on the stamp, was rumored to have utilized Reverend Father F. X.
Weninger of Cincinnati, a German Jesuit missionary, as the model
for Marquette. Marquette University in Milwaukee, a small Jesuit
college, later acquired the painting and prominently displayed it
in their reception room.31 The official press circular announcing
the stamp designs credited Marquette University for the loan, and
its use was cause for local celebration. Newspapers and philatelic
journals around the nation widely published the announcement,
inadvertently granting the institution free advertising. If Merritt’s
public statement is taken at his word, any religious endorsement
was unforeseen and perhaps an unwelcome effect of the selec-
tion. The reception of the piece reflects the “semantic density” of
meanings embedded in these selections; consumers scrutinizing
these images may have connected to (or disconnected from) these
images in ways that Merritt never intended.
There were implicit political messages in the stamps as well,
though these may not have been discernible to all consumers.
Philatelist John Luff, for example, criticized the 8¢ stamp (fig. 13)
for endorsing free silver Populism. He told his readers in Mekeel’s
Weekly Stamp News that Frederic Remington’s drawing of troops
guarding a train in the stamp was depicting “Coxey’s Army, or
Colonel Bill Bryan leading his hordes of free silver votaries.”32 As
an employee of the Scott Stamp & Coin Company, Luff was eco-
nomically invested in promoting stamp collecting, with his per-
sonal collection largely specializing in the stamps of Britain and its
Pacific colonies. Politically he supported U.S. imperialistic ventures.
His concern for eliminating forged stamps seemed in accord with
his desire for a gold standard to replace “inauthentic” greenbacks.
The source of the $2 stamp can be more explicitly traced to its
political roots. It pictured the Eads Bridge in St. Louis with sev-
eral steamboats and the skyline of the city. The image was taken
from an admission ticket to the Republican National Convention
held in St. Louis in 1896, which had rejected a silver money plank
and nominated McKinley for president (fig. 15). Many newspa-
pers incorrectly cited the original source of the image as a pho-
tograph, but a letter between Merritt and Johnson of the Bureau
of Engraving and Printing reveals that Merritt deemed the pho-

74 bonnie m. miller
Fig. 15. U.S. $2 stamp, “Mississippi River Bridge,” Post Office, Omaha issue,
1898. Raymond Ostrander Smith, designer, Marcus W. Baldwin, engraver,
56,200 issued. Republican National Con-vention Ticket, 6¼" × 3" (St.
Louis: Woodward and Tiernan Printing, 1896). The ticket shows Civil War
general and president Ulysses S. Grant’s log cabin near St. Louis, called
“Hardscrabble” (it still exists today). Scan courtesy of Susan H. Douglas
Political Americana Collection, #2214. Division of Rare and Manuscript
Collections, Cornell University Library.
tograph inadequate and suggested to Johnson that he base the
engraving on the Republican National Convention ticket.33 The
ticket was likely recognizable to political interests of that region,
thus providing an indirect endorsement of the Republican Party.
The selection further ignited a degree of local rivalry, irritating
some residents of Omaha, who had advocated for an image of
Rock Island Bridge to appear on the stamp, showing a view of the
city of Omaha in its background. The Post Office received letters
expressing frustration over giving St. Louis the honor of represent-
ing the region’s trade links between East and West when Omaha
was the city hosting the fair. These heated exchanges make evident
that stamp collectors and area residents recognized the impor-
tance of the series in propagating regional interests, to the point
that they intervened to have a voice in shaping it.
Unlike the 1¢ and $2 stamps, some of the selections seemingly
enjoyed broad support. To represent the theme of western explo-
ration, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing featured the exploits
of General John Charles Frémont on the 5¢ stamp, the foreign
mail postage rate (fig. 16). Nicknamed “The Pathfinder,” Frémont
was well known to nineteenth-century Americans for his expe-
ditions to the Rocky Mountains, and indeed the image on the
stamp celebrates the moment he placed the flag at its peak in 1842.
Likely at the suggestion of the stamp’s engraver, Marcus Baldwin,
bep director Claude Johnson solicited approval from Merritt to
increase Frémont’s size in proportion to the other figures in the
original scene, to ensure that his portrait would appear clearly on
the miniature image as well as accent the mountain peaks in the
background for visual effect.34
Not only did the engravers distort the visual proportions to
heighten the grandeur of his accomplishment, but Frémont him-
self also had a hand in manufacturing the moment. Cognizant of
the power of travel writings to shape a legacy, Frémont forbade any
member of his exploration party to keep a diary so that he alone
could capitalize on publishing their exploits. In his writings, he
explained that the South Pass, which he followed up the ascent,
was so gradual that he struggled to find a place that signified an
actual “peak.” There were fifty-five peaks higher than the one he

76 bonnie m. miller
Fig. 16. U.S. 5¢ stamp, “Frémont on Rocky Mountains,” Post Office, Omaha
issue, 1898. From John William Orr’s woodcut in Francis C. Woodworth, The
Young American’s Life of Frémont (New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan,
1856). Raymond Ostrander Smith, designer, Marcus W. Baldwin, engraver,
7,694,180 issued.
chose to plant the flag on, but this detail was muted in his widely
circulated official report of 1843. The Post Office Department was
certainly not aware of this when they claimed in an official circu-
lar that the stamp represented “the Pathfinder planting the U.S.
flag on the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains.”35 Jessie Benton
Frémont, the explorer’s widow and daughter of Missouri senator
Thomas Hart Benton, was still living in 1898, and at Rosewater’s
request she sent the bep an illustration of the moment that came
directly from Frémont’s memoirs, along with a photograph of
the actual flag used, to serve as the source for the engraving. The
Bureau did not find it suitable, however, and chose instead to use
an unspecified wood engraving as the image source.36
Frémont’s military and political pursuits, moreover, did not seem
to undercut support for his selection. After earning his reputation
as an explorer, he entered politics and helped to found the Repub-
lican Party, running as the first Republican presidential nominee
in 1856, but lost to Democrat James Buchanan. During the earlier
war with Mexico, he had volunteered to lead a regiment, but his
forces had to withdraw from a confrontation with Mexico near
Monterey. Despite this setback, he was appointed the first Ameri-
can governor of California, a position that ended in his arrest and
court-martial.37 It may seem an odd choice to have picked a man
who did not win in his presidential bid and whose political and
military service was less than revered. But he successfully built
an image of himself as an icon of strenuous masculinity, one who
not surprisingly captured the attention of someone like Theodore
Roosevelt. He commanded expeditions into unchartered terri-
tories and rose to the challenge of confronting enemies (domes-
tic and foreign), which clinched his reputation as a “pathfinder,”
even if an unsuccessful one. He was believed to have embodied
the spirit and energy of the West, and as a result, American con-
sumers embraced his selection without complaint.
While the nation was still painfully recovering from the depres-
sion of 1893, the Omaha series sought to promote the capitalist
potential of the region for American agriculture and industry. The
2¢ stamp depicted a plowing scene from a large bonanza farm,
based on a photograph taken in 1888 in North Dakota of the Ame-

78 bonnie m. miller
nia and Sharon Land Company (fig. 17). Far from a small family
farm, this company had acquired about 40,000 acres of farmland
after the Northern Pacific Railroad went into receivership in 1873.
Bonanza or showcase farms were professionally managed single-
crop enterprises worked by migrant laborers numbering up to one
thousand per farm, with little participation by anyone involved in
the farm from local communities. Depicting sixty-one horses with
extensive plowing equipment, the miniature scene showed teams
at work who would have plowed more than one hundred acres a
day, at the rate of about one mile every half hour. The photograph
went on display at the North Dakota state exhibit at the Chicago
world’s fair in 1893 before it found a home in the Omaha issue.
This was the first U.S. postage stamp to be based on a photograph,
and although it did not include the name of the company in the
image (it was titled “Farming in the West”), it is the most explicit
example of a stamp used as a corporate advertisement, so much
so that several firms apparently made inquiries to the Amenia and
Sharon Land Co. to find out how they, too, could get selected to
appear on a postage stamp.38 Recognizing the commercial windfall,
the Dalrymples Farming Corporation, another bonanza farming
company in the region, stirred up some controversy by attempting,
futilely, to claim the picture as their own.39 The stamp, however,
served as an endorsement for the Amenia and Sharon Land Co.,
which placed it on all correspondence and used the image on its let-
terhead and invoices, with the caption: “The picture on this stamp
is from a photograph taken on one of our farms at Amenia, nd.”
The stamp was also the first U.S. postage stamp to contain a
likeness of a living American. Heretofore all Americans depicted
on stamps were honored posthumously and were of prominent
statesmen. This stamp, by contrast, featured ordinary Americans
engaged in daily labor: driver Evan Nybakken, field boss Elihu Bar-
ber, and foreman Sam White. Nybakken, according to sources who
knew him, complained for years that a gust of wind sent his hat
flying at the moment the original photograph was taken, covering
his face. Marcus Baldwin, the engraver of the stamp, reproduced
the photograph with precision, denying Nybakken the pleasure
of having his face on a U.S. stamp.

the commemorative stamp issue 79

Fig. 17. U.S. 2¢ stamp, “Farming in the West,” Post Office, Omaha issue,
1898. From a photograph of Amenia and Sharon Land Company, North
Dakota. Raymond Ostrander Smith, designer, Marcus W. Baldwin, engraver,
159,720,800 issued.
 The intended “miniature message” of the 2¢ stamp was to con-
vey western farming as big business, a fusion of industrial inno-
vation and agricultural bounty. The importance of these capitalist
virtues to the overall design of the issue is evident in the fate of
this particular stamp. Merritt initially slotted this scene as the
$2 stamp, but the Congressional Postal Committee decided that
this scene was most representative of the western tableau they
had envisioned. As a result, they switched it to be the 2¢ stamp
(displacing the stamp picturing St. Louis’s Eads Bridge) because
the 2¢ stamp would see much greater circulation as the domestic
first-class postage rate. And, in fact, the 2¢ stamp was the most
printed of the series, totaling 159,720,800.40 This move aimed to
satisfy major agricultural interests that had political ties to Con-
gress. The decision to switch the order of the stamps, however, dis-
rupted the chronological flow of the sequence and reflected the
impetus to prioritize certain “miniature messages” over others, in
this case the link between farming and commerce.
The precedent for such a switch had occurred five years ear-
lier, with Postmaster General John Wanamaker’s organizational
scheme for the Columbian Exposition commemorative issue in
1893. Rather than proceed through the events of Columbus’s life
in chronological order for the sixteen-stamp series, Wanamaker
chose to spotlight the most important scenes on the least expen-
sive stamps, which were also the ones most commonly used for
routine mail delivery. The 1¢ stamp, based on a painting by Wil-
liam H. Powell, pictured Christopher Columbus in sight of land.
The engraver adorned the sides of the image with stereotypical
depictions of Native Americans appearing defeated and compli-
ant, becoming the first U.S. postage stamp to depict them. Wana-
maker connected the monetary value of the stamp to the import
of the message, prioritizing the most salient themes while at the
same time democratizing the circulation of the messages to ensure
maximum consumption.41
The Omaha series, the 4¢ stamp in particular, perpetuated the
Columbian issue’s narrative of the discovery and exploration of the
Americas, visually celebrating western settlement and the inevi-
table demise of Native peoples and culture. The 4¢ stamp in the

the commemorative stamp issue 81

Omaha series, based on an engraving by Seth Eastman titled Buf-
falo Chase in Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s Information Respecting the
History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United
States (1854), depicted a Native American on horseback, pursu-
ing and firing his arrow at a buffalo (fig. 18). The Department of
the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs had commissioned School-
craft’s multivolume study, perhaps accounting for why the Bureau
of Engraving and Printing consulted it. The original publication of
Eastman’s Buffalo Chase had accompanied Schoolcraft’s descrip-
tion of the daring, but vanishing, escapade of the buffalo hunt:
“the savage bands of the west, whose progenitors have, from time
immemorial, depended mainly upon the buffalo, must, with them,
disappear from the earth, unless they resort to other means of sub-
sistence, under the fostering care of the General Government.”42
Schoolcraft framed the fading of the spectacle of the buffalo hunt
as inevitable, a perspective that the bep likely shared when select-
ing the image.
The artist, Seth Eastman, had been a graduate of West Point,
a captain in the army, and member of the military’s Topographi-
cal Bureau. He witnessed the Seminole War firsthand, and while
observing the Sioux in his seven-year stay at Fort Snelling, he
created a portfolio of Native American portraits and scenes. In
1848, Eastman’s political connections facilitated his reassignment
to Washington dc, where he gained prominence as one of the
nation’s leading painters of Native Americans. After the head of
the Office of Indian Affairs backed Eastman’s appointment, Con-
gress approved the acquisition of Eastman’s services as illustrator
of Schoolcraft’s government-authorized study. President Andrew
Johnson later commissioned Eastman to paint scenes like the Buf-
falo Chase to decorate the quarters of the House Committee on
Indian and Military Affairs, in order to capture the vanishing way
of life imagined for Native peoples and the buffalo.43 Eastman was,
therefore, a perfect choice for the Omaha series; he was an estab-
lished authority on Native American life whose vision of Native
peoples emerged from and closely adhered to government policies.
The prevalence of the “vanishing Indian” motif in American
visual and literary culture of that period made the “miniature

82 bonnie m. miller
message” of the stamp recognizable, a symbol of the impending
disappearance of Native tribes that followed the march of western
expansion.44 It complemented the theme of the Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition’s most advertised attraction: the Indian
Congress. Promoters celebrated this assembly of more than five
hundred people from tribes across the Trans-Mississippi region
as the last opportunity to bring together Native peoples before
they vanished. While the Indian Congress depicted sham battles
and Native American dances in a nostalgic “spectacle of the ‘con-
quered,’” the stamp similarly celebrated the beauty and skill of the
mounted Indian in his savage splendor. 45 The intent of both was
to situate Native Americans within the myth of their demise and
conquest. While Eastman’s original engraving depicts a second
Native American spearing a buffalo in the background, Bureau
engraver Smillie excised him from the scene, instead presenting
the Native American as a solitary figure hunting on the plains,
unthreatening in his isolation while gloriously majestic.46
In the narrative sequence of the series, the pioneer family trav-
eling westward displaced the roaming Native American. Artist
A. G. Heaton submitted one of his pieces for inclusion in the
series, and it became one of the more interesting selections: the
10¢ stamp, titled “Hardships of Emigration” (fig. 18). In the scene,
a family’s migration westward via prairie schooner is halted by a
horse who has “fallen from exhaustion,” to use the words of the
official description. The family looks on as the father leans in, pre-
sumably to put down the expiring horse. One newspaper account
described it as follows: “The 10-cent stamp shows the hardships of
emigrants following in the footsteps of scouts. . . . It [the horse] is
surrounded by the emigrant, his wife and children, who are look-
ing at it in helplessness.”47 Given the repertoire of available imag-
ery of pioneers crossing the plains in wagons and coaches, it seems
striking that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing chose to depict
these pioneers, including the only woman to appear in the whole
series, in a state of “helplessness” and potential peril. One can sur-
mise that their attempt was to humanize pioneer families and cel-
ebrate their courage for assuming such risk. Heaton’s image may
also have been chosen because he had some sway with the Post

the commemorative stamp issue 83

Fig. 18. U.S. 10¢ stamp, “Hardships of Emigration,” and 4¢ stamp, “Indian
Hunting Buffalo,” Post Office, Omha issue, 1898. U.S. 4¢ stamp from Robert
Hinschelwood’s reproduction of Seth Eastman’s drawing Buffalo Chase, in
Henry R. Schoolcraft, Information Respecting the History, Condition, and
Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (Philadelphia: Lippincott,
Grambo, 1854). Raymond Ostrander Smith, designer, George F. C. Smillie,
engraver, 4,924,500 issued. U.S. 10¢ stamp from Augustus Goodyear Heaton’s
painting, Hardships of Emigration, 1892. Raymond Ostrander Smith, designer,
Marcus W. Baldwin, engraver, 4,629,760 issued.
Office, having taken part in selecting images for the Columbian
issue of 1893. Still, the “miniature message” of this stamp was less
forthright than the others in encouraging future migration. If the
desired effect was to garner attention, though, the emotive power
of the scene successfully got the mainstream and philatelic press
to take notice.
The purchase and dissemination of the stamp issue overall gave
the local economy a boost. Many businesses across the country, and
especially in the Trans-Mississippi region, bought large quantities
of the stamps for use in promoting their commercial enterprises.
Omaha candy manufacturer D. J. O’Brien, for example, caught
the attention of the Omaha Bee when on one visit to the Omaha
post office he purchased $500 of the 2¢ stamps, for all correspon-
dence related to marketing his candy, licorice, and woodenware.
Fred Macy & Co., a large manufacturer of desks and office furni-
ture based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, placed an order for two
hundred thousand 1¢ stamps.48 The Omaha issue appeared on the
Montgomery Ward catalogs that year, and the department store
had a building at the exposition that included a room for writing
letters.49 This business practice derived from a shared perception of
the stamps as emblems of regional and national pride. Businesses
utilized the stamps, and made this point known in their adver-
tising, in order to attract consumers who might appreciate their
support of the exposition and celebration of the region. Newspa-
per documentation of these many postal transactions offered col-
lectors a means to track the circulation of the stamps as market
commodities. For businesses, press accounts of the purchases pro-
vided an extra level of advertising. In this way, collectors, the Post
Office Department, the Trans-Mississippi exposition corporation,
and private enterprise all reaped the financial reward of popular
consumption and interest in the Omaha stamp issue.

Resisting Consumers
Contemporary stamp collectors highly value the Omaha issue,
leading the Post Office to re-release the series in its original bicolor
design on the centennial of its printing in 1998. But in the late
1890s, the stamp issue inspired significant resistance from collec-

the commemorative stamp issue 85

tors, dealers, and philatelic societies in London, Boston, Wash-
ington, and San Francisco. They opposed the idea of government
agencies relating to collectors as potential consumers. If purchas-
ing stamps could be used “to replenish the treasuries of weak gov-
ernments,” as Scott Stamp & Coin Co. feared in its letter of protest
to the Post Office Department, then it would sanction a corporate
vision of government in which the goal would be to profit from,
rather than govern, its citizens.50 Critics called the commemorative
stamp issue “unnecessary” and expressed concern about potential
speculators buying up the stamps in bulk and selling them later
at inflated prices. The Omaha issue threatened to force collectors
to buy these stamps at high costs to maintain the completeness
of their collections, but many also worried that the issue might
diminish the financial value of their entire collection.
There were other voices of dissatisfaction in the mix. Some felt
that commemorating an “industrial” exposition was not of equal
importance to the Chicago world’s fair of 1893. Others criticized
the aesthetic composition of the stamps themselves, most notably
philatelist John Luff ’s infamous assessment of the issue as “poorly
conceived and executed, overloaded with ornaments, heavy in color,
and blurred in printing.” The New York Times similarly panned the
series as “destitute of any art quality.”51 Yet such critiques failed to
dampen the popular acclaim for the series, suggesting that typical
collectors and consumers preferred to make their own aesthetic
judgments about the stamps rather than submit to the expertise
of cultural authorities.52 Rather than aesthetics, the most heated
resistance centered on the issue of stamp speculation, and the con-
troversy sparked a firestorm of attention in the press, so much so
that Mekeel’s Weekly Stamp News printed that the Omaha stamps
have “been to the stamp papers what the Maine incident has been
to the wider field of American journalism.”53
After the Columbian issue of 1893, the Society for the Suppres-
sion of Speculative Stamps formed in London to oppose such com-
memorative issues. A few countries around the world, including
Portugal, Greece, and Hungary, had put out a limited number
of commemorative issues in the mid-1890s to celebrate national
anniversaries and events, and some philatelists in England and the

86 bonnie m. miller
United States were growing weary of the practice. Following the
announcement of the Omaha issue, the Society for the Suppres-
sion of Speculative Stamps was one of its most outspoken critics.
In 1898, P. M. Wolfsieffer sent a letter to the postmaster general on
behalf of the society asking for the stamp release to be abandoned:
“Since the issue of the Columbian set in 1893, or more strictly in
the last few years, the custom of emitting special stamps to cele-
brate occasions of varying national importance has been abused,
especially by minor countries, that consider such issues primarily
as a convenient means through which to replenish governmental
exchequers by the sale of the stamps to philatelists.” The postmas-
ter general in reply thanked them for their comments but stated
that he could “see nothing in them to warrant the Department in
changing its intentions as to this matter.”54 Other organizations
similarly weighed in, including the Boston Philatelic Society, who
chastised the Post Office for resorting “to the practice adopted by
many bankrupt nations who issue commemoration stamps as a
means of replenishing their treasuries.”55 Scott’s Stamp and Coin
Company urged collectors not to buy the stamps, even going so
far as refusing to print spaces in their albums for collectors to
place the commemorative issues printed between 1897 and 1899.56
While some praised the Omaha issue as a “boom to philately” for
inspiring new collectors, the market-oriented nature of the hobby
also urged some to militate against its expansion. One stamp col-
lector in 1898 criticized commemorative stamp issues for creat-
ing “competition amongst collectors.”57 Rather than desiring more
people to take up the hobby, a rise in collectors might boost the
circulation of stamps, which in turn would diminish the value of
stamps that might otherwise be rare. Harper’s Weekly dismissed
the objection that the stamp issue was to “catch the pennies” of
collectors, but expressed a larger concern about the legitimacy of
the government to act as advertiser of the exposition.58 They felt
uneasy about the government’s increasingly interventionist role
in promoting tourism and popular consumption, a trend that had
been accelerating since Wanamaker’s leadership of the Post Office
in the early 1890s. In an age when the lines between government
and big business were blurring, the commemorative stamp release

the commemorative stamp issue 87

exemplifies active government participation in the growth of a
consumer-based economy. The strong show of resistance against
it, particularly by the philatelic community, illuminates one site
of cultural tension awakened by this shift.

Philatelic and Souvenir Culture at the Fair

The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition offered many
sites for the sale and display of stamps and souvenirs. Stamps were
sold at multiple locations on the Midway, the entertainment zone
of the fair.59 In 1898, the Nebraska Philatelic Society sought to capi-
talize on fair publicity by inviting stamp organizations from around
the country to hold their annual convention in Omaha. Most phil-
atelic societies in that era were located in the eastern states, and
ultimately they declined. After the rejection, the Nebraska Phil-
atelic Society closed ranks and launched a new organization, the
Trans-Mississippi Philatelic Society, barring any collectors who
lived east of the Mississippi River. The new society was short-lived,
but in 1934 collectors in the Midwest formed an organization of the
same name.60 Despite the divisiveness that this incident precipi-
tated, the Nebraska Philatelic Society produced a stamp exhibit in
the Nebraska Building that attracted interest from philatelic orga-
nizations across the country.
Stamp and coin collectors found much to tantalize their inter-
ests at the Omaha fair. The Treasury Department exhibited the
coin press that struck the souvenir medal of the exposition, and
the Government Building featured the original sheet of the Trans-
Mississippi stamp issue. The Post Office also had an extensive dis-
play in the Government Building of U.S. and foreign postage stamps
and of models of contemporary mail carriers and old-time stage-
coaches. One of the most popular features of the exhibit was the
dead letter division. Dead letters referred to mail that had failed
to reach their destination. The Post Office would open these let-
ters, only returning to sender items of value, and if left unclaimed,
burning all other contents. Spectators were fascinated not only with
the letters, but also with the various unclaimed trinkets contained
within: hats, thimbles, teeth, toys, miniature photographs, jewelry,
and much more. The Post Office exhibit edified fairgoers with a

88 bonnie m. miller
bit of American postal history while at the same time remind-
ing them of the intangible value of postal communication, offer-
ing a voyeuristic glimpse into the private discourse of others who
would never read the words or receive the gifts of their intended.61
The exposition also offered fairgoers a variety of visual and mate-
rial artifacts that they could collect in order to authenticate their
experience: stamps, postal cards, photo books, and commemora-
tive souvenirs. Writing postcards, taking photographs, or collect-
ing souvenirs enabled fairgoers to mark their social and economic
status as modern tourists.62 Many of the state buildings and some
corporate (such as the Press and Montgomery Ward Buildings)
on the grounds offered sitting rooms with stationery for visitors
to write down their experiences in letters and postcards to loved
ones. State buildings advertised special porches and parlors fit-
ted for the comfort and refreshment of their guests with “easy
chairs and lounges,” sofas, and desks, some with separate facili-
ties for men and women.63 Utilizing these sitting rooms, fairgoers
may have sought to preserve memories from the fair by crafting
a written narrative of their experience that they could share with
friends and family. Souvenir postcards, containing views from the
fairgrounds, colored portraits of delegates to the Indian Congress,
or photographs of Midway performers and concessions, could be
mailed on location. The U.S. Postal Card Company of Omaha cre-
ated a set of ten picture postcards from the Trans-Mississippi Expo-
sition, sold at 25¢ per set, depicting the buildings and grounds of
the White City. Local businesses, in addition to the fair’s official
photographer, also printed and distributed illustrated postcards
for advertising purposes.64 Regional businesses promoted the fair
in their advertising in order to capitalize on the boost in tourism
that the fair would bring to the city. The Union Pacific Railroad,
for example, gave out souvenirs with views from the fairgrounds
to their patrons in an attempt to profit from the transportation
needs of travelers.65
The prize souvenir of the Omaha fair was a specially designed
medal (fig. 31), awarded to honorary guests and available for pur-
chase by fairgoers, which fair management hoped would “serve
the double purpose of advertising and commemorating the great

the commemorative stamp issue 89

event.”66 Zachary T. Lindsey, chairman of the executive committee
and manager of the department of ways and means, selected the
design. His idea was to convey a “before” and “after” effect on the
two sides of the coin to portray the outcome of American west-
ward settlement from 1848 to 1898. These dates are significant; the
United States had acquired parts of the Trans-Mississippi region
from Mexico in 1848 while 1898 saw the expansion of U.S. domin-
ion outside its continental borders. According to the narrative put
forth on the medal, these fifty years marked the transformation of
the West into “civilized” society. The “before” side (labeled “1848”),
according to fair publicity, “will form a scene suggestive of the con-
ditions existing in this section before the encroachments of the
white man drove both Indian and buffalo into the mountains and
finally accomplished their almost complete extinction.”67 Drawn
by fair architect Thomas R. Kimball and utilizing a similar motif
as the 4¢ stamp, this side created an icon of so-called savagery, pic-
turing “a wild, half-naked Indian, astride a wild bronco, in hot pur-
suit of a buffalo.”68 The “after” image (labeled “Trans-Mississippi
Exposition Omaha 1898”) represented the “most refined product”
of civilization embodied in American womanhood, as T. J. Bois-
seau’s essay in this book discusses.69 To create this image, appointed
judges selected profile views of women from the Trans-Mississippi
region, two from each state, and photographer George Rockwell
blended them into a single image through composite photography.
The selection of the women’s faces for the composite medal
invited advertising of the region of a different sort. Preference in
many of the state contests went to younger, single women over
married, and the chosen became local celebrities in their own
right, having their picture and biographies published in the local
press. Judge William Neville, vice president of the exposition for
Nebraska, selected the two women to represent his state. He offered
solace to those not chosen by promising to frame the pictures of all
the submissions and exhibit them in the rotunda of the Nebraska
Building at the exposition. He claimed that “this display will have
a strong effect on immigration to Nebraska, especially among the
young men of the east, and that as a result, the matrimonial market
will experience a wave of prosperity which will bring about thou-

90 bonnie m. miller
sands of desirable matrimonial alliances.”70 His use of commer-
cial language, of markets and marital prosperity, epitomized the
growing consumer mentality of the period, as finding a spouse was
likened to achieving material success. The souvenir medal could
easily have depicted an archetypal goddess figure or a historical
person, but instead the decision to feature living women, hailed
as beautiful types of the West, aimed to sell the concept of west-
ern settlement through enticements of romantic union.
Although the souvenir medal portrayed an idealized woman and
a Native American, it is notable that the commemorative stamp
series almost entirely featured images of Anglo-American men,
with the exception of the mother in the emigrant family scene and
the buffalo hunter in the 4¢ stamp. By contrast, in the first com-
memorative stamp series of the World’s Columbian Exposition of
1893, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing included the portrait
of Queen Isabella, a specific historical personage celebrated for
her contribution to the discovery of the Americas, not an abstract
type meant to stand for Anglo-American civilization as a whole.
Publicity for the souvenir medal framed the composite portrait
as an object of men’s desire and fulfillment, not as recognition of
women’s achievements in the West. Aimed at male collectors, the
Omaha issue gendered western settlement and progress as mas-
culine and white, a theme reinforced by fair organizers who chose
not to include a Woman’s Building at the fair and who located the
Indian Congress in a space outside the exposition’s main grounds.

Rendering the “New West” Aesthetic

While the Post Office Department and Bureau of Engraving and
Printing in Washington put forth a nostalgic image of western
exploration, pioneering, and settlement, fair organizers sought to
use the fair to promote a progressive, more urbane western ethos.
Intrinsic to marketing the commercial possibilities of the West
for local organizers was a need to establish its cultural core. Fair
organizers designed the architectural structures, layout, statuary,
and fine arts exhibit to impress upon visitors a sense of regional
sophistication and aesthetic taste (fig. 30). Armand H. Griffith,
the director of the Detroit Museum of Art, managed the fine arts

the commemorative stamp issue 91

exhibit and made the final selections in consultation with Paul
Charlton, chairman of the committee of the Western Art Asso-
ciation. Rather than stake a claim to regional or even national
styles or subjects, Griffith thought it best to establish the standing
of the Trans-Mississippi region by putting on an exhibit of inter-
national stature. Griffith claimed to have visited the art centers of
Europe to scour collections and he appointed commissioners in
other cities and countries to supplement his selections. He told
the press that his aim was to secure pieces of “the highest merit
and excellence” so that “nearly every known school of painting
will be represented.”71
Local fair publicity celebrated the international breadth of the
collection and, in turn, praised the exhibit for demonstrating
the cultural appreciation for art among citizens of the West. Out
of the hundreds of paintings and statues on exhibit, most of the
pieces singled out in the local press were from European artists or
European-trained American artists (a point clearly emphasized in
the accounts). For example, William Howe of Philadelphia had two
paintings on display of cattle, a subject that resonated with the cel-
ebration of the western ranching industry, and yet press accounts
focused on his European reputation: he is “an artist whose standing
in Europe is such that his pictures are admitted to the far-famed
salons of Paris,” claimed the Omaha Bee.72 The visual content itself
of the pieces on display, evoking scenes of rural family life, seemed
less important to publicists than putting forth Howe’s transnational
reputation, to show how the West had moved beyond the crude-
ness of its initial stages of exploration and development. Albert
Shaw described the fine arts exhibit “as fairly representative of the
best European and American painting” verifying “that the west-
ern towns are developing an intelligent taste and appreciation.”73
Charles Howard Walker, the Boston-based partner of fair archi-
tect Thomas R. Kimball, promoted the fair as emblematic of the
“New West” in Century magazine; he wrote that the fair illumi-
nates “certain factors which it was hardly expected would exist in
a pioneer country,” and chief among them is an “appreciation of
art and the power to produce it.”74
Following in the footsteps of the Chicago world’s fair of 1893,

92 bonnie m. miller
the Omaha exposition delivered an architectural vista of classical
grandeur, described by one of the architects as an “ever-varying
composition of perpendicular shafts crowned with richly orna-
mented capitals.”75 Fairgoers could walk the broad esplanades sur-
rounding the Grand Canal that stretched about a half a mile and
connected the ivory-colored buildings housing the central exhib-
its (fig. 2). Statuary, terraces, fountains, and lavish gardens lib-
erally adorned the buildings and colonnades in a neo-classical
style. Much could be written about the intricacies of Walker and
Kimball’s designs, which dazzled fairgoers with a sweeping view
of urbane and aesthetic sophistication. The details of the statu-
ary and building ornaments intertwined agricultural and indus-
trial elements, such as interlacing cogwheels with fruit and grain
products, with classical allegorical figures symbolizing progress,
prosperity, and enlightenment.
The creation of this White City in just a few short months sym-
bolized the spectacular rise of the “New West,” hailed by John L.
Webster in his speech on opening day: “These mighty structures
stand where fifty years ago were the clustered tepees of the Omaha
Indians.”76 The tactical decision to locate the Indian Congress on
the periphery of the new White City architecturally demarcated
this narrative of regional transformation (fig. 8). The fair design
similarly bespoke the “utter annihilation of everything Spanish in
all the West” and, by contrast, the ascension of “the virile growth
of the Anglo-Saxon,” noted William Allen White in McClure’s.77
The trope of the vanishing Indian and the expulsion of any hint
of Spanish influence in the architecture or ethos of the fair visu-
ally confirmed the emergence of a mature “New West,” devoid of
seemingly inferior or primitive influences.
The White City, the elegant Grand Canal, and the copious stat-
uary certainly offered fairgoers a vision of the sublime, but fair
artists also infused a western aesthetic into some displays. The Bur-
lington railroad exhibit in the Nebraska department of the Agri-
culture Building, for example, sought to convey an “object lesson
about the great West” through a series of four “life-sized” art-
works. The female artist of the series incorporated the very prod-
ucts of the territories—grains and native cereals—to add texture

the commemorative stamp issue 93

to the pictures. Taking forward the narrative of the stamp’s emi-
grant scene, the pictorial series told the story of a young pioneer:
the first picture depicts him driving out West with his oxen as his
only capital; the second shows a modest cabin that he has built as
he begins to cultivate the land; the third shows the growing farm-
house—a cozy scene of “rural domesticity,” claimed Frank Leslie’s
Illustrated Newspaper; but the fourth goes beyond anything in the
stamps to show his magnificent and “modern” country seat. Lit-
erally made from the very materials of western agricultural pro-
duction, the scenes impart the “dream” of the American West that
frames agrarian life as the ideal of domestic comfort and the route
to self-reliant and self-made prosperity.78 Yet unlike the bonanza-
farming scene of the 2¢ stamp, these art pieces represent more of a
Populist vision of the West—the ideal of simple agrarianism over
industrialized agriculture.
The production of stamps, medals, architecture, art, and other
forms of visual culture for the fair created competing representa-
tions of the West, in some cases validating mythic notions of west-
ern simplicity and rusticity while in other instances extolling the
“New West” as a center for industry, agricultural innovation, and
the arts. Fair publicity made evident the cultural tension between
claiming legitimacy via association with the more established art
centers of Europe and attempting to stake out a uniquely Amer-
ican artistic identity, one that blended westward expansion, art,
nationalism, and commerce. “Special attention has been devoted
to making the exhibition largely American,” wrote the Populist
Omaha Woman’s Weekly of the fine arts exhibit, which “will appeal
strongly to the patriotism of visitors.”79

“Imperialistic” Stamp Collecting

After the exposition received over two million gate receipts during
its five-month duration, the press hailed it as a great success.
Claimed one account, “in all essential regards the West is shown
to be fully abreast with the older East. The vitality, energy, intel-
ligence and pride of the newer section of our country are proven
to be well out of the raw and crude condition of the recent settle-
ment of that region.” The fair was proof that the West had come

94 bonnie m. miller
into its own as a center of agricultural and industrial development
as well as of culture and the arts. To all international guests and
those traveling from the eastern states, one writer felt assured that
the exposition would convince any “visitor who remains for any
length of time” that the people of the Trans-Mississippi states are
“pleasant, well bred, [and] well educated.”80
The signing of the Treaty of Paris at the close of the Spanish-
American War marked a turning point in American history with
the nation’s acquisition of overseas territories. Popular interest in
America’s expanding empire led some of the organizers of the Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition to reopen the grounds the
following year, during the summer of 1899, as the Greater Amer-
ica Exposition. It was the first and only exposition in American
history dedicated to the celebration of American colonial posses-
sions. In anticipation of the Greater American Exposition’s opening,
the Omaha Excelsior encouraged the Post Office to take advantage
of popular interest in empire-building with a special stamp: “The
Excelsior’s idea for a greater America issue would be to show the
same map, the world rolled out flat, indicating American posses-
sions in red.”81 The postmaster general did not take the suggestion,
but this idea of recalibrating the world map to accentuate Amer-
ica’s new acquisitions exemplifies the ways that stamps, despite
their miniature form, could do the work of promoting national,
imperial, and commercial ideologies. Most post offices around
the country continued to sell the Omaha stamp issue throughout
1899, as the nation embarked on this new course of colonial occu-
pation that generated a climate of political divisiveness at home
and mounting resistance from nationalist forces abroad.
Massachusetts Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a long-
time friend of Roosevelt and a leading advocate for U.S. imperialist
expansion in these debates, was also a self-professed stamp col-
lector. To a young Lodge, collecting stamps was akin to “treasure-
hunting.” The excitement was not in the trade or speculation but
rather in the adventure and act of discovery of finding new stamps:
“prying into forgotten corners and going into all sorts of out-of-
the-way places . . . was very gratifying to boy nature,” he recalled
in his memoirs. He dreamed of that moment when he might find

the commemorative stamp issue 95

a rare stamp specimen, like one of the triangular stamps from the
Cape of Good Hope or the highly coveted Mauritius stamps of
1847.82 Another collector, this one female, shared Lodge’s sense of
the joy of discovery, claiming that when you come upon that rare
find, “you examine it with all the pride of a conqueror.”83 Their
shared conceptualization of the practice encompasses the aura of
empire: the lure of the exotic, the riches of acquisition, and the tri-
umph of the taking. Stamp-collecting albums, which some pub-
lishers titled “imperial” albums, facilitated this type of thinking by
grouping stamps categorically by empire, positioning the stamps
of mother countries alongside those of their respective colonial
possessions. New imperial reconfigurations that result from war,
in this case from the gains and losses of the Spanish and Ameri-
can empires, could substantially affect stamp album organization.
The Government Building at the Omaha fair contained an exten-
sive display of past U.S. stamps, and one of its most popular items
of interest to collectors were sheets from Hawai‘i. Popular inter-
est in Hawaiian annexation sparked interest in these stamps, as
did the issues from America’s newly acquired colonies from Spain.
Remarkably quickly, the U.S. government extended domestic postal
rates, laws, and structures to Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, and Cuba,
though they did not fully integrate the Philippine mail service.84
Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith, Gary’s successor and
fellow McKinley appointee, put it best in his annual report, “when
our troops advanced into Cuba the postal service also advanced
with them.”85 The prospect of these colonial issues inspired great
excitement and anticipation amongst collectors. “To see an issue
of stamps appearing from each of the colonies of Cuba, Porto Rico,
and the Philippines authorized by the United States Government
would be nothing short of a revelation to American collectors,”
printed the Pennsylvania Philatelist.86 The appeal of war-related
events also inspired many collectors to seek out stamps issued
by Filipino nationalists in their quest for independence as well as
past Spanish stamps from its centuries of colonial occupation of
the new territories.87
The Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars stim-
ulated a great boom in the hobby. “Never was there a year in the

96 bonnie m. miller
Fig. 19. Envelope (postmark September 5, 1898) with 2¢ stamp from Omaha
issue and portrait of Rear Adm. William T. Sampson, commander of the
North Atlantic fleet during the Spanish-American War. Scan courtesy of
Schuyler Rumsey Philatelic Auctions.
history of philately so full of important events as 1898,” stated the
Philadelphia Inquirer.88 The timing of the Omaha exposition with
respect to these international events created a special opportunity
for continental and overseas imperial themes to merge in Amer-
ican visual culture. Many Americans expressed their patriotism
through acts of consumption, which included the purchase of
postcards and postal covers containing Spanish-American War
iconography (fig. 19). Portraits of generals and military heroes,
of President McKinley, the American flag and military accoutre-
ments, and, of course, the sunken uss Maine illustrated mailings
that, thanks to the timing of events, were often affixed with Omaha
fair stamps, most typically of the 1¢ and 2¢ varieties. Postal culture
became an important site for government and corporate interests
to unite nationalistic and militaristic themes with a celebration of
American industrial and agricultural development in the West.

Notes
1. Charles Austin Bates, “Advertising by Exhibit,” John A. Wakefield Scrapbooks,
vol. 4, original in Omaha Public Library, microfilm copy in Nebraska State Histor-
ical Society (cited hereafter as Wakefield Scrapbooks, nshs).
2. See Russell Lewis, “Everything under One Roof: World’s Fairs and Department
Stores in Paris and Chicago,” Chicago History 12 (Fall 1983): 28–47, Russell W. Belk,
Collecting in a Consumer Society (London: Routledge, 1995), and Steven M. Gelber,
“Free Market Metaphor: The Historical Dynamics of Stamp Collecting,” Compara-
tive Studies in Society and History 34, no. 4 (October 1992): 743.
3. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New Amer-
ican Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 32–35, 184.
4. Sheila A. Brennan, “Stamping American Memory: Stamp Collecting in the U.S.,
1880s–1930s” (Master’s thesis, University of Notre Dame, 1996), 131–34.
5. Stephen M. Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 114–16; Ellen Gruber Garvey, “Dreaming in
Commerce: Advertising Trade Card Scrapbooks,” in Acts of Possession: Collecting in
America, ed. Leah Dilworth (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 80.
6. Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society, 55.
7. “Taught by a Stamp,” Chicago Tribune, August 26, 1894, 27.
8. Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress, Official Proceedings of the Eighth
Convention of the Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress Held at Omaha, Neb., Nov.
25, 26, 27, and 28, 1895 (Omaha: Press of the Omaha Printing Company, 1895), 165.
9. William Allen White, “An Appreciation of the West: Apropos of the Omaha
Exposition,” McClure’s Magazine 11, no. 6 (October 1898): 575. White’s Emporia (ks)
Gazette was politically influential; at the time White was a Progressive who was crit-

98 bonnie m. miller
ical of Populism and friendly with Theodore Roosevelt, as well as Octavia Thanet
(Alice French), another booster of the exposition in periodical literature.
10. See discussion in Robert W. Rydell, “The Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition: ‘To Work Out the Problem of Universal Civilization,’” American Quar-
terly 33, no. 5 (Winter 1981): 589–91.
11. David Trask, “The Nebraska Populist Party: A Social and Political Analysis”
(PhD diss., University of Nebraska, 1971), 266–69.
12. Henry Wysham Lanier, “The Great Fair at Omaha: The Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition, June 1 to November 1, 1898,” American Monthly Review
of Reviews 18, no. 1 (July 1898): 54. As noted below, Albert Shaw was editor of this
journal, though he may not yet have taken the reins in 1898, but it seems likely that
there was a connection between him, Lanier, and the Expo organizers.
13. John Luff, What Philately Teaches: A Lecture Delivered before the Section on
Philately of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, February 24, 1899, 3rd ed. (New
York, 1915), 6–7. Another advocate for stamp collecting in this period was L. Frank
Baum, most famous for his authorship of The Wizard of Oz (1900) and its creative
parable of Populism in the Midwest. He published an amateur stamp journal in the
1870s in upstate New York called the Stamp Collector.
14. Jack Child, Miniature Messages: The Semiotics and Politics of Latin American
Postage Stamps (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 1–2, 16–19; Kristi S. Evans,
“The Argument of Images: Historical Representation in Solidarity Underground
Postage, 1981–87,” American Ethnologist 19, no. 4 (1992): 750; Ekaterina V. Haskins,
“‘Put Your Stamp on History’: The usps Commemorative Program Celebrate the
Century and Postmodern Collective Memory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no.
1 (February 2003): 3.
15. The Universal Postal Congress was the primary international meeting of the
Universal Postal Union, in which issues affecting international postal services were
discussed.
16. John A. Wakefield to James B. Haynes, of the Publicity Department, January
23, 1897, Edward Rosewater Papers, American Jewish Archives.
17. “Philatelists Now Object,” Omaha Bee, January 2, 1898, 8.
18. John A. Merritt to Claude M. Johnson, December 27, 1897, Records of the
National Archives and Records Administration [nara], courtesy of the Bureau of
Engraving and Printing [bep].
19. “Designs for the New Postage Stamp Issue,” Congregationalist 83, no. 2 (Jan-
uary 13, 1898): 53; “Exposition Notes,” Omaha Woman’s Weekly, January 15, 1898, 3.
20. This was published in newspapers across the country, including the Daily
Public Ledger [Maysville, Kentucky], January 13, 1898, 3.
21. See William H. Truettner, “Prelude to Expansion: Repainting the Past,” in The
West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920, ed. William H. Tru-
ettner (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 57–59.
22. William MacDonald Sinclair, John MacWhirter (Royal Academician): His Life
and Work (London: Virtue, 1903). MacWhirter’s The Vanguard is in the collection
of Dundee’s Art Gallery & Museum, Scotland.

the commemorative stamp issue 99

 23. Kenneth A. Wood, Post Dates: A Chronology of Intriguing Events in the Mails
and Philately (Albany: Van Dahl, 1985), June 17, 1898, entry.
24. “The Omaha Stamps,” Omaha Excelsior, August 27, 1898, Wakefield Scrap-
books, vol. 3, nshs.
25. Albert Shaw, “The Trans-Mississippians and Their Fair at Omaha,” Century
56, no. 6 (October 1898): 847. Shaw, a journalist who had local connections in the
Trans-Mississippi region (he graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa), was also
editor of the American Review of Reviews. His many writings included works on
municipal reform and Abraham Lincoln’s political career.
26. Fred Schrader, “Stamps for the Exposition,” Omaha World-Herald, Decem-
ber 30, 1897, 1.
27. Alexander Nemerov, “Doing the ‘Old America’: The Image of the American
West, 1880–1920,” in The West as America, 287–88.
28. Robert Cherny, Populism, Progressivism, and the Transformation of Nebraska
Politics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 52–54; Stanley Parsons, The
Populist Context: Rural versus Urban Power on a Great Plains Frontier (Westport ct:
Greenwood Press, 1973), 104–9.
29. “Why Marquette Is There,” Omaha Bee, August 29, 1898, 5.
30. James F. Brennan to Bro. Doyle, July 16, 1898, reproduced in Randy L. Neil
with Jack Rosenthal, United States of America: The Trans-Mississippi Issue of 1898
(Danbury ct: Andrew Levitt, 1997), xi.
31. “Has Its Place in History,” Omaha Bee, February 28, 1898, 8.
32. Lester G. Brookman, The United States Postage Stamps of the 19th Century, vol.
3 (New York: H. L. Lindquist, 1967), 180; Neil, United States of America: The Trans-
Mississippi Issue of 1898, xv–xvi.
33. John A. Merritt to Claude M. Johnson, February 24, 1898, Records of the
nara, courtesy of the bep.
34. Johnson to Merritt, February 9, 1898, Records of the nara, courtesy of the bep.
35. Reproduced in Brookman, The United States Postage Stamps of the 19th Cen-
tury, 3:162–63.
36. “Flag of the Pathfinder,” Omaha Bee, January 31, 1898, 8.
37. Geoffrey C. Ward, The West: An Illustrated History (Boston: Little, Brown,
1996), 100, 108–11, 176. See description of 5¢ stamp in Tessa Sabol, “Trans-Mississippi
Exposition Commemorative Stamp Issue and National Identity at the Turn of the
Twentieth Century” (paper for the National Postal Museum Winton M. Blount
Symposium, 2010), 16.
38. Allan M. Thatcher, “2¢ Trans-Mississippi Design,” Stamps, June 24, 1939, 405–6.
39. From interview notes between Leonard Sackett and H. L. Chaffee, president
and general manager of the Amenia and Sharon Land Co., April 2, 1953, Institute
for Regional Studies. Courtesy of the North Dakota State University special col-
lections; “Discovery of Photo Identifies Farmhand on 2¢ Trans-Miss,” Linn’s Stamp
News 72 (November 8, 1999): 1.
40. Michael I. Casper and Clifford Blizard, Stamps: Collecting United States Stamps
for Pleasure, Investment, and Profit (2011), 49, www.casperstamp.com/index.php?
action=Book; Gary Griffith, “The 2¢ Trans-Mississippi Is an American Classic,”

100 bonnie m. miller

Stamp Collector, March 23, 1998, 6; Joseph G. Wester, “USA: The Trans-Mississippi
Issue of 1898 $2 Design,” London Philatelist 110 (June 2001): 171–72.
41. Casper and Blizard, Stamps, 27–29.
42. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Information Respecting the History, Condition and
Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, vol. 4 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippin-
cott, 1854), 95.
43. Brian Dippie, Catlin and His Contemporaries: The Politics of Patronage (Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 178–84, 194–207; Gary Griffith, “Soldier-
Artist behind the 4¢ Trans-Mississippi,” Stamp Collector, December 28, 1998, 6.
44. For paintings on the theme of the Native American buffalo hunt, see Rena N.
Coen, “The Last of the Buffalo,” American Art Journal 5, no. 2 (November 1973): 83–94.
45. Bonnie M. Miller, “The Incoherencies of Empire: The ‘Imperial’ Image of
the Indian at the Omaha World’s Fairs of 1898–99,” American Studies 49, nos. 3–4
(Fall–Winter 2008): 39.
46. See Sabol, “Trans-Mississippi Exposition Commemorative Stamp Issue,” 7.
47. “A Resplendent Show,” Wichita Daily Eagle, April 28, 1898, 4.
48. “Candymen Buy Stamps,” Omaha Bee, July 19, 1898, 4; “Demand for the Spe-
cial Stamps,” Omaha Bee, February 28, 1898, 8.
49. “Special Stamps in Great Demand,” January 22, 1898, Wakefield Scrapbooks,
vol. 3, nshs; “Calling for the Stamps: Business Men Here and Elsewhere Will Make
Use of Exposition Souvenirs,” Omaha World Herald, January 22, 1898, 7.
50. “Stamp Collectors Protest,” American Journal of Philately 11 (January 1898), n.p.
51. Neil, United States of America: The Trans-Mississippi Issue of 1898, 144; New
York Times quoted in Sacramento Record-Union, October 2, 1898, 9.
52. Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age
America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 300–327, analyzes how different
constituencies consumed art in the 1890s, including a split between metropolitan
centers and less urbanized regions.
53. “The ssss and the Omaha Stamps,” Mekeel’s Weekly Stamp News 11, no. 13
(March 31, 1898): 148, cited in Brennan, “Stamping American Memory,” 150.
54. Herman Herst Jr., “Collectors Hated 1898 Trans-Mississippis,” Linn’s Stamp
News, February 19, 1990, 36.
55. “Opposed to the New Stamps,” Kansas City Journal, January 25, 1898, 2.
56. Brennan, “Stamping American Memory,” 150–51.
57. W. J. Hardy and E. D. Bacon, The Stamp Collector (London: George Redway,
1898), 87.
58. Harper’s Weekly quoted in “Concerning the Stamps,” Omaha Bee, January
28, 1898, 5.
59. “Interesting Gossip for Stamp Collectors,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Septem-
ber 18, 1898, 7.
60. J. F. McGee, “A Short History of tmps,” cornpex, October 11–13, 1957, 8.
61. James B. Haynes, History of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposi-
tion of 1898 (Omaha: Published under direction of the Committee on History, 1910),
148; on dead letters, see David Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern
Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2006), 158–66.

the commemorative stamp issue 101

 62. Rachel Snow, “Tourism and American Identity: Kodak’s Conspicuous Con-
sumers Abroad,” Journal of American Culture 31, no. 1 (March 2008): 7–19.
63. “Montgomery Ward & Co at the Exposition,” Omaha Bee, June 14, 1898, 12;
Octave Thanet [Alice French], “Staples of the Great West,” Omaha Bee, August 7,
1897, 15.
64. A list of these exposition postal cards can be found in C. H. Stevens and F. B.
Stratton, eds., United States Postal Card Catalog: With a Special Appendix on Expo-
sition Postal Cards (Albany or: Van Dahl, 1970), 131. See also J. R. Burdick, Pio-
neer Post Cards: The Story of Mailing Cards to 1898 (J. R. Burdick, 1957), 35–38, 116.
65. “Puts Out Beautiful Souvenirs,” August 1898, Wakefield Scrapbooks, vol. 6,
nshs.
66. “Girls, Send Photos,” Helena Independent, January 4, 1898, 5.
67. “Medal for the Exposition,” December 1897, Wakefield Scrapbooks, vol. 3, nshs.
68. This account appeared in many newspaper descriptions of the medal. See, for
example, “A Composite Western Girl Unique Design for the Souvenir Medal of the
Trans-Mississippi Exposition,” Charlotte Observer, January 25, 1898, 4.
69. “Designs for the Stamps,” January 12, 1898, Wakefield Scrapbooks, vol. 3, nshs.
70. “Beauty Gets a Square Show,” Omaha Bee, January 13, 1898, Wakefield Scrap-
books, vol. 3, nshs.
71. “The Opening Day,” Hutchinson News [Kansas], June 1, 1898, 7; “Omaha’s Great
Exposition in 1898,” Salt Lake City Daily Tribune, November 28, 1897, 16.
72. “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha Bee, May 15, 1898, Wakefield Scrapbooks,
vol. 4, nshs.
73. Albert Shaw, “The Trans-Mississippians and Their Fair at Omaha,” Century
56, no. 6 (October 1898): 849.
74. Charles Howard Walker, “The Great Exposition at Omaha,” Century 55, no.
4 (February 1898): 518.
75. Walker, “The Great Exposition at Omaha,” 519.
76. “Pride of the West,” Nebraska State Journal, June 2, 1898, 2. John L. Webster
was the unanimous choice of Nebraska delegates to the Republican state conven-
tion to be Theodore Roosevelt’s vice president in 1904.
77. White, “An Appreciation of the West,” 577.
78. “A Western Creation: The Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha, Nebraska,”
Frank Leslie’s 46 (October 1898): 444–45.
79. “Exposition Notes,” Omaha Woman’s Weekly, May 5, 1898, 11.
80. “The Omaha Fair,” Syracuse Evening Herald, November 7, 1898, 4; Thanet,
“Staples of the Great West,” 15.
81. Omaha Excelsior, January 7, 1899, 2.
82. Henry Cabot Lodge, Early Memories (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1913), 25.
83. Verna Weston Hanway, “Firelight Reveries,” Philatelic West and Camera News
31, no. 2 (November 1905), n.p., cited in Brennan, “Stamping American Memory,”
63. Hanway authored a column in the Philatelic West called a “Woman-Collectors’
Department” to attract more women into stamp collecting. On Hanway and the Phil-
atelic West, see Sheila Brennan’s digital project, “Stamping American Memory: Col-

102 bonnie m. miller

lectors, Citizens, Commemoratives, and the Post,” http://www.stampingamerican
memory.org.
84. Wayne E. Fuller, The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1972), 232.
85. “The Postal Service: Annual Report of the Postmaster General,” Topeka Weekly
Capital, November 29, 1898, 4.
86. “Effect of the War on Stamp Collecting,” Pennsylvania Philatelist 14, no. 3
(August 1898): 51.
87. “Spanish Colonial Stamps Neglected by Most Collectors, the War Has Restored
Them to Favor,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 23, 1898, 4.
88. “Aguinaldo’s Postage Stamps: The Philippine Leader Authorizes a Native
Issue,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 12, 1899, 6.

the commemorative stamp issue 103

 3
Women and Art in the Passing Show
wendy jean katz

On May Day in 1895, artist Ethel Evans took over the art column
for the daily Omaha Bee (fig. 20); the paper turned itself com-
pletely over to women editors that day. Evans designed the col-
umn’s logo: a woman in classical dress, holding a palette and brush,
symbolizing Art, looks toward a perspective view down a long
street, which is lined with handsome multistory buildings, deco-
rated with arches, towers, and pedimented windows. An organi-
cally curving decorative motif flows from her embracing gesture
toward this street. Without pedestrians or streetcars to block it,
a bright, open, and urbane boulevard, perhaps evoking Omaha’s
downtown business district, where the Bee’s office and artists’ stu-
dios were, invites entry. “The Passing Show,” the title of Nebraska
novelist Willa Cather’s long-running column for a newspaper in
Omaha’s neighboring city, Lincoln, suggests that the role of the
columnist was to make connections between and create meaning
out of the city’s transitory people and entertainments. In doing
so, Cather’s column, like those of her female peers, established a
place for women, at least as spectators, in city streets. Evans’s col-
umn also encouraged the cosmopolitan female reader to move into
and around the city as well as the larger world, and Evans autho-
rized her presence there on multiple grounds. When she became
art critic for the Bee during the Trans-Mississippi Exposition of

105
1898, she brought a similar agenda to her columns on “Art at the
Exposition.” In finding meaning not only in the main exposition
but also in its “passing show,” the nickname for the Omaha Mid-
way that evoked the ephemerality of the entire exposition and its
visitors, Evans and her fellow female journalists emphasized their
agency as professional workers as well as spectators.
One source of female authority was “municipal housekeeping.”
Evans opened her 1895 column with an excerpt on women’s clubs
bringing art to the schools. As a lecturer on art to women’s clubs,
Evans asserted herself in the public sphere based on an expansive
view of female domestic authority over children, education, and
the creation of a moral environment generally.1 But as a trained
artist, a working woman or “bachelor girl,” like the women who
advertised art lessons and portraits on the same page of the Bee,
Evans had the authority of her professional credentials, too.2 The
various contributors to her 1895 column, artists in Omaha and
other cities around the country, accordingly value skillful tech-
nique in art over narrative content, style above subject. They share
the language of aestheticism, of art for art’s sake, which was asso-
ciated with European training and models. The aesthetic move-
ment, albeit with its radical stress on art for art’s sake modified for
American sentiments, offered female artists a professional identity
that by detaching aesthetics from morality also empowered their
movement into new sites for public and civic life.3 For example,
a few years before the exposition, the Omaha School Board tried
to fire a Catholic music teacher. In the extensive coverage of the
case in Edward Rosewater’s Omaha Bee, a defense ensued based
on her professional credentials, and her position was restored.
Evans’s appointment as drawing instructor for the public schools
came under consideration at the same time, and the comparison
with her case and credentials implicitly buttressed the rationale
for hiring on the basis of professional qualifications rather than
moral (religious) ones.4
A second sketch in Evans’s column for the Bee introducing local
Art Notes, the only section written by Evans herself, reinforces this
professional authority. This design features a more businesslike
woman, with umbrella, briefcase, and crisp coat and hat, ready to

106 wendy jean katz

Fig. 20. Ethel Evans, “Art,” Omaha Bee, May 1, 1895, p. 11. Scan courtesy of the
Library of Congress’s Chronicling America.
venture out. And in this section Evans describes a more specific
downtown itinerary, moving from the Omaha Academy of Fine
Arts in the new public library building, designed by exposition
architect Thomas R. Kimball, to the “cosmopolitan” (and male)
Omaha Club in the Sheeley block, run by Albert Rothery, the art
columnist for the Omaha World-Herald, and Richard Gilder, a
landscape painter and proofreader for the World-Herald. The itin-
erary continues to an exhibition at H. P. Whitmore’s gallery, then
to still life painter Frances Mumaugh’s studio in the Paxton block,
located next to two other female artists and art teachers.5
That tension in Evans’s column between the classicized female
who promises to reform—clean up, elevate, improve—the city, and
the more professional modern woman who already competes in
its central business district, spurred much of women’s involvement
in the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha.
The cover of an exposition guidebook, based in part on a sketch
by architect Kimball, even echoed her design’s structuring of the
relationship of women to the city (fig. 21). A more forceful—not
quite as flatly decorative, more three-dimensional—allegorical fig-
ure of liberty raises the torch of enlightenment and bares a breast, a
gesture that also implies nurture; two babies lift a shield below. To
“Illustrate the Progress of the West,” she points to an inset photo-
graph of the exposition’s central lagoon and court, the fair’s equiv-
alent to and model for Omaha’s downtown.
The exposition was located northwest of downtown, on an unde-
veloped tract owned by art collector Herman Kountze, not that far
from the smoke and dirt of the warehouses and railroads along
the Missouri River. Elsie Reasoner, an exhibition publicist, in fact
praised the view from the exposition not of the decorative lagoon
but of the nearby freight cars and smelting works. If Reasoner’s
gaze did not stretch to actual workers in the yards, it neverthe-
less acknowledged the capital necessary to impose the exposition’s
aesthetic design and metaphors on the city.6 Unlike a photograph
of the city of Omaha, in the guidebook’s cover photograph of the
artificial environment of the exposition, the “markers of money,
commerce, individual initiative, marketing and exchange” are
invisible. But the inset photograph does include stylishly dressed

108 wendy jean katz

Fig. 21. Trans-Mississippi International Exhibition, Omaha, June to November
1898, Illustrating the Progress of the West (Omaha: Trans-Mississippi
Exposition, 1898). From the Collections of the Omaha Public Library.
Work in the public domain, scan courtesy of the Omaha Public Library.
women who walk both alone and accompanied in its foreground.
The exposition’s veiling of social class, its replacement of a city
of labor with an aestheticized city seemingly devoted to specta-
tors and consumers, encouraged women’s professional activity.7
It provided the grounds (literally) on which artists and business-
men, men and women, negotiated and consolidated Progressive
Era authority.
The upper-class women in Omaha who, like Evans, wrote about
the fine arts exhibition and the exposition, exhibited in it, deco-
rated its buildings, and rejected a separate women’s building, were
not necessarily interested in abandoning Victorian doctrines of
separate spheres of activity for men and women. Many of them
were involved in the movement for women’s suffrage—the presi-
dent of the Omaha Women’s Club, Mrs. Henrietta Draper Smith,
was one of the state leaders for suffrage, as well as a Woman’s Board
member for the exposition—but as “art workers,” beautifying the
city, they adopted a different emancipatory language, that of the
arts and crafts movement. Like its progenitor, aestheticism, arts
and crafts practitioners detached—freed—the artistic from the
subject represented, locating aesthetic value instead in the artist’s
technique and sensibility. That sensibility could be carried any-
where; rather than being confined to the home, trained aesthetic
taste might be turned on streets, squares, and parks, creating a uto-
pian social world. Participating in leagues, congresses, and guilds
that espoused aesthetic aims shared with men, women gained pro-
fessional qualifications, if not actual equality. In part because of
upper-class women’s personal, professional, and economic part-
nerships with the merchants funding the exposition, its display of
art and aesthetics—in a space where everything was artificial and
man-made—reinforced a detachment of respectability from place
that gave urban women increased freedom and control.
In small Gilded Age cities like Omaha, white, middle-class, and
usually single working women—writing for the newspaper, teach-
ing in the schools, selling in the shops, or typing in an office—
increasingly overlapped and inhabited the same streets, streetcars,
and districts as women who had similar jobs or worked in hotels,
laundries, or manufacturing, but who had different and some-

110 wendy jean katz

times more relaxed ideas about conduct.8 Upper-class women who
wished to distinguish themselves from their ethnic or working-
class neighbors, while remaining visible on urban streets and
active in downtown workplaces like the newspapers, studios, and
retailers, supported a model of professionalization that drew class
lines and defined respectability apart from physical locations and
neighborhoods.
For Jewish immigrants like Omaha Bee founder Edward Rose-
water and many of the other self-made businessmen in the city,
aestheticism, displayed through a taste for luxury goods like paint-
ings or interior decor, or perhaps through hiring columnists like
Evans, conferred social distinction on those who did not have tra-
ditional modes of access to class power.9 But it did not necessarily
align them with the suffrage movement. Rosewater had famously
debated suffragette Susan B. Anthony in Omaha’s Boyd Theater in
1881, the same year the Nebraska legislature put suffrage before the
voters, who rejected it. His goal in defending the rights of female
Catholic music teachers (among others) was to weaken the influ-
ence of the anti-Catholic American Protective Association, which
had dominated city politics from 1893 to 1895. Rather than func-
tioning as a separate party, the American Protective Association
published lists of acceptable candidates for office—the Democratic
Omaha World-Herald published their ticket in 1892—and thereby
impacted legislators and school boards throughout the state.10 Mrs.
Charles Rosewater (Rosewater’s daughter-in-law) was a public
school teacher. But credentials for female teachers, like aesthet-
ics and the Omaha expositions of 1898 and 1899, were just part of
the varied cultural terrain on which Rosewater’s political battles,
often against Gilbert Hitchcock of the World-Herald, were fought.

Exposition Politics and Progressive Allies

To understand the perspective on the exposition of women and
artists like Evans, it’s helpful to recognize their social and politi-
cal alliances. As engineered by Rosewater, the Trans-Mississippi
International Exposition of 1898 was intended to further Repub-
lican progressivism in Omaha. One Populist paper called it an
“engine” to help the Republicans “recover the state.”11 Rosewater

the passing show 111

and his collaborators—he was sole director of publicity and pro-
motions for the exposition after he outmaneuvered Hitchcock, and
he hired “newspaper men” Elsie Reasoner and Ellenore Dutcher
to assist him—were able to capitalize on the economic and politi-
cal upheaval of the 1890s to do so.12 Omaha in particular had been
struggling. After thirty years of a booming population (from 1,883
in 1860 to over 100,000 in 1890), Omaha’s population had stagnated
in the 1890s. By 1900 residents still numbered just 102,555, and the
city limits were the same as they were in 1887.13 Foreign-born res-
idents, 39 percent of the population in 1870 (many drawn by rail-
road advertising), had dropped to 23 percent by 1900. Immigration
and population declined because Omaha as an entrepôt was hit
hard by state crop failures in 1890 (followed by bad years in 1892–
93 and near total failure in 1894–95), which triggered merchant
and bank failures peaking in 1893 and 1896, respectively.14 Prices
declined until 1897, and even state-funded bailouts for drought-
stricken agriculture didn’t supply much relief. Organized anti-
Catholicism, the factionalization of the Republican Party around
monetary policy and monopolies, and the Populist third party
challenge owed to this economic upheaval, too.
Local politics and hierarchies were also unstable in the 1890s,
as the cultural ordering of what had recently been a frontier town
came into conflict with prairie populism. The city had voted for
Democrat Grover Cleveland for president in 1888 and for for-
mer Democratic mayor James Boyd (owner of his namesake the-
ater and opera house) for governor in 1890, but the Populists had
their conference in Omaha in 1892. In 1894 the “fusion” of Pop-
ulists and Democrats in the state defeated the Republican candi-
date and elected Populist Silas Holcomb as governor. Despite this
record, Omaha was overall Republican, with Republican voters
mostly in the outer rings of the city, in the newer, more suburban
districts, like those being developed in the tract for the Trans-
Mississippi Exposition (fig. 22). Democrats were mostly concen-
trated in the inner city and the eastern and southern precincts, an
area that included the central business district, with its newspapers,
department stores, corporations, railroad stations, banks, business
interests, rooming houses, smaller residential units, lack of parks,

112 wendy jean katz

and more crowded conditions. Immigrants lived downtown, but
thanks to streetcar lines they were also dispersed throughout the
city.15 However, there were concentrations of ethnic populations
(mostly Irish and German, but some Czech, Italian, Polish, Chi-
nese, Danes, Swedes, and Russians) in the central business district
and the eastern part of the city. For anti-monopoly factions of the
Republican Party, including Rosewater, allying with the Demo-
crats/Populists was important in gaining Republican influence in
the city as well as in the state.
The pragmatic Rosewater was willing, unlike some elite reform-
ers, to tolerate “vice,” which made it easier to form alliances with
Democrats, whose immigrant base typically opposed prohibi-
tion. As retail in the city moved west to 16th Street (street num-
bers mark the distance from the Missouri River, the city’s eastern
boundary), the older downtown near 9th Street acquired saloons,
brothels, and gambling halls. Tom Dennison, a professional gam-
bler and the city’s longtime political boss, came to town in 1890
and by 1900, with the help of Rosewater’s Omaha Bee, consoli-
dated his base in downtown’s Third Ward. Though vice was mostly
confined to this “burnt district,” the central business district was
adjacent, and it was difficult to keep it behind closed doors.16 One
paper criticized the practice of conveying arrested prostitutes, who
were “neatly and cleanly attired” and “evidently sober and respect-
able,” in open wagons through the streets to the police station at
11th and Dodge.17 It’s suggestive of the difficulties for professional
women in downtown like Evans that an ex-prostitute observed
that teachers, clerks, stenographers, and shop girls participated
in the underworld and that any working woman was liable to be
accosted on the street or receive insinuating glances.18
The exposition, then, offered an opportunity to expand Republi-
can state and regional appeal, especially to immigrants, in a highly
controlled and managed environment. With Rosewater’s back-
ing, the exposition fought off attempts to ban liquor sales and
close on Sundays, and the Trans-Mississippi had special days for
German, Bohemian, and Swedish immigrants. Its director, Gur-
don Wattles, though he would author an antilabor pamphlet (the
exposition managers had agreed to pay workmen union wages

the passing show 113

Fig. 22. Map of Omaha, Official Guide Book to Omaha and the Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition (Omaha: Megeath Stationery, 1898),
143. From the Collections of the Omaha Public Library. Work in the public
domain, scan courtesy of the Omaha Public Library.
though not to hire only union men), in his opening day speech
welcomed the “people of the world” to what he called a haven for
the oppressed in the West. On Nebraska Day, the state attorney
general celebrated the contributions of immigrants to the coun-
try, calling Americans a race that combined all others (italics for
emphasis).19 T. S. Clarkson, manager of the exposition, was a dele-
gate to the Congress of Representative White and Colored Amer-
icans, which met in the auditorium of the exposition; Nebraska’s
Populist governor had just vetoed a bill that would have permit-
ted marriages across racial lines and did not attend the Congress.
Republicans in 1900 would take the state from the Populists (or
Fusion Party).
Resistance to women’s suffrage, something shared by Hitch-
cock of the Democratic World-Herald, was part of that appeal to
ethnic groups; Susan B. Anthony prior to her debate with Rose-
water had observed that in the West “native-born white men, tem-
perance men, liberal-minded, decent men voted for it [suffrage].
Against it were the rank and file of Mexicans . . . miners, foreign-
ers, German, Irish. The Negro also voted against it.”20 Despite his
practical courting of immigrants, Rosewater, whose wife and daugh-
ters participated in Omaha women’s clubs, maintained alliances
with upper-class, native-born, and often pro-suffrage professional
women, especially at the exposition. The exposition’s design cre-
ated “zoned” neighborhoods (e.g., for the Midway), but its stress
on a unified, heterosocial, and consumer-oriented urban space
supported elite women’s freedom of movement—even as it put
on display their still subordinate position.21
Women were active in both paid and unpaid white-collar posi-
tions at the exposition. The exposition corporation had its head-
quarters in the Paxton Block, where women had art studios and
offices. Male and female clerks, stenographers, writers, and pub-
licists crowded into exposition headquarters by 1897, at a time
when only twelve male laborers had been hired. In addition to
Evans in the Bee reviewing the exposition’s art and architecture
(her brother-in-law, Zachary Taylor Lindsay, was on the exposi-
tion’s executive committee), and Reasoner’s and Dutcher’s work in
publicity, Ella B. Perrine covered education, the special domain of

the passing show 115

the exposition’s Woman’s Board, for the Bee. Lydia McCague, who
wrote for the Populist Omaha Woman’s Weekly, designed the cer-
tificate for the Boys and Girls Building, also run by the Woman’s
Board.22 Julia Officer was the manager of the musical artists, and
Mellona Butterfield was superintendent of the decoration of the
Nebraska State Building, which contained two hundred pictures by
Nebraska artists, almost all women.23 The Nebraska Ceramics Club
(almost all women) had a state-subsidized space in the Liberal Arts
Building, and in the Fine Arts catalog nearly 20 percent of the 413
exhibiting artists were women, though Bessie Potter was the only
woman of the seven sculptors.24 At the Art Congress, the (female)
art critic for the Chicago Post and a female art historian (the lat-
ter had lectured before the McKinleys) were speakers. Other club
women staffed private and state-sponsored exhibitions, demon-
strating how to cook with corn or hosting a sod house (a Populist
symbol). Women of less social prominence staffed ostrich farms,
perfume counters, and restaurants and performed on the Midway.
Rosewater’s progressive vision of the city, with its political alli-
ances, thus offered working women a pleasurable and engaged
urban experience. In a “romance” of the exposition written by a
clubwoman for the World-Herald, the upper-class heroine (who
instead of visiting the Art Building finds love in the Government
Building’s dead letter display) moves alone through the exposi-
tion without any difficulties. In another story by the same author,
amid the patriotic fervor of seeing President McKinley, the writer
mingles with (and charitably helps elevate to better viewing posi-
tions) farmers, African Americans, gray-haired mothers, and the
general “mass of humanity” without a second thought. And Rose
E. Strawn, a women’s club member and an associate editor at the
Populist Woman’s Weekly, wrote that “society girls” walk the “cos-
mopolitan” streets of the Merry Midway, “mingling with Mr. Lo
and Hans, and wish they could dwell there longer.”25 In a tirade
against the Republican city mayor, one moralizing nativist judge
included the accusation that at the exposition he had permitted
“boys and girls, married women and married men, [to dance]
like drunken satyrs down the avenues and along the lagoons; how
Turks and white women were drunk together.”26

116 wendy jean katz

The Exposition as Department Store
Conflicts over women’s symbolic and actual bodies inside the expo-
sition highlight the ways in which art at the exposition marked new
boundaries for women’s behavior and movement. Just before the
exposition opened, a Salvation Army lieutenant and ensign scaled a
fence and climbed the Arch of the States at the 20th Street entrance
to the exposition in order to hack off the arm and leg of a volup-
tuous kneeling nude statue “proclaiming from a trumpet the story
of the great west.” It had been designed by St. Louis sculptor Rob-
ert P. Bringhurst, who also received the contract for the heroically
sized sculptures of fame and other statuary groups on the Fine
Arts Building (fig. 30) and the Mines Building. The statues on the
Arch of the States, near the entry gate, served as a sort of adver-
tisement or barker “trumpeting” the exposition and invited view-
ers to the fair. Their position on the cornice of the Arch meant the
statues could be seen from the street and even from the Salvation
Army Building at 20th and Pinckney, not just by those inside the
exposition. The two crusaders who attacked it were trying to pro-
tect Omaha’s youth from its tempting presence. Dorothy Maurer
explained that “we go into the dives of cities to raise the sinner
out of the mire” and to rescue young souls from damnation, and
if not interrupted, “would have chopped every statue in pieces.”27
The publicity around the Salvation Army women’s actions cre-
ated interest in what was fairly uninspiring stock fair sculpture,
literal-minded in its equation of trumpets and fame, wings and
uplift.28 The newspapers published sketches of the sculpture (fig.
23) with its missing limbs, stressing its resemblance to the trun-
cated bodies of prestigious ancient sculptures. Quite a stir had
been made, for example, about obtaining a copy of the Louvre’s
ancient and headless sculpture, the Victory of Samothrace, for the
Art Building. The World-Herald commented that the Salvation
Army story reminded them of Carey J. Warbington, who in 1890
had destroyed a William Bouguereau painting. That earlier event
had occurred during a “foreign art exhibition” in Omaha, called
this to distinguish it from an exhibition of local artists, though
the sponsors for the two exhibitions overlapped. Warbington, an

the passing show 117

Fig. 23. “Vandalism,” Omaha World-Herald,
May 25, 1898, p. 8.
accountant, threw a chair through the Return of Spring, a glossy
nude, then “carelessly” walked away. He was convicted of insan-
ity, and he eventually committed suicide, but the picture toured
the United States with the rent in it left intact and the offending
chair accompanying it—a spectacle not of art but of the new social
conventions governing women. For Warbington’s objection to the
painting was less to the nude per se than that it was “out of place.”29
He acknowledged having seen such paintings in brothels, in the
course of his accounting duties, but put in the gallery, it endan-
gered respectable women. Both Warbington and the Salvation
Army officers justified their violence with the idea that the physi-
cal presence in civic spaces of even representations of the immoral
(rather than any actual behavior) threatened everyone in the vicin-
ity.30 By contrast, the Everleigh sisters’ private fancy brothel out-
side the exposition (somewhat removed from the “burnt district”
south of downtown) remained free from attack. Art at the expo-
sition was not just a test of Nebraskan provinciality; it marked a
space where some of the usual determinants of female respect-
ability might be suspended.
Actual as well as allegorical women ran this gauntlet of chang-
ing expectations for women’s public presence. On the testimony
of a Chinese laundryman from Lincoln, three women who had
been brought to work at the Chinese village in the exposition as
waitresses and “beauties” were removed by constables from their
lodging (at Thirteenth and Chicago), and by ruling of Judge Cun-
ningham R. Scott they were put into the custody of an Omaha
missionary to prevent them from being employed as prostitutes.
Judge Scott was known to rule on religious-moral rather than legal
grounds, and his decision was overruled by a federal judge. The
women had strenuously objected to lodging with missionary Miss
Wyckoff, in her “horrid” rooms on the third floor of a house at 2211
Douglas Street; they preferred to go to jail. They were permitted
to return to the village at the exposition.31 Whether the women
were involved in sexual trafficking (some 360 Chinese workers
were said to have disappeared from the exposition; the assumption
was that they were dodging immigration laws) was never really at
issue in the court, nor were any men arrested. The question was

the passing show 119

more whether the court had the right to detain the women based
on their environment rather than their actions. The environment
of the exposition, with its wide array of working women on public
display, eroded the distinctions that Scott and the Salvation Army
depended on to define respectability.
More terribly, at the very end of the exposition, James Melchert
killed a woman, Lillian Morris, and then himself in the studio of
the exposition’s official photographer. Both Melchert and Morris
were exposition employees. He sold souvenir photographs on the
grounds, and Morris sold perfumes at the Liberal Arts Building,
probably as an extension of her job as a saleswoman at the Boston
Store, a downtown department store with a big display of wom-
en’s fashions at the exposition. The newspapers claimed Melchert
was angry that Morris was escorted home from work by a roman-
tic rival who worked at Boyd’s Theater in the city, where Evans
had her studio.32 The newspapers’ interpretation of his behavior as
stemming from disapproval of her movements in public empha-
sizes how the exposition’s economic opportunities helped legiti-
mize and facilitate some women’s mobility.
The “department store wars” of the late 1890s reflect a simi-
lar tension over the expansion of public territory where women
could move without loss of respectability. Populist editors like
Mary Fairbrother and Willis Hudspeth, who supported working
women, attacked the local department stores for paying women
starvation wages of one to three dollars per month.33 But where
Fairbrother advocated for equal pay with male employees, Hud-
speth turned the economic argument into a moral one, claim-
ing that the fashionable and ornate stores actually degraded the
women who worked there. Salesladies were told to find men to
help defray the cost of the stylish clothes they were expected to
wear, in effect forcing working women into “immoral means of liv-
ing.” The Western Laborer countered that “we know these girls as
neighbors,” and even if the department store was what the Omaha
Penny Press and Hudspeth’s Labor Bulletin said it was, “it would
have no effect upon the girls we know.” This was because a good
woman will be good anywhere, and “her morals are as safe from
contamination in a department store” as in Bible class. The editors

120 wendy jean katz

then extended the argument, pointing out that Hudspeth, a for-
mer editor at their paper, had worked side by side with “lady com-
positors,” where he had heard lewd language and seen unseemly
conduct in their presence. So a department store was no more
dangerous an “environment” than a printing office, a book bind-
ery, the telephone service, typewriting, clerking, copying, or the
“thousand and one situations” where women work with men.34
The Western Laborer, though no admirer of the New Woman,
had extensive advertisements from the major department stores—
although they tried to avoid ones for non-union-made goods—
including Jonas L. Brandeis’s Boston Store at 16th and Douglas and
the Hayden Bros. Store at 16th and Dodge. Brandeis was one of
the directors of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition (as was Thomas
Kilpatrick, owner of a large department store at 11th and Harney),
and he joined storeowner William Hayden as a manager at the
Greater America Exposition of 1899, as well as serving with Kil-
patrick on the city parks commission. Estella Brandeis was a stu-
dent of Ethel Evans, and her designs for wallpaper were on display
in the Manufactures Building.35 The exposition, with its empha-
sis on the display of goods and its involvement of female labor, in
some senses was an open-air department store.
Women’s relative freedom at the exposition met with varying
types of resistance. Melchert was, of course, exceptional, though
one female editor pointed to him as an example of too-common
“gorilla young men,” suggesting a certain savagery in how other
men behaved as well. Less violent institutional resistance to wom-
en’s presence occurred in the office of superintendent of exhib-
its H. B. Hardt, whom the Bee accused of both lining his pockets
with bribes from exhibitors and making sexual comments (“inex-
cusable verbal assaults”) and using profanity toward “unmistak-
ably modest and respectable women” who came into his office
to conduct business.36 Even Evans’s paper ventures into the pub-
lic would be rebuked, but her reviews of “Art at the Exposition,”
published in one of Omaha’s major newspapers, nevertheless cre-
ated a space for a spectator whose movements have few physical
boundaries and who is given an active and legitimate role in the
city as viewer, consumer, and even producer. An advertisement for

the passing show 121

an art supplies store next to one of her columns featured a young
woman putting a male artist into a frame, suggesting the role of
aesthetics in giving women greater public agency.
In one Bee column Evans is an invisible eye, floating effort-
lessly from a vantage point that takes in a view of the sunset over
the Iowa hills and then captures the symmetry of the exposition’s
Renaissance-based architecture—designed by Kimball, the Paris-
trained architect for Wattles, Kountze, and other exposition direc-
tors’ mansions. Her commentaries overall do not frame art, artists,
or architecture at the exposition as in any direct way a represen-
tation of the city or its population, but as an exception to it. She
praises the colonnade linking the buildings of the exposition, which
screens out the messiness of the city beyond. Bringhurst’s sculp-
ture for the Arch of the States at the entrance, now repaired, is
admired for its appropriate illustrativeness. And when she reviews
the clubwomen’s flower parade (fig. 36), a spectacle of upper-class
fashion and femininity, she urges the women—safely in their car-
riages—to pelt spectators with their paper flowers.37 Rather than
being a static genteel display, she thinks that they should engage
the street.

The Aesthetic Gaze amid the Crowd

Though the exposition introduced the Indian Congress as a fea-
ture of American world fairs, Rosewater and his allies’ progres-
sivism did not extend many opportunities for public participation
at the exposition to Native Americans and even fewer to Native
women. The Bee had covered the Plains wars, including the 1890
massacre at Wounded Knee in neighboring South Dakota, which
occurred during Republican Benjamin Harrison’s presidency, in a
style of yellow journalism designed to incite fear.38 Rosewater and
his political connections were key to securing the Indian Congress
at the exposition, but like the Indian hunter motif on the souve-
nir medal (fig. 31), it was meant as a foil for a more evolved civi-
lization (embodied as a white woman), and so it kept Natives in
association with a primitive past, not the modern present. Evans
too relied on Native women spectators to highlight her own class-

122 wendy jean katz

based refinement in ways that were not available to her when char-
acterizing the taste of her Anglo-American peers.
One of the relatively rare Anglo-American acknowledgments
of contemporary Native women’s achievements came in Ella B.
Perrine’s regular column in the Bee on education. Education was
the special responsibility of the exposition’s Woman’s Board of
Managers, who organized all the educational congresses except
for the Indian Congress. Perrine, college-educated like Evans,
noted with admiration the speeches given by Harvard anthropol-
ogist Alice Fletcher and Omaha tribe member Francis La Flesche
at the Musical Congress. Perrine singled out for praise paintings
by Angel DeCora, a “full-blooded” Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) art-
ist and illustrator, which were part of Fletcher’s demonstration in
the Government Building of Indian schools’ success at teaching
Anglo-European styles of art. As Francis La Flesche’s sister, the
Populist journalist and artist Susette La Flesche Tibbles wrote,
such art—distinguished from either the Indigenous “relics” or
the life-sized mannikins of Native women and men making pots
or carvings next to Fletcher’s exhibit (fig. 51)—was a marker of
elite civilization.39 Perrine’s own attention to the Native display
came through its validation by professional women like Fletcher,
a former consultant to President Cleveland and a founder of the
Association for the Advancement of Women. As Perrine put it, if
Peabody Museum scholars like Fletcher cared about Native arts,
then perhaps there was good in them.40
Perrine’s column often appeared on the same page of the Bee as
Evans’s articles, but Evans accommodated Native women differ-
ently. According to one newspaper account, Indians “under proper
restrictions” were permitted to go into the city as well as to exhibi-
tions and amusements on the exposition grounds.41 Evans assigns
Indigenous people a place at the exposition through their relation-
ship to Anglo-American art, but unlike Perrine, she does not iden-
tify them as makers of art, music, or decorative crafts, even though
tribe members at the Congress sold handiwork, as Nancy Parezo
discusses in her essay in this volume. Evans began one column, for
example, with appreciation of the Minnesota State Building, a glo-

the passing show 123

rified log cabin with an attractive wide porch and an informal char-
acter that Evans said reminded visitors of their youth. Following
this evocation of a pioneer past (a past that actually excluded most
Omaha immigrants), she considered the cabin’s stained glass win-
dow, by Marion Graves, with its portrait of Yellow Boy, a Fort Peck,
Montana, Assiniboine. Evans notes that his brother was a captain
in the U.S. military, but nevertheless interprets Yellow Boy’s “awk-
ward majesty” as a symbol of his “race.” His stance, with a hand
shadowing his eyes (cf. fig. 45), looking into the future, expressed
trepidation over being crowded out of his country.
Evans jumped from this familiar masculine symbol of a vanish-
ing if noble (because cooperative) race, part of the pioneer past, to
an anecdote of a less noble if more contemporary female viewer.
She recounted seeing two “Indian squaws with papooses” touring
the art gallery. The term “squaw” was used by most popular writers
about the fair and in the titles of some of Rinehart’s photographs
(often when posed with a named Native man), and it associated
the women with servitude and so with the working class. Here it
serves as a foil for Evans’s cultural, class-based (not simply ethnic)
superiority. Nothing attracts the women until they come to John
Haberle’s Bachelor’s Drawer (1894), a trompe l’oeil painting with
a narrative that suggests the painting’s absent bachelor is marry-
ing and so changing his way of viewing the world. From a man
about town, who gazes at nude photographs, a medium that rein-
forces the low or inartistic connotations of a realist style, Haberle’s
painting proposed a transition to fatherhood’s new lenses. Evans
believed Haberle’s illusion of the physical presence of the objects
in the painting would inevitably appeal to the ‘“savage mind” and
untutored, unaesthetic eye.42
She had elsewhere condemned Haberle’s deceptive style, men-
tioning it in connection again with discussions of the female nude
and uneducated viewers—her own columns, of course, being a
form of tutelage, even including help on how to identify Greek and
Roman architectural orders. In a column surrounded by adver-
tisements for the painting Phyllis, the Artist’s Model, for example,
Evans declared that a nude Water Nymph by Emil Henry Wuertz
at the exposition displays a sympathy that is entirely lacking in

124 wendy jean katz

“greenbacks painted on a board,” a reference to Haberle’s style of
painting, as bills were a popular subject in American trompe l’oeil.43
Counterfeiting—and greenbacks, to hard money Republicans like
banker’s daughter Evans, were especially worthless—or imitation
in art, is not the goal of the artist or the viewer; sympathy with the
ideal is. Wuertz’s Nymph thus is a symbol of youthful abandon,
made more poignant by his own recent untimely death, attract-
ing the sympathetic viewer. Evans contrasted this to Haberle (and
implicitly to the artist of Phyllis), who instead understands art as
merely deceptive illusion, practiced with the commercial goal of
attracting audiences. The Indian women, she said, prefer this sort
of imitation in pictures as they do in beads and jewelry.
This sneer at their taste differs from how she handles the pre-
sumably equally uninformed but not always working-class view-
ers of the painting Trilby on the Midway. Trilby’s creator, Astley D.
M. Cooper, like Haberle, often worked in a trompe l’oeil style (fig.
26), and his version of George du Maurier’s famous heroine was
strongly illusionistic. As Emily Godbey’s chapter in this volume
details, Evans called this an “imitative ignoble style” in the same
category as Haberle, one that “kills” du Maurier’s fearless grisette,
who was to many Americans a symbol of the female Bohemian.
Evans recommended that viewers compare Trilby to a dainty lit-
tle nude—Isaac Henry Caliga’s After the Bath, in the Fine Arts
Building—to see where Cooper erred. Evans doesn’t character-
ize Trilby’s viewers explicitly, as she did with the Native women,
but she opens the column with the blindness of the “masses” and
their taste for the “deadly common place.” She explains that she
would not have bothered to review commercialized “calendar”
art (worse than colored photographs) in the Midway, except that
she “hears it [Trilby] spoken of as a masterpiece.”44 In a previous
month’s column on the club women’s flower parade (fig. 36), in
which forty carriages were decorated with paper flowers—Evans
thought the scene was a gorgeous picture belonging to the Amer-
ican school, though with French influence on its details—Evans
would have seen Trilby ads surrounding her column.45 But her
comment about hearing it spoken of might also refer to the notices
in the World-Herald.

the passing show 125

 An initial puff of Trilby in that paper celebrated its popularity
(one thousand visitors in the first three hours) and its endorse-
ments by “eastern” critics and press, and described an effect of
relief so wonderful that the nude woman appeared to project three
feet from the canvas. The pose was graceful and charming, and its
technique (drawing, modeling, et al.) wonderful.46 Though this is
almost certainly a press release, Rothery had earlier called the sim-
ilarly themed Phyllis, the Artist’s Model, a painting that would open
on the Midway opposite Trilby, the work of a master hand. Phyl-
lis had at the time of his writing been on exhibition at the Board
of Trade, located next to Omaha’s Commercial Club; Club pres-
ident James E. Baum had been one of the initiators of the expo-
sition. In this same column Rothery mentioned Nebraska artists
with art in the Nebraska State Building at the exposition, a list
that included Evans and Cora Parker, head of the Art Department
at the University in Lincoln. Both women had studied in Paris.47
Like Evans and Parker, Rothery was an art instructor, though pri-
vately, and he supported local artists in the Western Art Associ-
ation and the Art Workers Society. In his regular “Art Notes” for
the World-Herald, he covered female artists without overtly sexist
language. He called Evans’s work strong and sincere, for example.
Given that for upper-class women public display of their artistic
accomplishments might be understood as a performance of their
genteel status, rather than as an authentically creative or profes-
sional act, the term “sincere” may have a gendered albeit positive
connotation. But Rothery and Evans diverged on the question of
judgments on art. For Rothery, it was impossible to define good art,
whereas for Evans, one’s judgment was a test of one’s social place.
So when Rothery’s paper, the World-Herald, describes Indig-
enous spectators, it finds them visiting the Midway concession
the Old Plantation, where they compare their snake dance to the
Negro buck and wing dance.48 Though this does not locate them in
the milieu of high civilization in the Fine Arts Building, it (mock-
ingly) assigns them the evaluative gaze of anthropologists. The Old
Plantation concession had incorporated as a “before and after” dis-
play, meant to show progress from antebellum plantation to mod-
ern achievement. Perhaps inevitably, modern achievements, even

126 wendy jean katz

limited to the sphere of popular music and dance, were minimally
represented; Robert Rydell suggests that the concession imported
New South race relations.49 But the idea that at such a concession,
as at the fair’s exhibits generally, the viewer is intended to compare
“cultures” and forms of art is different than Evans’s assumption that
the savage mind is incapable of such action. In a painting by Astley
Cooper owned by William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a man in stereo-
typical Indian regalia gazes at a mounted bison head and artifacts
of Plains warfare artistically arranged on a wall. The Native viewer
in his delighted recognition of the objects authenticates the col-
lection of curios, but it is not him but the presumably white west-
ern viewer (the painting hung in a hotel in Cody, Wyoming) who
appreciates the nearly trompe l’oeil illusionism of Cooper’s style.50
As Evans in her reviews moved around the exposition and its
buildings (often giving specific coordinates to help readers follow
her physically), a central metaphor is the way in which artworks
constitute a crowd, an undifferentiated mass, at least at first. They
resemble an American mob, a crowd whose diversity is unappeal-
ing and uninviting, especially to those with refined (European)
sensibilities. The key, however, is to select congenial individuals
to befriend, and with a crowd of pictures, “our choice is not apt
to be above our station.” Those who raved over the boy with the
pinks by John George Brown (a specialist in humorous, glossy pic-
tures of working-class boys) won’t stop for the sinuous lines and
color harmony of aesthete John W. Alexander’s Woman in Yellow.51
Evans and her readers are free to plunge into the crowd, with the
security of knowing that a good picture is not apt to appeal to the
uninitiated; that even within the crowd and not just in the pro-
tected confines of the private home, social as well as aesthetic dif-
ference can and will still be recognized.
This permits her to embrace elements of American impression-
ism in a way that Rothery, who disliked “isms” and unfinished
painting (a jab at the sketchiness of impressionism), did not. He
was unimpressed by the superintendent of the Fine Arts build-
ing, Armand H. Griffith, having procured a set of impression-
ist paintings from dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in New York. Evans
defended impressionism. Those who have not seen nature look

the passing show 127

like that must wish that they could. Although Evans finds that the
impressionists force their mode of working on the viewer, break-
ing with realism, she still evaluated Mary Cassatt positively as an
artist who doesn’t care for “prettiness” but for tone and harmony.
She even politely dismissed two Anglo-American women in the
Fine Arts building. They don’t understand a painting by Alice D.
Engley, who had trained in Paris, of a man with a blue beard, or
rather, they don’t understand that color is affected by light and
atmosphere, and that painting is not a mirror.52 It is not a mirror
of its subject because it asserts the individuality of the artist, a tone
Evans also successfully asserted in her writing.
Evans achieved some influence through her commentary. An
editorial in a North Dakota paper commenting on Trilby, for exam-
ple, echoes her fairly directly, saying that despite some pronouncing
it a masterpiece, it was really a disappointment, with the anatomy
implausible and with the face the color of advertising pictures
aimed to please the masses.53 But Evans took some risks in send-
ing her public or professional persona, with its strongly marked
individuality, onto the Midway.54 The visible backlash against her
consisted of letters written by Trilby’s owner, L. Alonzo Lincoln,
to both the Bee and the World-Herald. In the Bee, though he ques-
tioned Evans’s knowledge of art, Lincoln civilly concluded that there
are several kinds of art, just as there are different breeds of horses,
and one should not criticize them all according to the same crite-
ria. But in the World-Herald, he referred to Evans as “an Omaha
critic” who is obscure, unknown, small-brained, frivolous, and sar-
castic, and who voices mere personal prejudices.55 Since frivolity
and sarcasm were the stock tools of the newspaper critic, perhaps
his comments connoted a gender critique; what was acceptable
for a male critic was not proper for a woman, whose nature was
supposed to be more earnest—though that would serve as a bar
to her competing in the newspaper world. But given Lincoln’s
financial stake in Trilby, one would have thought his condemna-
tion would be understood as motivated by self-interest and dis-
missed or ignored.
Yet his attack on Evans’s credentials roused defenders, including
Octave Thanet (Alice French), a best-selling syndicated columnist

128 wendy jean katz

and friend of Theodore Roosevelt, as well as Clement Chase, edi-
tor and publisher of the weekly Omaha Excelsior. Chase was a sta-
tioner involved in organizing (and profiting from) the exposition,
and his wife was a painter as well as in charge of entertainment
for the Woman’s Board of Managers. Chase knew Ethel as Ettie,
and to a degree he supported the New Woman, even publishing
a photograph of Mrs. Frank A. Rinehart, wife of the fair’s official
photographer, as a record-breaking lady cyclist. Chase also praised
Omaha illustrator Rose O’Neill for “living on perfect equality with
man” as she pursued her career. But Chase sometimes made fun
of women’s clubs, including a (female-authored) satire of the club
woman who bicycled, served on a school board, was a Daughter
of the American Revolution, and read Tolstoy and Ibsen.56
A letter to the editor in Chase’s Excelsior reproached Trilby’s
owner for complaining about Evans’s review. The letter explained
that Evans wrote in the spirit of a true artist, without thought of
how her views would be received by Philistines; she was fearlessly
rational, and as someone so recently returned from the French
schools (of art) she should be respected more than those trained
merely in Milwaukee and Chicago (the Poughkeepsie-born Roth-
ery had studied art in New York City).57 Chase’s own editorial
instead relied more heavily on the authority that Evans derived
from her social superiority (she was the daughter of a wealthy
banker, and her sisters had married well) in writing that the “bla-
tant upstarts, of the Jewish and other faiths, [who] were allowed”
to take charge of the fair, had caused the backlash against Evans’s
reviews. Rosewater “had to get on his little knees to a very refined
and highly cultivated young woman” to get her to write up the pic-
tures, as she had demurred based on her inexperience with news-
paper criticism. The series was nevertheless brightly written (not
frivolous) and refreshing, an “oasis amid camels and jackasses,”
a dig at the exposition’s pretensions. Only when the Bee’s busi-
ness office reminded the “little editor” that the nude young lady
(Trilby) was a profitable patron did the paper publish Lincoln’s
rebuttal to her, which Chase called a slap in Evans’s face, though
Rosewater “had to stand on tiptoe to do so.”58 Chase’s attack was
on the Bee, not Lincoln or the World-Herald, perhaps because the

the passing show 129

Bee had betrayed its own correspondent in airing Lincoln’s pro-
test. But Chase also took advantage of the uproar to attack Rose-
water personally; his previous rants had caused Rosewater in his
role as director of publicity to refuse him a press pass. The con-
troversy, though seemingly small, in any case may have been a
slap—a challenge to Evans’s honor and her public appearance of
chastity and respectability—as her columns in the Bee stopped.

Impressionism, Eclecticism, and the Control of New Art Institutions

The differences between the World-Herald and the Bee critics over
commercial art also reflected the disagreement among Omaha’s
elite on how or how much to popularize art. Evans and the wom-
en’s clubs wanted reproductions of masterpieces and training in
design in the schools and more displays of public art generally. The
women’s clubs tried to get the city and county to pay to make some
of the exposition statues permanent in a park. They proposed buy-
ing sculptor Edward Kemeys’s wild animal sculptures, which had
been popular at the Chicago World’s Fair, even though Kemeys
was not an academically trained sculptor. In parks, famous or sen-
sational art like his would attract popular support. They did not
particularly wish for an eclectic model for a museum, however. As
Evans said about the Horticultural Building, with its “flaunting”
mixed style of architecture, it appealed to people just as a med-
ley does in music, but neither the mixed style nor the medley is
good art or good music.59 This role in determining the purity and
boundaries of good (high) art at the exposition was part of what
gave professional women like Evans more freedom, although it
also responded to broader class fears that Omaha’s taste would
be dismissed as provincial. The stakes for these judgments of art
were higher because exposition managers, who included several
of the city’s art collectors, especially Kountze and J. N. H. Patrick,
anticipated that the Trans-Mississippi art collection would become
the nucleus of a city museum. Space for a gallery in the Kimball-
designed public library had already been secured, and instead of
awards or medals, the exposition offered purchase prizes for art
to help stock it.
The superintendent of the Fine Arts Building, Armand H. Grif-

130 wendy jean katz

fith, was selected by the exposition’s executive committee because
he had transformed the Detroit Museum of Art into a popular
attraction. Griffith had increased attendance by giving very well
attended free lectures on everything from manners to home deco-
ration and by bringing natural and man-made curiosities into the
collection.60 He was willing to exhibit crowd-pleasing pictures—
whether trompe l’oeil ones like Haberle’s, or giant sensational his-
torical paintings like Ferdinand Roybet’s massacre scene, Charles
the Bold at Nessle (1892), or Georges Rochegrosse’s The Fall of
Babylon, an 1891 scene of drunken revelry that ended up on the
Omaha Midway. His view of judging art superficially resembled
Evans’s, as he argued that pictures are like people: one must be
acquainted with them before one can decide on liking them or
not. But Griffith does not assert art’s power to sort out the social
order. For him, the best artist is the trickster, who can fool the
public with his illusions of nature, a point of view that presumes
artist and viewers all share the same concept of nature—there are
not special people with special sensibilities capable of seeing art
or nature differently.61 A publicity item like the one in the World-
Herald that described Cooper deceiving rural visitors into believing
Trilby was alive, while it assigned a remarkable degree of gullibil-
ity to the common (uneducated) man, is nevertheless a descrip-
tion that is meant to lure all viewers, whom it assumes share the
pleasure of recognizing artistic deception.62
Griffith had not been the first choice of Omaha’s artists, however.
The Western Art Association had been asked to identify a super-
intendent for this sensitive position of creator of the base for an
Omaha museum. The World-Herald said the Association wanted
a “New York artist of great repute” at considerable expense, while
Griffith agreed to serve without compensation.63 Presumably the
Western Art Association anticipated that a New York artist would
practice a policy of greater selectivity and less showmanship, and
they only reluctantly yielded to the exposition managers’ prefer-
ence. The pictures by American artists eventually purchased by the
exposition directors for a future Omaha museum, however, fol-
lowed the Western Art Association preferences. They were selected
by a committee of local artists that included Ethel Evans, J. Laurie

the passing show 131

Wallace, a Thomas Eakins student and an eminence grise on the
Omaha art scene, and J. O. Jorgensen, an instructor at the Western
Art Association’s academy. The trio picked Robert Reid’s impres-
sionist nude Opal (“will create considerable dissatisfaction”), Louis
Paul Dessar’s French peasants in Departure of the Fishermen (even
though in choosing it “we were guided by many things that the
public would not appreciate”), Charles H. Davis’s rustic houses
in Abandoned on the New England Coast (“which will not appeal
strongly to most persons”), The Cow Herd (Girl Herding Cows) by
Eanger I. Couse (a popular Taos colony artist, of whose picture
Wallace says it “can by no means be classed with the other paint-
ings”), and Moonshine and Mist by I. Edmund Whiteman (won’t
“greatly attract the general public”).64 Evans had given lengthy
favorable notice to Reid, Dessar, Davis, and Whiteman. By con-
trast, the official souvenir booklet for the exposition, designed to
sell to a broad public, concluded with a reproduction of Richard
Lorenz’s A Wordless Farewell, where a dog mourns his master’s
death on the prairie. Crowds had gathered around the picture,
moved by the story, but Evans utterly condemned its drawing,
atmosphere, and expression.65
To some extent, Rothery and the World-Herald may have fallen
into Griffith’s camp of greater eclecticism. Rothery in his “Art Notes”
column and exposition notices paid considerable attention to the
state-sponsored Nebraska Ceramic Club’s china painting in the
Liberal Arts Building, whose location outside the Fine Arts Build-
ing had been a bone of contention, and more generally, to the lace,
embroidery, and other decorations in the Nebraska State Building
and the Liberal Arts Building. Evans, however, restricted her com-
mentary to paintings, sculpture, and architecture, only excepting
public decorative projects like Graves’s stained glass. As a woman
trying to succeed in the professional practice of oil painting, she
kept her physical and aesthetic distance from art associated with
the domestic sphere.66 Mellona Butterfield, a ceramics artist with
a well-known studio downtown, had been appointed superin-
tendent of decoration and later, without more pay, hostess of the
Nebraska State Building, in part thanks to Populist patronage, but
Evans barely mentioned her. The State Building (designed by Lin-

132 wendy jean katz

coln architect James H. Craddock, a Catholic with Populist/Dem-
ocratic ties), she said, wasted its beautiful situation on the river
bluffs, though it was not as hideous as the Pottawattamie wigwam
(fig. 48), a five-story yellow wigwam built by Iowans in the sort of
architectural symbolism or signage typical of fair midways. Evans
briefly added that the Nebraska building’s interior was a travesty
as well as inartistic.67
Butterfield, who had exhibited in the Woman’s Building at the
Chicago fair and studied art in New York, Detroit, and Chicago,
had won the job of superintendent despite stiff competition from
art collector and Western Art Association member Charles F. Cat-
lin, whose wife, Josephine, had studied at New York’s Art League
before helping to organize the first (1877) art exhibition in Omaha
at Trinity Cathedral. Catlin had declared that he would prevent the
Nebraska Building from becoming an aesthetic chamber of hor-
rors as at the state fair, which had been endorsed by the Nebraska
Ceramics Club, and had Populist allies. Possibly being Catholic
worked against his appointment. He would eventually take charge
of the exhibition of Phyllis, the Artist’s Model, on the Midway.68
Butterfield, “an artist whose judgment was reliable,” had to jug-
gle requests for space and decoration in the State Building from
women’s groups including the Women’s Christian Temperance
Union, the state women’s clubs, the Woman’s Suffrage Association
(a desk between the door of the Ladies Waiting Room and near a
room under the stairway), the women’s arm of the Grand Army
of the Republic (the powerful Republican party organization had
initially intended to have a separate building), the Philanthropic
Educational Organization, and the Daughters of the American
Revolution as well as Chautauqua and all the men’s fraternal orga-
nizations. Her most serious conflict in assigning space was with
the Nebraska State Historical Society, whose director wanted relics
in glass cases in the spot where she had located ten paintings by
the University of Nebraska’s art department chair, Cora Parker.69
Butterfield won.
Unlike Evans, Rothery in the World-Herald (that ally of popu-
lism, paper money, and William Jennings Bryan) praised Butter-
field’s harmonious color choices for the building and approved

the passing show 133

of the Nebraska artists with pictures in the state building, artists
who included Evans.70 The fear expressed in Republican papers
about the Nebraska State Building was that, like Catlin’s cham-
ber of horrors at the state fair, it would become “a refuge for art
not good enough” to be included in the Fine Arts building. This
was much the same fear expressed about art or objects shown in
a Woman’s Building, which by erasing class distinctions in favor
of gender unity risked being “an aggregation of freaks under one
canvas.”71 This was exacerbated by the way in which “in matters
of art, the West is very, very young—we open ourselves to satire”
unless “great strictness” is used “to repress the efforts of many who
are unacquainted with what is right and beautiful in art.” Noth-
ing must be allowed that won’t pass the “lorgnon of experience”
wielded by those “who know.”72 Those who know included both
male and female art critics, often with literary credentials, who,
if they hailed from the region, had left it, as for example Octave
Thanet (Alice French, Iowa), Willa Cather (Nebraska, but then
living in Pittsburgh), impressionist supporter Hamlin Garland
(Iowa, then in Chicago), Isabel McDougall (Chicago Post), and
Ethel Evans (Iowa and France).
For most of these writers, admiration for female peasants like
those in the pictures by Dessar and Couse bought for the Omaha
library became a touchstone for their connoisseurship. Cather,
in her column The Passing Show for the Lincoln woman’s weekly
Courier, for example, focuses on Bouguereau. The only painting
by him she thinks “sincere” is a little peasant girl, a child of the
soil, very near to the earth, with nothing of the “flashing, unnat-
ural perfection” or “gleaming skin, that virginal sex-less flesh that
has made him famous and hateful.” His style is usually aimed too
low—at bars, gambling halls, and Americans—and accordingly he
mass-produces it in a studio “with its miles and miles of gleaming
canvases, its hundreds of white limbs and perfect curves.”73 Sarah
B. Harris, the Courier’s feminist editor, similarly praised the Trans-
Mississippi art collection under Griffith for including French and
Dutch peasants by Jules Breton and Josef Israel, and she extended
Cather’s critique of the polished academic and commercialized
nude to a campaign to ban the signs and posters in the city streets

134 wendy jean katz

that feature women who take up cigar box poses, with “hypocrit-
ical” expressions.74 The Courier was “railroad Republican” and, if
not overtly hostile to Rosewater and the Indian Congress, was not
particularly supportive of the Omaha exposition either. In a slam
at the exposition’s retail backers, store owners like Brandeis and
Kilpatrick, a correspondent wrote that “the word ‘cheap’ is writ-
ten all over Omaha at the present time in great big red letters.”75
The peasant helped distinguish aesthetic women from their more
eclectic, popularly minded peers.
Evans, like Cather, gave Bouguereau credit for his drawing, but
not much more than that: his nude in the art gallery is “hideous”
with a “dislocated shoulder and maimed hand in a garden of flow-
ers,” yet is hung on the line when one by Neuhaus (Johannes Albert
Neuhuys), a Dutch painter of the lowly, was far better.76 Peasant
painters like Dessar (an American) or Julian Dupre display “nat-
ural sympathy” with simplicity and piety, straightforwardly show-
ing “the quiet, peaceful life of the country woman.” Evans seems
to have been a “peasant” painter, working in a subdued palette,
though like many of her American peers who studied in Paris,
she adopted impressionism for her landscapes (fig. 24). Elia Peat-
tie, in her women’s column for the World-Herald, offered muted
praise for her style of the 1890s, saying Evans’s atmospheric coun-
try scenes are “more or less poetic,” depicting “pleasing things,”
and so people are grateful for their cheerful sentiment. In 1898
Rothery said her oil studies of peasant girls show understanding
of outdoor painting, suggesting her movement toward impression-
ism. A later story said she achieved success as a painter of “fish-
ing boats and harbors,” a description that indicates that whether
in the more subdued tonalist style (associated with the aesthetic
movement) or in a brighter, more realist impressionist mode (nei-
ther style was illusionist because of their rhetoric of the artist’s fil-
tering sensibility), she avoided gritty motifs.77
When the Americanized version of the peasant appears as a
critic of art at the exposition in a series of stories in Populist Mary
Fairbrother’s Woman’s Weekly, the aesthetic movement’s lack of
truthfulness seems instead to be highlighted. “Granny’s Written
Opinion” of the exposition has a title that emphasizes that the

the passing show 135

Fig. 24. Ethel Evans, The Lesson (La Leçon), oil on canvas, n.d., Joslyn Art
Museum, Omaha. bequest of Fannie O. Greene, 1935. Artwork in the public
domain, scan courtesy of the Joslyn.
common folk are tied to oral traditions, and her letters from the
country to a granddaughter living in Omaha are composed in
what is meant to be a humorous dialect equivalent to her speech,
distancing the urban reader and the actual author from her opin-
ions. Granny fears that the “fairy wonderland” she has heard about
is really a conglomeration of Omaha’s burnt (red light) district,
North 16th Street (rough), and the Midway, but she will come
because she doesn’t want the “injuns to think she’d never traveled
any.” Elsie Reasoner’s promotional material for the exposition had
explained that its purpose was to show that the West with its buf-
falo and Indians was part of the past—but they are still imagined
as neighbors for rural Granny, tying her to the past.78 She next
writes from Omaha to her husband, not as a bodiless eye but as a
rather material person, who pays five dollars for a room and suf-
fers in the packed streetcars, though in a nod to this character’s
Populist politics, she acknowledges that they get you to the fair
“before you can say [land reformer] Henry George.” The empha-
sis on rubbing shoulders with the crowd is typical of a more dem-
ocratic style of journalism than Evans; Elia Peattie too described
riding the streetcar in her column, A Word with the Women, in
the World-Herald. Peattie also wrote for the Woman’s Weekly, urg-
ing club women to become active in municipal housekeeping, and
she ran for the school board. By contrast, when Evans speaks of the
streetcar, it is to recommend that the reader exit it early in order
to enter the exposition at the Arch of the States, which to her is a
symbol of elite, restricted entry.79
Granny approved of all the Nebraska-sponsored displays, the sod
house, which was run by a woman, the pictures made of corncobs
and cornhusks, also made by a woman, and Miss Butterfield at the
State Building. Had plans gone forward to re-create William Jen-
nings Bryan’s first homestead or to erect statues of French realist
painter Francois Millet’s agricultural laborers Digger and Sower at
its entrance, presumably she would have approved of those, too.80
But she warns that in the gentlemen’s parlor of the Nebraska Build-
ing is a picture that no “little gal, or young woman with a bo” could
look at, and no man she knows could like, as it is a “poor, wishy
washy lifeless naked creature overcome with shame.” Losing a lit-

the passing show 137

tle of her dialect, she says the Society for the Prevention for Cru-
elty to Animals ought “not let this slaughter of innocents go on”
in the name of art, and asks why in this heat do we need clothes if
the form divine is so pure and refining? The painting referred to
may have been by a Nebraska woman, perhaps necessitating the
Weekly writer’s anonymity.
Admiration for the simple, homely country people given aesthet-
icized treatment—turned into objects admired for their design—in
pictures of Holland and France is thus contested by the “reality” of
the Nebraska folk, the provincial, prudish Populist peasants, who
cannot be represented seriously or artistically, but who may none-
theless ventriloquize some elite women’s concerns. The author’s
use of dialect for Granny was typical of local colorists, who at
the time were debating just this question of how much realism,
or rather how much social criticism, was compatible with art.
Octave Thanet, a vigorous supporter of the Omaha exposition,
had famously engaged Hamlin Garland (an advocate of impres-
sionism in its more extreme form, where it engaged with the urban
not the rural marginalized) on this question at the Chicago fair.
Thanet argued, as she had before, that “art only soils her white feet
when she prowls into the vile byways of the human heart.” Gar-
land rebutted her position that truthful depictions of labor, ones
that included dirt, toil, and loneliness, were not permissible in art,
by emphasizing that what was picturesque or poetic to her as an
observer looking “across the barbed-wire fence” was something
a good bit grimmer to those like him who had actually labored,
and art should represent his experience, too.81 Thanet, like Evans,
believed in a style that poetically distanced its subjects from harsh
environments; Garland understood that commitment to such a
style excluded him and other working-class voices.
Thanet was a best-selling novelist of midwestern and southern
life with a column for the McClure syndicate published in the coun-
try’s sixty largest newspapers. She was against woman’s suffrage
and labor unions, and she thought the Populists were socialists,
but saw herself as a member of a progressive American aristoc-
racy: she was a member of the Colonial Dames, the Daughters of
the American Revolution, the Society of the Mayflower, and the

138 wendy jean katz

Descendants of Colonial Governors. She wrote about the Omaha
exposition in Cosmopolitan and endorsed Evans’s “picturesque”
essays, which can be understood by any “honest farmer, any clerk
or typewriter,” and so will lead the plain people toward the aes-
thetic ideal.82 Thanet was in some ways more of a realist than Evans.
She was known for writing about labor conflicts, albeit from the
side of capital, and so she started her column about the exposi-
tion not on the bluffs of the river but in the powerhouse that fur-
nished electricity. In the Minnesota log cabin, she is interested
not in the stained glass window but in the gas cylinders that light
it. For most of the women involved in the exposition, Thanet’s or
Evans’s shared stance that art must depict the poor and ordinary,
but preserve an aesthetic, aristocratic distance in doing so—tied
to the tradition of the ideal nude—was part of elite women’s claim
to enter public space.
For Populists or other radicals, though, this compromise on an
idealizing or academic realism and impressionism was not suffi-
ciently critical of the status quo. Hamlin Garland was invited to
speak at the Art Congress, and rather than offer the standard praise
of art’s ability to lead man toward more spiritual preoccupations, his
speech asserted the value of materialism: matter has not degraded
the man, he said; material life (including labor) is not in itself cor-
rupting or belittling.83 But his defense of artistic naturalism did not
have much impact. The congresses themselves had limited appeal
and attendance, or as Populist editor Mary Fairbrother predicted,
“a large element of women” in the Trans-Mississippi country were
only casually interested in matters “seen from the narrow and
cultured point of view of the woman’s club.” Fairbrother’s Wom-
an’s Weekly specifically covered women’s clubs, and she herself
was active in them, but she disapproved of the plan in 1898—put
forth by the Omaha Women’s Club, not by the exposition manag-
ers—of confining the women’s department to education instead
of a woman’s building that might have held “far reaching ideas of
interest to every woman.” The education bureau had been decided
on at a mass meeting called by John Wakefield, secretary to the
exposition board of managers. Newspaper reporters, three hun-
dred school teachers, and altogether a thousand women from all

the passing show 139

walks and conditions of life responded to the call, but Fairbrother
says that no effort was made to seek their opinion, only that of the
members of the Woman’s Club, which included the wives and rel-
atives of most of the exposition managers.84
Women had a separate exhibition space in 1893 in Chicago, in
1895 at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta,
and at the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition. But in Omaha,
the women’s clubs decided against it. Mrs. Frances Ford explained
that “a woman’s building filled with her handiwork seems to some
of us like the page which newspapers so kindly furnish and dedicate
to us—a place no woman cares to look into.”85 Similarly there was
no building dedicated to African Americans as there had been at
the two southern fairs. As the Democratic Afro American Sentinel
put it, there was quite enough of the color line in Omaha without
erecting such a building.86 And the women’s committee—mostly
upper-class native-born club women, including the mother of the
fair’s chief architect, Thomas R. Kimball, as well as Ethel Evans’s
sister, who herself was a former president of the Farmers and Trad-
ers Bank, several school teachers, and one Catholic—seemed to
have similarly preferred assimilation to separation as the more
Progressive choice. Instead, their Woman’s Board (on which the
African American Women’s Club unsuccessfully tried to secure
a single member, a public school teacher) took responsibility for
the Girls’ and Boys’ Building, including publishing a paper called
the Hatchet, after George Washington’s misdeed, as well as for all
educational displays, including the congresses, and decorative art
(ceramic, lace, straw, basket work, etc.) exhibitions.87
The organizers of the Art Congress, which brought in two women
as lecturers, included Paul Charlton, a lawyer and the president
of the Western Art Association, as well as Griffith, the superin-
tendent of the fine arts exhibition, Mrs. (Jennie) W. W. Keysor,
a member of the Western Art Association and in charge of the
art department for the Omaha Women’s Clubs, and Ethel Evans.
By the end of the exposition, Evans was treasurer of the new Art
Workers’ Society of Omaha, which would only admit people with
a “high feeling of what art is,” professional artists in particular.88
Organized by artists (workers), unlike the Western Art Associa-

140 wendy jean katz

tion, women in it gained an official role, so for professionals like
Evans, the strategy of drawing professional and cultural but not
gender boundaries at the exposition seemed successful.

Women, Populism, and Art at Greater America in 1899

Fairbrother got a quasi-Woman’s Building the next year at the
much-maligned successor to the Trans-Mississippi, the Greater
America Exposition. Rosewater was at first involved in the plans,
supported by most of Omaha’s downtown merchants, to capital-
ize on the existing infrastructure and host a second exposition
on the same site. The scope of the exposition was explicit: to pen-
etrate the secrets of America’s “new empire” and to bring these
territories “figuratively within the vision” of visitors, by a display
of customs and manners as well as flora and minerals. But with
George L. Miller, the former editor of the Democratic Herald at
the exposition’s helm, Rosewater perhaps envisioned the World-
Herald replacing the Bee as beneficiary of exposition publicity, and
he bowed out. Without his or other significant lobbying in Wash-
ington, the federal government did not sponsor an exhibition. And
unlike the Indian Congress, the villages from the United States’
new colonies and territories in Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, and the Phil-
ippines had mixed success, as discussed in Stacy Kamehiro and
Danielle Crawford’s essay in this volume. Given that most of the
Democratic and Populist papers and politicians had been highly
critical of annexation and what they saw as McKinley’s imperial-
ism (Mary Fairbrother was on the committee of Omaha’s Anti-
Imperialist League), and their limited influence with the military
and colonial governments, displays and people were slow to arrive
and small in number.
Although Rosewater’s Bee was generally supportive, the whole
affair of “the Greater America Imposition” was too democratic in
tone for the railroad Republicans. As a “moral factor” it was a total
failure, “tough beyond expression,” and unfit for anyone to patron-
ize.89 The Populist Western Laborer, though staunchly opposed to
imperialism as betraying national ideals, was nevertheless even
more enthusiastic about the Greater America Exposition than they
had been about the Trans-Mississippi, for which they had pointed

the passing show 141

out (in big headlines) that the fair meant “‘Spring Chicken Fried
Potatoes and Blackberries’ for Us All.” They may have hoped that
the more that was known about the colonies, the less likely they
were to be pursued; the Philippines, they argued, was no place
for (presumably white) laboring men. Other than distiller Peter
E. Iler, who had tried to coerce his workers to vote for McKinley,
the Greater America managers sympathized with labor, most of
them paying union scale, and the goods on exhibit were union-
made. The Populist paper accordingly ran regular press releases
for the exposition, which it had not done in 1898, though the edi-
tor had at that time mentioned that Trilby was “one of the finest
paintings we ever saw.”90
Perhaps not surprisingly, this “coarser” fair, where inebriated
revelers flung wisps of grain stolen from the Agriculture Building
and the Philippine village rather than paper flowers from the car-
riages of Omaha’s upper 400, followed a different model for women
and for art. Another mass meeting, attended by only about two
hundred women, was held to determine what woman’s role would
be, this time with Fairbrother presiding. They secured a gallery of
the Manufacturers’ Building to be a “Greater American Home.”
Fairbrother’s argument was that most women work at home at
things that aren’t given a monetary value, especially when done
for their families. What Gurdon Wattles, president of the Trans-
Mississippi Exposition, had called the “bed quilt” element would
be honored as craftspeople and their labor given economic value
in a woman’s gallery.
Fairbrother hoped that the space would be an actual living and
working space, a model home made up of about twelve “living
rooms” with pictures on the walls, needlework, pressed flowers,
and an “art gallery for the home” with photographs, statuary, and
ceramics from the Nebraska Club. She stressed “live” exhibits, with
women demonstrating watercolor painting, lace making, china
painting, embroidering, portrait painting, hair styling, and dress
fitting, as well as a teacher in a playroom. A reception room with
hostesses supplied by the Women’s Club would create an atmo-
sphere of “rest and real home feeling” for visitors, and there was
a lunch room. At the previous year’s Girls’ and Boys’ Building,

142 wendy jean katz

according to a “school girl” in the Bee, the best part of the build-
ing was the “Home restaurant.” There was also a printing shop,
staffed entirely by women, as Fairbrother had won the contract to
produce the daily program for the exposition. And as Fairbrother
was a local representative of the Women’s Christian Temperance
Union, the “famous” painting of temperance leader Miss Frances
Willard and Her Political Peers, owned by Mrs. Henrietta Briggs-
Wall of Kansas, occupied an important place. It contrasted Amer-
ican women’s lack of suffrage to men who did have it, including
Native Americans (a man in full regalia), convicts, the disabled,
and the mentally ill; other women contributed artworks, too.91
It had briefly been speculated that Griffith in 1898 would secure
African American expatriate painter Henry Ossawa Tanner’s
renowned Raising of Lazarus (1896) for the Art Building, a hope
furthered by a visit to Omaha by his father, Bishop Tanner of the
African Methodist Church, but nothing came of it. African Amer-
ican men (if not women, who had to petition for employment)
were hired at the 1898 exposition, though they met discrimina-
tion there as they did in the larger city and in the Bee’s coverage
of urban affairs.92 But in 1899 their presence seemed further lim-
ited to the expanded Old Plantation concession on the Midway,
run by “progressive” showman Emmett C. McConnell with local
investors. Despite Mary Fairbrother’s role in organizing the Wom-
an’s Building, with its more inclusive aims, and her rejection of
discrimination—she covered the Negro Women’s Clubs in her
paper—there is no evidence of participation by African Ameri-
can and Indigenous women.93
The art department was also restructured. John Ross Key, grand-
son of anthem-writer Francis Scott Key and a former Confeder-
ate soldier, was named superintendent; he also sketched the 1899
exposition’s posters. Key in 1898 had a whole gallery in the Illinois
State Building showing his paintings of the 1893 Chicago world’s
fair, and Rosewater hired him to do similar views (fig. 9) of the
Trans-Mississippi Exposition for publicity purposes, including as
a gift to President McKinley. Done in an academic style that pre-
served architectural detail but with a bright palette influenced by
impressionism, they sold well as Prang chromo-lithographs.94 The

the passing show 143

leftover prints, like Rinehart’s 1898 photographs (amateur photog-
raphers were allowed into Greater America for just a quarter—the
fee had been a dollar in 1898, with half going to Rinehart), were
repurposed as souvenir images of the Greater America Exposi-
tion. Key also had connections to Omaha’s social circles: he would
marry exposition publicist Ellenore Dutcher, who continued at
Greater America to be in charge of the Press Building.
As the World-Herald told “Art Lovers,” the twelve rooms in the
Fine Arts Building at Greater America would feature tapestry, rugs,
furniture, and bric-a-brac as well as nine hundred oil paintings,
watercolors, and sculpture. Key announced two crowd-pleasing sets
of paintings as the main attractions, one by Russian artist Vasily
Verestchagin, of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and the other by
French painter James Tissot, of the life of Christ. A Denver collec-
tor named Ernesti was supposed to contribute “Indian pictures,”
and the Chicago Art Institute was said to be sending a group col-
lected by Sara Hallowell, a friend of Mary Cassatt and supporter
of the impressionists. The “Elegantiarum Collection of Antique
Art,” which included Baccarat crystal, Limoges porcelain, furni-
ture, articles de virtu, and other “rare pieces,” was also advertised.95
There was of course a selection of contemporary American artists
akin to those shown the year before, including Key’s own views
of the Chicago fair.
The newspapers also endorsed the Artists’ Studio, which ini-
tially had been thought of as a live exhibit for the Fine Arts Build-
ing. It ended up on 1899’s West Midway, where it picked up on the
interest in the nude artist’s model and the cosmopolitan space of
the artist’s studio that was demonstrated in Trilbymania and the
Trilby painting in the 1898 Midway. The Artists’ Studio featured
two male Chicago artists painting four “beautiful” female and one
“strong man” models in an artistic atmosphere that included Per-
sian armor. It was presented as moral and instructive and attractive
to Omaha’s art students—and less risqué than a briefly considered
Paris studio.96 Artists’ studios, both men’s and women’s, were fre-
quently described in newspapers; Ellenore Dutcher surveyed those
of Omaha in 1897, including clusters of women in the Paxton Block
and the Woman’s Exchange at 17th and Douglas and the New York

144 wendy jean katz

Life Building. Such descriptions established a realm for the profes-
sional woman, semipublic (one sold works out of one’s studio) but
with domestic touches. Mellona Butterfield’s was strongly decora-
tive: a “nest of roses, butterflies and exquisite things.” Cora Park-
er’s was more Bohemian, with a fishnet, teapots, trinkets, and a
divan full of pillows. In a photograph of Rothery student Marta-
nie Snowden’s Omaha studio, the space is dominated by a taxi-
dermied deer’s head, which corresponds to her still life paintings
of game, though it is balanced by a prominent graceful classicized
female sculpture and other decorative notes connoting a more flo-
ral upper-class femininity.97
The commercial and so more theatricalized Artists’ Studio on
the Midway, with its armor, was most likely less domestic and
more opulent than these Omaha studios. Displaying “native Amer-
ican womanly types” as models, it was supposed to reproduce a
famous (male) New York artist’s studio, perhaps William Merritt
Chase’s. In place of Trilby, in the former Trilby Temple, was Tojet-
ti’s First Grief (The Death of Abel), and the Midway nude was Una,
by Dubufe, the latter from a family of French painters who since
the 1830s had been sending titillating scenes for paying exhibition
to the United States. Small framed reproductions of Una were sold
as souvenirs, but without much controversy; Una was associated
with religion and truth, not artists’ models.98 A painting of Trilby,
standing mesmerized by Svengali before an audience, was also
exhibited, but not in the Midway and without comment or con-
troversy: the academically trained and often chromo-lithographed
Constant Meyer’s c. 1895 Trilby hung in the Fine Arts Building.99
Key shared the Fine Arts Building with Nettie Collins, the daugh-
ter of a local art collector and fiancée of a local banker, who had
responsibility for an “Art Loan” section, to include the best local
pictures, curios, and artistic articles.100 The aim was to give the
building appropriate atmosphere and to educate people on inte-
rior decoration, a profession Key had practiced in Chicago. In 1898,
George Lininger’s collection of old masters, contemporary Euro-
pean and American and local artists (and ceramics) had been the
subject of a photo series in the pages of the Excelsior, documented
as they hung in the rooms of his house. Mellona Butterfield, who

the passing show 145

was related to the Excelsior editor, had in the 1898 Nebraska State
Building’s interior decoration similarly combined art, curtains,
furniture, and table top décor. Key and Collins’ efforts to create
an enriched domestic atmosphere in the Fine Arts Building, like
Fairbrother in the rooms of the Women’s Department, moved in
this direction, and their spaces would have had a certain conti-
nuity with women artists’ studios.
Key’s exhibition was overall more illustrative and less adven-
turous than 1898: no Mary Cassatt, although American favor-
ites from the previous year like Reid, Meakin, and Ochtman had
multiple pictures. Not much criticism was aimed at Verestchagin’s
paintings beyond the usual public relations puffs. An academic
realist, he was celebrated for his powerful antiwar message—he
was compared to Leo Tolstoy—and so perhaps in the wake of the
Spanish-American War his work sent a less than welcome mes-
sage to Greater America visitors. He completed a series on the
American invasion of the Philippines by 1901 that one American
critic said “would be too painful to describe.”101 Tissot was a soci-
ety painter, with ties to American leaders of the aesthetic move-
ment, John Singer Sargent and James A. McNeill Whistler. After
a vision, Tissot had produced 350 small watercolors of the life of
Christ, and viewers may have had trouble reconciling his highly
detailed style with the ostensible spiritual message; he was the
subject of cartoons.102
Ellenore Dutcher wrote four or five unsigned reviews of the art
collection for the Bee, but unlike Evans’s efforts to articulate aes-
thetic values, she mostly commented on individual pictures by
contemporary Americans. Like the World-Herald—Rothery still
wrote on art for them—she preferred academic realism and Bar-
bizon School–derived landscapes, and without explicit judgment
she noted paintings that appealed to audiences because of their
sentiment or narrative, like western artist Frederic Remington’s
Missing or Richard Lorenz’s Critical Moment, the latter illustrated
in the Greater America Fine Arts catalog.103 Both papers and Fair-
brother’s weekly singled out Amanda Brewster Sewell’s large dec-
orative Pastoral (also illustrated in the catalog) for praise. Sewell
had contributed murals to the Woman’s Building at the Chicago

146 wendy jean katz

exposition on a pastoral theme.104 Like the more polyglot exhibi-
tion itself, the reviewers avoided the assumption that a single stan-
dard of taste might be applied to all the artworks.
A hint of displeasure from Evans (who had moved her studio
to the Bee Building) or from her circle over the selection of art for
the 1899 Fine Arts Building may be visible in a dispute over hang-
ing the pictures. In a letter to the editor of the World-Herald, the
members of the Art Workers’ Society, where she was an officer,
complained that four paintings by local artists had been accepted
but consigned to a spot near the floor. One of them, a view of
Douglas County (Omaha’s county) by Richard Gilder, who spe-
cialized in rural Nebraska landscapes, had been pronounced by
local artists as first class, with good tone, excellent atmospheric
effects, and modern methods; so the writer asks “Why this dis-
crimination?”105 Accepting local artists like Gilder to the exposi-
tion was not itself an innovation. In the 1898 Fine Arts Building,
Mellona Butterfield had two porcelain panels, Katherine Willis, a
student of Wallace, a midwestern landscape, Francis Mumaugh (a
student of New York artist William M. Chase, she had exhibited
at the 1893 World’s Fair and like Rothery had a still life in George
Lininger’s collection) one painting, and Ethel Evans four pictures set
in picturesque (cathedrals, streets, cottages) rural parts of France.
From Lincoln, Cora Parker and Alice Righter (who had studied
in France) had portraits, and N. S. Holm, then studying in Chi-
cago, had some sketches.106 All the artists in 1898, then, had aca-
demic training and credentials.
In 1899 Rothery had two paintings, Wallace two portraits, and
Gilder his one, but the other six local artists were women. The inclu-
sion of decorated china in the Fine Arts Building (albeit confined
to a corridor, near Gilder’s painting) further reversed the usual
gender ratios, much as had happened in the 1898 Nebraska State
Building. Only three men contributed to the more than two hun-
dred ceramic artworks; Butterfield had twelve pieces. Five other
local women contributed fourteen decorated china works.107 These
differences between the two art exhibitions, one stressing contem-
porary European masters and selected American artists who had
trained in European styles, the other more eclectic in media and

the passing show 147

makers, rehearsed the fissure in Omaha’s art society between those
who wished to advance “art” in Omaha and those who wished to
advance the interests of local artists. The Art Workers’ Society
complaint about Gilder reflects their concern about Key eroding
the professional standards for judging art.
The low attendance at the Greater America Exposition, and its
resulting lack of profits for investors and exhibitors, suggests the
strained effort among Omaha’s elite to fuse populism and imperi-
alism. Rosewater Republicans had been willing to join forces with
the Populists and the Democrats to run the city and enact reform.
The 1898 exposition, with its substantial support from railroads
and bankers, displayed the success of their alliance. Rosewater
had supported Populist governor Silas Holcomb, and Holcomb
was scrupulous about dividing the political spoils, including expo-
sition appointments, among the three parties. But the Spanish-
American War, which ended at almost the exact time as plans for
Greater America were being debated, broke up the consensus.
Where some saw militarism and expansion tied to corporate greed,
the core of the Populist Party, native pro-temperance Protestants,
supported the war and shifted back to the Republicans. Rosewater
shifted back with them. Or as the Excelsior acknowledged, “The
Man with the Hoe” has had his day; now everyone is looking for
“The Man with the Dough.” The Republican Party’s continuing
factions—the patrician Fontenelle Club battled Rosewater’s Equal
Rights League—permitted Democrats to take control of the city
and its political machine, though not the state.108 Greater Amer-
ica, abandoned by the Republicans and straining to align Demo-
cratic and Populist views with Anglo-American imperialism, lost
the backing of Progressive artists and reformers.

Conclusion
But the passing show of 1898 and the taste for spectacle among
merchants as well as the masses influenced Omaha’s art. In 1901
George Lininger, the owner of the most significant art collection
in Omaha and a key supporter of the local art scene, as well as an
ally of Rosewater and Fairbrother against old guard Republicans
like Judge William Keysor, husband of Jennie Keysor, a teacher

148 wendy jean katz

and head of the Art Department for the Women’s Clubs, purchased
William Bouguereau’s Return of Spring. The catalog for Lininger’s
collection opened with Lincoln poet (and regular contributor to
Fairbrother’s Woman’s Weekly) Isabel Richey’s comparison of the
Lininger gallery’s atmosphere to a hashish dream, filled with houris
and color, with Mrs. Lininger a magician at its heart.109 Likely no
one who visited the gallery when it was open to the public twice
a week would have identified Mrs. Lininger with Bouguereau’s
nymph of spring—Laurie Wallace had soberly realist portraits
of both Liningers in the gallery—yet the seductive and arousing
atmosphere of art and fantasy, the private made public show, had
been brought under feminine auspices. As historian David Sco-
bey said of a Bouguereau nude displayed on Broadway in New
York City, it propelled “the redefinition of respectability, public-
ity, womanhood and sex in Gilded Age public culture.”110 Even-
tually Lininger’s collection would be the foundation for the city’s
Joslyn Art Museum and its international collection.
An anthropologist of world fairs astutely noted that “goods can
be used as fences or bridges.”111 Chicago’s world fair had relegated
its Fine Arts Building to the outskirts, but at Omaha in 1898 and
1899, art was in the Grand Court. Chicago had built a natural his-
tory museum as a legacy of its fair, but it was art that would be
the only permanent legacy of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in
Omaha: the paintings purchased for the city’s public library. The
type of art at the Omaha expositions did not differ drastically from
each other or from previous American expositions, but elite white
women were able to use not just its creation but also its arrange-
ment and modes of viewing to create fences between them and
other working women and men on the streets of the city, as well as
to build bridges to cultural institutions and male-dominated pro-
fessions. Ethel Evans, who went on to a career in New York with her
longtime companion, Fannie Greene, would be invited to exhibit
at the elite Republican bastion, the Fontenelle Hotel. Butterfield,
who like Evans taught art in the public schools, by 1909 was on
the faculty at Bellevue College in Omaha, and the third consecu-
tive woman chair of the University of Nebraska’s Art Department
would be appointed in 1900. Drawing on both her professional and

the passing show 149

ancestral connections, Ellenore Dutcher gained the franchise for
producing ceramic pins for the Daughters of the American Rev-
olution (and voted against their blacklist in the post–World War
I era).112 In a city where women’s suffrage would be legalized just
barely before it was made federal law, with the help of large public
projects like the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, and even without
a building of their own, elite Anglo-American women in Omaha
were able to consolidate around a concept of professional prog-
ress in art whose success depended on their inclusion.

Notes
I am grateful to Anne Rimmington, an undergraduate research assistant at the Uni-
versity of Nebraska–Lincoln, who did an outstanding job of helping to search the
newspaper archives. I am also grateful for the assistance of Max Sparber at the Doug-
las County Historical Society, the reference librarians at the Nebraska State Historical
Society, and the curators and registrars at the Joslyn Art Museum and the Durham
Museum in Omaha. This project could not have been completed without the assis-
tance of Timothy Schaffert, Martha Grenzeback of the Omaha Public Library, and
Katherine Walter, Laura Weakly, and Karin Dalziel of the Center for Digital Research
in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
1. Karen Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in
America, 1890–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Agnes Hooper
Gottlieb, Women Journalists and the Municipal Housekeeping Movement, 1868–1914
(Lewiston ny: E. Mellen Press, 2001); Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Ban-
ners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
2. Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870–
1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
3. Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in the Gilded Age
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals:
Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
4. Omaha Bee, May 21, 1895; June 18, 1895, 8; see also June 23, 1894, 3. The World-
Herald also covered the dispute albeit more briefly and neutrally: May 21, 1895, 4;
June 18, 1895, 2.
5. Ethel Evans, “Art,” Omaha (May Day) Bee, May 1, 1895, 11. The Music page was
written by Mrs. H. P. Whitmore, whose husband owned an art gallery; Mrs. Charles
Rosewater wrote on education; Mary Fairbrother was city editor and would go on
to publish her own paper, which was associated with the women’s clubs and Popu-
lism; Mrs. George L. Miller, wife of the editor of the Omaha Herald before it merged
with the World, also had a column, as did Mrs. William J. Bryan, whose famous pol-
itician husband was affiliated with the World-Herald. The issue’s “Men’s page” urged
that women become members of the board of education, and had a feature on “The
New Man,” who would give up the double standard.

150 wendy jean katz

 6. Elsie Reasoner, “Landscape Gardening,” Excelsior, March 12, 1898, 8. Reasoner
would also do publicity for the Paris Exposition of 1900.
7. Margaretta Lovell, “Picturing ‘A City for a Single Summer’: Paintings of the
World’s Columbian Exposition,” Art Bulletin 78, no. 1 (March 1996): 40–55, 54.
8. Timothy Mahoney, “The Great Sheedy Murder Trial and the Booster Ethos of
the Gilded Age in Lincoln,” Nebraska History 82 (2001): 163–79; Sharon Wood, The
Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
9. On aestheticism’s role in assisting the nouveau riche to enter aristocratic cir-
cles, see Albert Boime, “Sargent in Paris and London: A Portrait of the Artist as
Dorian Gray,” in John Singer Sargent, ed. Patricia Hills (New York: Whitney Museum
of American Art, 1986), 75–101, and Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian
Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
10. It had 6,000 members at its peak and circulated 18,500 copies of its organ, the
American. Cary Wintz, “Responses to Ethnic Groups in Omaha, 1892–1910” (Mas-
ter’s thesis, Kansas State University, 1968).
11. Western Laborer, January 30, 1897, 2. The Populist editors acknowledge that it
was W. J. Bryan who first brought the motion for the exposition at a “free silver con-
gress” (the Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress), and it was Independent senator
William Allen who got the appropriation through the Senate, but of the fifty exposi-
tion directors, only five were free silver men, several were corporation lawyers, and
most were hostile to labor. On Rosewater, see Dale J. Hart, “Edward Rosewater and
the Omaha Bee in Nebraska Politics” (Master’s thesis, University of Nebraska, 1938).
12. The World-Herald, June 21, 1898, said Dutcher, who also hosted the Press
Building at the Exposition, was well known as a “newspaper man,” and her articles
for the Boston Transcript had been widely copied. Reasoner wrote for the Associ-
ated Press and as an assistant to the publicity department had articles on the expo-
sition in Midland Monthly (Iowa), Overland (San Francisco), Chaperone (St. Louis),
Boston Herald, Chicago Tribune, and the Gentleman Farmers Magazine. In 1899 Rea-
soner would work for the publicity department in Chicago for the Paris Exposition
of 1900; World-Herald, May 15, 1898, 5.
13. The census figure often given for 1890 is 140,452, but this seems to have been
overinflated by about 40,000. See, for example, Kathleen L. Fimple, “An Analysis of
the Changing Spatial Dimensions of Ethnic Neighborhoods in Omaha, Nebraska,
1880–1900” (PhD diss., University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 1989), 96.
14. Bruce Raymond, “A Study of Political and Economic Conditions in Nebraska
in the Early 1890s” (Master’s thesis, University of Nebraska, 1923).
15. One geographer estimates there was an 89 percent dispersal of ethnic inhab-
itants among the city blocks. Fimple, “Analysis of the Changing Spatial Dimen-
sions,” 108ff; Howard Chudacoff, Mobile Americans: Residential and Social Mobility
in Omaha, 1880–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).
16. Estimates of the number of prostitutes in the city hovered at 1,600 as late as
World War I. David L. Bristow, A Dirty, Wicked Town: Tales of 19th Century Omaha
(Caldwell id: Caxton Press, 2000), 208. Orville D. Menard, River City Empire: Tom
Dennison’s Omaha (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013). Thanks to Den-

the passing show 151

nison’s turn to the Democrats after Rosewater’s death, Omaha would have a long-
term Democratic mayor.
17. Sharon E. Wood, “Introduction,” in Josie Washburn, The Underworld Sewer:
A Prostitute Reflects on Life in the Trade (1907; Lincoln ne: Bison Books, 1997), xiii.
18. Western Laborer, June 6, 1896, 4; Washburn, The Underworld Sewer, 106–7.
19. Gurdon Wattles, A Crime against Labor: A Brief History of the Omaha & Council
Bluffs Street Railway Strike (n.p., 1909); Wintz, “Responses to Ethnic Groups,” 60–65.
20. Susan B. Anthony’s speech, 1882, quoted in Thomas Chalmer Coulter, “A
History of Woman Suffrage in Nebraska, 1856–1920” (PhD diss., Ohio State Uni-
versity, 1967), 93.
21. Barbara Berglund, Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the
Urban West, 1846–1907 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007); see also David
Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Phil-
adelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).
22. Western Laborer, May 29, 1897, 2; their newspaper office was in the Labor Tem-
ple, 15th and Farnam. Lynn Curtis wrote Trans-Mississippi stories for the Omaha/
Council Bluffs magazine, the Trans-Mississippian, which also published Dutcher. As
the Western Laborer, June 26, 1897, 2, sarcastically observed, Lindsay as of June 1897
only had six relatives on the Trans-Mississippi payroll. The August 1897 payroll for
the exposition, Western Laborer, September 25, 1897, 2, listed at least seven female
stenographers, who were paid less than the men in the job. Freeman P. Kirkendall,
an Omaha boot manufacturer whose name like that of Evans’s brother-in-law indi-
cates his family’s commitment to Republican principles, was in charge of the grounds.
Zachary Taylor was a slave owner, but he opposed extending slavery into the west-
ern territories he had helped acquire in the war with Mexico. Progressive Repub-
licans like Theodore Roosevelt and his friend William T. Cody (who had a day
dedicated to him at the exposition) were ardent expansionists but also supporters
of civil rights, or as a Cody Wild West program of 1899 said, “The soldiers—white,
red and black— . . . follow Roosevelt and the flag.” Quoted in Janet Davis, “Instruct
the Minds of All Classes: Celebrations of Empire at the American Circus, 1898–
1910,” in Dreams of Paradise, Visions of Apocalypse: Utopia and Dystopia in Ameri-
can Culture, ed. Jaap Verheul (Amsterdam: vu University Press, 2004), 58–68; 61.
23. Mr. H. H. Bagg of Peru, Nebraska, an art teacher, had four pictures; Mr. A.
C. Peters of Filley had one table top picture, Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Hogle of Omaha
each had two pictures. Butterfield had seven watercolors, one mirror, and several
pieces of china. Report of the Superintendent of Decoration of the Nebraska Build-
ing, transcript, Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Records, rg0042,
series 3, Nebraska State Historical Society.
24. Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, Official Catalogue of Fine Arts
(Omaha: Klopp & Bartlett, 1898). That was about the same percentage who exhib-
ited at the Chicago world’s fair and at the National Academy of Design in New York.
Carolyn Kinder Carr, Revisiting the White City: American Art at the 1893 World’s Fair
(Washington dc: National Portrait Gallery, 1993), 82.
25. “Art Congress in Session,” Omaha Bee, September 30, 1898, 7; Lida Patrick
Wilson, “How Uncle Sam Played Cupid: A Romance of the Trans-Mississippi Expo-
sition,” World-Herald, October 30, 1898, 18; Wilson, “An Episode of President’s Day,”

152 wendy jean katz

World-Herald, November 13, 1898, 22; Rose E. Strawn, “The Merry Midway,” Wom-
an’s Weekly, September 3, 1898. Wilson covered that year’s meeting of the Federa-
tion of Women’s Clubs in Denver as a special correspondent.
26. “Bits of Oratory by Judge Scott,” Chicago Tribune, February 5, 1899.
27. “Dorothy’s Crusade,” World-Herald, May 24, 1898, 1; “Exposition Statuary Can
Be Patched,” World-Herald, May 25, 1898, 1; “She Has Done Enough,” World-Herald,
May 26, 1898, 8; “Nude Statues Attacked with an Ax,” Omaha Bee, May 24, 1898, 2.
28. See Caroline V. Green, “Fabricating the Dream: American World’s Fair Sculp-
ture, 1876–1915” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1992); George Starr, “Truth Unveiled:
The Panama Pacific International Exposition and Its Interpreters,” in The Anthro-
pology of World’s Fairs, ed. Burton Benedict (Berkeley: Scolar Press, 1983), 134–75.
29. “With an Assassin’s Hand,” Omaha Bee, December 16, 1890, 1; Eric Zafran,
“William Bouguereau in America: A Roller-Coaster Reputation,” in In the Studios of
Paris: William Bouguereau and His American Students, ed. James Peck (New Haven:
Philbrook Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2006), 17–44.
30. Perhaps a similar feeling led to the arrest of vendors of netoscopes and arto-
scopes at the exposition with their views of living pictures and famous paintings
and statues. Omaha Bee, August 24, 1898.
31. Omaha Bee, June 19, 1998, 8. For an overview of Chinese villages, see Bar-
bara Vennman, “Dragons, Dummies, and Royals: China at American World’s Fairs,
1876–1904,” Gateway Heritage 17, no. 2 (1996): 16–31; Mae Ngai, The Lucky Ones: One
Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 2010), 95–105. On Judge Scott, who also brought female dancers into court
in the name of morality, see Edward Francis Morearty, Omaha Memories: Recollec-
tions of Events, Men, and Affairs in Omaha, Nebraska, from 1879 to 1917 (Omaha:
Swartz Printing, 1917), 123, and the Western Laborer, November 4, 1899, 1.
32. “Killed Her for Love,” World-Herald, October 24, 1898, 1; “Melchert Commits
Murder,” Omaha Bee, October 24, 1898, 1; “Melchert Was Insane,” Omaha Bee, Octo-
ber 25, 1898, 7. John De Renville “Pony” Moore, a former newspaperman for both
the Bee and the World-Herald, with connections to the elite Omaha social organi-
zation Ak-Sar-Ben, was a manager at Boyd’s Theater, experience that translated into
him eventually taking charge of the Filipino village at the Greater America Exposi-
tion and at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition in 1901.
33. Western Laborer, April 11, 1896, 5.
34. “War on Department Stores,” Western Laborer, November 27, 1; Western Laborer,
December 4, 1897, 1.
35. Ella B. Perrine, “Exposition and Education,” Omaha Bee, (no date) 1898.
36. Sarah Harris, “Observations,” Courier, October 29, 1898, 1; “Hardt as a Hold
up Artist,” Omaha Bee, November 3, 1898, 5. Hardt was arrested on charges of forg-
ery on October 30, accused of having awarded premiums to firms in return for com-
pensation. The World-Herald, December 1, 1898, 6, says he was exonerated of the
charges of fraud and misconduct. He went on to work at the Buffalo Pan-American
Exposition of 1901.
37. Ethel Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha Bee, June 13, 1898, 1; August 30,
1898, 5; August 10, 1898, 5. See also T. J. Boisseau’s essay in this anthology on how
clubwomen revised exposition imagery to suit their own purposes.

the passing show 153

 38. Kevin Abourezk, “From Red Fears to Red Power: The Story of the Newspa-
per Coverage of Wounded Knee 1890 and Wounded Knee 1973” (Master’s thesis,
University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2012), argues that World-Herald coverage attacked
the government and its Indian agents for starving the Indians, while the Bee sup-
ported the government.
39. Susette La Flesche Tibbles (Bright Eyes) and her husband, Thomas Tibbles,
had investigated the battle at Wounded Knee and reservation conditions for the
World-Herald, and by 1898 Thomas was editing a Populist newspaper in Lincoln.
According to La Flesche Tibbles and Fannie Reed Griffin in their Oo-mah-ha Ta-wa-
tha (Omaha City) (Lincoln: privately published, 1898), Omaha’s arrival in the front
rank of modern civilization is evidenced in part by an art gallery “not equaled in any
city.” La Flesche Tibbles illustrated Oo-mah-ha Ta-wa-tha, which tells the story of
her family’s drive for citizenship, ending with the 1898 exposition. Thomas H. Tib-
bles, “Art at the University,” Lincoln Courier, November 26, 1898, also wrote a let-
ter to Sarah Harris, editor of the Courier, urging better funding of the University of
Nebraska’s Art Department, which was headed by a woman.
40. Ella B. Perrine, “Exposition and Education,” Omaha Bee, July 18, 1898, 5. Per-
rine is listed in the Annual Register of the University of Chicago as a student in 1895–
96. Evans attended Western College in Oxford, Ohio, and studied art in Omaha and
Paris. Julia Officer, manager of the musical artists for the exposition and originally
from Council Bluffs, attended Rockford College, Illinois, as well as a Boston musi-
cal conservatory, and was an active club woman. World-Herald, September 25, 1898,
5. Elizabeth Hutchinson, “Modern Native American Art: Angel DeCora’s Transcul-
tural Aesthetics,” Art Bulletin 83, no. 4 (December 2001): 740–56; Bonnie M. Miller,
“The Incoherencies of Empire: The ‘Imperial’ Image of the Indian at the Omaha
World’s Fairs of 1898–99,” American Studies 49, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2008): 39–62.
41. Omaha Bee, October 23, 1898, clipping in the Douglas County Scrapbook,
Nebraska State Historical Society.
42. Ethel Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha Bee, August 23, 1898, 7. On the
connotations of “squaw,” see Nancy J. Parezo and Angelina Jones, “What’s in a Name?
The 1940s–1950s ‘Squaw Dress,’” American Indian Quarterly 33, no. 3 (Summer 2009):
373–404; Paul Staiti, “Illusionism, Trompe L’oeil, and the Perils of Viewership,” in Wil-
liam M. Harnett, ed. Doreen Bolger (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1992), 31–47.
43. Ethel Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha Bee, July 10, 1898, 4.
44. Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha Bee, September 13, 1898, 4. Maria
Weed, “The Nude in Art,” Midland Monthly Magazine 8 (November 1897): 431–32,
was critical of du Maurier for turning Trilby from a fearless barefooted model into
a shrinking, heartbroken woman, and warned that “to the pure all things are pure,”
while “prejudice” is the “enemy of Progress.” The Iowa magazine regularly featured
stories on women in art and a series on “The Woman Who Wants to Be a Man.” Its
editors thought the Chicago world’s fair was a city of heaven and were firm support-
ers of assimilation, imperialism, and women at the Omaha exposition.
45. Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha Bee, August 10, 1898, 5.
46. “A Great Painting,” World-Herald, August 21, 1898, 3.
47. Albert Rothery, “Art Notes,” World-Herald, June 12, 1898, 21.

154 wendy jean katz

 48. “Old Plantation,” World-Herald, August 4, 1898, 5. Josh Clough cites the sec-
ularizing Grass dance as the most important one at the Indian Congress, though the
tribes would not commit to any set schedule, only dancing when “they feel like it.”
Clough, “‘Vanishing’ Indians? Cultural Persistence on Display at the Omaha World’s
Fair of 1898,” Great Plains Quarterly 25, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 67–86; 78.
49. Robert W. Rydell, “The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition: ‘To
Work Out the Problem of Universal Civilization,’” American Quarterly 33, no. 5 (Win-
ter 1981): 601. Bee editor and Exposition publicist James B. Haynes, “The Great Event
of 1898,” Leslie’s Weekly (February 3, 1898) 74, described the Afro-American village
as including both voodoo and the finest operas by famous negro vocalists, citing
Anton Dvorak’s description of Negro melodies as a great and noble school of music.
50. Cooper’s Viewing of Curios (1909), Buffalo Bill Center of the West, http://collections
.centerofthewest.org/treasures/view/viewing_the_curios. Buffalo Bill was solicited
for stuffed bison to decorate the Nebraska State Building, but the shipping proved
too expensive. Armand Griffith, “American Pictures at the Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition at Omaha, Nebraska,” Brush and Pencil 3, no. 1 (October
1898): 44–45, described Indian spectators in the galleries similarly, admiring (and
“thoroughly understanding”) a painting of a dying Indian chief and his son.
51. Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha Bee, June 19, 1898, 5. See also Saul
Zalesch, “Competition and Conflict in the New York Art World, 1874–1879,” Win-
terthur Portfolio 29, no. 2 (1994): 103–20.
52. Ethel Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha Bee, July 1, 1898, 1; Evans, “Art at
the Exposition,” Omaha Bee, June 26, 1898, 13.
53. “Omaha’s Show,” Grand Forks Herald, September 18, 1898, 6.
54. On the importance of individuality to the female art critic in stepping into
the public sphere, see Pamela Gerrish Nunn, “Critically Speaking,” in Women in the
Victorian Art World, ed. Carissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 1995), 107–24, and Claire Richter Sherman and Adele Holcomb, Women
as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820–1879 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981).
55. L. Lincoln, “Regarding Trilby,” Omaha Bee, September 14, 1898, 7; “Reply to
an Omaha Critic,” World-Herald, September 18, 1898, 8.
56. Excelsior, October 2, 1897, 3; October 16, 1897. Anna Rinehart followed in the
steps of her sister-in-law, Dora Rinehart, who was a champion cyclist in Denver. By
the end of 1898 O’Neill was living in New York City as an illustrator, last name of
Latham. Blanche L. McKelvy, “Woman’s Work,” Excelsior, January 15, 1898, 7.
57. almk, Excelsior, September 24, 1898, 9. For brief biographies of Nebraska art-
ists, see William Gerdts, Art across America (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), 3:395–
400, and although they do not mention Evans, see Clarissa Bucklin, ed., Nebraska
Art and Artists (Lincoln: School of Fine Arts of the University of Nebraska, 1932);
Norman Geske, Art and Artists in Nebraska (Lincoln: Sheldon Memorial Art Gal-
lery, 1983); and James Schaeffer, Nebraska Art Today (Lincoln: Sheldon Memorial
Art Gallery, 1967).
58. Excelsior, August 6, 1898, 1–2; September 24, 1898, 9; October 22, 1898, 1.
59. The Trans-Mississippian, September 1897, 7; “Buying Statuary,” World-Herald,
March 10, 1898, 1; “Kountze Park Sculptures,” World-Herald, March 18, 1898, 8.

the passing show 155

Kemeys submitted a sketch of an Indian spearing a buffalo. Ethel Evans, “Art
at the Exposition,” Omaha Bee, June 16, 1898, 5. On the separation of high art
from low, see Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural
Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) and Paul
DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Cre-
ation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture,
and Society 4 (1982): 33–50.
60. Jeffrey Abt, A Museum on the Verge: A Socioeconomic History of the Detroit
Institute of Arts, 1882–2000 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001).
61. Armand H. Griffith, “Art at the Exposition,” Excelsior, July 23, 1898, 7; “Nebraska
Photographers’ Convention,” Omaha Bee, August 18, 1898, 5.
62. “Rural Visitors View Trilby,” World-Herald, September 4, 1898, 6. See also
Staiti, “Illusionism, Trompe L’oeil, and the Perils of Viewership,” 31-47, and Michael
Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2004).
63. World-Herald, July 9, 1897.
64. “Paintings for the Library,” Omaha Bee, January 16, 1899, 8. Moonrise on Cape
Ann, by Lewis H. Meakin, isn’t mentioned, as it was selected later.
65. Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Bee, June 19, 1898, 5.
66. Laura Prieto, At Home in the Studio (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2001).
67. Perhaps a lack of unity of style in the Nebraska State Building disturbed her. The
walls were tinted with colored stencils on the borders, draperies festooned windows
and doors, and floors had matting and carpet or rugs, plus 150 chairs “of all styles,”
tables, desks, cots, and pillows, as well as pictures by forty-eight artists. Each frater-
nity who obtained space in the building, however, had their own decorations as well.
68. Woman’s Weekly, January 8, 1898, 1; Excelsior, December 4, 1897; Excelsior,
October 8, 1898.
69. Governor Holcomb had endorsed Col. T. B. Hatcher, a South Omaha pol-
itician active in the painters’ union, for the position of superintendent, but the
executive committee in charge of the state building preferred Catlin’s proposal of
a more aesthetic interior. Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Papers,
vol. 2, directors’ letterpress, December 9, 1897–March 16, 1898, #291; Letter to Gov-
ernor Holcomb, January 28, 1898, Silas Holcomb Papers, box 1, letterpress, March–
November 1898, letters 47 forward, April 1898; Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition Papers, box 2, correspondence, folder 12, a-b (Jay Ross Barrett of Nebraska
State Historical Society and Mellona Butterfield, March–April 1898), Nebraska State
Historical Society.
70. Ethel Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha Bee, June 16, 1898, 5; Albert Roth-
ery, “Art Notes,” World-Herald, May 1, 1898, 17; June 12, 1898, 21. The Pottawatomie
County wigwam is described in “Tepee for Pottawattamies,” Omaha Bee, November
15, 1897, 6. Cora Parker had ten pictures and two statues in the Nebraska Building;
Tanie Snowden of Omaha (a student of Rothery) had two pictures; a sister of Jose-
phine Catlin had one. Miss Iler (perhaps a relative of Peter Iler, who would be active
as a director of the Greater America Exposition) had one, and Lilla Seavey, the wife
of the former Omaha police chief, had one. Mrs. Tina McLellan Hinman (Omaha)

156 wendy jean katz

had eight, Alice Righter of Lincoln had four (both Hinman and Righter had paint-
ings in the Fine Arts Building, as did Parker), and Miss Almira Graves of York, who
had trained in Chicago, had four table top pictures. Mrs. Mumaugh donated twenty-
seven watercolors and twelve oil paintings. Numerous other women donated por-
traits of Nebraska governors and politicians by male artists.
71. Excelsior, February 12, 1898, 7; “Sub Rosa,” Excelsior, January 21, 1899.
72. Sarah Harris, “Observations,” Courier, October 9, 1897, p. 1.
73. Willa Cather, The Passing Show, Courier, October 30, 1897, 8. Her preference
for peasants is paired with an enthusiasm for Sousa, Kipling, and the perhaps face-
tious “wish [that] we could have a small war or two.”
74. Sarah Harris, “The Trans-Mississippi Art Exhibit,” Courier, November 13, 1897,
9; September 11, 1897, p. 1. Harris graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1888.
A feminist, she took charge of the weekly Courier with associate editor Willa Cather
in 1895, although Cather left not long after.
75. Sarah B. Harris, “Observations,” Courier, June 25, 1898, 1; William Reed Dun-
roy, “Jottings,” Courier, August 27, 1898, 1. Dunroy was a Nebraska poet.
76. Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha Bee, June 26, 1898, 13. The nude she
refers to, 155 in the catalog, Psyche, was thought by the Joslyn Museum (Trans-
Mississippi files, Joslyn Museum, Omaha) to be by Bouguereau, painted in 1890.
77. Elia Peattie, “A Word with the Women,” World-Herald, December 27, 1895, 8;
Albert Rothery, “Art Notes,” World-Herald, January 16, 1898; Omaha Bee, June 14, 1923.
78. “Granny’s Written Opinion,” Woman’s Weekly, June 25, 1898; July 2, 1898; July
12, 1898. Elsie Reasoner, “Apropos of Exhibitions,” Excelsior, June 4, 1898, 2. The Pop-
ulist weekly Western Laborer also regularly ran columns in dialect.
79. Henry George advocated for a land tax, a topic discussed in one of the expo-
sition congresses. On Peattie, whose husband was an editor at the World-Herald,
see Eileen Wirth, From Society Page to Front Page: Nebraska Women in Journalism
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013); Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha
Bee, August 30, 1898, 5.
80. “Bryan’s House,” Lincoln State Journal, March 10, 1898; the sheet music cover
for Morte Parsons’s The Sod Shanty: A Trans-Mississippi Souvenir (Omaha: Morte
Parsons, 1898), Omaha Public Library, available at the Trans-Mississippi and Inter-
national Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu, pairs a view of a sod house with the exte-
rior of the Nebraska State Building as a symbol of modern progressive Omaha, and
was sung on Nebraska Day at the Exposition, when William Jennings Bryan gave
an oration; “Exposition Decorations,” Excelsior, March 5, 1898, 7. According to the
World-Herald, March 16, 1898, 8, the plan was first to erect President McKinley’s first
home, and when Bryan’s was proposed as a companion, the Exposition managers
dropped the whole idea as too politicized. Millet’s Digger and Sower were included
as decorations at the main entrance to the Agriculture Building, and Sower influ-
enced the sculpture put atop the Nebraska capitol by Lee Lawrie (finished 1932) as
a symbol of Nebraska’s peasant (farmer) republic.
81. Quoted in Sandra Ann Healey Tigges, “Alice French: A Noble Anachronism”
(PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1981), 85–86; see also George McMichael, Journey to
Obscurity: The Life of Octave Thanet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).

the passing show 157

 82. Octave Thanet [Alice French], “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition,” Cosmopol-
itan, October 1898, 608–13; Octave Thanet, “Our Exposition Summed Up,” Omaha
Bee, August 28, 1898, 17.
83. Hamlin Garland, “Address before the Literary Congress Omaha Exposition,”
1898, manuscript, Hamlin Garland Papers, University of Southern California. Mary
J. Reid, “Octave Thanet and Western Realists,” Midland Monthly Magazine 9 (Feb-
ruary 1898): 98–108, includes Hamlin Garland and Elia Peattie in her discussion.
84. Mary Fairbrother, Woman’s Weekly, February 18 and 25, 1897.
85. World-Herald, January 31, 1897, 6.
86. “The Women say ‘Nit,’” Afro American Sentinel, March 6, 1897, 2; Enterprise,
July 3, 1897, 1. See also David J. Peavler, “African Americans in Omaha and the 1898
Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition,” Journal of African American His-
tory 93, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 337–61.
87. Edith Marion Evans attended the same college (Western in Ohio) as her sis-
ter Ethel and worked with her father at the Farmers and Traders Bank of Malvern,
Iowa, before becoming president of the bank for five years prior to her marriage to
Judge Joseph R. Reed of Council Bluffs in 1893. Trans-Mississippian, March 1897, 7.
The African American Women’s Club selected Lucinda W. Gamble, a public school
teacher, to represent them. Afro-American Sentinel, April 3, 1897, 1; “Advance of Their
Craft,” Omaha Bee, November 3, 1898, 5.
88. Evans in New York joined the National Association of Women Painters and
Sculptors and the Pen and Brush Club. Like her mother, Evans left the bulk of her
$6,000 estate to the women of her family and her “lifelong friend,” Fannie Greene,
with whom she lived in New York City. Malvern Leader, May 2, 1929, 1.
89. “The Greater American,” Courier, July 22, 1899, 2; the Rounder, “Here and
There in Omaha,” Courier, October 7, 1899, 3.
90. Western Laborer, July 18, 1896, 1; on Iler, Western Laborer, June 19, 1897, 1;
“Greater America,” Western Laborer, April 15, 1899, 1; “In the Beginning,” Western
Laborer, July 29, 1899, 1; on the Philippines, August 12, 1899; on Trilby, “World Her-
ald Day,” Western Laborer, August 27, 1898, 1.
91. Henrietta Briggs-Wall of Hutchinson, Kansas, commissioned W. A. Ford for
the pro–women’s suffrage painting, which was exhibited at the Columbian Exposition
in Chicago and finally donated to the Kansas Historical Society, https://www.kshs.org
/kansapedia/cool-things-american-woman- and-her-political-peers-painting/10294.
92. Afro-American Sentinel, April 3, 1897, 4; “Art for the Exposition,” Omaha Bee,
December 29, 1997, 5; (Rev.) John Albert Williams, “Public Pulse: An Appeal to the
Liberal Minded,” World-Herald, July 16, 1898, 4; H. K. Hillon (?), “Public Pulse: The
People’s Paper,” World-Herald, January 12, 1897, 4.
93. “Old Plantation,” World-Herald, June 25, 1899. Fairbrother observes that the
cultured and educated Mrs. L. M. Pryor writes for the paper about the colored
women’s clubs and that she herself does not make distinctions on the basis of color,
although women who are hedged by conventionalities or believe it is a disgrace to
work do so, Woman’s Weekly, August 20, 1898.
94. Alfred C. Harrison Jr., “John Ross Key’s World Fair Paintings,” Magazine
Antiques 165, no. 3 (March 2004): 78–87.

158 wendy jean katz

 95. “Fine Art from Louisiana,” World-Herald, May 25, 1899, 5.
96. “Midway Gleanings,” World-Herald, July 12, 1899, 4; “Midway Gleanings,” World-
Herald, July 21, 1899, 3; “Greater America Exposition,” Trans-Mississippi Exposition
files, Douglas County Historical Society (on J. B. Morris of Illinois’s concession for
the Parisian Art Studio, which will attract attention from “straight-laced” art crit-
ics). The artists were C. L. Sherman and Troy S. Kinney, the latter a student at Yale
under John F. Weir, an artist Rothery admired, and the professional strongman was
Mr. Armstrong, a Chicago model. Albert Rothery, “Art Notes,” World-Herald, July
23, 1899, 18. Two of the women models included Miss Wallace and Miss De Arny,
“Scenes along the Midway,” Omaha Bee, September 12, 1899, 7.
97. Ellenore Dutcher, “Art Studios of Omaha,” Trans-Mississippian, November 1897,
7–8. Laurie Wallace’s studio was the most richly decorated, with Chinese embroi-
dery, rare porcelain and bronzes, and Turkish rugs and draperies, as perhaps befits
his status as Omaha’s best-known artist. Rothery by contrast had only plaster casts
and a few odds and ends. Fairbrother on Butterfield (421 Paxton Block), Woman’s
Weekly, March 26, 1897; Fairbrother on Parker, Woman’s Weekly, November 20, 1896;
Snowden’s studio, 608 Paxton Block, reproduced in James B. Schaeffer, Nebraska Art
Today (Lincoln: Sheldon Museum of Art, 1967), 12.
98. “Attractions of the Exposition,” World-Herald, June 25, 1899, 25. The World-
Herald calls him Alonzo Tojetti, but it seems to be Virgilio (1851–1901), son of an
Italian painter named Domenico Tojetti, a student of Bouguereau and Gerome, and
a well-known artist in New York City who also did large-scale decorative work. The
paper suggested Tojetti was ill and might not live long as a further incentive to visit
his painting. “Midway Art,” World-Herald, July 4, 1899, 2. Claude-Marie Dubufe
(1790–1864), Edouard Dubufe (1820–83), and Guillaume Dubufe (1853–1909); “Mid-
way Gleanings,” World-Herald, August 2, 1899, 8. Una was the name of a character
in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
99. Greater America Exposition, Omaha, Nebraska, July 1st to November 1st, 1899.
Illustrated Catalogue Fine Arts. John R. Key, art director (Omaha: Klopp & Bartlett,
1899), 94 #582 (in Gallery 7).
100. “A Few Words to Art Lovers,” World-Herald, June 25, 1899, 30; Excelsior,
April 1, 1899. Nettie W. Collins was the daughter of art collector G. H. Collins and
was engaged to Herbert E. Gates of First National Bank. Mellona Butterfield, super-
intendent and hostess for the Nebraska State Building in 1898, was in charge of the
Public Comfort Building (the former Illinois State Building) in 1899.
101. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, “An Appreciation of Verestchagin’s Art,” Brush and Pen-
cil, 9, no. 6 (March 1902): 360–65, 367–71.
102. Omaha World-Herald, July 12, 1899. On Tissot, see Nancy Rose Marshall,
“James Tissot’s Coloured Photographs of Vulgar Society,” in Victorian Vulgarity:
Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture, ed. Susan David Bernstein and Elsie Browning
Michie (Burlington vt : Ashgate, 2009), and Judith Dolkart, James Tissot: The Life
of Christ (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2009). On Sargent’s recommendation, the
Brooklyn Museum bought the set for $60,000 in 1900.
103. Rothery, “Art Notes,” World-Herald, July 23, 1899, 18; [Dutcher], “Good Pic-
tures on Exhibition,” Omaha Bee, August 21, 1899, 5; “For Artists and Amateurs,”

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Omaha Bee, August 22, 1899, 5; “Paintings in Gallery No. 3,” Omaha Bee, August
28, 1899, 5; “Gallery No. 4 Hung with Excellent Pictures,” Omaha Bee, September 4,
1899, 5; “Paintings in Gallery No. 5,” Omaha Bee, September 13, 1899, 3.
104. Corn, Women Building History, 114–16; “A Pastoral,” Woman’s Weekly, March
31, 1899.
105. Art Student, “Public Pulse: Why This Discrimination,” World-Herald, August
24, 1899, 4. Gilder’s A Glimpse of Nebraska was hung in the West Corridor running
between the main galleries, near the ceramics cases and the other Omaha artists,
Mrs. E. E. Livingston’s View in the Country, Mrs. Anna McKnight’s Cozy Corner,
Carolyn D. Tyler’s Sail-Boat, and Nina E. Lumbard’s Old Stairs at San Gabriel Mis-
sion. Greater America Exposition, Illustrated Catalogue Fine Arts, 116.
106. In the Nebraska State Building, Mumaugh had 27, Parker 10, Righter 4, and
Butterfield 7; Evans had just 1.
107. The other Omaha artists were Ella Ittner (four paintings), Vena Park, and
Mrs. Swick. Park and Nina Lumbard also had ceramics, as did Omaha artists L. Belle
Perfect, L. A. Lund, and Blanche Schneider. My estimate of three male ceramic art-
ists is based on their names; some of the artists who just used initials may have also
been male, but even if they all were, still more than 90 percent of the producers were
women. Among the paintings and sculptures, there were at least forty-six female art-
ists with eighty-three pictures, about 11 percent of the total. Several of the men had
very large numbers of pictures: Boston illustrator E. W. D. Hamilton had a group
of thirty, A. J. Fournier had twenty-one, and so on, accounting for the smaller pro-
portion of pictures by women even though more women participated than in 1898.
108. Excelsior, December 16, 1899. Edwin Markham’s 1899 poem, “The Man with
the Hoe,” and the famous Jean-Francois Millet painting it referred to had appeared
in the Western Laborer, April 15, 1899, 1. Hitchcock of the World-Herald would be
elected to Congress for the first time in 1902.
109. The Lininger Collection: Catalogue of the Art-Collection of George W. Lininger,
Omaha, 25 cents. Sold for the benefit of the Western Art Association. Omaha: Chase
& Eddy, printers, 1888; Catalog of the Lininger Art Gallery, 1911. See also Jo L. Wetherilt
Behrens, “Painting the Town: How Merchants Marketed the Visual Arts to Nineteenth-
Century Omahans,” Nebraska History 92 (Spring 2011) 14–39; John Ott, Manufac-
turing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial
Capital, and Social Authority (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014).
110. David Scobey, “Nymphs and Satyrs: Sex and the Bourgeois Public Sphere in
Victorian New York,” Winterthur Portfolio, 37, no. 1 (2002): 43–66.
111. Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World’s Fairs (Berkeley: Scolar Press,
1983), 2.
112. Margaret Gibbs, The dar (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 129.

160 wendy jean katz

 4
Trilby Goes Naked and Native on the Midway
emily godbey

Except for the evil hypnotist Svengali, a character who has entered
popular culture, the novel Trilby, much like Omaha’s Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898, has vanished.
George du Maurier’s 1894 novel was an international success, sell-
ing over 200,000 copies in book form after already being published
serially, while Omaha’s Trans-Mississippi attracted 2.6 million peo-
ple; ironically, hardly a trace of either is present today. The forgot-
ten book and the neglected fair intersect in a painting that is also
no longer available: a nude painting based upon Trilby was a Mid-
way feature at the 1898 Omaha exhibition. This painterly sideshow
sheds light on some of the Exhibition’s core issues; the Astley D.
M. Cooper painting existed in a realm between realism and fak-
ery, education and entertainment, while it simultaneously entered
a debate about popular art and high Art. Omaha’s Trilby, a paint-
ing of a naked model posing on a pedestal, emphasizes what the
entire fair was about: spectacle, illusion, the differences between
education and entertainment, as well as the desire to put the West
on the map of American consciousness, so to speak. As such, the
Trilby painting can serve as an important indicator of the values
and aspirations of the Omaha exhibition, one that even adopted
Trilby as a homegrown western lady, not a Parisian nude model
out of a sensation novel. The Omaha publicity cast their Trilby as
an upstanding citizen of the Trans-Mississippi.

161
Trilby on Omaha’s Midway
The Trilby painting was located on the Midway (fig. 3), the section
of the fair that was not made to be an educational, cultured, and
gleaming White City. Instead, the Midway was a place for exhibi-
tions and entertainments like fairground rides, magic acts, physi-
cal and technological marvels, and food and drink (including beer
sold by Pabst and Schlitz). Omaha’s Midway in this respect followed
the example set by the Chicago World’s Columbian Exhibition of
1893. While Chicago’s White City embraced the lakefront, its Mid-
way Plaisance stretched east-west along what is now 55th Street,
offering separate territory for different kinds of attractions with
very different aims. Chicago’s and Omaha’s exhibitions, taken as
a whole, thus had a much different atmosphere than the Centen-
nial Exhibition in Philadelphia during 1876, which did not include
commercial entertainment in its educational, high-minded pro-
gramming. For example, Philadelphia’s exposition in Fairmount
Park featured the Total Abstinence Fountain, sponsored by a Cath-
olic temperance organization, which did not exactly bode well for
those looking for fun and frivolous amusement.
In Omaha, the Trilby painting took its place in a bustling,
commerce-driven Midway, where rides such as Griffith’s Scenic
Railway (fig. 64), the Circular Venetian Gondola, Shooting the
Chutes (a ride with splashdown into water), and the Giant See-
Saw (Omaha’s answer to Chicago’s Ferris Wheel) gave people thrills
through novel physical experiences. Entertainment venues like
Darkness and Dawn (a trip to hell and heaven, where hell defi-
nitely sounded like more fun) and the cyclorama (naval battle
display) offered a different kind of amusement. The Mystic Maze
and the Palace of the Mysteries used illusions and tricks to delight
fairgoers. Physical and technological marvels included the Edison
Wargraph (moving pictures just two years after the invention of
the machine), X-ray displays, Libby glass blowers whose pièce de
résistance was a blown glass dress, contortionists, boxers, wild ani-
mals, midgets, and, of course, dancers. The Streets of All Nations
and ethnographic/race shows offered something less savory than
what might be familiar from Disney’s contemporary theme parks

162 emily godbey

in which one can visit foreign lands: the Old Plantation with buck
and wing dancers, the South African ostrich farm staffed by Zulus
(there was a Zulu wedding during the Omaha run), and the Moor-
ish Palace and the Streets of Cairo, with the notorious girls (fig.
40) who did the dance du ventre (belly dancing).
The Trilby painting exhibit concession subleased space from the
Moorish Palace, which seems quite appropriate, since those exotic,
scantily clad, hookah-smoking dancing girls might offer a pre-
view of the painted nude in the Trilby Temple. (The scantily clad
girls there and at the Streets of Cairo, however, could only be con-
sidered racy for the times and morés of 1898; athletes today wear
fewer and far tighter clothes.) The nude Trilby painting also shows
parallels to the Palace of the Mysteries, which had a dancing girl
illusion, sparked by H. Rider Haggard’s fantasy book, She: A His-
tory of Adventure, which centers around a spectacularly beautiful,
immortal, veiled queen in a lost world filled with fire and volca-
noes. The queen, or “She-who-must-be-obeyed,” has remained an
icon of female power. Three key elements united the Midway fea-
tures: commerce (a different fee per exhibit), entertainment, and a
focus on bodies. The last characteristic perhaps needs more expla-
nation; whether personally experiencing bodily thrills in an accel-
erating fairground ride, drinking alcohol, and watching midgets,
contortionists, or dancers, the Midway was a place to indulge in
the pleasures of one’s own body and watch others use theirs. As
such, Cooper’s Trilby fit right in.

Inspiration: The Novel Trilby and Its Reception

It seems implausible that a British novel concerned with bohe-
mian Paris would provide the inspiration for a Midway painting in
Omaha. Du Maurier’s sensational (and spectacularly terrible) novel
centers on Trilby, a young woman of complex multinational heri-
tage and shady circumstances who works as a nude artist’s model
in Paris during the mid-nineteenth century. Svengali hypnotizes
her, and she sings beautifully under his spell, whereas normally
she is tone-deaf. She is characterized as a grisette—an attractive,
lower-class flirt. Aside from her remarkable abilities as a hypno-

trilby goes native 163

tized singer, she is known for her clothing and lack thereof. “She
would have made a singularly handsome boy,” the narrator claims,
as Trilby walks around Paris in a man’s military jacket and a pair
of men’s slippers (fig. 25).1 The slippers protected her famous feet,
for “Trilby had respected Mother Nature’s special gift to herself—
had never worn a leather boot or shoe, had always taken as much
care of her feet as many a fine lady takes of her hands. It was her
one coquetry, the only real vanity she had.”2 The artists around her
draw her feet or make plaster casts of them, attempting to preserve
their elegant form in any way possible. At one point, a doodle of
Trilby’s foot on a wall is chiseled out as a keepsake, reminding one
of what happens with Banksy’s graffiti art today.
As an artist’s model, she poses in the “altogether”—the nude:
“I’m posing for Durien the sculptor on the next floor. I pose to
him for the altogether.”
“The altogether?” asked Little Billee.
“Yes—l’ensemble, you know—head, hands, and feet—everything—
especially feet. That’s my foot,” she said, kicking off her big slipper
and stretching out the limb. “It’s the handsomest foot in all of Paris.
There is only one to match it, and here it is,” and she laughed heart-
ily (like a merry peal of bells), and stuck out the other.3

Trilby is characterized as “equally unconscious of self with her

clothes on or without! Truly she could be naked and unashamed—in
this respect an absolute savage.” Du Maurier’s narrator praises her
willingness to be unclothed, as “nothing is so chaste as nudity,”
adding that “[t]he more perfect her unveiled beauty, the more
keenly it appeals to his [the artist’s] higher instincts.”4 A mid-
western newspaper pardoned Trilby for her behavior, stating that
“‘Trilby’ is a true story—a composite of the experience of many
poor girls, of whom she is an accurate type. They know no better
life than they are living. Their moral environment is limited, and
therefore their untaught souls feel no consciousness of shame.”5 Her
nude modeling is accompanied by hints that “she followed love for
love’s sake only,” and the narrator applies the phrase “Quia multum
amavit!” to her—words Jesus Christ says to Mary Magdalene.6 A
fallen woman, Trilby has a breakdown in which she repents and

164 emily godbey

Fig. 25. Wistful and Sweet, from George du Maurier, Trilby (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1894), 17. Trilby is dressed in a military coat, petticoat,
and slippers, as illustrated by du Maurier himself. Artwork in the public
domain.
regrets her naked bohemian past, eventually becoming the sing-
ing automaton of the evil, dirty, and very Jewish musician Sven-
gali, who is illustrated as a bearded, diabolical spider on his web.

Trilbymania: Selling a Fad and a Fetish

Trilby’s behavior was morally suspect, but the book itself was
described as “awfully bad,” even in 1895, as in a commentary in a
New York journal, the Critic.7 Contemporary scholars like Sarah
Gracombe have cut to the chase by calling Trilby “a very weird
novel.”8 The book includes foreign words on nearly every page,
mostly spoken by the Austro-Hungarian Svengali, who speaks
a patois of German, French, Yiddish, and nonsense. The heavily
illustrated book is melodramatic, overblown, and outlandish. As
a sample, consider this passage in which Svengali examines Tril-
by’s mouth as if he were buying a horse:
“Himmel! The roof of your mouth is like the dome of the Panthéon,
there is room in it for ‘toutes les glories de la France,’ and a little to
spare! The entrance to your throat is like the middle porch of St.
Sulpice when the doors are open for the faithful on All Saints’ Day,
and not one tooth is missing—thirty-two British teeth as white as
milk and as big as knuckle-bones! and your little tongue is scooped
out like the leaf of a pink peony, and the bridge of your nose is like
the belly of a Stradivarius—what a sounding board!”9

Du Maurier’s drawing for this scene is equally strange and unset-

tling, with a bearded, hook-nosed Svengali investigating Trilby’s
back molars at close range with opera glasses. A publisher made
clear that books like Trilby should not be put into the hands of
children or young girls because Trilby threatened conventional
morality.10 Some saw the book as an immoral tale, but others com-
mented that all the morally harmful parts were in French, which,
one might imagine, many readers could not understand, as “a con-
versation recently overheard . . . between two feminine young per-
sons in Indiana” revealed:
“What is this ‘Trilby’ everybody is talking about?” asked one of these.
“Oh,” replied the other, “it’s a book—a novel.” “They say it is awfully

166 emily godbey

 bad,” said the first young person. “Yes, I’ve heard so; but it isn’t so
at all. I read it clear through and there wasn’t anything bad in it. I
didn’t like it either; there is too much French in it.” “French,” com-
mented the first young woman, “well, that’s it then—all the bad part
is in French.” “I hadn’t thought of that,” mused the other one; “I sup-
pose that’s just the way of it.”11
The book was “dirty” in more than one sense, as in the early chap-
ters of the book, du Maurier describes the filthy, smelly, and muddy
Latin Quarter as fitting a bohemian artist’s lifestyle.12 Dirty or not,
the book was a sensational hit, and Emily Jenkins notes that it was
a best seller, in an age in which the best seller was a new concept,
with a middle class buying books and transforming reading into
a social activity. The book sold like hotcakes even after appearing
serially in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.13 Library copies flew
off the shelves; the Mercantile Library in New York had one hun-
dred copies, but that number was not enough to satisfy its mostly
male members’ wish to lay hands on the book.14
Du Maurier’s scandalous, talked-about novel tickled the late
nineteenth-century reader’s fascination with bohemian life, hyp-
notism, and fetishism of female body parts, particularly of “per-
fect feet.” The artists around Trilby were fascinated with her lovely,
slippered feet; one of the artists she poses for is “bewildered to find
that a real, bare, live human foot could be such a charming object
to look at” even on “a figure that seemed just then rather grotesque
in its mixed attire of military overcoat and female petticoat, and
nothing else!” Those feet become the subject of attention, as the
novel relates: “It is a wondrous thing, the human foot—like the
human hand; even more so, perhaps; but unlike the hand, with
which we are so familiar, it is seldom a thing of beauty in civilized
adults who go about in leather boots or shoes.”15 The feet represent
du Maurier’s distaste for aestheticism, as the foot unencumbered
by society’s leather boots embodies “happy evolution”—the anti-
dote to artificial and decadent aesthetics.16
With the Trilby craze, a whole universe of Trilby products
exploded as international mass-market commodities. There were
Trilby hats, Trilby stoves, Trilby stage adaptations, Trilby soap, and

trilby goes native 167

foot-shaped Trilby ice cream.17 There was even a Trilby sausage in
Philadelphia that was “something new, and fills a long-felt want.”
The sausages—rather obscenely—were claimed to “melt in your
mouth.”18 Midwestern women rushed to have their feet photo-
graphed, as a new pars pro toto portrait.19 Emily Jenkins notes that
the foot fetishism in Trilby “occurred just when that very activ-
ity was becoming commodified in brothels and clothing stores,”
as well as “the moment in which fetishism was first documented
and defined by doctors and psychiatric specialists.”20 Specifically,
in the spring of 1894, Freud was writing about the foot fetish case
of Emmy von N., a hypnotized patient, an analysis that would end
up in his Studies on Hysteria the following year.

Trilby Comes to Nebraska

One might think that Nebraska was far enough from Paris and Lon-
don to avoid Trilbymania, but in Omaha, “Trilby’s voice seems to
have carried that distance without the least trouble.”21 An Omaha
bookseller declared that Trilby (even with its profusion of pas-
sages in foreign languages) was his best seller ever, including the
$50 version (about $1,400 in today’s dollars).22 A druggist in Lin-
coln, just some sixty miles from Omaha, capitalized on the ideas
of magic and mesmerism to market two new patent medicines:
Trilby headache tablets cure as if by magic, when all others fail.
At Rigg’s Pharmacy cor 19th and O.23
Trilby’s “Truthful pills” is a specific in all cases of kidney and
liver troubles. Just one pellet at night does the work. At Rigg’s
pharmacy cor 12 and O.24
Mesmerism was in part “magic” that might make one more “truth-
ful” under a spell, but undoubtedly these pills did nothing of
the sort. As late as 1901, an Omaha confectioner offered “Trilby
kisses” for ten cents.25 A musical evening called “An Evening with
Trilby” was held in Omaha accompanied by seven lectures about
the book: “The Story of Trilby,” “Du Maurier, His Life and Work,”
“The French of Trilby,” “The Identity of Artists in Trilby,” “Tril-
by’s Voice and Method,” “Trilby as Hypnotic Subject,” and “Could

168 emily godbey

Trilby Be Successfully Dramatized?”26 The Lincoln Courier pub-
lished this piece of doggerel poetry written especially for the paper
about the phenomenon:
trilby
(Written for The Courier)
It’s Trilby this and Trilby that
Trilby shoes and Trilby hat,
Trilby songs and Trilby plays
Trilby hose and Trilby stays.
Everything beneath the sun
Everything that’s said or done
Has some connection
With that dreadful Trilby craze.
It’s Trilby here and Trilby there
Trilby feet and Trilby hair,
Trilby gowns, and what is worse
Here we have a Trilby verse.27
Live performances based upon the novel did come to the east-
ern Nebraska area. When the theatrical manager E. E. Rice adver-
tised for a woman to pose in a tableau vivant—costumed actors
posed in a silent and motionless scene—at Lincoln’s Garden The-
ater, he got an overwhelming response from “Trilbys” of all ages,
shapes, and sizes. As he remarked, “I have selected enough Trilbys
to have a different one for every night for the rest of the season. I
will put a society woman on Monday.”28 In Omaha and neighbor-
ing cities, a woman called Trilby was hypnotized onstage, and a
singer performed Trilby’s signature song supposedly under hyp-
nosis.29 The Lincoln Courier excitedly reported that a stage adapta-
tion was in the works. Although Paul Potter’s New York theatrical
company was supposed to start running the play in Lincoln on
May 29, 1895, Potter canceled the western tour.30 Instead, a dif-
ferent company played in Omaha during the first weeks of Janu-
ary 1896. Teenage girls were apparently enthusiastic about seeing
the play, as one critic said that “it is amazing to see the throngs of
girls in their teens that fill the house,” and noting that although a

trilby goes native 169

girl’s mother would think that the daughter is learning about vir-
tue, the daughter might be learning through the story that a fallen
woman wins everybody’s love.31
When a lesser production of Trilby came to Omaha, a Lin-
coln editor at the Courier had very unkind words for it, calling it
“melodramatically repulsive” and noting that it passed “the bor-
der line of decency.” “It was realism carried to an objectionable
point,” continued this critic. Rather oddly, he applied words to the
play that many would apply to the book, while praising the poorly
written novel: “[The play] was bald, uncouth, depraved, inartistic,
indelicate, grotesque. The book is artistic, delicate, refined, nat-
ural.”32 For this critic, the University of Nebraska offered a solu-
tion. He encouraged theater-going college men to hiss because the
play was so poor: “Hissing should be carefully used, but there are
times when actors and playwrights need it as an indication of the
public taste.”33 Commenting on the Trilby play, an Omaha critic
echoed the Lincoln colleague, naming Trilby a “contagion, which
ran its course, like the measles.”34 That Trilby could be considered
a disease indicates its low-class status, an aspect that will appear
later in this essay.

Astley David Middleton Cooper, Western Painter

Astley David Middleton Cooper, the painter of Omaha’s Trilby
sideshow attraction, was born in 1856 in St. Louis, Missouri, to
David Middleton Cooper, a physician, and Fannie Clark O’Fallon,
grandniece of the explorer William Clark. Legends about Cooper
say that he “was with the Custer and Crooke [sic] expeditions that
were sent out to fight the Indians, and went with General Grant
and his staff on their visit to the Pacific Coast.”35 Cooper generally
produced two kinds of paintings—western motifs with bison and
Native Americans, said to be based on his personal experience of
living with Native Americans (which may have been a complete
fabrication), and his mostly nude saloon beauties, many of which
were painted to settle Cooper’s bar tabs in the San Francisco and
San Jose areas, where he settled.36 Many of these in both genres
were in a trompe l’oeil style, as in Pygmalion’s Galatee of 1904 (fig.
26), where the sculptor’s model is shown coming to life. The mar-

170 emily godbey

ble steps of the room extended to the edge of the painting, with
the flowers and veil trailing over them in a style that suggested that
stone and silk were touchable and real. In Cooper’s time, one might
imagine that the illusion was further extended by putting real stairs
in front of the painting, as was done in the case of Omaha’s Trilby.
One seeming exception to Cooper’s repertoire of western themes
and barely clothed ladies, though still in the trompe l’oeil style that
brings the longed-for object into an illusion of three-dimensional
existence, was his painting of Mrs. Leland Stanford’s jewels, before
they were auctioned to raise money for Stanford University. How-
ever, Mrs. Stanford’s painting gives one relevant bit of informa-
tion about the painter; Cooper was said to have offended Mrs.
Stanford by being drunk when he arrived to paint. Reputed to be
a party boy, Cooper’s Egyptian-themed studio (with taxidermied
elk head, Navaho rug, and Native American artifacts) in San Jose
attests to his flair for the outrageous, flamboyant, and theatrical—
qualities that the Trilby sideshow also displayed.37
Astley D. M. Cooper’s Trilby painting, a female nude modeling
on a pedestal, was shown at the exposition’s Trilby Temple, where
the 8' × 12' painting was considered “the most popular exhibition on
the Midway.”38 L. Alonzo Lincoln of Boston purchased the painting
for $25,000 and organized the painting’s tour around the country
(the cost of the painting may have been a falsehood to attract the
audience’s attention). By the time it arrived in Omaha, the paint-
ing had been shown in Boston, New York, Cincinnati, Milwaukee,
Minneapolis, Grand Rapids, New Orleans, and Chicago, venues
which can be tracked through newspaper advertisements (fig. 27).
Cooper’s painting at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition was not with-
out its own colorful history; the Trilby Temple almost burnt down
during the fair when the very real draperies caught fire, and at the
conclusion of the exhibition, fair officials seized the painting as
collateral for an unpaid concession bill (a seizure that ended with
a brawl resulting in broken fingers and a broken gate).39 The Trilby
painting was then the subject of a court case as Alonzo Lincoln
and his wife attempted to get it back. Eventually Trilby must have
been returned to the owners, as there are records of other exhibit
venues, mostly at department stores, as late as 1900.

trilby goes native 171

Fig. 26. Astley D. M. Cooper, Pygmalion’s Galatee, 1904, oil on canvas, 120"
× 84" (304.8 × 213.4 cm.). No photograph, nor the Trilby painting itself, has
surfaced. This painting of an almost-nude woman on a pedestal with trompe
l’oeil elements like the flowers and steps resembles reports about Cooper’s
Trilby. Artwork in the public domain; scan courtesy of Jackson’s International
Auctioneers and Appraisers, Cedar Falls, Iowa.
Fig. 27. Trilby advertisement,
Omaha Bee, August 14, 1898,
p. 22. Typical advertisement
for Omaha’s Trilby exhibit.
Scan courtesy of the Library
of Congress’s Chronicling
America.
 Like the Trans-Mississippi Exposition itself, the painting has
since vanished; there seem to be no photographs of it, one sus-
pects because then the consumer saved the ten cents admission
fee to see it in person. For that reason, the official photographs
show only the exterior and lobby areas of the Trilby Temple (figs.
28, 29). Sandwiched between the Mystic Maze and the Moorish
Village, the building’s classical lines provided a contrast with the
Islamic imitations, and the classical structure of Ionic columns,
pilasters, and pediment gave the impression that this exhibit was
showing real Art, with a capital A. Fairgoers would have recog-
nized the architecture as a signifier of stable, established places of
commerce and culture like banks, museums, government build-
ings, and the Grand Court of the exposition (fig. 2). However, the
Temple was not made of marble, and it had a giant, swagged heart
on the pediment—an ornament not found in ancient Greece nor
in modern fine arts museums; this was a temple devoted not to
Aphrodite but to a popular goddess of love, Trilby, who certainly
walked on the earth with her perfect feet.
The two wall paintings surrounding the lobby entrance (fig.
29) hinted at the saloon painting style, although the subjects were
more clothed and not by A. D. M. Cooper. The entrance space dis-
played aspirational cues for sophistication (rugs, piano, classical
architectural elements) as well as indices that this was a space that
acknowledged the commercial world. The giant heart above the
doorway and the painted floral swags at the ceiling with dangling,
lacy hearts look like paper lace Valentine’s Day cards, which were
made by machine and available in stores at the time. The hearts
and floral motifs on the exterior and the interior of the space
were based upon the cover design for the 1894 Harper Brothers
edition of the novel, which had a gold-winged heart (signifying
Trilby) atop a green spiderweb (Svengali) surrounded by floral
swags and ribbons. In addition, the heart above the doorway had
newfangled electric light bulbs, one of the central attractions of
amusement parks and exhibitions at the turn of the century. The
Trans-Mississippi was made to be seen at night (fig. 71), an effect
that pleased even Ethel Evans, art critic for the Omaha Bee: “If
you imagine that nothing could be more beautiful than this view

174 emily godbey

Fig. 28. F. A. Rinehart, Trilby Temple, Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition, Omaha, 1898. From the collections of the Omaha Public Library.
Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
Fig. 29. F. A. Rinehart, The Great Trilby, Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition, Omaha, 1898. From the Collections of the Omaha Public Library.
Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
of the Lagoon Court at twilight, it is necessary to wait until by a
magic touch each building is outlined by electric lights.”40

The Painting’s Commercial Appeal

Cooper’s painting at Omaha’s Midway was part of popular culture,
and this essay is an attempt to recuperate and understand that envi-
ronment from very scarce source material. The exposition corpo-
ration left almost nothing in the way of paperwork documenting
concession contracts, minutes, or other evidence of their exchanges
with the entrepreneurs and exhibitors who created the fair. What
is left of Cooper’s painting in particular are the newspaper reports
and advertisements, most of which highlight the painting’s cash
value, fame, and verisimilitude. For example: “Cooper has repre-
sented du Maurier’s heroine as posing in the “Altogether” for the
art class in Paris, and so true to life that one can hardly believe it
is a painting. It seems like a beautiful living model. There is noth-
ing indelicate about it, for it is purely beautiful. The figure stands
in an alcove and the relief is so wonderful it seems to be right in
the room instead of on the canvas. The picture has been visited
by more than 2,000,000 people in the last three years and will be
likely to draw large crowds here.”41
Articles ran before the painting’s arrival to drum up interest,
excitedly pronouncing, “‘Trilby’ is coming; not the real, live ‘Trilby,’
but so nearly like her that you can’t tell the difference.”42 Adver-
tisements stressed the cost of the painting and number of people
who had already seen it since it had been “shown in all the prin-
cipal cities of the country and has created such a furore in art cir-
cles.”43 Reports noted famous visitors like Mayor Carter Harrison
of Chicago, who “paid the artist, Cooper, a very high compli-
ment.”44 Hailed as one of the most popular exhibitions, the Trilby
Temple was also said to be “one of the best paying attractions of
the exhibition, as ladies are especially charmed with it,” although
why it might be popular with the ladies was not explained.45 The
claims about ladies enjoying the exhibit may or may not be true,
but these reports may also have been there to encourage ladies to
see a nude painting of someone of their own gender.
In fact, the illusionistic effect of the painting itself had some

trilby goes native 177

of Svengali’s spellbinding hypnotic powers, as reports exclaimed,
“Trilby holds her visitors spellbound with admiration.”46 A puff in
the Omaha World-Herald continued, “There is something about
the picture which casts a spell upon the visitor as you gaze upon
this life-like form. You are thrilled with its wonderful realism and
the lips almost unconsciously utter the words ‘How beautiful!’”47
Newspaper articles praised its “wonderful realism,” a trompe l’oeil
effect completed by the objects in the exhibition space that were
represented in the painting, including the actual rug and steps.
“Cooper has wrought a work so true to life in every detail that you
can hardly believe your eyes,” crowed a report, crowning Cooper
a modern-day Zeuxis.48 The “figure seems to be three feet away
from the canvas—a marvelous effect.”49 Articles described the ever-
present rubes of the Midway who asked, “When does she dance?”50
The Trilby Temple was right next to the Moorish Village danc-
ing girls, making this question more understandable.51 Another
country bumpkin exclaimed as he viewed the work, “That haint
no paintin’, Bill. That’s one of them livin’ pictures like we see’d at
the orpery house last year. They can’t fool me, by gosh.”52

Controversies about Nudity at the Western Exhibition:

“Give Venus a Bathrobe”
As others in this volume attest, the Trans-Mississippi aimed to
amaze the country with an aesthetic experience in a western venue.
The Boston-based architect of the exposition noted in Century mag-
azine that it was a surprise that Omaha could be the White City to
the West, writing, “The appreciation of art and the power to pro-
duce it is, therefore, an unexpected element in many of the trans-
Mississippi States.”53 Efforts were made to enhance the buildings
by adorning them with vaguely classical allegorical statuary (fig.
30). However, not everyone enjoyed the officials’ efforts. Lieutenant
Maurer of the Salvation Army went to a religious meeting on the
exhibition’s grounds a few days before the public opening and was
horrified at the “shocks against decency in the public gaze” in the
statuary adorning the buildings—statuary that was supposed to
elevate the climate of the fair.54 Maurer enlisted the help of a col-
league who also found the artwork improper and lewd. On May 23,

178 emily godbey

1898, Lieutenant Dorothy Maurer and Ensign McCormick decided
to solve the problem by climbing ladders they found nearby and
using an ax to chop off offending body parts. Lieutenant Maurer
held the ax, while Ensign McCormick held the ladder. An evan-
gelical newspaper called Maurer a “lassie of a reformer,” who per-
formed “a valuable moral contribution to the show.” In the eyes
of the two Salvation Army women, Robert Bringhurst’s figures
on top of the Arch of the States were indecent; the vandal even
wished that she had had more time to damage more of the nudes,
although she left a few bushels of arms, legs, and other parts for
the groundskeepers to collect. “‘It was hard work,’ said one of the
women, because the two had to climb a high fence with barbed
wire that tore their hands and clothes.”55 The two were arrested
and quickly posted bond. The Presbyterian church endorsed their
actions with a resolution.56
While the evangelical newspaper reported favorably on the act,
more urbane newspapers used the incident as a funny story about
“overfinickal” [sic] religious zealots.57 Perhaps to point to how Oma-
ha’s prudery might be received elsewhere, the Bee collected edito-
rial comments: the Chicago Tribune noted that something must
have been “radically wrong” with the lieutenant because “[w]hen
a young woman mounts a ladder and climbs on her hands and
knees to a position where the burly minions of the law can only
prance around below her and beg her to come down and be arrested
she must be in deadly earnest.” The Chicago Post reflected, “We
are inclined to think that the spectacle of a girl climbing a barbed
wire fence and scaling a great arch must be quite as distressing
as anything in the line of the nude art that was likely to be exhib-
ited there.” The Chicago Times-Herald wisecracked that the Salva-
tion Army ladies practiced the “ax standard of art criticism” and
implored “the exposition managers to provide Apollo with a pair
of “Apollo $4 pants” and to “give Venus a bathrobe at least.” For
the Cupid, the paper recommended “perhaps the little fellow can
manage to escape unpleasant attention by donning knickerbock-
ers.”58 In official photographs of the exhibition, one can see the lad-
ders left in convenient places (fig. 30), although they are not the
ones that the Salvation Army used to reach the offensive statues.

trilby goes native 179

Fig. 30. F. A. Rinehart, Fine Arts Building, Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition, Omaha, 1898. From the Collections of the Omaha Public Library.
Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu. St. Louis
sculptor Robert Porter Bringhurst, also the sculptor for the Arch of the States,
produced eight heroically sized figures of Fame (bearing a palm on either
arm) for the pediment, plus twelve groups of three for the corners, six or
seven feet tall, twenty groups of cupids and eagles, and a running frieze of
figures symbolical of the arts. Note the convenient ladder at left.
The Question of Art with a Capital A
In contrast to the condemnation of the nudity in the official art and
the resulting vandalism, the worst criticism that Trilby received
was that it did not qualify as art. The Omaha Bee’s art critic, Ethel
Evans, took the painting to task, saying that the girl’s anatomy was
patently incorrect, quipping,
She rests, or is supposed to rest, on her right foot, therefore the right
hip should be higher than the left one; it can’t be otherwise in life
unless her left leg was several inches longer than the right one, which
must have been the case with his model as her two hips are opposite
one another—and yet the oracle tells us that all artists and doctors
agree that it is the most wonderful anatomical picture ever painted!
I think a surgeon would say she ought to be sent to the hospital and I
am sure an artist would. Not that one expects perfection of drawing,
only no deformities. The oracle tells us also, with the same enthusi-
asm and tone of voice with which he formerly recited the multipli-
cation tables, that her measurements agree in every particular with
the Venus de Milo!59

In this way, Evans vehemently disagreed with the promoters’ claims

of “perfect anatomy,” hurling the same criticism of deformity at
celebrated French academic artist William Bouguereau, whose
work was in the official art exhibition, saying that his painting
showed a “dislocated shoulder and maimed hand.”60 Of Trilby,
Evans sneered, “a photograph colored by receipt would be quite
as interesting and have the advantage of being in drawing.” As
a result, Evans recommended that her readers view more artis-
tic nudes present in the official hall for art exhibition—minus of
course the misshapen Bouguereau nude—rather than Cooper’s
Midway show. In another article, Evans expressed a snobbishness
about art and realized that her criticism of Cooper’s picture was
probably going to fall on deaf ears: “A good picture is not apt to
appeal to the uninitiated any more than does good literature or
good music.” Evans did not have positive things to say about the
uninitiated or the unwashed masses, remarking that “en masse
people are a mob.”61 Art for the masses was even less appealing for

trilby goes native 181

her, since she came from an aesthetic tradition (art for art’s sake),
with all of the elitism that those words imply.
Evans directly questioned Cooper’s status as an artist: “Who is
Mr. Astley Cooper? He is not heard of at any of the exhibitions, he
is unknown to artists, and yet we are informed that he has accom-
plished what artists have striven in vain for centuries to accom-
plish, and the people believe this oracle.” Cooper was not exactly
unknown, but undoubtedly he did not qualify as the right kind
of artist, as he was more of a commercial painter whose work was
displayed in places of business. For example, Cooper had a work
in Chicago on display both before and after the World’s Colum-
bian Exposition, but not at the exposition itself. Downtown depart-
ment stores showed Cooper’s 11' × 13' (!) painting, The Morning of
the Crucifixion (1892).62
L. Alonzo Lincoln shot back in Evans’s own newspaper, saying
that Evans must have been standing in the wrong place to appre-
ciate the painting:
The feet being foreshortened would make them appear small for the
figure unless this fact were taken into consideration, then the arms
being uplifted would have the effect of making the neck look much
shorter and thicker than if the arms were down. Then again, the fig-
ure is much larger than life, being six feet and one inch high, and
when standing close and selecting any one part for criticism such
things as the eyes and mouth, or other parts of the figure might seem
too large unless this fact was taken into consideration. The picture
should be viewed at a distance of at least thirty feet away to get the
proper proportion.63

Lincoln backed up his claim by saying that an anatomy profes-

sor at Cincinnati Medical College “brought his entire class” to
see the painting, and that another anatomy professor at Tulane
praised the nude as the “grandest picture from an anatomical
standpoint.” While doubting Evans’s training and ability as an art
connoisseur, Lincoln made an interesting point: “She also forgets
that there are several kinds of art, just as there are several kinds
of horses, and that all pictures should not be criticized alike any
more than a race horse should be criticized for not being able to

182 emily godbey

draw a heavy load,” a thought-provoking comment that bears some
consideration in this discussion. Evans, coming from a wealthy
and educated background, preferred high Art over popular and
commercial art. Perhaps what offended her was that the Midway
painting was advertised as an artistic masterpiece, not as a piece
of popular art. Even the word “masterpiece” is a coded word to
someone as educated as Evans was; that term originally signified
a painting apprentice’s final work—the final exam, if you will—in
order to be formally admitted to the painters’ guild. Cooper had
not received any such stamp of approval. As such, Trilby was out
of bounds, in Evans’s opinion, falsely claiming territory in which
it did not belong. As Wendy Katz’s essay in this volume indicates,
when low culture stayed within its boundaries, it could stay, just
like the brothel outside the exposition’s gates.
However, when objects crossed the line between high and low
art, some—like Evans—felt that order had to be restored. Evans
was not the only person who felt that boundaries had been violated:
A touch of prudery was manifested on the grounds yesterday when
the guards were sent to round up and bring in the netoscopes and
artoscopes that have been displaying views of living pictures [tableaux
vivant] and reproductions of famous paintings and pieces of statu-
ary. It was stated that an order had been received from headquarters
to this effect on the grounds that the pictures were immoral. In view
of the fact that not one of the pictures begins to compare with some
of the sights in no less than half a dozen concessions on the grounds,
the action occasioned considerable comment.64

In this example, when “famous paintings and statuary” (which one

would assume included plenty of high art nudes) were displayed
by the vendors in a popular medium, that line was crossed. The
vandalism in 1890 of Bouguereau’s Return of Spring was another
case of an object blurring the line between high and low art.
Bouguereau was an acknowledged academic artist, but the van-
dal who threw the chair into the painting could not square what
looked like a brothel painting in a high art venue. The confu-
sion between where the vandal thought the painting belonged
and its actual venue incited the man—who was later judged to be

trilby goes native 183

insane—to damage the painting.65 When Evans writes that Tril-
by’s “face is painted according to the colored calendar type of
beauty; eyes much too large, mouth too red, nose very straight,”
she attempted to instruct an audience that genuinely liked the
“colored calendar type of beauty.” Evans was preaching to a peo-
ple who had already embraced the cheap chromolithograph; hers
was a losing battle, for many Americans hung chromolithographs
on the walls with little sadness that the inexpensive, democratic
images were not paintings.66 In fact, companies like Currier &
Ives and Prang specialized in colored lithographs with prices
that almost anyone could afford. While Cooper’s former client,
Mrs. Leland Stanford, would have probably agreed with Evans’s
argument, likely many of Mrs. Stanford’s staff enjoyed the litho-
graphs and paint-by-number paintings that Evans detested and
saw in Cooper’s work.
Alonzo Lincoln was not done with Evans yet. He submitted
another response to the editors of the Omaha World-Herald in
which he wrote, “Art criticism is a very peculiar thing. Few critics
reflect how much easier it is to destroy than to construct.” After
expressing his opinion that Evans was not qualified to judge, Lin-
coln appended a poem challenging grousing critics:
I had a dream one night,
And in my dreams I seemed to reach
A place where critics
Had to practice what they preach,
And if they ridiculed a thing
Or at it poked their fun
They straightaway must arise and show
Just how it should be done.67
Lincoln wrote that if Evans were to see the painting correctly, “I
am sure that she [would] apologize to ‘Trilby.’” Lincoln could wait
for a cold day in Hades before Evans was going to back down, and
it seems apparent that he did not know that Evans was a trained
artist in the European tradition as well as an accredited drawing
teacher in the public schools.
Evans, however, well understood what made the Trilby painting

184 emily godbey

such an attraction, outside of the sensational, timely subject mat-
ter: “The main attraction about the picture is the classic entrance
to the building in which it is placed, the clever way in which it
is lighted and staged, and the fact that your attention is called to
all the details, the roses, the cupids and the miniature on the jar-
dinière, each drooping leaf of the palm and the worn out velvet
of the dais.”68 Evans correctly comprehended that showmanship
and verisimilitude sold the Trilby painting, especially since lectur-
ers pointed out all the details in what was surely glowing praise.69
With the lecturers comparing the actual rug on the Trilby Temple’s
floor with its painted representation in the painting, it is no won-
der that viewers enjoyed the work as their attentions were directed
to the very aspects that the showman had hyped in advertising
and newspapers had praised. Trilby’s exhibition with painted and
actual objects also compares favorably to the touring exhibition
of Bouguereau’s Return of Spring, which had been severely torn
in 1890 by the Omaha man throwing a chair at it. That painting,
along with the chair used to damage it, went on tour as a unit.
The disagreement between Ethel Evans and Alonzo Lincoln
surely was fueled by the fact that Lincoln was out to make money,
not to educate people on the merits of Art. In this way, the battle
between high, academically informed Art and popular art occur-
ring at the exhibition echoes arguments in du Maurier’s Trilby. Du
Maurier was absolutely anti-aestheticism, to the point that in the
serial version, he made fun of James McNeill Whistler, whom he
knew, mocking him as Joe Sibley, the “Idle Apprentice.” Litigious
Whistler threatened legal action against Harper’s (he had already
sued John Ruskin for libel in 1878), and for the book version, the
Whistler character became a rather innocuous Swiss man. Some
believe that du Maurier was so vehemently against aestheticism
because while studying at the Antwerp Academy in 1857, he suf-
fered a detached retina in his left eye and lost his sight, virtually
ending his aspirations of being a fine artist. Instead, with his lim-
ited sight, he was relegated to being an illustrator—not his origi-
nal intention. In Trilby, his distaste for aestheticism is expressed
through the ongoing praise for Trilby’s natural, beautiful feet that
no amount of imposed, studied artifice could improve. Further

trilby goes native 185

supporting this viewpoint is the fact that the hypnotized, sing-
ing Trilby becomes more and more an automaton instead of the
authentic individual whom one meets in the first chapters.
When Evans and Lincoln attack each other, they are repeat-
ing some of the arguments in Trilby. Evans’s world was one that
included formal training in the approved academy and art muse-
ums, while Lincoln’s was one directed at a popular audience uncon-
cerned whether the painter had academic training. Cooper’s Trilby
was part of a system of buying and selling, and it is no accident
that some of Trilby’s later engagements were in large department
stores where the public eagerly paid for Trilby hats, shoes, and mis-
cellanea during the craze as well as other products already men-
tioned in this essay, like the factory-made paper lace Valentine’s
Day cards that inspired the Trilby Temple’s architectural ornamen-
tation. The department store offered free viewing of the work to
generate foot traffic through the store or directly generated reve-
nue by charging a dime to see the work.
And why would the public put down a dime? They had already
been told of the monetary value of the work and of the numbers of
people who had already seen it. Whether the painting was actually
worth $25,000 or had been seen by two million people was abso-
lutely irrelevant because the strategy clearly worked on a numbers-
oriented late-nineteenth-century public. This situation reveals an
aspect of modernity that drove Trilbymania: the cult of celebrity,
in which fame accrues to the already famous, reaffirming one of
Trilby’s messages. As Trilby herself is transformed into a marvel-
ous singer, she becomes a supercharged celebrity (one with lovely,
erotic feet), in the same way that the book itself became a (shoot-
ing) star.70 The real or overestimated fame of Cooper’s Trilby was
therefore linked to a modern system of marketing, commerce,
and celebrity that Evans did not—or chose not to—acknowledge,
favoring instead her vision of pure, aesthetic Art.
The story of the Midway’s Trilby painting highlights a number
of issues of the Omaha exhibition, as the painting treads the deli-
cate line between realism and fakery, as well as between education
and entertainment while challenging the boundaries between high
and low art. While the Trilby painting may or may not have shown

186 emily godbey

incredible—even spellbinding—verisimilitude, the Indian Con-
gress, in which a large contingent of Native Americans camped on
the exposition’s grounds, was originally intended to be an ethno-
graphic lesson. The Indian Congress, however, as Akim Reinhardt
discusses in another essay in this book, devolved into sham bat-
tles (fig. 44), complete with mock scalpings for delighted paying
customers. After the sham battles became an irresistible, profit-
able entertainment, James Mooney from the Bureau of Ameri-
can Ethnology called the Omaha Indian Congress a Wild West
sideshow and not an ethnographic exhibit.71 The Trilby painting
was probably no more realistic than the average saloon painting
or chromolithograph, just as the sham battles performed by real
Native Americans were no more realistic than Buffalo Bill’s per-
formances. In addition, the Trilby painting mirrors an exhibition
that—unlike so many others—actually turned a profit because it
gave the fairgoers what they wanted, not the purely educational
experience that many of the fair planners and high-minded advi-
sors had in mind. The art critic’s and ethnologist’s recommenda-
tions would go unheeded; entertainment was more interesting
than education, popular culture more compelling than high Art
with that capital A.

Trilby Was Actually a Western Farm Girl

Finally, publicity around Cooper’s painting transformed what had
been an international book sensation with a leading character of
complex multinational background into a purely western story.
Cooper, originally from St. Louis but working in San Jose, Cal-
ifornia, was known for his paintings of Native Americans and
saloon paintings of nude or nearly nude women, so he was a Trans-
Mississippi native—and so was his nude model. At the time of the
exhibition, newspapers endlessly ran a story entitled “The Story of
a Model: She Posed for One Picture and Lifted a Farm Mortgage.”72
The newspaper story relates that the California artist was looking
for the perfect model for a Trilby painting and heard about a stun-
ning young woman in Kansas City; Cooper traveled from Califor-
nia to Kansas City to meet her. The exquisitely beautiful “country
girl” from western Missouri had lost her father after he endured

trilby goes native 187

crisis after crisis on their farm, much like Trans-Mississippi citi-
zens had experienced during the Money Panic of 1893, frequent
droughts, and insect onslaughts. Like Trilby, the Kansas City model
was an “unfettered child of nature.” The natural beauty “grew up
wild and free, unrestrained in spirits and in form. No corsets ever
encircled her waist and no tight shoes distorted her feet.”
In an interview, the young woman adds to the pathos by remark-
ing that she was brought up in a convent after the death of her
father. In this interview, she also says that she secured a job mod-
eling cloaks in a clothing store. As she and her mother were about
to lose the family farm, the daughter posed nude for Cooper, with
her mother’s consent and studio presence. In the interview, the sit-
uation becomes a bit more complex, with the young lady object-
ing to posing in the nude, commenting, “Imagine my horror! I
refused. I, who had always been noted for my modesty, to pose in
the ‘altogether’!” However, the woman’s mother and a friend per-
suaded her to do the job.73
The self-identified “westerner by birth,” who was “as perfect as
a picture,” was paid enough for being Cooper’s nude model to lift
the farm mortgage. With her nude modeling, the family survived
the farm and financial crises and became western landowners with-
out a bank note. At the end of the model story, the Kansas City
woman herself becomes not a tawdry nude model, nor a grisette,
but a perfectly respectable “wife of a Kansas City businessman.”
The interview adds another twist to the story in that the young lady
does this service for Cooper not only for the money but because
she “was doing a service for art.” She tells the Washington Times
reporter, “I was promised a sum of money large enough to lift a
mortgage on our homestead and braced up with the thought that
this was art with the big A, and so here I am.”74 Although Ethel
Evans of the Omaha Bee would clearly deny the model’s claims
for being a part of Art, the story adds an element of moral cor-
rectness instead of bohemian or aesthetic decadence. In this way,
the promoters of Omaha’s Trilby painting portrayed the model as
a shining example of trans-Mississippi history and western deter-
mination. The “Story of a Model” was reproduced almost verbatim
in the newspapers wherever Cooper’s Trilby traveled, the imag-

188 emily godbey

inary western backstory that transformed du Maurier’s Parisian
grisette and model with perfect feet into a homegrown, morally
sound western farm girl.

Notes
1. George du Maurier, Trilby, intro. Elaine Showalter, notes Dennis Denisoff
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13. All other references are to this edition.
2. Du Maurier, Trilby, 16.
3. Du Maurier, Trilby, 15.
4. Du Maurier, Trilby, 66, 67.
5. “Grisettes: A Class of Women Who Live Modestly in Their Shame,” Sioux City
Journal, November 4, 1897, 2.
6. Du Maurier, Trilby, 36. Translation: “Because she loved much” (Luke 7:47).
7. “The Lounger,” Critic 32 (May 4, 1895): 333.
8. Sarah Gracombe, “Converting Trilby: Du Maurier on Englishness, Jewishness,
and Culture,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 58, no. 1 (June 2003): 76.
9. Du Maurier, Trilby, 50–51.
10. “Publisher Richmond Makes a Clear Distinction,” Lucifer the Light Bearer
[Topeka ks], August 25, 1897, 270. Jude the Obscure and A Lady of Quality also
merit his blacklist.
11. The Critic as quoted in Joseph Benson Gilder and Jeannette Leonard Gilder,
Trilbyana: The Rise and Progress of a Popular Novel (New York: Critic, 1895), 26. See
also Kimberly J. Stern, “Rule Bohemia: The Cosmopolitics of Subculture in George
du Maurier’s ‘Trilby,’” Victorian Literature and Culture 38, no. 2 (2010): 547–70, who
suggests du Maurier’s novel makes the case against just such provincial nationalism
as the two Indiana women are supposed to display.
12. Joseph Bristow, “‘Dirty Pleasure’: Trilby’s Filth,” in Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and
Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005), 155–81.
13. Emily Jenkins, “Trilby: Fads, Photographers, and ‘Over-Perfect’ Feet,” Book
History 1 (1998): 224, 226, 229.
14. Gilder and Gilder, Trilbyana, 22.
15. Du Maurier, Trilby, 16, 17.
16. Christine Ferguson, “Footnotes on Trilby: The Human Foot as Evolutionary
Icon in Late Victorian Culture,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28, no. 2 (2006): 127–
44; Lisa Tickner, “Bohemianism and the Cultural Field: Trilby and Tarr,” Art His-
tory 34, no. 5 (November 2011): 978–1011.
17. On Trilby subculture, see Stern, “Rule Bohemia,” 547–70. Wilkie Collins’s
Woman in White (1859) and James A. M. Whistler’s painted version of 1863 are inter-
esting predecessors, especially as Whistler and du Maurier were at odds over aes-
theticism. Like Trilbymania, there were accompanying stage shows, commodities,
and parodies. Nicholas Daly, “The Woman in White: Whistler, Hiffernan, Courbet,
du Maurier,” Modernism/Modernity 12, no. 1 (January 2005): 1–25.
18. The Critic quoted in Gilder and Gilder, Trilbyana, 26.

trilby goes native 189

 19. “New Photographic Fad,” Kansas Semi-Weekly Capital 22, no. 80 (October
5, 1900): 2. “A photograph has been published by [Napoleon] Sarony, of New York,
called the ‘Trilby Foot.’ It is tolerably graceful, but the little toe is weak. It is aston-
ishing to what extremes the Americans have gone over du Maurier’s story.” “Photo-
graphs of the Month,” Practical Photographer [London], no. 69 (September 1895): 287.
20. Jenkins, “Trilby,” 254–55. See also Robert A. Nye, “The Medical Origins of
Sexual Fetishism,” in Fetishism as a Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William
Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 13–30; Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,”
in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed.
James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1961), 21, 154; Freud, “Three Essays on the The-
ory of Sexuality,” in Complete Works, 7, 153–55.
21. Gilder and Gilder, Trilbyana, 21.
22. “Books That Sell and Others That Do Not,” Omaha World-Herald, July 23,
1899, 25.
23. Lincoln Courier, October 26, 1895, 12.
24. Lincoln Courier, January 11, 1896, 9.
25. “Delicious and Pure,” Omaha Bee, October 9, 1901, 12.
26. Gilder and Gilder, Trilbyana, 21.
27. William Reed Dunroy, “Trilby,” Lincoln Courier, April 27, 1895, 9.
28. “‘Trilbys’ by the Hundreds,” Lincoln Courier, March 2, 1895, 4. Even society
women from the Daughters of the American Revolution bought into Trilbymania,
staging their own tableaux on Easter in 1895. Daughters of the American Revolu-
tion, New York City Chapter, Tableaux from Trilby under the Auspices of the New
York City Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution for the Benefit of the
Barnard College Chair Fund; Easter Monday Afternoon, 1895, at the Lyceum Theatre,
New York (New York: n.p, 1895).
29. “It Burlesqued Burlesque: The White Crook Company Gives a Very Bad Per-
formance,” Sioux City Journal, October 10, 1897, 4; “Amusements,” Omaha World-
Herald, September 27, 1897, 2; “Events in Council Bluffs,” Omaha World-Herald,
February 20, 1898, 7.
30. “‘Trilby’ Has Cancelled All Western Dates,” Lincoln Courier, May 25, 1895, 5.
31. “The Tendency of ‘Trilby’—a Fragment,” Lucifer the Light Bearer, October
8, 1898, 326.
32. W.M.S. [W. Morton Smith, who was also the political editor], “The Stage,”
Lincoln Courier, January 11, 1896, 5. Smith sold the paper to feminist Sarah Butler
Harris in September 1896, and she brought Willa Cather in as an associate editor.
33. “We and Our Neighbors,” Lincoln Courier, January 18, 1896, 6.
34. “Amusements,” Omaha World-Herald, January 27, 1898, 4. Some pieces of
history one simply cannot invent, like the story of the two actors who escape just
over the Nebraska border to Iowa in order to get married in a big hurry: “William
Lackey, the ‘William Lackaye’ of the stage and the Svengali of Paul Potter’s ‘Trilby’
play, and Alice Evans, an actress, came from Omaha to Council Bluffs this after-
noon and were married in haste in the courthouse.” Alice Evans played “Trilby”
in the A. M. Palmer company. Sam T. Jack, another director, said, “She fell in love
with ‘Svengali’ eight months ago, before he had made fame in that role and, known
to just a few friends, the couple have carried on a courtship under the mask of Lit-

190 emily godbey

tle Billie’s play love case with Trilby.” The bridal couple did not bring any witnesses,
“but Dr. F. S. Thomas of the County Insanity Commission and Claude Dye of the
County Treasurer’s office were impressed into service.” “‘Svengali’ Lackaye Is Hyp-
notized: He Marries Miss Alice Evans, an Actress in the ‘Trilby’ Company,” Chicago
Daily Tribune, September 26, 1895, 4.
35. “The Artist,” Anaconda [mt] Standard, October 16, 1910, 3.
36. An article from 1964 asserts that Cooper lived with Indians for seven years. “Art
Piece Mixup Very Confusing,” Reno Evening Gazette, March 4, 1964, 19. Researcher
Annie Ronan is of the opinion that the story about the Indians was just marketing,
not fact. Personal communication with Annie Ronan. Ronan curated the 2015 Stan-
ford University exhibition entitled “Astley D. M. Cooper and Mrs. Stanford’s Jewels.”
Cooper is also associated with the Taos, New Mexico, art colony, which specialized
in Native American subjects.
37. In Cooper’s Viewing the Curios (1909), an admiring man in full Plains Indian
costume lends authenticity to Cooper’s highly illusionistic rendition of a trophy-
mounted bison head and war implements, which are apparently part of a European-
American collection. The title consigns both the traditionally clothed Native viewer
and the artistically arranged trophies on the wall to the past, albeit a past that is meant
to stir nostalgia in the collector. Buffalo Bill Cody owned this and three other pic-
tures by Cooper, including a similar picture of Native artifacts arranged on a wall,
titled Relics of the Past—the Buffalo Head (before 1910), which included a portrait of
Cody. Cody hung the deceptively (theatrically) realistic painting in the Irma Hotel in
Cody, Wyoming. Robert Bonner, “‘Not an Imaginary Picture Altogether but Parts’:
The Artistic Legacy of Buffalo Bill Cody,” Montana: The Magazine of Western His-
tory 61, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 40–59, 94–96.
38. “Glimpses of the Midway; New Features at the Darkness and Dawn Conces-
sion,” Omaha World-Herald, September 4, 1898, 6.
39. “‘Trilby’s’ Narrow Escape,” Omaha World-Herald, August 31, 1898, 5. For the
legal tangle, see “Where Is Trilby?” Omaha World-Herald, October 16, 1898, 10; “Trilby
Walked Out: Scrimmage Ensued, but She Followed Attorney Strickler,” Omaha World-
Herald, November 4, 1898, 8; “Trilby Escaped,” Omaha World-Herald, November 5,
1898, 9; “Trying to Find Trilby: Mrs. Lincoln Secures a Mandamus to Compel Con-
stable Learn,” Omaha World-Herald, November 29, 1898, 3. Alonzo Lincoln would
go on to exhibit Cooper’s Cleopatra in an Egyptian temple at the Pan-American
Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in 1901. See Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skep-
ticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press), 153–84.
40. Ethel Evans, “Art at the Exhibition,” Omaha Bee, June 13, 1898, 5.
41. “Amusements,” Omaha Bee, August 14, 1898, 22.
42. “Glimpses of the Midway: Gay Trilby Is Coming to Enliven the Street,” Omaha
World-Herald, August 7, 1898, 6. None other than Willa Cather would find her “real
Trilby” in 1900: “The real Trilby has come across the seas in the person of Miss Clara
Butt, the Trilby whose voice differed from other voices as the flavor of the peach dif-
fers from apples, the Trilby with the voice without a soul. Certainly she is unique
among contraltos and unique among women. Conceive, if you will, a woman six
feet two by actual measurement, slender, willowy, serpentine; long, long arms, nar-

trilby goes native 191

row shoulders, a trifle stooped, outlines almost epicene, a small head set on a long,
curved throat, heavy lidded, languid eyes, a face common and middle class, and a
nose which belongs to the genus of cheapside and you have Clara Butt.” Willa Cather,
“The Passing Show,” Lincoln Courier, January 6, 1900, 2.
43. “Glimpses of the Midway: Gay Trilby,” Omaha World-Herald, August 7, 1898, 6.
44. “Glimpses of the Midway: Distinguished New Yorkers Take in the Palace of
Mysteries,” Omaha World-Herald, October 9, 1898, 2.
45. “Glimpses of the Midway: Writes a Splendid Tribute to the Cyclorama,” Omaha
World-Herald, September 8, 1898, 2; “A Great Painting,” Omaha World-Herald, August
21, 1898, 3. Also see “Third One for the Crowds,” Omaha World-Herald, August 25,
1898, 2: “The great ‘Trilby’ is drawing crowds of enthusiastic visitors. Every one who
views this magnificent masterpiece goes away singing its praises. Ladies are espe-
cially enthusiastic and come in parties every day to see it.”
46. “Glimpses of the Midway: Splendid Tribute to the Cyclorama,” Omaha World-
Herald, September 8, 1898, 2.
47. “The Great Tribly [sic],” Omaha World-Herald, August 28, 1898, 2. On hypno-
tism in painting, see Catherine McNickle Chastain, “Louis Eilshemius’s ‘Svengali-
Like Stare’: Mesmerism and the Artist’s Figurative Paintings,” Nineteenth-Century
Art Worldwide 5, no. 2 (Autumn 2006), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org.
48. “The Great Tribly,” Omaha World-Herald, August 28, 1898, 2.
49. Omaha World-Herald, October 16, 1898, 10.
50. “Glimpses of the Midway: Splendid Tribute to the Cyclorama,” Omaha World-
Herald, September 8, 1898, 2.
51. “Glimpses of the Midway,” World-Herald, September 8, 1898, 2. Because the
Moorish Village concession did not pay their fees to the exposition corporation, and
it was the Moorish Village concession that had subleased space to the Trilby Tem-
ple, the corporation seized Trilby at the end of the exposition. That is not to say that
L. Lincoln always played by the rules either. When the Trilby painting was shown
in Washington dc, Lincoln tried to get around the license tax using laws that were
valid for a mutoscope company, which did not have to pay the fee. The district asses-
sor thought differently and ordered that the exhibition pay the license fee. “License
Tax on All Exhibitions Charging Admission Fees,” Baltimore Sun, April 27, 1899, 2.
52. “Glimpses of the Midway: Darkness and Dawn Concession,” Omaha World-
Herald, September 4, 1898, 6. The rube at the exposition or amusement park was a
stock comic motif, as in Marietta Holley’s books in which a dull-witted “Samantha”
is dropped into various unfamiliar situations.
53. Charles Howard Walker, “The Great Exposition at Omaha,” Century 55, no.
4 (February 1898): 518–21, 518.
54. New York Evangelist, 69, no. 23 (June 9, 1898): 16.
55. “Omaha’s Art Crusade,” Kansas City Journal, May 27, 1898, 4.
56. “Indorsing Vandalism,” Kansas City Journal, May 30, 1898, 4.
57. “Dedicated by the Scribes,” Saint Paul Globe, May 30, 1898, 7.
58. “Omaha’s Art Crusade,” Omaha Daily Bee, May 29, 1898, 12.
59. Evans, “Art at the Exhibition,” Omaha Daily Bee, September 13, 1898, 4.
60. Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha Daily Bee, June 26, 1898, 13.
61. Evans, “Art at the Exposition,” Omaha Daily Bee, June 19, 1898, 5.

192 emily godbey

 62. Advertisement, Chicago Daily Tribune, February 18, 1894, 29. The painting
ended up in the Westmar College art collection. The city of Le Mars, Iowa, became
the owners following the November 1997 closing of the college. The painting was to
be sold at auction when the Maser Family Foundation stepped in, offering to restore
the work at their expense and return it. It is now in the Religious Heritage Room,
Plymouth County Historical Museum, Le Mars, Iowa. Beverly Van Buskirk, “Restored
‘The Morning of the Crucifixion’ Returns to Le Mars,” Le Mars Daily Sentinel, Octo-
ber 29, 2002, http://www.lemarssentinel.com/story/1021193.html.
63. L. Lincoln, “Regarding Trilby,” Omaha Daily Bee, September 14, 1898, 7.
64. “Hawkeyes Visit the Show: Des Moines at the Exposition with Its Hustling
People and Officials,” Omaha World-Herald, August 24, 1898, 2. Apparently these
hustlers were not around for long on the grounds, as on August 16 this ad appeared,
seeming to indicate that between the 16th and the 24th, someone had accepted the
job: “Wanted—Energetic man with a few hundred dollars to take state agency for the
Artoscope, the newest and best automatic picture machine on the market; big money
can be made by a good hustler; see samples at room 614 Paxton block between 10
and 12 a.m. and 2 and 4 m.” Omaha World-Herald, August 16, 1898, 7.
65. The similarity of the two incidents was noted at the time. Mary Holland
Kinkaid, “The Salvation Army Girls and the Torchbearer,” Denver Evening Post,
May 28, 1898, 6.
66. Lori E. Rotskoff, “Decorating the Dining-Room: Still-Life Chromolitho-
graphs and Domestic Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Amer-
ican Studies 31, no. 1 (April 1997): 19–42.
67. L. Lincoln, “Trilby Defended: Owner of Painting Replies to the Omaha Critic,”
Omaha World-Herald, September 18, 1898, 8.
68. Evans, “Art at the Exhibition,” Omaha Daily Bee, September 13, 1898, 4.
69. The “lecturers” rescued the painting from the Trilby Temple fire. Reports from
other venues also mentioned that the painting was described to visitors in detail.
70. Jenkins, “Trilby,” 228.
71. Patricia Shad Pixley, “A Most Interesting Spectacle: Omaha’s 1898 Trans-
Mississippi Exposition,” Nineteenth Century 18, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 5–9; Robert
Bigart and Clarence Woodcock, “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition & the Flathead
Delegation,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1979):
14–23; Robert W. Rydell, “The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition: ‘To
Work Out the Problem of Universal Civilization,’” American Quarterly 33, no. 5
(Winter 1981): 587–607.
72. “Trilby Still Draws,” Minneapolis Journal, April 23, 1896, 2. This story ran
(mostly verbatim) until at least 1900 as the painting continued to tour the coun-
try. The rest of the citations in this paragraph are from this instance of the story.
73. “‘Trilby’ Talks: A Times Man Interviews du Maurier’s Heroine,” Washington
Times, February 5, 1899, 5.
74. “‘Trilby’ Talks,” Washington Times, 5.

trilby goes native 193

 5
Condensed Loveliness
tracey jean boisseau

“An ideal American head,” “the perfect flower of its womanhood,”

and “condensed loveliness”: these phrases appear throughout the
winter of 1897–98 in press releases such as that found in the May 22,
1898, issue of the Omaha Bee entitled “Typical Western Woman.”1
In glowing terms the article describes the picture of “the strongest
type” of western womanhood, planned for one side of the official
souvenir medal (fig. 31) issued by the Trans-Mississippi and Inter-
national Exposition, which was set to open on the first of June.
Engraved on the souvenir is a profile of a white woman, hair in a
chignon with elaborate floral necklace and collar, floating above
the date 1898. “The result” of the design, as confirmed in a press
release that appeared in many journals simultaneously, “was an
ideal American head, full of the combined force, intellectuality,
vivacity and beauty of the typical [western] American girl . . . the
perfect flower of its womanhood as developed under the constant
stress of an ever-advancing civilization.”2 (Brackets in the original.)
Gracing the other side of the medal was the perceived opposite
of this “perfect flower of womanhood,” in the form of a generic and
shirtless male Indian, also in profile, spearing a buffalo. Thomas
R. Kimball’s initial sketches for this side of the souvenir virtu-
ally conflated buffalo and Indian, juxtaposing them equally; the
final version distinguishes them more sharply, with the strongly
foreshortened bison head projecting toward the viewer and the

195
Fig. 31. Official souvenir coin, Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition, brass. About 25,000 in silver, bronze, brass, and copper were
coined on the press in the U.S. Government Building, at a cost of $3,027.63,
bringing in $5,963.00. Brass coins sold for 25¢. Obverse: Composite type
of Trans-Mississippi womanhood, designed by photographer George G.
Rockwood of New York. Reverse: Indian spearing a buffalo, design by
Thomas R. Kimball of Omaha, architect-in-chief of the exposition.
Courtesy of Tom Hoffman at info@so-calleddollars.com.
Indian in seemingly lower relief profile. Beneath the portrayal of
Indian hunting was the date 1848, signifying the half century that
had elapsed since the gold rush and the Mexican-American War,
which had ceded the United States much of the Trans-Mississippian
West being celebrated at this exposition. As the American Jour-
nal of Numismatics informed its readership, the Indian side of the
exposition souvenir conveyed
a scene which shows an occupation that has forever ceased upon the
Western plains—the favorite sport of the barbarous tribes who once
fought and hunted over those wide prairies, but who are fast vanish-
ing before the march of an invading race, their wigwams replaced by
populous cities, and their war-whoops drowned by the scream of the
locomotive. Only an inspection of the medal itself will show how suc-
cessfully the happy thought of its designers has been carried out, in
thus contrasting the present and the past.”3

Together the two sides of the souvenir medal represented a cul-

tural and temporal disjuncture between the contemporary moment
of 1898, presumably foretelling a flourishing urbane and industri-
alized future, and that of the region’s picturesque but seemingly
doomed barbaric past, when Indians and animal hunting predom-
inated in the American West. Agreement regarding the import of
the medal and its reflection of the central mission of the exposi-
tion was unanimous and unambiguously expressed throughout
the national press. The New York Times, for instance, identified
an essential contrast between white woman, as representative of
white civilization and industrial progress, and Indian hunter, as
representative of savagery, and proclaimed this contrast and con-
tinuum to be the central message of the souvenir and of the fair it
commemorated. Celebrating the aptness of the message and the
design, the newspaper enthusiastically declared, “The medal as a
whole is indicative of and fittingly illustrates the strides that civ-
ilization and culture have made in the West during the past fifty
years.”4 In an extremely concise manner, the official souvenir medal
of the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition presented fairgoers with
the shortest possible summary of the fair’s intended message, a

condensed loveliness 197

dense visual message that was simultaneously racial and gendered
in its central preoccupations.
Although much has been written regarding the 1898 exposi-
tion’s overt and unmistakably racialized civilizational ethos and,
in particular, the presentation, performativity, and political impact
of the Congress of Indians at this fair, very little of what has been
written has taken gender as a significant organizing element of
the racial ideology that was promoted at this watershed event in
regional cultural politics. In part, this may be due to a general lack
of feminist scholarly interest in the 1898 exposition, itself proba-
bly a consequence of the absence of a separate women’s building.
The muted participation of women in this fair seems to have
left little evidence in the historical record for scholars of women’s
history to contemplate. The Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition’s all-white Woman’s Board of Managers restricted its
mandate to educational congresses and raising the funds for and
supervising a Girls’ and Boys’ Building, an unprepossessing build-
ing that included a restaurant, child care for ten cents an hour,
a children’s magazine, and offices for various women’s clubs. A
similar reasoning that rejected self-segregation was employed by
black women. The African American Women’s Club formed to
advocate for African Americans at the exposition unanimously
decided against a separate women’s or “Negro” exhibit. Fearing
wholesale exclusion from the fair on account of their race, how-
ever, they submitted a formal petition to the exposition’s board
of directors demanding equal representation for African Ameri-
cans (male and female) in exhibits and employment. This included
whatever exhibits and organizing the Woman’s Board of Manag-
ers decided to embark upon, even if that only consisted of activ-
ities associated with the Girls’ and Boys’ Building. According to
David J. Peavler, the members of the African American Wom-
en’s Club specifically petitioned the Woman’s Board to insist that
black women be included, forwarding to its executive leadership
“the names and credentials of dozens of well-qualified African
American women who were seeking employment.” The leaders of
the Woman’s Board agreed—on at least two occasions—but then
failed to make good on their commitment. In the end, as Peavler

198 tracey jean boisseau

caustically points out, “The only African Americans who partic-
ipated in activities at the Girls’ and Boys’ Building were the child
performers from the Old Plantation on ‘Children’s Day.’”5
Native American women were if possible even more excluded
from fair administration and employments, as Thomas H. Tibbles,
married to Native American (Omaha and Ponca) activist Susette La
Flesche, observed when he demanded that at least one day at the
exposition be set aside for the “Progressive Indian.”6 He contrasted
the absence of educated Indians with the government-sponsored
Indian Congress, which only exhibited Indian resistance to the
white civilizing mission. For the very reason that it highlighted
what were seen as traditional modes of life, the Indian Congress
was the unrivaled exhibition of the 1898 fair, and many scholars
have taken special pains to dissect it, albeit without specific focus
on Indian women’s experience or the gendered meanings that a
focus on Indians at this fair generated. Yet the two sides of the offi-
cial souvenir medal of the fair point to how connected race and
gender ideology were at this event and how dialogic and interde-
pendent the representation of white women (as symbols of a white
civilizing mission) and Indians (represented most often as male)
have been in American culture.7
The 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition souve-
nir coin medal epitomized and cemented the conflation between
the ideologically resonant beauty assigned to middle-class white
women and the United States’ “manifest destiny,” its purportedly
inevitable and triumphal march across the plains to the defeat and
near extinction of Indian societies. The history of the medal at the
fair—and in particular its production chronicled in the regional
and national newspapers for months ahead of the opening as one
of the fair planners’ most successful publicity strategies—is of great
relevance to the ultimate meanings attached to the exposition and
to the contemporary estimation of the fair’s cultural and politi-
cal relevance. The key to the phenomenal success of this object’s
messaging was composite portraiture, or portraits achieved by the
overlaying of numerous photographed faces in order to produce an
“averaged” set of common features. This photographic technique
in the late nineteenth century was believed capable of conveying

condensed loveliness 199

the most essential of social truths about humanity. Just as import-
ant in this particular historical moment was composite portrai-
ture’s capacity to serve as a partially obscuring veil behind which
could hide the faces of respectable middle-class white women who
very much wanted to have their image and their beauty honored
by the fair but who also cringed at the notoriety associated with
sexualized or commercialized visibility. With composite portrai-
ture providing the necessary ideological mechanics to permit a
cultural pivot on the question of public display, the 1898 souve-
nir medal served as one of the first visual interventions propel-
ling white women’s bodies into American mass culture by way of
a world’s fair.

Portraits of the Invisible

Under pressure to draw from local industries and artists, expo-
sition planners chose Thomas R. Kimball, a prestigious architect
from a wealthy Omaha family who was responsible for the over-
all design of the exposition and its signature Arch of the States
(fig. 10), to design the Indian side of the coin. For the image of
western womanhood they had to cast their net further afield to
find George G. Rockwood (1832–1911) of New York, a photogra-
pher with a reputation as a portrayer of national heroes as well as
a photography innovator. An obituary of Rockwood in the Wash-
ington Post claimed he had produced more than 350,000 photo-
graphic portraits during his lengthy career, many of them national
icons associated with the “winning” of the West such as Buffalo Bill
Cody, Ulysses S. Grant, and Theodore Roosevelt. Credited with
being one of the first photographers to introduce the carte-de-visite
photograph to the United States, Rockwood was also a major fig-
ure in the development of photo engraving, photo sculpture, and
instant photography.8 But it was his recognized supremacy in the
technique of composite portraiture that drew exposition officials
to him for the purpose of creating the fair’s signature objet d’art.
Rockwood was closely associated with composite photography’s
development as a quasi-scientific art form in the United States, as
well as its technical perfection and the dissemination of the various
methods associated with it. In 1887 he published a widely reprinted

200 tracey jean boisseau

article in the Art Amateur in which he explained his preferred tech-
nique for producing an “averaged” photograph of multiple sub-
jects by seating them in front of the camera for equal fractions of
the total exposure time. In this method of composite portraiture, if
there were ten models and a twenty-second exposure, each model
would appear in front of the camera for one tenth of the time of
the exposure, or two seconds. In the article Rockwood described
a recent assignment photographing “nine young ladies” of a lit-
erary club whose combined portrait exhibited facial features that
conveyed a “high level of intellectual ability . . . if there is anything
in the teachings of physiognomy or phrenology.”9
As indicated by Rockwood’s comment, and like earlier
nineteenth-century “sciences” of physiognomy and phrenology,
composite photography was believed to unveil something more
than mere anatomical commonalities shared by its subjects. Deeper
and more intangible truths regarding character, mentality, intel-
lect, class status, capacity for governance, and evolutionary devel-
opment were attributed to the blurred palimpsests that resulted
from the technique. Such “sciences” were shaping the artistic uses
to which photography would be put on both sides of the Atlan-
tic. For instance, about the same time that Rockwood was flat-
tering the ladies of a literary club with a composite of their faces
meant to confirm their intellects, French amateur photographer
Arthur Batut, having read about composite portraits in scientific
journals, produced a composite portrait of the women of south-
western France, or what he called portraits “of the invisible,” proof
of the “physiognomic essence” of the region.10 Positioned at the
interface between art and science, composites of beautiful white
women seemed especially apt as vehicles for the conveyance of
higher truths and deeper realities about modern human societ-
ies and national character.
The tone of Rockwood’s article suggests he was confident there
was something important to be learned from composite portraits,
though the article provides no clear evidence of what Rockwood
thought about the particular meanings attributed to the many
composite portraits he was paid to produce. Instead, in the arti-
cle he focused on explaining the various methods involved and

condensed loveliness 201

made plain his preference for his more delicate and complex tech-
nique over cruder ones where “each person has been photographed
separately, and from the negatives a transparency has been made,
and these each in turn copied on to one plate,” the technique that
Rockwood would ultimately have to resort to for the 1898 souve-
nir medal.
The employment of Rockwood and his use of compositry for
the 1898 souvenir coin was not a haphazard choice on the part of
the exposition organizers. From its introduction in the United
States, composite photography was associated with producing
reliable historical evidence of classical cultures from ancient coins
and medallions, an association that suited the aura of classicism
that nineteenth-century American expositions generally sought
to cultivate. The alternate method of composite portraiture that
Rockwood described in his article had been utilized first and most
famously in the United States in the previous decade to produce
another souvenir medallion, this one commemorating the success-
ful delivery to New York, from Egypt, of a 3,000-year-old, 68-foot,
240-ton, single shaft of red granite dubbed “Cleopatra’s Needle.”11
A composite profile of Queen Cleopatra generated from overlay-
ing photographs of antique coins bearing her supposed likeness
was the basis for the design of one side of the souvenir. The pub-
licity resulting from the donation of the Egyptian obelisk, along
with the distribution of a composite portrait that claimed to pro-
vide an authentic glimpse of how the famed Cleopatra genuinely
looked, helped elevate composite photography to the level of what
Rockwood termed a popular “craze.” The American Journal of
Numismatics directly credited the Cleopatra souvenir medal as
the specific inspiration for the Trans-Mississippi coin.12
Although the Cleopatra souvenir medal was key in bringing
composite photography to public attention, the technique was
more than just a fad, and its applications went beyond the mint-
ing of commemorative medallions. By the end of the century, it
had become an indispensable technology of the repressive appara-
tus of the state and a formidable tool of its policing agencies. The
science imagined lying behind composite portraiture was con-
firmed and amplified by as eminent a figure as Sir Francis Gal-

202 tracey jean boisseau

ton, the famed British statistician and psychometrician. Galton
had developed and adopted the technique of composite photog-
raphy to uncover what he believed to be the historic and racial
evolution of civilization as expressed in the variable anatomy of
the human face. Again, historic coins and medallions were cen-
tral in this endeavor as the sources from which composite por-
traits were generated. Lending high-culture gravitas to composite
portraiture and deepening its scientific authority and application,
Galton applied the technique to a variety of Greek and Roman
portrait coins to produce, in the blurred likenesses generated by
composite portraiture, what he believed to be the “vanished phys-
iognomy of a higher race.” Composite portraits, and specifically
those derived from ancient coins and emblems, became central
to Galton’s production of an archive of ideal types of whiteness.
Compositry was so central to Galton’s translation of his work to a
broad reading public that he included a plate of six portrait medal-
lions of Alexander the Great, forming what Allan Sekula calls the
“introductory, epistemological benchmark” to his first great work
on anthropometrics, Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883).13
In the decade following Galton’s publication, composites became
key photographic evidence in the public dissemination of the
anthropometric findings of a variety of high-profile public intel-
lectuals, appearing in such hugely influential works as those by
the sexologist Havelock Ellis (The Criminal, 1890) and criminolo-
gist Cesare Lombroso (Criminal Man, (1895/1897).14 The invention
of photography itself enabled the production of what Sekula calls
“archives” of visual knowledge able to reveal and purvey truths most
useful to the policing of society, both in the specific case (locat-
ing and identifying particular persons of interest to the state) and
in the general case (producing broad insights regarding the clas-
sification of persons for the understanding of social truths about
humanity writ large). Photography served as the handmaiden
to nineteenth-century sciences such as phrenology, which were
viewed by the public as significant to forming social policies and
institutions inclusive of the modern prison, school, and social wel-
fare agencies. “Especially in the United States,” Sekula points out,
“the proliferation of photography and that of phrenology were

condensed loveliness 203

quite coincident”—together serving the purposes of monitoring
and repressing the “dangerous classes.”15
Compositry could be used to many political ends. American
Progressives used it to expose social problems endemic to indus-
trial capitalism at the turn of the century, such as inadequate hous-
ing and exploitation of immigrants and the industrial working
class. Lewis Hine, the Columbia University–trained sociologist
and photographer who joined the campaign to establish child
labor laws in the United States, employed composite photogra-
phy to create images meant to move a general public to support
the movement and federal legislation. Hine layered—often with-
out trying to disguise the discrepancies between one body and
another—numerous photographs of cotton mill workers on the
same photographic plate to produce composite portraits (fig. 32)
in an effort to demonstrate the stunting and deforming effects of
factory work on the growing bodies of America’s youngest work-
ers.16 Regardless of the political orientation of its deployers, com-
posite photography amplified the general ideological effects of
nineteenth-century photography by manifesting abstractions such
as “average types” in a form that was taken for concrete visual evi-
dence. Embodying in its “singular multiplicity” an entire archive of
photographs, the composite photograph became central to trans-
lating photography into social commentary and politicized mean-
ing in the 1880s and 1890s.17
The “average ideal” that compositry produced (or claimed to
reveal) generated a particular fascination at international expo-
sitions in those same years.18 Exhibits relying on compositry to
establish theoretical claims to sociological and anthropological
truths were always overlaid with dense gender and racial implica-
tions. For example, in the Anthropology Hall of the 1893 Chicago
Columbian Exposition, a pair of sculptures, presented as com-
posite ideals of the average American man and woman based on
statistically averaged anthropometric studies and composite pho-
tography, were a huge hit with fairgoers. The well-formed female
sculpture especially sparked public comment. As a composite of
Ivy League college students, it appeared to discredit theories that
increased rates of higher education had diminished middle-class

204 tracey jean boisseau

Fig. 32. Lewis Wickes Hine, Composite Photograph of Child Laborers Made
from Cotton Mill Children, 1913. These ghostly images appeared on National
Child Labor Committee posters. Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy
of the National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs Division.
American women’s femininity and reproductive health putting the
future of the white race itself at evolutionary risk.19
Such visual displays at expositions served to present evidence
of norms that could support a number of opposing political view-
points including counternarratives of race and gender. W. E. B.
Du Bois, for instance, seized the opportunity that the 1900 Uni-
verselle Exposition in Paris afforded to expose large international
audiences in the United States and Europe to views of black Amer-
icans that diverged sharply from the majority of images of dark-
skinned peoples at nineteenth-century expositions. He displayed
an archive of 363 photographs of attractive and well-dressed Afri-
can American women and men of the middle classes. Notably, this
archive did not include composite portraiture, and indeed in its
refusal to generalize or produce one essentialized “type” of black
person, the archive countered some of the racist pseudo-science
of Galton and his followers. The large number of portraits of indi-
vidual, literate, and “cultured” African Americans encountered
together served to counteract the presentation of black people as
one-dimensional, untutored, barbaric, strange, and even repul-
sive, which the expositions’ colonialist exhibits (both of photo-
graphs and of living human beings displaced from their homes)
otherwise tended to suggest.20
Composite portraiture aimed at a different political project,
collapsing archival collections into singular images that afforded
opportunities for typing people into categories that seemed con-
clusive. Whether encountered at a world’s fair or in the pages of a
newspaper or scientific treatise, at the base of the ghostlike images
that composite photography tended to produce seemed to lie a
truth with the power to explain national histories, class relations,
and race differences, with profound implications for policy mak-
ing.21 This power was available not only for the rarified scientific
purposes of the anthropometrician, the noble aims of the social
reformer, and the disciplinary ambitions of the state, but also for
publicity campaigns like the one accompanying the installation of
Cleopatra’s Needle in Central Park and for the seemingly innocent
amusement of illuminating shared characteristics among members
of such micro groups as George Rockwood’s young ladies’ book

206 tracey jean boisseau

club.22 By the end of the century, the proliferation of composite
photography had made the American public well aware of it as a
technique and highly attuned to its sociopolitical uses and episte-
mological promise. Hence in 1897, when the chairman of the Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition’s Executive Committee,
Zachary T. Lindsey, considered how best to produce an image for
the definitive souvenir of the exposition with the capacity to carry
the central message and ideological weight of the fair—as well as
draw forth public curiosity and attention—composite portrai-
ture had two decades of scientific authorization, state sanction-
ing, artistic exploration, and commercial popularization behind
it, making it perfectly suited to his ambitions.

Their Special Souvenir

The material production of the medal as a physical object was itself
an event and point of interest to the crowds that thronged the expo-
sition’s fairways. A mechanized coin press was imported from the
U.S. Mint in San Francisco and installed in the U.S. Government
Building to create approximately 25,000 medals in real time in
front of those who wished to purchase them.23 Jess R. Peterson, a
historian of Omaha, reports on the excitement and “fascination”
generated by the opportunity to witness “the definitive souvenir”
being coined by the press during the exposition.24
Commemorative medals or coins were issued in the nineteenth
century to mark major public events and ceremonies and were a
ubiquitous part of world’s fairs and international expositions. The
1898 souvenir coin medal was in keeping with the previous uses to
which composite portraiture had been put in regard to ancient or
classical coinage while also cohering with the nationalist icono-
graphic traditions common to international expositions. It delib-
erately associated the 1898 souvenir medal with ancient Greek and
Roman empires, while heralding the rise of the American empire
in the West. The 1898 souvenir coin was also unique, however, its
true departure being its reliance on the images of specific living
women and its use of compositry to create a representative image
that simultaneously exposed and hid these women’s visages from
public view.

condensed loveliness 207

 Although idealized female images in classical poses or costume
were common elements in many of the allegorical sculptures on
display at nineteenth-century expositions (fig. 30), they typically
served as stand-ins and vessels for abstract ideas and ideals and
referred to no woman in particular nor even to women as a class
of people.25 In part, this was due to the view that women had not
contributed to public life and in part due to the widespread assump-
tion that the commercial distribution of images of identifiable liv-
ing women put them at risk of being viewed sexually and even
pornographically by a male public—something no respectable
women or their families would tolerate for most of that century.
The first hint of an exception to this rule occurred at the 1893 Chi-
cago World’s Fair. At that fair, the U.S. Mint broke with a century-
long tradition of depicting “great men” exclusively on legal tender
when, as a companion to the exposition’s commemorative half-
dollar featuring Christopher Columbus, it issued a commemo-
rative quarter (fig. 33) featuring the profile of Queen Isabella I of
Castile, Spain.26 Not a living or contemporary woman with a rep-
utation for modesty to maintain, still the historical Spanish mon-
arch was the Mint’s first identifiable “great woman” and first foreign
head of state to appear on official U.S. money. This decision was
viewed, even in its own time, as the Mint’s official support for the
cause of “woman” and as a uniquely American acknowledgment of
woman’s newly acquired rightful inclusion in history and the pub-
lic life of a modern nation. According to a contemporary source,
“The Isabella coin will be the first ever minted in recognition of
woman’s place in the Government of the United States, and the
first—so far as the writer has knowledge—in special recognition
of woman by any country.”27
This attribution of feminist meaning was in keeping with the
intent of Bertha Palmer Potter, chair of the exposition’s Board of
Lady Managers, who was in large part responsible for the produc-
tion of this most unusual exposition souvenir. She championed
Queen Isabella as an equal partner to Christopher Columbus in
the discovery of the Americas, the five hundredth anniversary of
which formed the occasion of the 1893 exposition. By doing so,
Potter hoped to magnify the feminist messaging of the Woman’s

208 tracey jean boisseau

Building and locate women closer to the ideological center of the
exposition. The Isabella quarter’s anticipated fulfillment of her
intention was widely recognized in the popular press in the lead-up
to its issue. The Illinois-based Aurora Daily Express reported, for
instance, that the Isabella coins are “certain to command the atten-
tion of women the world over, since they are the first recognition
by a government of the position that women are attaining in art,
industrial, and social movements.” “Undoubtedly,” the paper con-
fidently reported, “the women of the country will regard this as
their special souvenir.”28
The design of the 1893 Isabella quarter suffered due to the lack
of precedent for featuring a “great woman” on a U.S. coin, discom-
fort at the Mint with a crowned head appearing on U.S. legal ten-
der, and perhaps from an absence of shared clarity concerning the
overall gendered meaning that the coin should convey. On sev-
eral occasions during the negotiations regarding the design of the
coin, Edward O. Leech, then director of the U.S. Mint, expressed
concern about “the distinction of sex” appearing on a U.S. coin,
which he claimed the secretary of the treasury deemed “improper
on a coin of the United States.”29 Ambiguity over the ideological
objectives of the coin as well as lines of authority in determining
its design produced bitter wrangling between representatives of
the U.S. Mint, Potter, and Potter’s choice of a female artist, Caro-
line C. Peddle. After Peddle’s proposed design (fig. 33) featuring
a powerful, seated, and obviously female monarch in resplendent
regalia was overruled by the Mint and replaced with a less excit-
ing bust of Isabella in profile, designed by Mint chief engraver
Charles E. Barber, Peddle quit the project. Far worse, from the
perspective of Potter, whose general inclination was to emphasize
exceptional women active in the public life of modern-day soci-
eties, the Mint chose for the reverse a modest image of a generic
woman, humbly kneeling at her work. The anonymous figure is
portrayed winding flax along a distaff, a tool widely and appro-
priately recognized, in the eyes of Leech, as symbolizing “patient
industry, and especially the industry of woman.”30 While Leech
expressed concern that a female figure on both sides of the coin
would result in what he perceived as altogether “too much woman,”

condensed loveliness 209

Potter was particularly vexed by the depiction of women’s work
as essentially domestic and mired in preindustrial modes.31 Pot-
ter and Leech were not the only ones dissatisfied with the result.
It sold so badly that 15,000 of the 40,000 produced were eventu-
ally returned to the Mint to be melted down.
The official souvenir medal of the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition, featuring an intriguing composite por-
trait of western womanhood on one side and a dynamic scene of
an Indian hunting buffalo on the other, was greeted with far more
enthusiasm and eagerness on its release by a public that not only
had the opportunity to watch their own personal souvenir being
made at the fair but had been drawn into its production process
during the winter preceding the opening of the exposition. Whet-
ting the public’s appetite for the object, and in turn for the Omaha
exposition, was a novel publicity campaign—one that relied on a
subtly alluring regionwide beauty contest designed to generate the
archive of photographs of young women from which their com-
posite image would be created.32

Assembling an Archive of Beauty

The on-site production of the 1898 souvenir medal was a draw for
fair visitors who flocked to purchase it. But it was the preproduc-
tion process involved in generating a portrait of western white
womanhood sufficient to serve its ambitious ideological purpose
of representing the manifest destiny of the United States that sat-
urated the souvenir medal with its most salient—and somewhat
controversial—set of meanings. In December 1897, each state of the
Trans-Mississippi West was asked by exposition manager Lindsey
to submit two photos of its most handsome women to be incor-
porated into the composite portrait on the fair’s souvenir medal.
Newspapers throughout the region addressed their pleas for pho-
tograph contributions to young, mostly unmarried women, sup-
posedly and invariably from respected middle-class families, in
an effort to find those women whose features would best repre-
sent the strengths and virtues of a particular state’s (white) pop-
ulation at large. In the end, forty-three photos were submitted by
twenty-two states between January and March 1898 to comprise

210 tracey jean boisseau

Fig. 33. Caroline C. Peddle, sketch for the Queen Isabella souvenir quarter,
pencil, pen, and ink, 1893. Letter from Peddle to Oliver C. Bosbyshell, April
3, 1893, Records of the Bureau of the Mint, rg 104, box 5, file “Columbian
Exposition Quarter, 1893,” in “Letters Received, 1873–1932,” National Archives,
Washington dc. Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of the National
Archives. U.S. Mint, Queen Isabella souvenir quarter, 1893, silver. Scan
courtesy of David Q. Bowers of Stacks Bowers Galleries. The quarters sold at
the exposition for $1. A major investor in the quarters, Scott Stamp & Coin,
criticized the U.S. Post Office’s commemorative Trans-Mississippi Exposition
stamps as exploiting collectors.
the archive out of which Rockwood would create an “averaged”
image.33 Laid upon one another in a palimpsest meant to elicit the
features common to the most beautiful and most genuinely rep-
resentative of (white) western women, the resulting image pur-
ported to isolate the facial features that the very best of the female
residents of the region shared. Collectively these faces were imag-
ined as corresponding to and conveying the virtues and strengths
that had enabled white western civilization to sweep through the
western states, conquering the region’s Native inhabitants as well
as its landscape.
The contest itself generated plentiful newspaper copy. The call
for photographs, “of cabinet size and taken of the left face” of
beautiful young women, was sent to major newspapers in all the
states of the Trans-Mississippi region. The high stakes of the con-
test were made immediately apparent by the florid language often
used to describe the contest and to appeal to “good-looking” wom-
en’s “patriotic” duty to represent their state and region. Vocifer-
ousness on this point, and not a little cheekiness, was conveyed in
flowery prose by such state representatives as Washington’s vice
president, George W. Thompson, quoted at length in the Spokane
Daily Chronicle:
Eastern Washington’s hour of triumph is near. The beautiful daugh-
ters of Spokane, the blushing maidens of the Palouse valley, the stately
dames of Walla Walla, the sun-kissed girls who dwell in the frontier
villages and farms of the Inland Empire, are to receive at last the hom-
age that is their due. Their lovely faces are to be chiseled in bronze
and silver, and stamped in solid gold; are to beam forth from printed
pages to bewitch ten million sons of America, lovers of the true, the
beautiful and the good.34

Once the contest was under way, almost immediately inter-

state competition arose and public unease was aroused regarding
the fairness of the competition. Of first concern was equality of
representation. Women from all corners of the Trans-Mississippi
West, and residing in even the least developed parts of each state,
were to have fair and equal standing in the contest in order to
ensure proportional representation in the resulting image of west-

212 tracey jean boisseau

ern white womanhood. Local and regional newspapers like the
Spokane Daily Chronicle were vigilant in guarding the rights of
far-flung rural areas within states (many of the states themselves
fairly newly formed) to participate in the contest on an equal foot-
ing with more urbanized, established population centers:
Last Thursday evening The Chronicle denounced an apparent attempt
to limit this competition to one section of this state. Today The Chron-
icle takes pleasure in announcing that every lady in Washington is
invited to compete for this high honor. All that is required is to send
a photograph taken in the manner described below, to Hon. George
W. Thompson, Tacoma, Wash., accompanied by her name and address
on a separate paper. That is all. The date for the closing of this contest
is not yet announced, but a reasonable time will be allowed so that
all who read this notice can compete on equal terms. It is urged that
the fair ladies of eastern Washington, prompted by a spirit of patri-
otism, shall assist in this contest by sending their photographs that
this state may be represented as it should be by the most beautiful
women of the west.35

Vice presidents (in the twentieth century they would become

known as vice or lieutenant governors) of each state in the Trans-
Mississippi region appointed themselves or small commissions—
invariably men only—to judge the competition. Commissions were
typically composed of newspaper editors, district court judges, or
other elected state officials.36 Presumably the stature of the male
judges would counteract the potential for crassness that a beauty
contest called to mind in the nineteenth century. This strategy,
however, was not wholly successful and did not entirely inocu-
late the contest from the taint of impropriety that clung generally
to the purveyance of women’s images in the public sphere or the
commercialization of their beauty.
Beauty pageants and contests occurred in nineteenth-century
America, but were extremely suspect enterprises, associated with
circuses, freak shows, nonwhite women, nonnormative bodies, and
the lower classes. World’s fairs helped expose the middle classes
to this salacious form of entertainment. As with the Isabella coin,
the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition pushed at the boundaries

condensed loveliness 213

of tradition, sponsoring the first permanently housed exhibit of
women put on display for their beauty at an American exposition.
Often advertised as “Forty Ladies from Forty Nations,” the World’s
Congress of Beauties was housed in a small building erected for
this purpose on the fair’s Midway Plaisance, the area of the expo-
sition where one could find all that was exotic, sensational, and
somewhat ignobly entertaining. Overseen by and also known as
the International Dress and Costume Exhibit, the World’s Con-
gress of Beauties formed a satirical foil and an unsubtle challenge
to the very serious and prestigious “World’s Congress of Repre-
sentative Women,” held in Chicago from May 15 to 22, which had
brought hundreds of leaders of national women’s movements, writ-
ers, activists, and intellectuals from all over the world together to
discuss the “woman question,” suffrage, women’s education, and
other political issues of the day in front of audiences that totaled
upward of 150,000.
In stark contrast, the World’s Congress of Beauties featured forty
young foreign-born women, each posed coquettishly and dressed
in outlandish and purposefully revealing costumes vaguely rem-
iniscent of a variety of national traditions. The “beauties” were
recruited to work at the fair by newspapermen W. T. C. Hyde and
William M. Knox of the Chicago Daily Press, and they were visi-
ble to the public for 25 cents. Only the women dressed in reveal-
ing costumes and performing “hootchy kootchy” belly dances not
too far away as part of the Street in Cairo exhibit on the Midway
received more press attention and attracted more commentary,
both appreciative and disapproving.37 Following this wildly pop-
ular exhibition of foreign “beauties” in Chicago in 1893, a nearly
inescapable tradition of exhibits, temples, halls, parades, and pag-
eants devoted to showcasing and exploiting the “exotic” beauty of
foreign women emerged at American fairs.
The origins and history of white female beauty displayed at
world’s fairs and expositions begins slightly later in the decade, fol-
lows a distinctly different trajectory, and is less well documented
than that of nonwhite and foreign women. Apart from Queen
Isabella—who was not a contemporary, not American, and not
featured at the 1893 fair for her physical appearance—it is nota-

214 tracey jean boisseau

ble that the first instances of specific white American women’s
images displayed commercially at world’s fairs also explicitly con-
flate their physical beauty with those fairs’ central messages. This
began haltingly in Atlanta in 1895 and was cemented by the suc-
cess of the Trans-Mississippi souvenir medal in Omaha in 1898.
After 1898, exposition organizers would regularly seek youthful
white women around whom they could design events, exhibits,
displays, souvenirs, and ephemera representative of the respec-
tive regions being celebrated.
Aware of respectable women’s hesitance to participate in the
commercialization of their appearance, exposition organizers elic-
ited the cooperation of Women’s Boards to vouch for the moral
sanctity of deploying particular middle-class white women in fair
advertising and iconography. At the 1895 Cotton States and Inter-
national Exposition in Atlanta, it was organizers of the Woman’s
Building themselves who sponsored a “Calendar of Southern Beau-
ties” featuring twelve original watercolor paintings of elite south-
ern white women meant to represent each of the twelve states
of the South participating in the exposition (fig. 34). The pub-
lic display of these women’s images contrasts sharply with that of
the women of color and foreign women featured on the Chicago
Midway in 1893. Rather than performing onstage in the seedi-
est corner of the fairgrounds, a dozen southern “belles” sat for
their portraits, which were repeatedly and insistently referred to
in the press as an “art feature” of the fair. Each painting by Caro-
line C. Lovell was hung in an “art gallery” of the Woman’s Build-
ing in Atlanta and depicted a young woman belonging to one of
the “families of great wealth and position throughout the South,”
with claims that she had been chosen “as much for her charm” as
for her physical beauty.38
Lovell’s careful posing of each model attempted to forestall any
hint of boldness or prurient interest in the images. Her portrait of
Annie Helen Reese from Alabama, for instance, carefully poses its
subject in a demure posture with hands behind the back and pro-
file turned slightly away from the viewer and downward to indi-
cate modesty and innocence. The body of the figure is made nearly
indiscernible by volumes of fashionable and elaborate clothing. A

condensed loveliness 215

fan and chignon complete the picture of shy reserve, wealth, and
elite status. But this attempt to dignify the mass production and
sale of pictures of beautiful young white women through associa-
tion with the high art of painting and the tradition of portraiture
proved shaky in its foundation, causing acerbic comment in the
press. Plans for parallel versions of the calendar featuring women
representing the North and West nervously omitted the names of
its young female subjects with the intention that each calendar
may be “accepted simply for its own artistic merit.” Apparently
the female models or their families regretted their willingness
to allow their names and identities to be connected with such a
commercial affair.
The success that organizers of the 1898 fair experienced in mar-
shaling middle- and upper-class white women’s beauty for the
commercial benefit of the exposition and their indispensability
to the production of regionalist and nationalist symbols in expo-
sition iconography thereafter shows 1898 to have been the turn-
ing point in this history. After 1898, mediated images of white
womanhood yoked to civilizational discourses and nationalist
agendas began to seem positively obligatory. A short two years
after the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, for instance, organizers
of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo staged a contest
to identify two white women to serve as models for the images of
North and South America to be featured on the exposition’s official
seal, poster, coin, and pin (fig. 35), one of whom, as an elite white
woman from a highly respectable “old” Virginia family, paid the
price for her bold departure from traditional expectations con-
cerning feminine modesty.
The design of North and South America as two women in diaph-
anous gowns, clasping one another’s hands at the juncture of the
two continents, was created for the 1901 exposition by Buffalo-
based artist Raphael Beck, using photographs of white women
identified by a beauty contest run and sponsored by the New York
World. Careful to claim that each model had been selected fairly
“out of hundreds,” the newspaper balanced its use of the likeness
of Maxine Elliot, a well-known stage actress, with that of the emi-
nently respectable and elite Maud Coleman Woods, who had been

216 tracey jean boisseau

Fig. 34. Caroline Lovell, Annie Helen Reese from Alabama, from the Calendar
of Southern Beauties (New York: Frederick C. Stokes, 1894). Briefly sold at
the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta. Artwork in the
public domain, scan courtesy of Birmingham Public Library.
identified by the Daughters of the Confederacy as “the leading
beauty of Virginia.”39 Elliot, a working woman whose career delib-
erately put her in the public eye, was far more comfortable with
her likeness being distributed widely than was Woods, who erro-
neously believed her identity would be withheld from the public.
Her family was besieged with unwanted attention as the fair opened
in the spring of 1901. Notoriety caused Woods to flee her home
community in shame, putting her in contact with a typhoid epi-
demic sweeping the state. Undoubtedly that disease was the cause
of her death later that summer, the day after her twenty-fourth
birthday. Nevertheless, public interpretation that she had died of
the mortification accruing to her public outing as one of the two
models for the 1901 Buffalo emblem persisted, as did the popu-
larity and circulation of her image as one of two “Miss Americas”
over the objections of her family.40 “Typifying the friendship of
the two Americas and suggesting clearly the unity of their inter-
ests,” the pictorial representation of Woods and Elliot as united
continents appeared on every form of ephemera and became the
most enduring commercialized image from an American expo-
sition in this period.41
With expositions in 1898 and 1901 demonstrating the commer-
cial potential of white women’s image harnessed to exposition pur-
poses, elaborate search strategies to identify specific white women
who could adequately represent and convey central messages of the
exposition, in particular the newspaper-led photographic beauty
contest, became part of the inevitable publicity strategies of fair
organizers after the turn of the century. Still pains were taken
to distinguish these types of contests from those performances,
contests, and pageants featuring foreign, nonwhite, and working
women. The purpose of the former was to find necessarily white
and respectably middle-class (if not verifiably virginal) women
whose beauty was imagined as representing something ineffable
but enormously important about the region or the United States
itself (or entire continents in the case of the 1901 Buffalo exposi-
tion). As well as providing an instrumental contrast articulating
the distinct relations of specific nations, ethnicities, and races to
modernity as a concept and as an ideological project, the purposes

218 tracey jean boisseau

Fig. 35. Emblem of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
Raphael Beck, designer. Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of
the private collection of Susan J. Eck, webmaster of “Doing the Pan,”
http://panam1901.org.
of the latter was to deliver tantalizing entertainment and entice the
male fairgoer to buy tickets to a fair otherwise advertised as edu-
cational and uplifting in its ethos.42 As part of the effort to keep
the two sets of female imagery distinct, white female fair orga-
nizers and the elite members of Women’s Boards were often put
on the spot to endorse and confirm the respectability of the pro-
cesses whereby white women’s images were gathered, produced,
and disseminated. Considering how novel the use of specific white
women’s images to sell world’s fairs was in 1898, it is not surprising
that the beauty contest that preceded the opening of the Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition was fraught with gender,
race, and class tension as these two parallel, but racially and class
distinct, deployments of women’s beauty unfolded.

Contesting the Contest

Strenuous objections to the elicitation of photographs from young
women across the region burst forth in early February 1898, with
the beauty contest in full swing and photographs beginning to
arrive in the offices of manager Lindsey.43 Members of the Woman’s
Board of Managers had reacted with outrage to a recent announce-
ment that the photos gathered would be exhibited and sold at the
exposition with the resulting proceeds going to support the Girls’
and Boys’ Building.44 Implicating the Woman’s Board by imply-
ing they condoned the publicity campaign and even more by posi-
tioning them to benefit financially from the contest seems to have
been the last straw regarding a publicity strategy that apparently
had long irked the members of the board on grounds of indecency
and vulgarity. Board secretary Frances M. Ford was “deputized to
make known the decision of the members of the committee” and
to demand that the local newspaper most devoted to promot-
ing the fair and the contest, the Omaha Bee, report the women’s
objections in full.
You may announce through the Bee [the paper quoted her as saying]
that the Woman’s board will have nothing whatever to do with this
picture business. We have not been asked to take these photographs
and exhibit them, and we object most decidedly to the announce-

220 tracey jean boisseau

 ment being made that we will do so. We do not want them and will
not exhibit them under any circumstances. The women have come to
the conclusion that this attempt to drag them into the affair is simply
a scheme to add dignity to an undertaking which was doomed to be
a fiasco when it was conceived.45

In an article subtitled “Women Balk on Exhibiting Pictures,”

the Bee’s report made clear how “up in arms” members of the
board were over this “gratuitous insult” and by the obvious attempt
to “inveigle” them into a “scheme” designed to suggest that they
condoned the contest. The vocabulary used by Ford—“insult,”
“inveigle” (published with quotation marks around it in the orig-
inal), and “scheme”—called to mind the specter of helpless young
women being seduced by unprincipled men, lured into prostitu-
tion by criminals, or coerced into what was often termed in this
period the “white slave traffic.”46 Donating the funds to a whole-
some cause, indeed a women’s cause, was too thin a veil for what
the women’s board perceived as exploitative and objectifying of
white women from the outset, according to the report. Ford took
pains to clarify the board’s long-standing disgust with the proj-
ect, stating that “up to this point, the Woman’s Board of Manag-
ers was not involved in the matter in any way and nothing was
said openly about the affair, although it develops that the mem-
bers of that body were not backward about expressing their opin-
ions when called upon.”
In her tirade, Ford indicates that it was not only the board
members—presumably matrons not themselves being solicited
for their photograph—who could see through the “scheme” to
expose vulnerable young white women to a public gaze that risked
demeaning them as objects on display. According to Ford, even the
most naive women throughout the Trans-Mississippi region were
loath to participate. “The men seemed to think,” she scoffed, “that
all that was necessary was to involve all the women who thought
themselves beautiful to send in their photographs and the mails
would be flooded with them. The result proves that the women
are not as great fools as the men seem to think, and now they are
trying to drag the Woman’s board into the affair in order to bolster

condensed loveliness 221

it up.” The Woman’s Board’s suspicion that the photos that young
women might be persuaded to contribute would be used to make
“fools” of them by subjecting them to indiscriminate, even por-
nographic, viewing was borne out by the spicy undertone of some
of the news reports published the previous month as the public-
ity campaign around the beauty contests heated up.
Two weeks earlier, for instance, the Bee had published an arti-
cle entitled “Beauty Gets a Square Show,” stating that beauty con-
test judge William Neville, a district judge also in charge of the
Nebraska State Commission at the exposition, “is in his glory in
the ‘beauty contest,’ . . . and is simply reveling in beauty.” Asked
if he would appoint others to help him evaluate the submissions,
“the judge’s face assumed a wounded expression and he answered
in a most positive manner, ‘This is a most important matter and
I shall take upon myself the responsibility of deciding the ques-
tion.’”47 The between-the-lines suggestion that male judges were
taking lascivious pleasure in the task of reviewing young wom-
en’s photos, in private and entirely apart from any sense of civic
duty to their state, continued to crop up in news reports published
throughout January.
Adding to the risk of humiliation that this pornographic notion
conjured was also the suggestion that some contestants were adver-
tising themselves for marriage through the mechanism of the beauty
contest and, as a group, helping to attract men with matrimony on
their minds to the region, thus increasing their collective chances
of marrying. Judge Neville, for example, anticipated “a measure of
satisfaction in store for those women who may not be chosen as
the representatives of Nebraska beauty,” announcing that he will
have all the pictures handsomely framed and hung in the rotunda
of the Nebraska building, so that
all comers may see for themselves the counterfeit presentment of the
thousands of beautiful women in Nebraska. The judge believes that
this display will have a strong effect on immigration to Nebraska,
especially among the young men of the east, and that, as a result,
the matrimonial market will experience a wave of prosperity which
will bring about thousands of desirable matrimonial alliances. In the

222 tracey jean boisseau

 opinion of the honorable vice president, this prospect should arouse
the patriotism of Nebraska women, especially those living in a state
of single blessedness, and result in a still greater number of pictures
being received.48

Objections voiced by the Woman’s Board might well have been

shared by young women around the region who may have bris-
tled at Judge Neville’s suggestive remarks and had “more sense,”
as Ford puts it, than to want to expose themselves to the pruri-
ent gaze of male judges and the general public who might imag-
ine they had sent in their photos for the purpose of advertising
their availability for marriage. As the Bee reported, “a woman may
think she is good looking,” continued Mrs. Ford in a spirited man-
ner, “but we give her credit for having more sense than to want to
parade that fact before the world at large, and the comparatively
small number of photographs which have been received by the
different vice presidents proves that our estimate is well founded.”
Without specifying a number, the Bee reporter had to concede the
point that the contest had elicited far fewer photographs than had
been anticipated and hoped for: “reports published in the papers
in the states where these proceedings have been conducted indi-
cate that the women have not been overly anxious to enter the
contest, the number of pictures received by the vice presidents
being decidedly small.”49
It is telling that neither the Omaha Bee nor the internal reports
generated by exposition officials supply clear information regarding
how many photos were gathered by each state or even a conclusive
and comprehensive account of all the winning photos submitted
to the exposition. One news report claimed “hundreds” of photos
were received, one claimed “thousands,” but in the end no defini-
tive numbers were publicized, as they might have been if the num-
bers were genuinely impressive. Omaha newspapers took pains, as
the winning photos arrived in Nebraska, to publish the names of
the contest winners alongside their photos, describing the young
women’s appearances in glowing detail and including references
to their education level, respectable hobbies and talents, and their
elite family lineage or the middle-class professions of their fathers

condensed loveliness 223

in an obvious attempt to ward off any implication that the young
women who contributed their photographs were unwholesome,
from transient or immigrant families, or were members of the
working or lower classes.50
Despite the Woman’s Board of Managers’ condemnation of the
contest and despite board secretary Ford’s labeling it a “fiasco,” the
photos were eventually selected and submitted to Rockwood, who
produced a composite portrait imagined as representing all that
these young women had in common with one another and with
the manifest destiny of the American West. The result, accord-
ing to the Omaha Bee, was “a face, at once strong and lovable, a
fine profile, with a strikingly intellectual cast.”51 Once composited,
the image of “the strongest type of western womanhood” drew
respectful praise in all reports of the exposition and by numis-
matic societies. The sexual innuendo that had accompanied some
of the reporting during the contest itself, of gleeful male judges
happily monopolizing the visual pleasure they took in examining
numerous young women’s photographs in private and at their lei-
sure, was replaced with a respectful tone of admiration for a com-
posite image of idealized womanhood representing all that white
civilization had brought to the region.52
Once produced, there is no evidence indicating, in specific,
women’s collective or individual private reaction to the coin, but
the members of the Woman’s Board were not content with remov-
ing themselves in the press from association with the contest that
had preceded it. Later that summer they staged a pageant of their
own devising, appropriating the composited image of white female
beauty Rockwood had created, and redeploying it to serve their
own purposes.
During the second week of August, members of the Woman’s
Board organized and participated in a competitive “Floral Parade”
held as part of “Flower Day” at the fair. Reportedly drawing the
biggest crowd since the July 4 celebrations, the Floral Parade con-
sisted of a procession of forty carriages fully lined and decorated
with flowers and filled mostly with the women of the board and
their female relatives dressed in formal attire, sporting elaborate
flowered hats and parasols (fig. 36). The overall visual effect of the

224 tracey jean boisseau

parade was of a well-heeled, stately nature, which drew an obvi-
ous parallel between the beauty of the women and the artificial
flowers with which they surrounded themselves.
In commenting on the procession, the Omaha Woman’s Weekly
did not hold back any superlatives, referring to the “august assem-
bly” as “an esthetical ideal, whose chaste, classical beauty will radi-
ate along life’s pathway like sunbeams above the gates of morn.”53
Through multiple references to “chaste” and “classical” beauty,
commentators worked hard to distance the Floral Parade from the
tawdriness associated with beauty contests and midway beauty pag-
eants featuring nonwhite or foreign women. The Woman’s Weekly
went even further to attribute political importance and national-
ist significance to the white women’s Floral Parade by pairing it
and putting it on par with the very recent presumed finale of the
Spanish-American War: “August 12, 1898, is recorded as an event-
ful day. Our inspiring ensign of Liberty first hissed the breeze over
the Sandwich Islands, the peace protocol with Spain was signed
and the Flower Carnival of the great Trans-Mississippi Exposition
was given to the world on that magnetic date. A date and day that
will live in the lives of some of Omaha’s most queenly women, and
their many admirers.”54 The writer’s lofty rhetoric explicitly linked
the event with the conquering of new territory in the Pacific in
a way that elevated the import of the Floral Parade to a national
and distinctly imperial ideal.
The entries to the Floral Parade were photographed by Frank
A. Rinehart, the fair’s official photographer, and judged by local
mayors. All of the parade’s participants were awarded a souvenir
medal specially commissioned by the Woman’s Board and minted
in silver for the occasion. The design of the Floral Parade medal is
particularly telling in that one side featured the composite image of
white womanhood pulled from the official souvenir medal. Even if
they had deemed the beauty contest that had presaged it beneath
their dignity and injurious to their sense of decorum, once com-
posited by Rockwood, the idealized image of white middle-class
womanhood must have proved too popular or too resonant and
thus irresistible to the middle-class women who staged the Flo-
ral Parade. But, for its reverse, the Woman’s Board replaced the

condensed loveliness 225

Fig. 36. F. A. Rinehart, Flower Parade, Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition, Omaha, 1898. From the collections of the Omaha Public Library.
Carriage stands in front of Horticulture Building. Artwork in the public
domain, scan courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition
Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
hunting scene with text reading simply “Souvenir Floral Parade
August 5th 1898” as if, by removing any trace of Indianness, the
link between white women’s visual representation and the spectac-
ularization of savagery, even by way of contrast, could be severed.55
The Woman’s Board attempted to transform the Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition medal into an object that retained
its power to elevate white womanhood to the pinnacle of the evo-
lutionary advance of civilization while avoiding the risk of the set
of potentially problematic meanings male organizers had assigned
to it by juxtaposing it with a scene of racialized savagery.

A Certain Type of Face

What was it about the face resulting from Rockwood’s composite
that appealed? The turn-around of the Woman’s Board in endors-
ing the souvenir medal’s image may have been largely a function
of the transformative power of compositry to eliminate the unsa-
vory elements involved with the beauty contest while enhanc-
ing the final portrait’s power to reveal the supposed racial truths
lying at the base of white civilization’s conquest of the West. But
it also helped that compositry adhered to what was emerging as
a mainstay component of American national identity: the idea of
America as a “melting pot” or composite itself. Redoubling the
effectiveness of this concurrence was Rockwood’s savvy grafting
of white women’s beauty onto the decade’s most fashionable image
of youthful American womanhood: the “Gibson Girl.”
Knowledgeable and mindful of the tastes of his audience and
consumer base, Rockwood’s image not only hid specific women
from view but it also capitalized on the popularity of Charles Dana
Gibson’s designs, cementing the association between his compos-
ite and Gibson’s ideal of white womanhood by asking women to
pose themselves in ways similar to the figures in Gibson’s illustra-
tions. In mid-February 1898, for instance, as photos were being
received, some of which were unusable due to their incompatibil-
ity with the standard profile format, manager Lindsey reminded
potential contributors of the “request of the artist” (by this he
meant Rockwood), “which is that each of the ladies should dress

condensed loveliness 227

the hair reasonably high on the head, according to the latest mode
of dressing the hair.”56
By 1898 Gibson’s magazine illustrations and the ways in which
he posed his models, with a thick mane of unruly hair swirled
messily and often placed high atop the head, had become the rage
throughout the United States. The Gibson Girl seemed to bring
forth all that was endearing and admirable in the “new woman”
of the 1890s while leaving aside the stridency and threat associ-
ated with her politics and causes. Finely drawn, without much of
any detail or setting and with smooth lines that often dissolve into
space, Gibson Girls promenaded down city streets, strolled along-
side fountains and past monuments at world’s fairs, romped on
public beaches, straddled bicycles, played golf, flirted with men
at the theater, and generally enjoyed their status as young, single
women of leisure. Confidence and independence were the hall-
mark of the Gibson Girl, secure as she was both in the knowledge
of her attractiveness and in her lack of fear of men or the power of
their public ogling. With hair that might be in charming disarray
due to an active lifestyle, a Gibson Girl was nonetheless impecca-
bly groomed and always fashionably attired and seemed immune
to the risk of being mistaken for a “public woman” despite her
intentional attracting of admiring male glances.57
Effort to leverage the value of the Gibson Girl as a national ideal
at an international exposition was most evident in the sculpture An
American Girl, created by sculptor Bessie Potter Vonnoh, a prom-
inent American artist (and the only female sculptor whose work
was included in the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposi-
tion Fine Arts exhibit). In 1899 Vonnoh was commissioned to pro-
duce a sculpture representing modern American womanhood for
the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle (fig. 37). Vonnoh hired the
best known of Gibson’s three principal models, Maude Adams,
who was also a successful stage actress. According to art historian
Linda Kim, the statue’s association with a recognizably American
ideal of womanhood served mutually to reinforce both the statue
and the Gibson Girl as representative of not only modern Amer-
ican womanhood but modern American womanhood as repre-
sentative of an idealized and forward-looking American nation.58

228 tracey jean boisseau

Fig. 37. Bessie Potter Vonnoh’s gold-plated statue of the American Girl was
displayed at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. Monumental News 12
(May 1890): 286. Work in the public domain, Google-digitized.
 Sometimes referred to in the press as the “Golden Girl,” the stat-
ue’s original design of solid gold, taken from a Colorado smelting
company, produced scathing comment in the press regarding its
cost and flamboyant choice of materials. This factor and, unlike
the archive of beauty that Rockwood drew upon for his com-
posite, Vonnoh’s reliance on one specific model, who was not a
respectable woman of the middle class, overwhelmed the advan-
tages that associations with Gibson’s popular figures could have
lent it. Debates over the statue’s merits as a symbol of American
modernity—specifically whether its gold pointed to American
materialism and its working-class female model symbolized the
crassness of American culture—overshadowed praise for its presen-
tation of a young, fashionable Gibson Girl as symbol of American
virtue and vitality. According to Vonnoh biographer Julie Aron-
son, at the height of the controversy, newspaper headlines quoted
Ferdinand Peck, the U.S. commissioner to the Paris exposition,
as stating that “‘No Gold-Plated Girl or Similar Freak’ would be
exhibited in the American section of the exposition.” Fearing that
a statue made of gold and infamously modeled on an actress might
confirm French art critics’ views of the United States as obsessed
with money and commercialism, Peck banned the statue from the
U.S. exhibit on the somewhat trumped up grounds that it repre-
sented a regional strength (the gold having come from the min-
ing industries of the American West) rather than the nation as a
whole. The American Girl finally ended up far from the Ameri-
can section of the exposition, grouped with other visual novelties
at the center of the Palais de l’Optique.
The statue’s designation as a novelty, rather than as an example
of American fine art, its post-exposition life as window dressing
for the new large department stores springing up in New York and
Chicago, and its eventual fate, to be melted down for the $97,000
worth of gold bullion that made up its hide, was in part due to the
perceived incapacity of Maude Adams—in the end a “working”
woman with a disreputable occupation as an actress—to serve
alone as a model of a “higher type” of American womanhood
and the nation at large.59 The problem with the American Girl
statue might have been solved through the composite process that

230 tracey jean boisseau

brought elite white women into the construction of representa-
tive national images. As instantiated by the 1898 Trans-Mississippi
Exposition medal, composites that relied on “real”—and verifiably
respectable—women, while also laying scientific claim to sym-
bolically representative features, were more capable of bearing
the weight of national identity at this moment. Just as compos-
itry as a science was reaching its height of public influence, and
the notion of America as an amalgam of all that was the best of
Europe’s white races was coming to the forefront of the national
consciousness, the Gibson Girl as American ideal was positioned
directly in these cultural crosshairs.
Gibson himself attributed, retroactively, his artistic vision of
American womanhood to the unique “melting pot” that repre-
sented America’s contribution to world history. “I’ll tell you how
I got what you have called the ‘Gibson Girl,’” he told a reporter
for the Sunday Times Magazine in 1910. “I saw her on the streets, I
saw her at the theatres, I saw her in the churches. I saw her every-
where and doing everything. I saw her idling on Fifth Avenue and
at work behind the counters of the stores. . . . The nation made the
type. What Zangwill calls the ‘Melting Pot of Races’ has resulted
in a certain character; why should it not also have turned out a
certain type of face?”60 (my emphasis)
The play Gibson referenced, Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot,
was staged in New York in 1908. At the climax of this popular
hit on Broadway, the hero declares the United States itself to be
producing the greatest human type of all time. “God’s Crucible,
the great Melting Pot, where all the races of Europe are melting,”
was producing “the coming Superman” in the form of the repre-
sentative American.61 Like Zangwill, by “races” Gibson undoubt-
edly meant to evoke the cresting waves of European immigrants
flooding New York’s harbor, exclusive of the nonwhite races of
Africa, Asia, and those native to the Americas. Zangwill’s play,
and its central idea that the United States was a democratic “melt-
ing pot” of the best of the white (European) “races,” had an enor-
mous impact on contemporaries like Gibson. Theodore Roosevelt,
after viewing it in 1912, was moved to write in a letter to Zangwill,
“That particular play I shall always count among the very strong

condensed loveliness 231

and real influences upon my thought and my life.” His letter fur-
ther clarified that Roosevelt considered the play to have expressed
his long-held view that white ethnic Americans had been fused
together into what might be considered a “composite” white race
representing a new “American nationality.”62 In an afterword to
his published play, Zangwill specified the race-specific nature of
this new national composite or “melting pot,” claiming that Jews
like himself represent the “toughest of all the white elements that
have been poured into the American crucible.”63
Long after Zangwill’s play had faded from cultural memory,
“melting pot” became the ultimate shorthand expression for the
creation of an American culture produced from a composite of
European whites—a notion central to the United States’ imagina-
tion of itself through much of the twentieth century.64 Gibson cer-
tainly believed his conception of the Gibson Girl was expressive
of American national identity because it was a seeming compos-
ite of many women rather than any one of them; racial and ethnic
differences were “sloughed off ” to reveal a purified, Progressive,
“Anglofied” American woman. Having evolved from heterogene-
ity into supremacy, she would be prepared to colonize “the dark
corners of the earth,” her power over men a recasting of Ameri-
can imperial power.65
Rockwood’s portrait of western white womanhood performed
its cultural work similarly. “Collective” in much the same way that
the Gibson girl was imagined as representative of a certain type
of composited face, Rockwood’s final portrait was drawn from
an archive of photographs of identifiable American women, who
resembled, or were made to resemble, Gibson’s “girls” and who were
imagined as qualified by their race and class to collectively repre-
sent both what was shared by all their countrymen as well as what
was distinctive to the American nation and exemplary about its
western frontier. As Gibson put it, rather than Rockwood creating
a wholly new image of Woman, it must have seemed to those who
looked upon the souvenir medal with favor, including the mem-
bers of the Woman’s Board, that “the nation made the type” that
had materialized in the form of this powerful exposition souvenir.

232 tracey jean boisseau

Archive of the Other-ed Women
While the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition souvenir medal
and Floral Parade souvenir medal proposed to represent the best
of the American West by way of a composite of idealized white
middle-class women, other women—working-class, nonwhite,
and foreign—were pictured very differently at the fair. People
employed at the fair carried an identity card sporting their like-
ness. These photographic images served a far different purpose
than to identify features conveying American manifest destiny and
white domination of the West. Such passes served to authorize
working-class people’s presence on the fairgrounds, as did their
inclusion in souvenir photos clearly identifying them with their
work, such as the waitresses at the German Village, who posed
with aprons, beer steins held aloft, and inviting smiles all around
(fig. 38). These women did not represent the noble messaging of
the exposition regarding the triumph of American civilization.
Instead their beauty was deployed to sell beer and amusement to
thirsty and flirtatious patrons, and their dress and postures were
meant to call to mind a quaintness attributed to premodern Europe
in contrast to modern America.
Photographs of Native women (fig. 39), participating in the
fair as delegates to the Indian Congress, were more stylized and
compelling. These portraits, while not unlovely or unsympathetic
due to the photographers’ determination to present the women as
individuals, nonetheless tended to resemble in format and presen-
tation the front, back, and side photos of Galton’s archive of crim-
inal and degenerate “types.”66 Other American women of color,
quite noticeably black women, are so little in evidence in the offi-
cial photographic record of the exposition as to seem virtually
imperceptible as feminine visual subjects. For instance, in Rine-
hart’s group photographs of the men and women who performed
as slaves in the Old Plantation exhibit—perhaps the only official
visual representation of black women at the fair—black women
are not photographed individually or seemingly for the purpose
of highlighting their femininity or physical beauty but rather out
of nostalgia for a time and place in which they were enslaved.

condensed loveliness 233

Fig. 38. F. A. Rinehart, Waitresses and Band, German Village, Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition, Omaha, 1898. German Village,
East Midway, advertised as “the Gaiety Resort of the Exposition,” featured
Kirchner’s Famous Lady Orchestra, vaudeville talent, a Vienna kitchen,
and Edelweiss beer. From the Collections of the Omaha Public Library.
Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
Fig. 39. F. A. Rinehart and Adolph F. Muhr, Katherine Antoine, Flathead
(Salish), front and profile, Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition,
Omaha, 1898. From the Collections of the Omaha Public Library. Artwork in
the public domain, scan courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
 Foreign-born (or seemingly so) “dancing girls,” particularly of
Middle Eastern, Asian, or Eastern European descent, performed
on the Omaha fair’s Midway and were orientalized in images that
presented them in pointedly undignified poses. While no “Con-
gress of Beauty” similar to that featured on the 1893 Chicago Mid-
way was organized at the Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition, and proposals for a comparable “Temple of Beauty”
at the 1899 Greater America Exposition in Omaha were ultimately
scrapped, analogous performances of mostly foreign women as
exotic dancers were quite prominent at the exposition and suffi-
ciently of interest that they were photographed at work and at lei-
sure.67 For instance, in Dancing Girls—Streets of Cairo (fig. 40), the
women who worked at the concession are shown slumped in their
chairs, smoking hookah, with arch expressions on their faces and
gazes that seemed to challenge the viewer to judge them by stan-
dards not applicable to their circumstances and not of their own
making. Photographed seemingly backstage and so not formally
performing, with what seem like intimate details of the interior
included, the photograph, like the entertainments on the “streets”
of the Midway, presented women’s bodies for inspection in ways
that differed markedly from the classicized idealization of mid-
dle- and upper-class white women.
Although the Midway (fig. 3) at the Trans-Mississippi Expo-
sition was deemed to be “instructive, amusing, refreshing and
wholesome,” with the “coarse features complained of at other expo-
sitions rigidly eliminated,” in fact the exposition had its fair share
of lewd entertainments that hinged on the display of nonwhite,
foreign, and working-class women’s bodies. It boasted the usual
Chinese, Moorish, and German villages, a Turkish bazaar, and
“Streets of Cairo” as well as a “Streets of All Nations” upon which
ambled costumed Assyrian swordsmen, wrestlers, and camels to
keep the “crowds in good humor.” Satisfying fairgoers’ expecta-
tions for history, novelty, and exoticism were exhibits such as the
“Old Plantation” where visitors could “for fun” look in on male
and female black performers posing as slaves picking cotton and
tobacco as in a pre–Civil War tableau.68 At the Wild West show
the military vanquishing of Indians could be replayed again and

236 tracey jean boisseau

Fig. 40. F. A. Rinehart, Dancing Girls—Streets of Cairo, Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition, Omaha, 1898. From the collections of the Omaha
Public Library. The East Midway concession included a cafe, an Egyptian
theater, camel rides, sword fights, and dancers. Artwork in the public domain,
scan courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Archive,
trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
again. And concessions featuring women with peculiar bodies such
as “Chiquita—the Living Doll,” a small woman from Cuba who
was hailed in Omaha and later at the 1901 Buffalo exposition for
her beguiling femininity and loyalty to America, attracted large
appreciative crowds and reams of positive press.69
The inclusion and attention devoted to the unusual or foreign—
grouped among the “incongruous or the unreal”—at this fair belies
the all too strenuously expressed claim made by sponsors and boost-
ers of the 1898 exposition that at it, unlike at the 1893 Columbian
exposition to which it was often compared, “freakishness” was given
no quarter even on its Midway: “But at no point has the prevailing
good taste been allowed to lapse. Novelty has not been allowed to
displace elegance, nor has any freakishness been given play. Dignity
and harmony characterize the buildings and the arrangements of
the grounds of the exposition. Over on the Midway ample scope
has been afforded for such display as suggests the incongruous or
the unreal, and even here there is apparently a steadfast purpose
toward fidelity of representation” (italics added for emphasis).70 In
direct contradiction to this claim, in the extant photographs of the
fair various “others” pose alongside animals, are presented with
lurid props and costumes, and figure as freaks and fetish objects.
At the center of a photo of performers posed at the entrance to
Hagenbeck’s Wild Animal Show, for example, a woman stands
with a boa constrictor draped across her shoulders and a small
child caged with animals at her feet (fig. 41). Incongruities such
as these abounded on the Trans-Mississippi Exposition’s Midway.
After paying a nominal entrance fee, pedestrians could amble
for free among the noble buildings of the Grand Court, but among
those shows that fairgoers were willing to pay extra to see were
“freak” shows such as Hagenbeck’s that were designed to empha-
size the unusual, the eerie, the monstrous, the savage—and the
sexually appealing. A promiscuous list of such “freakish exhib-
its” included the Indian Congress and, not unsurprisingly, beauty
pageants. Touting the Omaha expositions’ attractions “of every
imaginable character and of varying worth or merit,” a reminis-
cent article published in the Honolulu Evening Bulletin recalled
how one could, for instance,

238 tracey jean boisseau

Fig. 41. F. A. Rinehart, Entrance to Hagenback’s, Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition, Omaha, 1898. From the collections of the Omaha
Public Library. Carl Hagenback’s popular (since 1805) Wild Animal
Show (north Midway), featured exotic (elephants, bears, leopards, tigers,
jaguars, etc.) and often dangerous animals. Rinehart’s photo suggests the
performances’ display of “freakishness” in the way that the woman with the
boa constrictor and the child caged with lion cubs seem unperturbed and
“close” to animals. Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of the Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
 ride a camel along the Streets of Cairo, go 225 feet above ground in the
Giant See-Saw, descend to a representation of the depths of hades in
“Darkness and Dawn: or Heaven and Hell,” where you first had lunch
with a coffin for a table. You could ride on the Scenic Railway, Shoot
the Chutes, see any kind of cyclorama, see a boy “Buried Alive,” see
Gay Paree or a Beauty Show or Living Pictures, or Hagenback’s Ani-
mal Show for shudders and thrills, or the Old Plantation for fun or
any one of over half a hundred more, including the Cuban, Filipino,
Hawaiian, Samoan, Puerto Rican, German, Swiss, Chinese and Jap-
anese villages.”71 (italics added for emphasis)

At the 1898 Trans-Mississippi exposition and again at the 1899

Greater America Exposition, what Rosemarie Garland Thomson
refers to as “enfreakment,” or the spectacularization of nonnor-
mative, nonhegemonic bodies as “others,” producing a satisfy-
ingly whole and normativized subject position for the viewer,
took shape.72 On a continuum with exhibits of American slave
cabins conjuring a previous era of white ownership of black bod-
ies, villages of Pacific-rim people soon to be claimed as spoils of
the recent war with Spain, and the commercialized positioning of
those with unusual anatomies or talents on the edge or even out-
side the boundaries of the human, were the displays of young, for-
eign, and poor women’s bodies as objects to be possessed visually
by mostly male patrons willing to pay a little extra.
Despite race and class privilege, the middle-class white women
who sat on exposition women’s boards in this period were not
unaware of the risk of enfreakment posed by certain modes of rep-
resentation, although they were more likely to think of this risk
in terms of dishonor or public humiliation. Key among the most
likely avenues to such ignominy were photography, beauty contests
or pageants, and dancing and fashion shows, but any highlight-
ing of women as distinct from men could invite such exposure.
Indeed, merely the decision to self-segregate as women could trig-
ger even otherwise respectable middle-class white women’s asso-
ciation with freakishness, as this post appearing in the Excelsior,
referencing the Greater America Exposition held on the Trans-

240 tracey jean boisseau

Mississippi fairgrounds in 1899, sneeringly reveals the slippery
ideological slope women organizers navigated:
It seems settled beyond a doubt that the Greater America exposition
is to have a Woman’s building. Considering the fun that was poked
at the Woman’s building at the [1893 Chicago] World’s Fair, and sub-
sequent expositions, it shows a goodly amount of the “courage of
one’s convictions” to attempt the thing again. Why there should be a
distinctive building for women any more than one for men is one of
the things that, to the uninitiated, seems difficult of comprehension.
A Woman’s building is apt to degenerate into an exhibition that has
no sense of values, the only requisite for getting one’s work exhibited
being the one of sex. However, since the thing is settled one can only
hope that this will not be “an aggregation of freaks under one can-
vas.”73 (Italics included for emphasis.)

A prodigious number of “freaks under one canvas” was an oft-

repeated phrase used in the publicity surrounding carnivals, cir-
cuses, and traveling sideshows in the nineteenth century. The
presence of segregated women’s exhibits and Women’s Buildings
alone seemed to evoke the specter of enfreakment, rendering even
the 1893 Woman’s Building in Chicago a joke to the Excelsior,
despite its reputed enormous success. Feminist scholars have often
wondered about American women boards’ decisions following
the 1893 Columbian exposition to forego a Woman’s Building or
any sort of gender segregated exhibits at many subsequent world’s
fairs, without perhaps fully appreciating the existential threat of
otherness, particularly in the form of enfreakment, that inevita-
bly hung about the strategy.
Proximity to racialized others and the fear of being positioned
outside or on the edge of the main purposes of the fair were of
real concern to even the most elite of women in this period, and
the commercialized display of their beauty at world’s fairs and
expositions threatened to blur this fine line. As Julia Kristeva and
feminist visual theorists like Barbara Creed and Linda Williams
have noted, the female heroine and the monstrous are frequently
linked textually and imagistically in American popular narratives,

condensed loveliness 241

imagined as they are as opposites but only opposite inasmuch as
they are two sides of the same coin.74
Rosemarie Garland Thomson brilliantly extrapolates on this
explicit and implicit pairing in her article “The Beauty and the
Freak.” She explains how “through the ritualized viewing of each,”
the two seeming polar opposites, one “ideal” and the other “anom-
alous,” are linked by their mutual constitution and their coopera-
tion in distilling the figure of the “normative citizen of a democratic
order.” Those with disabled or atypical bodies are often joined by
those Garland labels as “cultural freaks,” meaning those exoti-
cized people of color imagined as living in a separate temporal
plane from the contemporary moment and who confer civilized
status upon the “modern” in anthropological exhibits common to
world’s fairs. At these events, “Wild Men,” “Zulu Warriors,” “Can-
nibals,” and “Missing Links” always appear in generic jungle set-
tings, brandishing spears, loincloths, and the uninhibited hair
characteristic of the eroticized “Circassian Slave,” a kind of exotic
fusion of the beauty queen and the cultural freak. Such props and
costumes suggest alienness, transgressive appetites, or forbidden
sexuality, and helped legitimate imperialism by depicting cul-
tural others as uncivilized savages needing subjugation or benev-
olent paternalism. Thomson goes on to explain how, in parallel
and conjoined ways, the beauty, the freak, and the savage, trans-
formed into spectacle, establish the white, normative, male view-
ing subject: “through hyperbolized sexual role performances, the
figure of the beauty offers to make her viewers into men. By parad-
ing exaggerated bodily lack or excess, corporeal freaks invite their
viewers to imagine themselves whole. By flaunting savagery, cul-
tural freaks extend the illusion of civilization to their audiences.”75
Supporting the argument ideologically linking beauty queens
with freaks and savages is the intertwined history of their spec-
tacularization in the nineteenth century. As Thomson and others
have noted, famed showman P. T. Barnum, best known for his trav-
eling exhibits of bodies of excess and/or lack, was also the first in
the United States to attempt to organize, in 1854, a genuine beauty
contest for white women. In an attempt to build on the phenom-
enal success he had experienced staging dog and baby contests,

242 tracey jean boisseau

he hoped to entice young white women to display themselves
onstage with attractive prizes and the pleasure of being recognized
for their good looks. When no “respectable” woman would agree
to participate, however, he attempted to mediate the scandalous
notion of a woman displaying herself in public by suggesting that
women send in photos of themselves instead. They did not. In the
1850s, and without the aid of compositry to provide a screen for
women who might like to participate, Barnum’s strategy failed to
win middle-class American women over to the idea of exposing
themselves as objects for public consumption.
Nearly half a century later, with compositry well established as a
photographic technique that resonated with scientific authority as
well as crucial veiling properties, Barnum’s first-proposed solution
of interposing the photograph between actual women and their
public display had more chance of succeeding. Though the 1898
beauty contest requesting young women to send in their photos
still clearly left the respectable women of the Trans-Mississippi
Exposition Woman’s Board uncomfortable and even outraged,
the resulting composited photographic image provided by Rock-
wood elevating white womanhood to a national ideal tempered
their concerns and provided the possibility for the resuscitation
of the composite within a context controlled by them, as mani-
fested in the Floral Parade. Eliminating the disturbing image of
the half-dressed male Indian hunter on the Floral Parade’s sou-
venir medal seemed to help in severing the enfreaking ideologi-
cal linkage between white female beauty and savagery at least for
the purposes of that event and its production of a souvenir that
the Woman’s Board controlled.
The specter of male Indian-ness frequently returned to haunt
the figure of white female beauty in twentieth-century exposition
art as illustrated by posters of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Expo-
sition and the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition, two of the
most admired collectibles from two of the most important Amer-
ican expositions held in the first half of the twentieth century (fig.
42). The French-designed art nouveau poster for the 1904 exposi-
tion centers a beautiful, young white woman as emblem of the fair
and, as with the Trans-Mississippi souvenir medal, pairs her with

condensed loveliness 243

a male Indian. Instead of a virile hunter, however, the poster dis-
plays a weary man who gazes sidelong at the woman and whose
face is pressed close to her bare shoulders. His hand may be poised
to embrace or grab her if not for her gentle and friendly suspen-
sion of it. The very modern and fashionably dressed white woman
appears relaxed and unaware or unafraid of any threat the Indian
man might once have posed to her; instead she assumes a powerful
position, poised to uplift him and guide him toward (white) civili-
zation and the modern era. The poster for the 1933 Chicago World’s
Fair features another dyad of white woman and male Indian, this
time both heroically stylized in the manner of much state-sponsored
political art of the decade. With even less sexual danger implied,
the stern but beckoning white woman is paralleled by an equally
dignified and stiffly upright Indian man who, despite the leader-
ship conveyed by his elaborate headdress and noble expression,
nonetheless appears to occupy a different plane of existence, as if
an apparition or memory of the woman or of the nation whom she
represents. In a direct echo of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition
souvenir medal, the temporal disjuncture associated with the male
Indian (vanquished past) and the white woman (modern nation) is
further clarified by the dates 1833 hovering above the Indian’s head
and 1933 hovering above the white woman’s. In these and innumer-
able other formats, idealized imagery of white womanhood paired
with the image of the “doomed” Indian man—as if he formed a
shadowy but necessary underside of her idealization—persisted as
featured aspects of the official iconography and artwork of Amer-
ican world’s fairs for another generation or more.76

Conclusion: Face-ing America’s Future

Most of the still lingering unease expressed by white women in
1898, unsure of the implications of their public display especially
when tethered to money-making or commercial purposes, seemed
to wither entirely in the generations coming of age after the turn
of the century.77 With it, the need or desire to blur the representa-
tion of respectable middle-class white women evaporated as did
part of the point of composite photography and Rockwood’s pho-
tographic practices. However, compositry in the configuration of

244 tracey jean boisseau

Fig. 42. Alphonse Mucha, Exposition Universelle & Internationale de St. Louis
États-Unis du 30 Avril au 30 Novembre 1904 (Paris: Champenois, 1903), color
lithograph. Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of the Library of
Congress. George B. Petty, A Century of Progress, 1933, poster. Petty was known
for his pinups of young women in bathing suits and pioneering airbrushing
techniques. cop_17_0023_00000_049, Century of Progress Records, 1927–52,
University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections.
white women’s representation persisted for much of the twentieth
century as a primary way of conveying the significance of a cer-
tain type of whiteness.78 Less a way of hiding an individual wom-
an’s identity than an ideological framing device key to symbolizing
a collective national identity, compositry and aggregation contin-
ued to govern women’s representation in the most iconic media
formats. In multiple and interchangeable if not identical images,
white women were arranged in the geometrical designs of a Busby
Berkeley musical, in mechanistic rows of kicking Rockettes, and in
the robotic annual promenades of Miss America contestants.79 And
despite the eventual eclipsing of international expositions in the
United States by the same film and televisual media that engraved
these aggregated images on the culture, American world’s fairs
continued for some time to provide a preeminent forum for the
dissemination of composite presentations of young white women
as idealized faces of the nation in the form of photographic ren-
derings of exclusively white beauty contests.
Between 1898 and the 1970s, when the American international
exposition tradition began to be severely curtailed, several gener-
ations of young white women eagerly lined up next to one another
to be judged as representative of the fair or that which the fair
denoted—such as in the photo of the “bathing beauties” awaiting
judges’ verdicts at the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair (fig. 43). Vir-
tually exactly the same height and weight, the women posed with
similar suits and hairstyles meant to emphasize less what made
them distinctive than what they held in common. White women
posed in lockstep uniformity became one of the most typical and
familiar of world’s fair advertisements and souvenir images, dis-
tributed through newspapers and taken home by fair visitors. With
arms flattened tightly to their sides and knees rigid to keep their
statuesque poses in place, the conformity conveyed by the collec-
tive image of white female beauty was more resonant with nation-
alist and racialist ideology than a photo taken of the one specific
winner of the contest. Lasting at least into the 1960s, enshrined as
these composite images were on souvenir items and the national
media for more than half a century, the composited and sculpted

246 tracey jean boisseau

image of American white womanhood as emblematic of a national
ideal that was first promoted at the Trans-Mississippi and Interna-
tional Exposition endured long after the close of that fair.
For many decades following the 1898 exposition, whether aimed
at elevating, amusing, or tantalizing audiences, the exhibits, events,
and publicity campaigns that served up women of all races, classes,
and nationalities as consumable visual objects held great promise
for fair organizers, sponsors, and boosters committed to attracting
public attention and ensuring the entertainment value of America’s
international expositions. Starting with the World’s Congress of
Beauties at the 1893 Chicago Exposition, racialized and somewhat
disreputable beauty shows featuring foreign or “native” women
(usually housed not too far from the cages and tents peopled by
those with atypical bodies and the enclosures confining Native
Americans, Pacific Islanders, and African “natives”) became a
ubiquitous feature of American expositions. From this point on,
working-class, non-white, and foreign women often found expo-
sure as well as employment on midway zones and some, like the
women often referred to as “Little Egypt,” earned moments of fame
and even enduring careers as performers by way of such exhibits
and campaigns that brought them to the public’s attention. White
middle-class women experienced less remuneration but arguably
more ideologically positive advantages as a consequence of the dis-
play of their likenesses at world’s fairs. The parallel, but distinct,
contests and pageants featuring them afforded a rare and rarified
opportunity for these women to center themselves as venerated
models qualified to represent the grandest of the expositions’ pur-
poses and principles. After the first successful deployment of this
strategy in Omaha in 1898, every subsequent American interna-
tional exposition would stage some sort of photographic beauty
contest to pinpoint a specific white woman, or more often a group
of them, represented by a composite image capable of conveying a
nationalist ideal as well as advertising the exposition’s central mes-
sage or the event itself. The two parallel deployments of white and
nonwhite women, interdependent on one another and materially
linked in the design of exposition art and objects, spoke volumes

condensed loveliness 247

Fig. 43. Bathing Beauty Contest, New York World’s Fair, 1939–1940 records,
Manuscripts and Archives Division, the New York Public Library, Astor,
Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
about the distinctions of race, class, and nationality in the dispo-
sition of women’s beauty at American world’s fairs.

Notes
I am indebted to Wendy Katz for drawing my attention to and inviting me to write
about this topic and for help researching it. I also thank fellow contributors to this
volume for reading early drafts and helping identify images. Special appreciation goes
to Tony Foreman for his assistance in tracking down knobby details in the archives
and to Allison Roberts for help with obtaining images.
1. “Typical Western Woman,” Omaha Bee, May 22, 1898, 19; Omaha Bee, Janu-
ary 11, 1898, 8.
2. These quotes, as well as all of the phrases in my epigram, appear in “The Omaha
Exposition Medal,” American Journal of Numismatics 33, no. 1 (July 1898): 33–36.
3. Kimball’s sketches, Thomas Rogers Kimball Papers, rg3607, Nebraska State
Historical Society; “The Omaha Exposition Medal,” American Journal of Numis-
matics, 33–34.
4. New York Times, June 26, 1898, 22.
5. David J. Peavler, “African Americans in Omaha and the 1898 Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition,” Journal of African American History 93, no. 3 (Sum-
mer 2008): 337–61, 341.
6. Thomas Tibbles, “Public Pulse: The Progressive Indian,” World-Herald, August
15, 1898, 4.
7. For Indian imagery used by nineteenth-century American women’s suffrage
advocates and twentieth-century feminists, see Gail H. Landsman, “The ‘Other’ as
Political Symbol: Images of Indians in the Woman Suffrage Movement,” Ethnohis-
tory 39, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 247–84.
8. Washington Post, July 12, 1911, 3.
9. George G. Rockwood, “Amateur Photography,” Art Amateur 18 (December
1, 1887): 2, reprinted as “Composite Photographs,” Anthony’s Photographic Bulle-
tin 18 (1887): 335–37.
10. Mia Fineman, Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), 111.
11. Bob Brier, Cleopatra’s Needles: The Lost Obelisks of Egypt (London: Blooms-
bury Academic, 2016).
12. “The Omaha Exposition Medal,” American Journal of Numismatics, 33. See also
Scott Driskell Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egypto-
mania (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
13. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64, 50.
14. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 12, 37, 40–43, 50.
15. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 12, 5.
16. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 53; Fineman, Faking It, 233.
17. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 56, expands this argument to all of pho-
tography, claiming that “the archive became the dominant institutional basis for
photographic meaning” itself.

condensed loveliness 249

 18. Composite photography as a tool to epitomize the highest types of Christian
civilization continued to hold the attention of Omahans after the exposition. In 1899
Joseph Gray Kitchell of Indianapolis produced a composite photograph made from
“all the greatest Madonnas painted by the old masters during 300 years.” In keep-
ing with the belief that compositry revealed deep “scientific” meanings, one news-
paper described the resulting face as “marvelously beautiful—perhaps the highest
type idealized by man, combining, as it does, all that is supreme in the conceptions
of such painters . . . as a scientific contribution to art the result is also significant.”
Omaha Excelsior, December 16, 1899, 2.
19. “The Average Woman,” Cambridge (ma) Tribune, May 27, 1893, 8. Eugenie
Uhlrich, “Reply to the Woman Who Wants to Be a Man,” Midland Monthly Mag-
azine 10 (July 1898), wrote to this Iowa magazine that the sculptures proved that
college women were unable to compete with men. According to Marianne Kin-
kel, Races of Mankind: The Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2011), 9–10, Franz Boaz, the preeminent anthropologist of his time,
condemned the composite science guiding sculptors Henry Hudson Kitson and The-
odora Alice Kitson, but only because their sample, being from an elite socioeconomic
class, represented a tiny slice of the American public. For more on ideal averages
and compositry, see Catherine Newman Howe, “Average Joes and Mean Girls: The
Average Representation and Transformation of the Average American, 1890–1945”
(PhD diss., University of California at Santa Barbara, 2012); and the excellent dis-
cussion of the anthropometric eugenic sculptures “Norma and Normman” in Anna
Creadick, Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 15–36.
20. On Du Bois, see Shawn Michelle Smith, “Photographing the ‘American Negro’:
Nation, Race, and Photography at the Paris Exposition of 1900,” in Looking for Amer-
ica: The Visual Production of Nation and People, ed. Ardis Cameron (Malden ma:
Blackwell, 2005), 61–87. On representation of Africans at the same exposition, see
Raymond Corbey, “Ethnographic Showcases, 1870–1930,” Cultural Anthropology 8,
no. 3 (August 1993): 338–69.
21. This point is also made by Mia Fineman, Faking It, 111.
22. For more on the creation of an ultracivilized or intellectual ideal, see Kathleen
Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-
Century America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996) and Bailey Van Hook,
Angels of Art: Women and Art in American Society, 1876–1914 (University Park: Penn-
sylvania State University Press, 1996).
23. The coin press was sponsored by the U.S. Treasury Department, evincing
federal support for what Bonnie Miller in her chapter in this volume calls “souve-
nir culture” at world’s fairs.
24. Jess R. Peterson, Omaha’s Trans-Mississippi Exposition (Charleston sc: Arca-
dia, 2003), 30.
25. This was usually in contrast to the greater realism and individuality assigned
to sculptures of (particular) men. See Judy Sund, “Columbus and Columbia in Chi-
cago, 1893: Man of Genius Meets Generic Woman,” Art Bulletin 75, no. 3 (Septem-
ber 1993): 443–66; Michele Bogart, Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York
City, 1890–1930 (Washington dc: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997).

250 tracey jean boisseau

 26. See Bonnie M. Miller’s chapter in this volume on the first U.S. postal stamp
featuring a woman at the 1893 Columbian exposition.
27. The Sunday Call quoted in Tom LaMarre, “Isabella Coin Marked Colum-
bian Expo,” Coins Magazine (November 20, 2013), reprinted at numismaster.com,
Krause Publications, 2016.
28. Aurora Daily News, April 20, 1893, 3.
29. Leech wire to Potter, April 21, 1893, quoted in Don Taxay, An Illustrated His-
tory of U.S. Commemorative Coinage (New York: Arco, 1967), 12.
30. Peddle’s drawing is in her letter to Oliver C. Bosbyshell, April 3, 1893, Records
of the Bureau of the Mint: Record Group 104: “Letters Received 1873–1932,” box 5,
file “Columbian Exposition Quarter, 1893.” Leech to Potter, April 12, 1893, quoted in
Taxay, Illustrated History, 11.
31. Leech to Bosbyshell, April 1893, quoted in Michael Moran, Striking Change:
The Great Artistic Collaboration of Theodore Roosevelt and Augustus Saint-Gaudens
(Florence al: Whitman, 2008); 94; see also 87–100.
32. At a midway point in the contest, the organizers of the Trans-Mississippi Expo-
sition considered holding a parallel set of two contests, one eliciting twenty-four
representative “Eastern girls” and one eliciting twenty-four representative “Western
girls” with a composite made from each collection in order to answer the question
“What characteristics and differences will they show?” Omaha Bee, February 7, 1898,
2. See also “Girls, Send Photos,” Helena Independent, January 4, 1898, 5.
33. The composite photograph on which the medal was based is reproduced in
the Iowa monthly Trans-Mississippian, August 1898, 5.
34. Spokane Daily Chronicle, February 15, 1898, 8.
35. Spokane Daily Chronicle, February 15, 1898, 8.
36. “Pick the Prettiest Girls,” Omaha Bee, January 11, 1898, 8.
37. For a thorough account of “Little Egypt” (a composite of performances by dif-
ferent women, none of whom were originally referred to as such), see Donna Carl-
ton, Looking for Little Egypt (Bloomington in: International Dance Discovery, 1995);
and Charles A. Kennedy, “When Cairo Met Main Street: Little Egypt, Salome Danc-
ers, and the World’s Fairs of 1893 and 1904,” Music and Culture in America, 1861–1918
(New York: Garland, 1998), 271–98.
38. Chicago Tribune, August 3, 1895, 16.
39. Lockport Union-Sun, December 4, 1900.
40. Lois McKenzie, “Maud Coleman Woods (1877–1901): Charlottesville’s Reluc-
tant ‘Miss America,’” Preservation Piedmont Newsletter, Fall 2002, 6–7.
41. Lockport Union-Sun, December 4, 1900. The image was so popular and reso-
nant with audiences that in 1915, fair organizers expropriated it with minor changes
for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, designed to cel-
ebrate the opening of the Panama Canal.
42. For instance, in the weeks prior to the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, news-
papers sponsored a beauty contest to find the most beautiful girl in California to
represent the declared superlative beauty of that state and to serve as a model for the
exposition’s principal poster art. Abigail Markwyn, “Queen of the Joy Zone meets
Hercules: Gendering Imperial California at the Panama-Pacific International Expo-
sition,” Western Historical Quarterly 47, no. 1 (2016): 51–72. San Francisco’s “China-

condensed loveliness 251

town” also sponsored a beauty contest of “respectable Chinese girls” selected from
the residents of their neighborhood. Chuimei Ho, “Chinese Women and the Panama
Pacific International Exposition,” aaas Pacific Division Annual Meeting, University
of California at Riverside, June 2014, paper abstract available at http://associations
.sou.edu/aaaspd/proceedings/proceedings.html.
43. The only other published expression of disapproval, and not so much of the
contest itself but of the aesthetics associated with compositry, that I found appears
in the Omaha Excelsior, January 15, 1898, 7. This reads, in its entirety: “If the com-
posite picture of the beautiful women of the Trans Mississippi region will be any-
thing like some of the horrors lately sent out under the name composition, it will
not be a thing of beauty and a joy forever.” That so little criticism of the contest and
medal can be gleaned from newspaper accounts should not be surprising given their
role as boosters for the fair.
44. The announcement in the Excelsior, January 29, 1898, 3, may have been par-
ticularly galling given that it attributed the impetus for this arrangement to a request
by the Woman’s Board. In its entirety, it reads: “The Woman’s Board of Managers has,
through Manager Lindsey, asked for permission to exhibit the pictures of the beau-
tiful women who have been selected as component parts of the composite picture.
The pictures will be arranged as an exhibit, a small admission fee charged, and the
proceeds will go toward the fund for the Boys’ and Girls’ building.”
45. The Woman’s Board officially rejected the fund-raising plan and nixed plans to
exhibit pictures of Nebraska women at the exposition. Omaha Bee, February 3, 1898, 8.
46. Young, vulnerable, portrayed as white and otherwise sexually innocent, women
and girls who were captured to serve as prostitutes and sold across state lines or
internationally, presumably by foreign or nonwhite men working conspiratorially,
became a major preoccupation of the press and the public at the turn of the century
resulting in the passage of the federal White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, better known
as the Mann Act after the congressman who championed it, James Robert Mann of
Illinois. For the racial and class politics of this phenomenon, see David J. Langum,
Crossing Over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1994).
47. “Beauty Gets a Square Show,” Omaha Bee, January 13, 1898, 8.
48. “Beauty Gets a Square Show,” Omaha Bee, 8.
49. “Beauty Gets a Square Show,” Omaha Bee, 8.
50. See, for example, Excelsior, March 28, 1898, 12.
51. “Typical Western Woman,” Omaha Bee, May 22, 1898, 19.
52. “Beauty Gets a Square Show,” Omaha Bee, 8.
53. Woman’s Weekly 207 (October 15, 1898). The relevant text reads: “Forty car-
riages, more or less gorgeous, with beautiful flowers and faces vied with each other
in the dazzling exploit.”
54. Woman’s Weekly 207 (October 15, 1898). The original parade date of August 5
(the date on the medal) was rained out, so it was held on the 12th. On “white queen”
imagery and rhetoric and its race and class implications, see T. J. Boisseau, “White
Queens at the Chicago World’s Fair: New Womanhood in the Service of Race, Class,
and Nation,” Gender and History 12, no. 1 (2000): 33–81.

252 tracey jean boisseau

 55. An article in the Omaha Bee, July 31, 1898, details the upcoming (August 5) Flo-
ral Parade, followed by a description of the upcoming (August 4) Indian Day parade.
The information is mostly factual, but it may be noteworthy that the descriptions
and scheduling of the Floral Parade and the Indian Congress parade were immedi-
ately adjacent to one other, in a juxtaposition similar to the composite medal. I am
grateful to Tony Foreman for this find and observation.
56. Z. T. Lindsey quoted in Spokane Daily Chronicle, February 15, 1898, 8.
57. See Ellen Wiley Todd, The New Woman Revised: Painting and Gender Politics
on Fourteenth Street (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
58. I am grateful to art historian Linda Kim for first educating me about this
sculpture. See her essay “The American Girl: American Women and Nativism at the
1900 Paris International Exposition,” in Women in International and Universal Exhi-
bitions, 1876–1937, ed. Myriam Boussahba-Bravard and Rebecca Rogers (New York:
Routledge Press, 2018), 65-82.
59. My understanding of this episode in the history of American sculpture at
international expositions comes from Julie Aronson, Bessie Potter Vonnoh: Sculp-
tor of Women (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 102–10; Peck’s quote, 105, is
from “Mr. Peck and the Proposed Gold Statue,” Denver Times, September 3, 1899, 2.
60. Gibson added, “There isn’t any ‘Gibson Girl,’ but there are many thousands
of American girls, and for that let us all thank God.” Quoted in Allison Bruning,
Reflections: Poems and Essays (Indianapolis: Mountain Springs House, 2012), 33.
61. Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 33–34.
62. Neil Larry Shumsky, “Zangwill’s ‘The Melting Pot’: Ethnic Tensions on Stage,”
American Quarterly 27, no. 1 (March 1975): 29–41; Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roos-
evelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 131.
63. Zangwill, The Melting Pot, 204.
64. For more on the impact of the “melting pot,” see Hans P. Vought, The Bully
Pulpit and the Melting Pot: American Presidents and the Immigrant, 1897–1933 (Macon
ga: Mercer University Press, 2004).
65. Jennifer Greenhill, “Troubled Abstraction: Whiteness in Charles Dana Gib-
son and George du Maurier,” Art History 34, no. 4 (2011): 732–53, 749, 743–44. See
also John Fagg, “Chamber Pots and Gibson Girls: Clutter and Matter in John Sloan’s
Graphic Art,” American Art 29, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 28–57.
66. F. A. Rinehart, The Face of Courage: The Rinehart Collection of Indian Photo-
graphs (Johnstown co: Old Army Press, 1972). Rinehart was commissioned by the
Bureau of American Ethnology to photograph delegates in these specific formats;
his assistant Adolph F. Muhr took most of them. Rinehart copyrighted the pictures
and sold them in books, for example, Rinehart’s Indians (Omaha, 1899), with two
color plates, and as individual prints and postcards. James M. May, “Frank Rine-
hart,” Museum of Nebraska Art, 2009, https://mona.unk.edu/early/rinehart.shtml.
67. Though no such temple materialized, in “Beauties of Various Lands,” the
Omaha World-Herald, June 11, 1899, 8, reported that the Greater America Exposi-
tion had secured a concession to display “Beauties of Various Lands” in an exhibit
called the “World’s Congresses of Beauties” and that this would “Form One of the
Principal Attractions.” The same proposition had apparently been considered and

condensed loveliness 253

rejected the year before as well. Omaha Evening Bee, June 16, 1897, 2. However, at
the 1898 exposition, there was a Congress of Woman’s Clubs (three days), a Moth-
ers’ Congress (two days), National Council of Women (five days), Jewish Council
of Women (two days), and Suffrage Day with Susan B. Anthony.
68. Quote from the Honolulu Evening Bulletin (1899) in Courtney L. Cope Ziska,
“Omaha, Nebraska’s Costly Signaling at the Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition of 1898” (Master’s thesis, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2012), 42.
69. Western Laborer, September 17, 1898. Born near Matanzas, Cuba, in 1869,
Espiridiona Cenda came to the United States with English menagerist Frank C. Bos-
tock, who also managed the Hagenback’s concession. Said to have brothers in the
Cuban army, the elegantly dressed singer-dancer was presented as a rebel against the
Spanish and a sympathetic figure to Americans during the Spanish-American War.
70. William S. Harwood, “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition,” Harper’s Weekly,
June 18, 1898, 591. See also observations offered by John E. Main, The Booze Route:
A Reform Book on Some of the Up-to-Date Evils of the Age (Los Angeles: Commer-
cial Printing House, 1907), 8–9, a visitor to the fair who expressed horror and dis-
dain for the licentious performances and vulgarity, particularly of foreign female
performers he believed were mendaciously referred to as “Little Egypts.”
71. “The Modern White City: How an Exposition Is Organized and Operated, and
How It Presents Itself to the Visitor,” Honolulu Evening Bulletin, December 16, 1899,
10. The article appeared after the second Omaha fair, the Greater America Exposi-
tion of 1899, had closed, and in recounting Omaha’s successes, the writer seems to
conflate the exhibitions of the two fairs, as for example for the Filipino and Hawai-
ian villages, which were only present in 1899.
72. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “The Beauty and the Freak,” Michigan Quar-
terly Review 37, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 459–74.
73. “Sub Rosa,” Excelsior, January 21, 1899, 1, a long comment on the first page
of the paper, continues that one silver lining of the decision to include a woman’s
building in the 1899 exposition is the ability to determine whether it held any value
to women themselves: “[This] would seem to give us a long desired opportunity of
seeing which method is really the one approved by the women and to which they
will give their loyal support.” The comment ends with the admission of a few legiti-
mate functions of a woman’s building: “A pleasant feature will be, of course that the
congresses of special importance to women will be held here, and the building will
be used as a rendezvous for visiting women.”
74. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1982); Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Femi-
nism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993); Linda Williams, “When the Woman
Looks,” in Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patri-
cia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Frederick md: University Publications of
America, 1984), 61–66.
75. Thomson, “The Beauty and the Freak,” 466–67, 470. See also Linda Frost, “The
Circassian Beauty and the Circassian Slave: Gender, Imperialism, and American Pop-
ular Entertainment,” in Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Pop-
ular Culture, 1850–1877 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 68–88.

254 tracey jean boisseau

 76. On the associations with domestic decor, see Elizabeth Cromley, “Mascu-
line/Indian,” Winterthur Portfolio 31, no. 4 (1996): 265–80.
77. For a cogent discussion of early twentieth-century women’s increasing ambi-
tion to display themselves in public, see Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman:
Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). For
a broad treatment of this phenomenon, see Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco, eds.,
The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the
1870s through the 1960s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).
78. Although the techniques associated with composite photography have been
superseded by more complex technologies, public fascination with the seemingly
“scientific” promise of compositry persists and has been resuscitated in academic
studies and electronic composites conveyed via the internet. For more on latter-day
deployments of compositry within a larger historical context of racialized beauty
norms, see Partha Mitter, “The Hottentot Venus and Western Man: Reflections on
the Construction of Beauty in the West,” in Cultural Encounters: Representing Oth-
erness, ed. Elizabeth Hallam and Brian Street (New York: Routledge, 2013), 35–50,
especially 37. Compositry also continues to link scientific explorations of race, com-
mercialized beauty, and state surveillance technologies; for example, The Daily Mail
Online, August 8, 2015, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3017464/Are-perfect
-faces-Scientists-map-features-world-s-beautiful-men-women-asking-100-people
-attractive.html. For a more academic consideration of the feminist and theoretical
issues raised by compositry in art, see Stephen Walker, “Helen Chadwick’s Compos-
ite Images,” Journal of Visual Culture 14, no. 1 (April 2015): 74–98.
79. On U.S. beauty pageants and the televised Miss America beauty contest, see
Armando R. Riverol, Live from Atlantic City: The History of the Miss America Pag-
eant before, after, and in Spite of Television (Bowling Green oh: Bowling Green State
University Popular Press, 1992); Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1983); Bonnie J. Dow, “Feminism, Miss America, and Media Mythology,”
Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6, no. 1 (2003): 127–60. For a global context, see Colleen
Ballerino Cohen et al., eds., Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests,
and Power (New York: Routledge, 1996); Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful
Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999).

condensed loveliness 255

 6
Indigenous Identities in the Imperialist Imagination
akim reinhardt

The White Man’s (and Woman’s) Burden

During the late nineteenth century, as the United States wound
down a centuries-long conquest of Indigenous nations that first
began with the arrival of Europeans, Americans embraced two
distinct strains of imperial iconography (the images and sym-
bols associated with imperialism). Two tropes (patterns of literary
narrative stereotyping), of the savage Indian and the progressive
Indian, spun on an axis of doomed Native savagery. In the domi-
nant trope, Indigenous people were rendered as either bloodthirsty
or noble savages. The bloodthirsty savage was a murderous, war-
whooping, tomahawk-wielding primitive whose killing, kidnaping,
and scalping merited his annihilation. One writer on the Omaha
world’s fair claimed Native people belonged to “savage and bar-
barous races” with “devilish cruelty and craftiness” and “primi-
tive modes of living.” This mythic type was complemented by the
sentimental trope of the noble savage, the proud, stoic warrior
who resolutely accepted his fate. Thus the very same writer could
claim that the Indian “does not parade his grievances.” Instead
he “awaits his doom, extinction, with stoical resignation,” while
boasting “grim silence and proud bearing.”
Both versions of the savage Indian trope, the bloodthirsty and
the noble savage, were usually male. However, images of the sav-

257
age Indian woman were occasionally thrown in for good measure.
Working with and for the savage male was the female accomplice
who tortured prisoners, or the victimized female drudge whose
labor the male savage exploited. The female equivalent of the male
noble savage was the Indian maiden/princess. Thus Mary Alice
Harriman referred to a group of Indian women as “pretty and good
natured, and plump,” while describing another Native woman as
having “the manner and bearing of a princess.”1 Either way, these
popular racialized images locked Indians into a romanticized prim-
itive past and presumed inevitability about their physical extinc-
tion amid the whirlwind of modernity.
Countering the noble and bloodthirsty savage tropes to some
degree was the less common, albeit strongly advocated progres-
sive form of imperial iconography. Progressive tropes cast Indi-
ans as impermanent savages, dynamic people full of potential who
could and should ascend the ladder of civilization. In this model,
Indians were a work in progress, transitional humans making
the remarkable journey from savagery to civilization. Emphasiz-
ing malleable cultural traits instead of inexorable racial charac-
teristics, this trope defined Indians as needing substantial help to
achieve civilization. Progressives reworked the popular theme of
the vanishing savage Indian. They framed Indians’ physical disap-
pearance as a serious, looming threat instead of an ironclad des-
tiny, warning that physical extinction would be the undesirable
outcome of not helping Indigenous people trade their supposedly
inferior cultures for “civilization.” Indians as a people were in need
and deserving of uplift and tutelage by the superior white (Anglo-
Saxon) race, and thus saving Indians’ physical bodies by destroy-
ing and remaking their cultures was seen as a moral imperative.
Of course the progressive model defined “civilization” exclu-
sively in terms of white, Protestant, Victorian culture, with a prej-
udice for patriarchy, agriculture, and female domesticity. And so
Harriman, whose writing indulged every stripe of supposed Indian
savagery, could also celebrate “what the Government is doing to
educate its young [Indian] wards.”2 All models of imperial iconog-
raphy grew from an assertion of Indian inferiority that led many
people to believe Indians would simply melt away in the face of

258 akim reinhardt

a superior white civilization. As Americans clung to a static con-
ception of Indigenous cultures, one thing they agreed on was the
presumption that those cultures were rapidly disappearing, and
generally they only questioned whether or not Indian peoples
would physically disappear along with them.
These competing yet related forms of imperial iconography
about Indians each reflected post–Civil War cultural concerns
about minorities more generally. The dominant, racialized model
of Indian savagery was akin to pervasive white attitudes about
African Americans, who were also often seen as being incompat-
ible with modern civilized white society. But whereas several mil-
lion former slaves and their offspring were valued as an important
source of labor, akin to draft animals, and subject to increasingly
rigid forms of legalized segregation that guaranteed their economic
exploitation while limiting their social interactions, the dominant
cultural trope of several hundred thousand Indians defined them
more as endangered wild animals with no place in modern civ-
ilization, thereby encouraging a general belief that as a result of
some vague social Darwinian process, Indigenous people would
conveniently vanish like the bison.
Meanwhile, the minority progressive model that focused on
absorbing and incorporating Indians into the larger white soci-
ety was similar in some ways to pervasive white attitudes toward
eastern and southern European immigrants, who were also con-
sidered to be not “white.” Schools and various charities dedicated
to “Americanizing” new immigrants were a hallmark of the Pro-
gressive Era (ca. 1890–1920). And in some ways, this programmatic
approach to culturally assimilating immigrants was a watered-
down version of the intensive cultural genocide campaign that
Christian churches, private charities, and the federal government
waged against Indigenous people. Reformers viewed institutions
like federal Indian boarding schools as a mechanism to preclude
the presumed physical extinction of Native peoples by destroy-
ing their cultures. Thus the popular slogan of the era was “Kill
the Indian to save the man,” which from the 1860s to the 1930s
was also the official agenda of the Interior Department’s Office of
Indian Affairs, sometimes known as the Indian Service, the fed-

indigenous identities 259

eral bureaucracy charged with overseeing the colonial adminis-
tration of Indigenous peoples.3
Progressive reform allowed for a marginalized form of Indian
agency. It maintained that Native people’s physical survival was
possible only if they accepted and worked toward their own cul-
tural extinction under the guidance of well-meaning whites. During
the late nineteenth century, the global imperial version of this pro-
gressive assimilationist philosophy was dubbed the “White Man’s
Burden” by English writer Rudyard Kipling.4 As the title of his
poem suggests, U.S. imperialism is often understood as a largely
male endeavor. However, recent scholarship has shown the per-
vasive and vital role of women.
While historians have long studied the role of women in the
Progressive Era’s reform movements, only more recently have they
analyzed the central role women played in devising and imple-
menting the assimilationist policies dedicated to the cultural geno-
cide of Indigenous societies and cultures.5 Women were central to
the agenda, with one scholar noting that “white American women
had been some of the most vocal proponents of the assimilation
policy for American Indians.” Accordingly, it was often reform-
minded women who produced and celebrated progressive impe-
rial iconography of the “civilizing” Indian. In so doing, they not
only turned their attention to imagery of Native women more than
men typically did, but they also advanced tropes of the Indian sav-
age who could and must change and of progressive Indians who
were changing through their acceptance of American civilization
and domesticity. These women typically worked with male allies.
However, many American men were keen on celebrating U.S. con-
quest and more prone to produce and promote macho iconog-
raphy of vanquished indigenes that reveled in violence and the
inevitable extinction of the “savage Indian.”6
All forms of imperial iconography about Native Americans,
sometimes complementing each other and sometimes in com-
petition, were on display during the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition in Omaha. The great variety of physical
objects referencing Native Americans, from tipis to photographs
to coins, was supplemented by written texts in programs, catalogs,

260 akim reinhardt

advertisements, newspapers, and popular magazines that pro-
moted the fair and helped define viewers’ expectations as well as
its legacy. In both poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, writ-
ers who engaged with the exposition cast Indigenous people either
as noble or bloodthirsty savages or, less commonly, as transitional
savages slowly adapting to civilization.
Progressive imperial iconography at the exposition was often
overshadowed by ubiquitous images of Indian savagery that were
so common in American popular culture. Compounding matters
was the patriotism and imperialism stimulated by the Spanish-
American War that further animated this language. On April 11,
1898, seven weeks before the opening of the Trans-Mississippi
Exposition, President William McKinley asked Congress to declare
war on Spain. Two weeks later, Congress complied. The first major
U.S. victory, a naval engagement in Manila Bay, occurred on May
1. Others followed until Spain capitulated on August 12.
Arrayed before the nation and world during this high imperial
moment, the Trans-Mississippi Exposition was awash in imperial
iconography from the Spanish-American War, which is explored
in essays in this volume by Sarah Moore, Stacy Kamehiro, and
Danielle Crawford.7 One scholar has described the fair as pro-
viding “ideological scaffolding for mass support for the govern-
ment’s imperial policies,” which included domestic policies toward
Native Americans.8 An example was the weeklong Peace Jubilee
held in October to celebrate the U.S. victory. President McKinley
attended on October 12, and Native people played a prominent
role in the event. Symbols of Indigenous peoples occasionally were
also juxtaposed with symbols of the war. For example, inside the
U.S. Government Building, near its display celebrating progressive
Indians, stood a large glass case with a model of the uss Maine
and the words “Remember the Maine” emblazoned on a wooden
banner atop it; the sinking of the warship in Havana harbor had
helped spur the conflict.
In defeat, Spain gave up control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Phil-
ippines, and Guam. The war launched the United States onto the
world stage as a peer of and competitor with far-reaching European
empires. U.S. triumph and Spanish cessions were not officially con-

indigenous identities 261

secrated until the Treaty of Paris was signed in December, almost
two months after the exposition ended, so the war and American
victory profoundly influenced the 1899 Greater America Exposi-
tion, a “sequel” fair in Omaha that attempted to capitalize on the
success of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition. The Greater Amer-
ica Exposition was primarily first and foremost an overt celebra-
tion of America’s new colonies (fig. 4) with scant Native American
or federal government participation. And although the Trans-
Mississippi Exposition of 1898 was planned before the outbreak
of war and was not as committed to and overt in its jingoism as
the 1899 fair, it still featured substantial interplay between Amer-
ica’s two imperial projects: its older conquest of North America
and its new overseas ventures, with each influencing representa-
tions of the other. Long-standing attitudes about the conquest and
forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples in North America were
augmented and occasionally shaped by newer overseas conquests.
Gender dynamics influenced these newer forms as well. Tropes of
both men and women advanced jingoistic and hyper-nationalistic
themes and helped to romanticize America’s burgeoning global
ambitions. These newer images vacillated between the fiercely mas-
culine, with its emphasis on savagery, and the sexualized feminine,
with its emphasis on domesticity and progress. The role of gender
in nuancing American imperial iconography at the fin-de-siècle
can also be marked by examining savage and progressive tropes
about Indigenous peoples at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition and
identifying and analyzing moments when they overlap with the
newer fascination with overseas imperialism.

Savage Tropes
The most famous feature, then and now, of the 1898 exposition was
the Indian Congress. Five hundred or more Native people from
approximately thirty-five tribes began arriving on July 30 and
spent three months living in a four-acre enclosure at the northwest
corner of the fair, near the livestock and poultry exhibits (fig. 52).
Home to Native men, women, and children from August through
October, the Congress was conceived, organized, and overseen by
American men who, to varying degrees, accepted elements of the

262 akim reinhardt

dominant savage trope. Omaha Bee editor and exposition organizer
Edward Rosewater conceived of the Congress and worked hard to
bring it to fruition. He originally envisioned having representatives
from every tribe in the Western Hemisphere present, living in tra-
ditional housing and performing dances in what he dubbed the
Grand Council Wigwam. Smithsonian Bureau of American Eth-
nology anthropologist James Mooney, who had worked on Indian
displays in several previous expositions, prudently persuaded the
publisher to gather participants merely from each tribe west of the
Missouri River. With regard to finances, Nebraska senator Wil-
liam V. Allen attempted to secure $100,000 in federal funding.
But when the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898,
congressional priorities shifted. Only $40,000 in federal money
was forthcoming.9
Each man advanced a version of the dominant imperial ico-
nography. Mooney, the scholar dedicated to chronicling Indian
peoples and cultures before they supposedly disappeared, hoped
for an ethnographic exhibit with attention to accuracy, akin to a
living museum. Rosewater shared Mooney’s ethnographic inter-
ests on an amateur level. He too wanted to assemble a complete
roster of Indians so Americans could have one last glance before
“the bronze sons of the forests and plains . . . are gathered to the
happy hunting ground.” However, as one of the exposition’s larg-
est stockholders and an Omaha business owner, Rosewater also
hoped the Indian Congress would bolster the Omaha economy
by attracting paying visitors, which meant emphasizing the “wild
savage” aspect of the dominant imperial iconography. His hopes
were fulfilled; for many visitors, the Indian Congress would be
the fair’s chief attraction, and the exposition would eventually
return a 92.5 percent dividend to shareholders. Meanwhile, Sena-
tor Allen had an overtly imperial viewpoint. He wanted the Indian
Congress to resemble displays at recent world’s fairs held in Bel-
gium and France, where savage and exotic “aborigines” from dis-
tant quarters of expansive European empires were presented for
spectators to ogle.10
Oversight of day-to-day affairs at the Congress fell to U.S. Army
Capt. William A. Mercer, who was also the acting Office of Indian

indigenous identities 263

Affairs reservation agent at the Omaha and Winnebago Indian res-
ervations, located just sixty miles north of the city of Omaha. Mer-
cer took his cue from a circular distributed to reservation agents
by Commissioner of Indian Affairs William A. Jones. A Wiscon-
sin financier and industrialist who knew very little about Indian
affairs, Jones had received his position as patronage for supporting
William McKinley’s successful 1896 presidential campaign. Rel-
atively new to the job and not fully enmeshed in the federal gov-
ernment’s progressive ideology, Jones echoed and promoted the
idea of Indians locked in amber, frozen in the past.
The commissioner’s circular directed reservation agents to gather
Native people for the exposition and stressed bringing “full blood”
Indians who would show off “traditional” masculine elements
of their culture such as warfare. “The encampment should be as
thoroughly aboriginal in every respect as practicable,” he wrote,
and “the primitive traits and characteristics of the several tribes
should be distinctly set forth.” There was no mention of bringing
“assimilated” Indians for contrast. As Jones became more familiar
with the progressive agenda, he would come to regret authoring
the circular, but by then it was too late. Captain Mercer’s adher-
ence to it, combined with his own popular culture sensibilities, led
to an Indian Congress that went beyond the noble savage tropes
championed by Rosewater and Mooney and openly appealed to
Americans’ preference for bloodthirsty savages.11
Much to the chagrin of ethnologist Mooney and the Smithso-
nian, what emerged at the Congress was often akin to a Wild West
show, featuring sham battles that proved especially popular with
fairgoers. One scholar has specifically labeled the Indian Congress
“a powwow and Wild West show.” Many contemporary observers
concurred. In fact, Frank Mattox and Rattlesnake Pete, who had
the concession for the Midway’s official Wild West show, even-
tually sued the Trans-Mississippi Exposition for infringement of
contract, claiming that they faced unsanctioned competition from
the Indian Congress. All this proved a tremendous embarrass-
ment for the Office of Indian Affairs, as progressive reformers had
been publicly opposing Indian participation in Wild West shows
since the 1880s. They fretted that the shows encouraged Indians

264 akim reinhardt

to indulge in an itinerant lifestyle in the unseemly entertainment
world by luring them away from the reservations, which progres-
sives envisioned as cauldrons from which bubbled up industrious
Christian farmers. It is no wonder that some scholars have gone
so far as to label the Indian Congress “a dismal failure.”12
“The Indian Congress itself is a great attraction, and this is the
first and probably last session this side of the ‘Happy Hunting
Grounds.’”13 So declared an official program, invoking supposed
Indian beliefs about the afterlife to paint the picture of a dying
race amid the exposition’s festivities. It is just one example of how
the exposition’s organizers drew crowds to the Indian Congress by
promoting the image of American Indians as savages doomed to
cultural and physical eradication. In that vein, on the Congress’s
very first day, Captain Mercer secured the largest U.S. flag that
could be found to fly over the Indian encampment, a muscular
symbol of American colonial dominance over its Native subjects
and their acquiescence. As the flag was raised, Indian bands were
directed to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” followed by “Yan-
kee Doodle Dandy.”14
The Indian Congress itself was rife with displays that white
observers interpreted as “savagery,” including a performance of
the Ghost Dance, which most Americans associated with vio-
lent Indian rebellion, and an Apache Fire Dance, which Mooney
referred to as a “war and devil dance.”15 Most nights, Indian people
of their own volition participated in an intertribal Grass Dance,
which drew spectators eager to see the pagan ceremonies of a dying
race. Indeed, no occasion was too banal for white promoters to
recast. Native men in particular were often shoehorned into the
role of exotic savage, no matter how benign their actions.
For example, on the first night of the Congress, a group of
Sičanġu (Brulé) Laķota (Sioux) people marched through the fair-
ground, singing Laķota welcoming songs to the other Native peo-
ples who had arrived after them. The Bee interpreted this warm
and friendly action as “giving an imitation of the old time war
whoop” and alarming onlookers with shouts and swinging hatch-
ets. Approximately half of the exposition’s visitors that night were
drawn to the Indigenous music. The following evening, about fifty

indigenous identities 265

Indians joined a white band, conducting a “goodwill” dance while
singing “When the Corn Is Ripe.” The Omaha World-Herald nev-
ertheless dubbed the performance “Indian War Dances.”16
Complementing the stock character of the violent, savage Indian
man was the Indian female drudge, who is abused and exploited
by the male. The stereotype of the savage male as lazy layabout,
who commands females to do his bidding, dates to early English-
Indigenous contacts and was still prevalent during the late nine-
teenth century. For several centuries, without a hint of irony, the
Euro-American patriarchal structure accused Native peoples of
gendered exploitation and inequality. Textual imagery of the fem-
inine savage, victim of her own men, could be found in observa-
tions of the Indian Congress, at least when patriarchal Americans
bothered to mention Indigenous women. For example, the Omaha
Bee announced: “In His Pristine Magnificence, Noble Red Man
Loafs While His Wife Looks After Affairs.” The article went on to
sarcastically belittle both American Indians and feminists. “The
Indian man is a firm believer in the rights of woman. At least he
believes that the woman has a perfect and undisputed right to work
while he takes life easy. The visitor will find the women putting
up the tepee, carrying the water, tending the babies, and tethering
out the ponies while the men visit back and forth or lie around in
the sun or shade as suits them best.”17
However, imperial iconography of the savage Indian was mostly
framed through the lens of Native masculinity, which was epito-
mized by violence. Popular perceptions of Indian violence were
bolstered by contemporary news accounts. For example, in late
October as the exposition was winding down, the front page of
the Omaha Bee displayed two articles. One bragged that the expo-
sition was “Going Out in Glory.” Another reported that Shoshone
Indians in Nevada were supposedly “planning an outbreak.” The
unsubstantiated article claimed “the leaders have incited their
followers to resist the law” and that “the Indians are well armed
and other tribes are expected to come to their aid.”18 It was pure
fantasy, as nothing came of it. However, such fantastical imagin-
ings were built upon and reinforced widespread assumptions of
Indian savagery.

266 akim reinhardt

 The most spectacular display of the savage trope at the exposi-
tion came from sham battles (fig. 44), which took place in front of
a grandstand with a seating capacity of five thousand. They quickly
became the Indian Congress’s biggest attraction. The first “battle”
occurred on August 10 after being suggested by a visiting chap-
ter of the Fraternal Order of Red Men, whose members wished to
participate in red face. When most of the white Red Men members
backed out, Captain Mercer added actors from the Midway’s Wild
West show, and the cast ballooned to nearly a thousand people,
mostly Indians. Mercer was even an active participant, awarding
himself top billing as a renegade white man. The show was a huge
success and became a regular feature of the Congress. Admission
was 10 cents. Half the money was divided among Indian partici-
pants, and the rest went to private promoters.
Aside from their nearly all-Indian casts after the initial show, the
sham battles at the Congress were similar in style and substance
to those staged by white and Indian actors that were a mainstay
of the Wild West shows touring the United States and Europe to
great success at the turn of the century. The imperial iconogra-
phy inherent in the performances in Omaha was unmistakable.
Beyond the fury of Indian men waging battle, highlights included
faux scalpings, Indian women conducting mock torture and muti-
lation of casualties, and white captives nearly burned at the stake
before being reliably rescued at the last minute. A typical newspa-
per ad, placed by Mercer in the Omaha Bee on the day of the first
battle, promised a “Clash of Arms by the Red Men’s Order and
Capt. Mercer’s Indians,” featuring a “Savage Attack upon White
Man’s Settlement. Heroic Defense and Defeat of Whites. Indians
Will Burn Victims at the Stake.” Spectators flocked to the battles.19
One of Frank Rinehart’s many photographs of the battles gives a
sense of their staged realism, with gun smoke swirling through the
air, “dead” Indians lying on the ground, a Native man (along with
several other men in headdresses crouched on the ground hold-
ing guns) surveying the scene from horseback in the foreground,
and paying customers looking on from the bleachers in the back-
ground. Costumed and armed, the spectacle of each Native mock
death rehearsed the impending demise of their “race,” which was

indigenous identities 267

Fig. 44. F. A. Rinehart, Sham Battle, Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition, Omaha, 1898. From the collections of the Omaha Public Library.
Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
justified by their supposedly savage nature. As national columnist
Octave Thanet wrote after attending the exposition: “‘Caesar, we
who are about to die, salute you,’ the gladiators called; the Indians
who are dancing in the smiling Omaha fields would fitly salute
us in such phrase, since they and their customs are doomed.”20
The fantasy of the Indian Congress as “a gathering of the rep-
resentatives of a fast dying race” was echoed by countless visitors
to the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, in part because after reading
Cosmopolitan, Century, Harper’s, Frank Leslie’s, McClure’s, etc., it
was what they expected. Not only was it the dominant form of
imperial iconography in the broader American culture, but pre-
vious reporting on American fairs had already established the
trope as part of their repertoire.21 Albert Shaw, who had partici-
pated in one of the press congresses at the Chicago World’s Fair,
accordingly would write in Century that “thus it happens that the
Indian Congress was to afford the last opportunity, presumably,
to see the red man in his primitive glory and in his various tribal
divisions, under correct conditions of dwelling, costume, indus-
try, and ceremonial.”22
As Indians supposedly neared their ultimate end, textual accounts
of their savagery served to implicitly (and sometimes explicitly)
justify their extinction. In the Omaha Bee article “Indian Loses
His Scalp: He Becomes the Victim of One of the Racial Character-
istics,” the author (through an anonymous translator) relates the
story of an Indigenous man at the Congress whose tribal affiliation
is not mentioned and whose name he claims translates as Eats His
Own Blood. Despite the gratuitous name, the author first estab-
lishes his protagonist as a noble savage: “Instead of being blood-
thirsty and cruel, he is one of the most genial and companionable
Indians on the grounds.” The author then pivots toward the theme
of savage violence by recounting the story of how Eats His Own
Blood lost his scalp to two other Indians. He quotes Eats His Own
Blood extensively, albeit in denigrating idiomatic English marked
by idealized primitive-speak like “the happy hunting ground.” The
tale is dramatic, rife with clichés, and highly improbable. Perhaps,
during the heyday of Yellow Journalism, the writer for the Bee fab-
ricated or greatly altered the story. Perhaps a genial and compan-

indigenous identities 269

ionable storyteller was putting the author on. Either way, Eats His
Own Blood’s epic, hourlong mano-a-mano battle with two other
Indians supposedly erupted from a dispute over a moose carcass.
After the hero knocks both of his rivals unconscious and sets upon
the moose, one of them, a “cowardly skunk,” comes to, attacks Eats
His Own Blood from behind, and takes his scalp. The story revels
in the excruciating details.23
Native peoples were hardly the only ethnic group subjected to
savage tropes at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition. The fair’s Mid-
way had an international flavor that bespoke America’s racialized
imperial gaze. Thus the exposition’s official program bragged of
its Afro-American village or “‘Old Plantation’ concession, where
“pickaninnies and other Southern darkies may be seen as if ‘on
their native heath.’” It was situated on the north Midway, among
other merchant-run concessions with an exotic character such as
the Chinese Village.24 There was also the Moorish Palace on the
east Midway, essentially a glorified vaudeville theater and side-
show that included re-creations of Marie Antoinette’s execution
and what purported to be a Sultan’s Harem. Within the Palace’s
Chamber of Horrors, homegrown imperial iconography was com-
bined with imaginings of foreign ones, the binding theme being
the savage violence of nonwhite peoples; the room featured the
Indian Scalping of a Prisoner alongside a Moorish Execution and
a Cannibal Feast.25
The fair’s theatrical exhibitions of barbarism from around the
world facilitated the tying of older savage Indian imperial iconog-
raphy to the new imperial iconography of the Spanish-American
War. Rosewater’s preference for savage tropes of American Indi-
ans over progressive images helped him make his case against tak-
ing on permanent foreign colonies: “Uncle Sam’s wards in Cuba
and the Philippines are liable to be as intractable as his wards on
the Indian reservations.”26 But perhaps the most garish and cer-
tainly the stateliest example came during the Omaha exposition’s
Peace Jubilee. Held from October 10 to 15, two months after the
war ended, the jubilee invited a coterie of Washington politicians,
military officers, and dignitaries to converge. There they delivered
speeches and exulted over the recent U.S. victory, a celebration

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that wallowed in displays of Indian savagery. Each day of the Peace
Jubilee was assigned a different theme. October 12 was President’s
Day in honor of McKinley, who was in attendance. He visited both
the U.S. Government Building, home to the federal government’s
display of the progressive Indian, and the Indian Congress, where
he was the guest of honor at a sham battle that drew some 15,000
spectators. After military exercises on the Grand Plaza and sepa-
rate men’s and ladies’ luncheons, the president gave a speech to an
estimated 75,000–100,000 people, though how many could hear
him is unknown. The commander in chief informed the massive
crowd that America’s quick victory confirmed the nation’s actions
were a reflection of God’s will.27
McKinley also reviewed a parade of tribal delegations, with the
leader of each being named as he passed. The exposition’s official
historian, himself a newspaper editor and publicist, recalled the
Indian regalia as the “gaudy . . . dress of savagery” and their saluta-
tions to the president as “novel” and showing “obeisance.” During
the day’s festivities, when Geronimo made pleasantries with his
old nemesis, Gen. Nelson Miles, the same commentator said of the
Apache leader that “the old man appeared as contented as a babe
laying its head upon the breast of its mother.”28 The press similarly
reveled in casting Geronimo as a defeated savage warrior. At nearly
seventy years of age, he was still held as a prisoner of war at Fort
Sill, Oklahoma, nearly a thousand miles from his Arizona home-
land. He and other Apaches had been brought to Omaha by the
War Department, not the Interior Department’s Office of Indian
Affairs. “Right here at the exposition are enough people coming
every day to put an end to every Indian in the world if they saw
fit to do so,” Geronimo mused, to the glee of reporters. “Then,
besides this, the white men have all the guns, powder and bullets.
They have all the big guns and they are the ones that count.”29 The
imperial iconography could not be clearer. Indians were a people
of the past, and the American conquest of them had been a cruci-
ble in which the young nation was fired, enabling it to now move
abroad and vanquish other imperial rivals and possess other non-
white peoples and their lands and resources.
A poem in the exposition’s children’s magazine, the Hatchet,

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published a month before the United States officially declared war
on Spain and two months before the Omaha exposition opened,
had already folded Indigenous Americans into the fair’s other pro-
jected international displays. The author’s sense of wonderment is
focused on strange delights from around the world. In this poetic
imagery, the “Indian red with feathered head” on parade is familiar
as a noble savage, but also offered anew, commodified as foreign
exotica, part of a global menu in which the exposition’s consum-
ers may partake:
From Russia cold and China old
Come wonders without measure,
From Norway’s pines and Afric mines,
Strange sights here greet our vision;
The hills of France seem to our glance
To be a land Elysian.
From Japan fair comes lacquered ware,
And brawny men gymnastic;
And Turks and Greeks with olive cheeks
Appear in dress fantastic.
The Indian red with feathered head,
The soft-eyed maiden Spanish,
And likewise, too, with bright eyes blue
The dainty maiden Danish,
Pass in review for me, for you.30
This acquisitive colonial fantasy of all the peoples and goods of the
world brought to the new center of civilization in Omaha helps
to show how gender shaped imperial iconography. While older
tropes were highly masculine, subject peoples could also be fem-
inized, sexualized, domesticated, objectified, and consumed. This
in turn opened avenues for female American authors of imperial
iconography to pursue. One way women shaped the savage trope
into something sentimentalized and more consumerist was by
tying it to genteel elements of Anglo-American civilization. Fan-
tasies of American domesticity and modernity were often used to
soften tropes of the bloodthirsty savage. Indians might be marked
as violent and exotic elements of nature, as bringers of dance and

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death. But their demise was cause for mourning, countered by cel-
ebrations of a rising white civilization.
Author May Blachley’s fable for the Hatchet, a children’s magazine
published by the Exposition’s Woman’s Board of Managers, chose
a quasi-immortal tree to symbolize American progress. Although
the tree has already been cut down, it nonetheless remembers
and relates the glorious, linear story of all that has passed before
it. The tree’s memoir begins by framing Indians as wild savages
and obstacles to America’s rise: “Many were the Indians who had
camped near me; many were the war dances that had taken place
in my sight; many were the scalps I saw dangling from the war-
riors’ belts, the scalps of ambitious miners who sought wealth
in California.” As the brief story advances, the tree is happy to
be chopped down and turned into a building, thus being reborn
in civilization. Indians have vanished, dismissed in the name of
progress, and are only faintly recalled. Near the end of the story,
a baby’s cry reminds the tree-cum-building “of the war whoop of
the warrior I had heard so many years ago when I was a young
and green tree.”31
Americans often entangled imagery of Indians and the natural
world. This not only allowed them to soften the edges of the savage
trope if they so desired but also gave them a way to define Indians
as a product of nature, and thereby claim both Native people and
nature as wild things destined to be tamed by civilization. Thus, as
with Blachley’s tree, even as Native people faced physical extinc-
tion, they might yet find immortality by becoming one with a wil-
derness brought to heel in the new American civilization. Hatchet
author Mary Rogers Kimball, an officer of the Woman’s Board of
Managers and the mother of the fair’s architect, constructed nat-
uralistic prose to tell the “true” tale of two “western” boys captur-
ing a live eagle in Wisconsin. In doing so, she celebrated noble
savages just as they were supposedly drifting into historical irrel-
evance. The boys are accompanied by a stock character, the taci-
turn male Indian guide/sidekick who aids and admires the boys’
manly feats. When the boys capture an eaglet, we are told that “the
Indian, grunting approval, grinned from ear to ear.” This is not the
violent savage bemoaned by the reminiscing tree; it is the noble

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savage who understands that his personal role is to serve superior
whites, while his people’s role is to make way for emerging white
civilization (hamfistedly represented by the young eagle) and aid
young America in its ascendance. At the same time, the parable
acknowledges American culpability in Indians’ tragic demise, a
common feature of the noble savage paradigm. Kimball tells us
that the cruel deeds of the surviving eaglet raised by the boys,
named E Pluribus Unum, “would fill a volume.”32
One writer for a nationally distributed woman’s magazine dis-
pensed with fiction and connected savage Indians to nature by
describing “painted braves in war-bonnets and wampum shout-
ing and dancing war-dances around the drums in the field nearby,
while the ponies graze peacefully, and a buffalo meditates on the
other side of the fence.” Indians in their natural state are so much
a part of the wild that in their presence, animals take on human
qualities. Bison meditate.33 And a writer for the Omaha Daily Bee,
describing a hundred-yard foot race, similarly claimed the race
showed “the Indian . . . in his natural and native sport.” The writer
presumed that complex games or organized team sport was beyond
the domain of “wild” Indians, who were inclined to express their
athleticism as does an animal: simply by running.34
When Americans were not framing Native people as vicious
and bloodthirsty savages or as elements of nonhuman nature,
they simply objectified them as inanimate objects. Prose about the
exposition was clear and precise in its objectification of Indians,
which at times was not just literary but also literal. “The Indian
will always be a fascinating object,” quipped Mary Alice Harri-
man in her observations of the Congress. That one brief sentence
managed to assert not only the objectification of Indians (“fas-
cinating object”) but also notions of collective singularity (“The
Indian”) and static ahistoricism (“always”), an impressive impe-
rial feat for just eight words.35
Most Americans perceived Indians ahistorically as people with
a flat, unchanging past and no future to move into amid the rapid
advances of a modern world. As Harriman wrote in her descrip-
tion of the exposition, “and saddest though most truthful of all
we must awaken to the fact that civilization, by past and present

274 akim reinhardt

methods, is surely, and by no means slowly, killing the last of the
only people who can rightfully be called Americans.”36 However,
when Americans contemplated details of the supposedly narrow-
ing Indigenous future, things often got hazy. Popular wisdom sug-
gested that Indians would evaporate into oblivion through some
vague ephemeral process that unfolded whenever savagery encoun-
tered civilization. Consequently, no one seemed to know when,
exactly, the presumed extinction might occur or even how. But
since Indians were still here, even something like the Congress,
which was designed to stage a final glimpse of the fading past,
couldn’t help but run headlong into the future. And when it did,
those who believed American modernity and living Indians to be
antithetical to one another were prone to marvel at their juxtapo-
sition and occasionally even grudgingly acknowledge some kind
of progressive future for Indigenous people.
Take, for example, one observer of the Indian encampment at the
Congress who quickly established Native savagery by referring to
its residents as “our swiftly passing forerunners,” with the “wildest
looking savage on the ground” found among the arriving Flathead
delegation (fig. 39). “There is no sound from them save an occa-
sional grunt,” and indeed, the aural scape of the larger Congress
was “the utterance of savage man forgetting himself.” At the same
time, the Native men are sentimentalized noble Red Men: they
retain “evident dignity” and carry themselves as “stately chiefs”
with “faces like bronze masks” or as a “Noble warrior . . . like a
Homeric hero.” Indeed, “Everybody here is picturesque.” But the
familiar narrative is challenged when the observer spends time in
the encampment, which leads him to confront signs of modernity:
“Here is a tepee with a bicycle leaning by its entrance, and there
is an Indian brass band.” In the end the author is forced to admit,
“They are not so savage as they look. Say ‘Hello!’ to them as they
run past and they shout back ‘Hello!’” And “two young bucks in
full paint, passing by on a run, respond to a solemn ‘How’ with a
friendly ‘Good Morning.’”37
Examples of imperial dissonance such as this were often framed
as amusing novelties. Offering such juxtapositions or role rever-
sals in a whimsical manner allowed staunch advocates of Indian

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savagery to be dismissive of progressive ideals, reducing them to
punchlines. However, such imagery inevitably created complica-
tions. The reality of Indians speaking fluent English, riding bicycles,
and the like challenged imperial images of Indigenous savagery.
Purveyors and consumers of savage tropes were forced to consider
their artificiality and, as with this observer, could be pushed toward
more progressive tropes. On the eve of the twentieth century, even
those who unquestionably accepted standard visions of Indian sav-
agery could not completely turn a blind eye to the ongoing pres-
ence of Native people in a nation obsessed with modernity. At the
same time, however, those who advocated a progressive vision of
the Indigenous future did not completely dispense with the very
notions of Indian savagery they so ardently opposed.

Progressive Tropes
Living in the heyday of Wild West shows, progressive reform-
ers worried that any displays of traditional Indian culture would
prove counterproductive to their assimilationist program, and they
sought to limit the perceived negative impact of such spectacles with
displays of their own. To do so, they turned to the federal Indian
schools, which were seen as the ultimate assimilationist engine.
In 1889 a small group of students from the Indian school in Law-
rence, Kansas, were brought to a St. Louis trade fair, where it was
hoped they could undercut a white promoter’s display of Apache
men who regaled the crowd with dances, songs, and war rituals.38
The effort was deemed a modest success, and for the 1893 Colum-
bian exposition in Chicago, Congress allocated the relatively meager
sum of $25,000 for a mock Indian boarding school display. None-
theless, then-Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Morgan was
optimistic that even this modest presence by assimilated Indians
could productively counter the impression made by the popular
Wild West shows’ warlike savages just outside the fairgrounds.
“The new and old can be sharply contrasted,” he asserted. “And
though the old may attract popular attention by its picturesque-
ness, the new will impress the thoughtful with the hopefulness . . .
of extending to the weaker the helpful hand of the stronger race.”39

276 akim reinhardt

In the end, the displays of Indian life by ethnographers and show-
men such as William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody proved more popular.
It is difficult to overstate how disappointed progressive reformers
were with the images generated by the Trans-Mississippi Exposi-
tion’s Indian Congress. Even ethnologist James Mooney, a profes-
sional purveyor of the noble savage trope satisfied with the notion
that Indians were doomed to extinction, complained that Capt.
William Mercer and the exposition staff seemed to run the Indian
Congress “with the sole purpose of increasing gate receipts,” and
that “in this place an ethnologist’s time is wasted & his labor lost.”40
Mooney’s ethnographic vision for the Indian Congress was largely
relegated to Indigenous housing, as Nancy Parezo discusses in
another essay in this volume. He also periodically participated in
Frank Rinehart and Adolph Muhr’s photography of Indigenous
peoples at the exposition (fig. 39). Mooney hoped that the por-
traits would produce valuable documents for posterity, though in
the end he was unhappy with what he considered the sentimen-
talized results.41
But if Mooney was disappointed with the Congress, progressives
who championed an Indian future based on cultural assimilation
were simply outraged. Politicians, federal officials, and various
reformers had initially supported the Indian Congress in Omaha,
believing it could compete with Wild West shows and also serve as
an object lesson in failed savagery. As a “live” exhibit and an eth-
nographic diorama of traditional life, the Congress might serve
as a sharp contrast to the achievements of boarding schools and
other “civilizing” programs. In Nebraska senator William Allen’s
words, the Congress would educate Americans “on the advance-
ment made by Indians under the [assimilationist] system adopted
by the Government.”42 But these grand schemes fizzled as progres-
sives quickly came to view Mercer’s Indian Congress as an utter
fiasco. The fallout was so severe that Commissioner of Indian
Affairs Jones afterward refused to approve any more contracts
for Indians to perform in shows. Indigenous people participated
at world’s fairs in Buffalo (1901) and St. Louis (1904) without fed-
eral sanction or involvement.43

indigenous identities 277

 The Office of Indian Affairs did make several efforts at the expo-
sition in Omaha to contrast the Indian Congress’s “traditional” vil-
lage encampments with progressive iconography, but all of them
were largely overshadowed by the Indian Congress. For example,
musical bands from a half-dozen Indian schools and communi-
ties performed, including those from the Genoa Indian School in
Nebraska, the Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota, the Crow
Creek (Sioux) Indian Agency in South Dakota, and the Santee Sioux
Agency in Nebraska. While the bands garnered only a fraction of
the attention paid to the Indian Congress, the purpose was clear.
Said Harriman in a California magazine: “The Indian band, made
up of youths from twelve to eighteen years of age from the Indian
Industrial School of Flandreau, South Dakota, well illustrated what
the Government is doing to educate the young of its wards.”44 Native
people performing American culture (costumes, marching, music)
reinforced progressive imperial tropes and proved that the federal
schooling system was achieving assimilation. Indian bands were
not only a form of public relations but also vindication of progres-
sive imperial reforms in a popular format; music and concerts were
generally among the biggest attractions at the exposition.
However, while the Indian bands were generally received quite
well by fairgoers, they remained a sideshow to the Indian Con-
gress. Many, perhaps most Americans, on seeing them still ques-
tioned the degree to which Native people could fully assimilate.
One way to make this point was by harkening to Indians’ sup-
posed savage nature. For example, an Omaha World-Herald writer
in language reminiscent of the “novelty” of seeing an Indian with
a bicycle asserted, “The Indian band from Sisseton Agency, half-
breeds and full blood Cheyennes, is a curiosity, and so is the music
they cut loose.”45
Some female observers, however, preferred to undermine pro-
gressive iconography within the context of modernity and domes-
ticity. Instead of denigrating Indian brass bands as half-breeds and
full-bloods, female observers could simply compare them unfavor-
ably with metropolitan white norms and standards. Alice French,
writing as Octave Thanet for Cosmopolitan, stated: “The Indian

278 akim reinhardt

band sits in its rude stand and plays ‘There’ll be a hot time in the
old town to-night,’ or ‘The Stars and Stripes,’ with as good success
with its brasses as any village band.” Ostensibly offering a com-
pliment, French still denigrates the Indians as primitive (“rude”)
and provincial, measuring them against white village bands. She
also turned her gaze to “the handsome young Indian in his smart
tweed suit who was holding an umbrella attentively over two Indian
maidens in civilized finery.” To French, a progressive Indian woman
was still a “maiden” and perhaps only masquerading as civilized.
Harriman, writing for Overland Monthly, also used white musi-
cians as a way to deny “assimilated” Indians full citizenship when
she noted that “these boys were as well advanced in their stud-
ies as American lads of the same age.” Harriman even took shots
at Indian women in western attire. “I was impressed, too, by the
refined bearing of an Indian lady—I use the word advisedly.”46
However, the primary display of progressive imperial iconog-
raphy at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition was in the U.S. Gov-
ernment Building, supervised by Harvard anthropologist Alice C.
Fletcher (fig. 50). A strident advocate of federal assimilation pol-
icies, Fletcher worked extensively with the nearby Omaha nation
and served as a consultant on Indian affairs to Presidents Ulysses
Grant and Grover Cleveland. She personally facilitated the allot-
ment of the Nez Perce and Winnebago Reservations, a federal pol-
icy that forcibly broke up communal reservation landholdings into
individually owned parcels, ostensibly to replace Indians’ commu-
nal culture with hardy individualism and to teach them the vir-
tues of private property. Mostly, allotment resulted in profound
Indigenous land loss and deep poverty.47
Rather than consigning Indian peoples to a romanticized and
sanitized past, Fletcher’s progressive imperial vision advocated
pushing them into the future by eradicating many elements of
Indian cultures and replacing them with idealized white, Protes-
tant, American norms. Instead of seeing Native people as incom-
patible with modernity, the eminent anthropologist viewed them
as “an alien race” that needed to be reshaped, forcibly if need be,
for life in the coming century. Thus in a journal published by the

indigenous identities 279

Hampton Institute in Virginia, itself a symbol of assimilationist
education and training, she proffered a vision in which Indians’
“future destiny is irrevocably interwoven with our national life.”48
Fletcher was hired by the Office of Indian Affairs to curate an
exhibit within the larger U.S. Government Building that presented
the progressive story of Indian civilization through the Indian
boarding schools. She gathered various examples of work by Indian
children at federal schools, such as class papers, photographs,
and products and handicrafts from their trade and shop classes,
including foodstuffs, blacksmithing, and needlework. Fletcher
complained that the allotted space was too small, and her modest
exhibit received only a fraction of the visitors and attention that
the Indian Congress did.49
Fletcher unsurprisingly shared the frustration and disap-
pointment that progressive Indian reformers felt with the Indian
Congress and its celebration of pre-conquest life, calling for the
elimination of such spectacles so that they “might cease to be an
obstacle in the path of the rising generation [of Indians] which must
be citizens with us under one flag.” Going so far as to insist that
America keep “the book of the past closed,” the Harvard anthro-
pologist deemed it “impossible for the chance visitor [at the expo-
sition] to obtain more than a superficial and misleading picture
of the Indian.” Believing her exhibits of Indian life to be authen-
tic, she belittled the “so-called ‘Indian congress’ at Omaha” as
merely “picturesque,” created to make a pleasing picture, not to
show the truth.50
For Fletcher, the Indian Congress at its worst was only imagery—
and false imagery at that. “The peculiarities of costume and per-
sonal decoration, which once stood for ideas of vital force in
aboriginal society, appear but as unmeaning oddities to the curi-
ous visitor,” she claimed, “while the Indian’s mode of living as
seen in the encampment, torn from its true environment and
divested of its ancient thrift, is made more grim and miserable by
being placed within sight of an exhibition [the larger exposition]
of great artistic beauty.” Fletcher aimed to delegitimize the Con-
gress, and she did so by comparing it to the style of the oil paint-
ings by Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) artist Angel DeCora, whom she

280 akim reinhardt

praised for conveying “a native feeling for color.” The phrase con-
veys racist essentialism but also associates DeCora with the aes-
thetic movement, which was hostile to the pretended naturalness
of the picturesque. Fletcher was implicitly aligning DeCora with
the sensibilities of modern European-American artists. It was one
way in which the anthropologist called upon former boarding
school students (DeCora had studied at Hampton before being
hired to teach at Carlisle Indian Industrial School) to advance the
progressive imperial agenda. By Fletcher’s account, these former
students “all bore testimony to the need and the helpfulness of
the schools. One and all recognized that the past life of the Indian
was a closed book and that the future prosperity of the people lay
with the white race and not apart from it.”51
Fletcher believed that sentimentalized imagery of the noble sav-
age not only discouraged Indians from moving “forward” but also
led whites to resist incorporating Native people into the Ameri-
can empire. To that end, she framed Anglo-Americans who visited
the Indian Congress as sadly deluded by atavism and the former
Indian boarding school students as the vanguard of racial prog-
ress. Their “bright faces, their neat and thrifty appearance often
formed a sharp contrast to that of other visitors who strayed by
with only harsh words for Indians in general.”52
Fletcher was bolstered by progressive allies, Native and white
alike. Susette La Flesche Tibbles, also known by her Indigenous
name, Inshata Theumba (Bright Eyes), was a member of the Omaha
tribe of Nebraska, the same group that Fletcher researched. In fact,
La Flesche’s brother Francis, who was employed at the Office of
Indian Affairs in Washington and who spoke on Indian music at the
Omaha exposition, worked closely with Fletcher, and the two would
eventually coauthor an extensive study on Omaha culture and soci-
ety.53 The La Flesches were a family of mixed European-Indigenous
(Omaha and Ponca) ancestry whose members generally supported
a progressive agenda for Native people. And La Flesche’s American
husband, Thomas H. Tibbles, was an advocate for Native rights who
with La Flesche had investigated the massacre at Wounded Knee
for the Omaha World-Herald.
In a letter to the editor of the World-Herald, Tibbles echoed

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Fletcher’s concerns and took it upon himself to speak on behalf of
the “Progressive Indian.” He contended that the exposition effec-
tively portrayed only one side of Indigenous life, which he saw as
backwards. Tibbles accused the fair of emphasizing only those
Indians who, he claimed, opposed schools and civilization. He
complained that the numerous Native physicians, lawyers, artists,
mechanics, ministers, teachers, writers, and orators had been left
out. Tibbles demanded that a day at the fair be set aside for the
“educated” Indian and that the federal government should pay for
their transportation and a display of their industry as it had for
the delegates of the Indian Congress. But his call went unheeded.54
For her part, Susette La Flesche Tibbles advanced progressive
iconography by writing a book with Fannie Reed Griffin on the
occasion of the Omaha world’s fair. La Flesche also illustrated
Oo-mah-ha Ta-wa-tha (Omaha City), which tells the story of the
La Flesche family’s “progress” since the 1854 treaty between the
Omaha nation and the United States and their drive for citizen-
ship and equality. Bringing the story up to 1898, La Flesche and
Griffin point to Nebraska residents’ various nationalities as evi-
dence of the state’s advanced civilization. Among the supposedly
happy ethnic Americans they celebrated as living peacefully with
no racial problems were the four Native tribes with reservations in
the state (Omahas, Otoes, Ho-Chunks [Winnebagos], and Dako-
tas [Sioux]).55 Progressive women were among the strongest pro-
ponents of progressive imperial iconography, often employing
themes of civilization, domestication, and harmony to make their
case. They were also among the harshest critics of savage iconog-
raphy, particularly noble savage tropes that they interpreted as
serious obstacles to their agenda.
However, not all progressive reformers rejected savage tropes
outright. Some, like Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who ran the
Hampton Institute where Angel DeCora had studied, held fast to a
racial ideology that defined Indigenous people as racially inferior
beings who would need many generations to catch up to whites, if
they ever could. Horace Bebok, Office of Indian Affairs agent on
the Sac and Fox (Mesquakie) Reservation in Iowa, was likewise
ambivalent. Despite being actively employed by the federal gov-

282 akim reinhardt

ernment to “civilize” Indigenous people, his own perception and
production of progressive imperial iconography were far from
pure. As an overt celebrant of U.S. imperialism past and pres-
ent, he romanticized male violence and conquest and was often
saccharine about the supposedly savage Indian past and present.
This led him to indulge in and contribute to tropes of Indian sav-
agery, while simultaneously advocating the progressive agenda
and demanding that current Indians conform to American fan-
tasies of modernity.56
Bebok, who accompanied Sac and Mesquakie Indians to the
Congress in Omaha, considered the people under his charge to be
a “typical example of the primitive Indian.” He described Indig-
enous people as “stoic,” their singing as “barbaric notes,” and he
exaggerated their spoken English, attributing to them such ste-
reotypical Indian-speak as “We kill em deer here. . . . Some days
one, some days five, kill em. Some days not kill em any. Ride all
over here, pony.”57 Emblematic of his imperial attitudes, Bebok
celebrated the “subjugation of the red man” and the “magnificent
empire” the United States had obtained west of the Mississippi
River, speculating about how proud Thomas Jefferson would be
if he were still alive to see what had become of his Louisiana Pur-
chase. Employing racialized social Darwinist language popular at
the time, Bebok claimed that “the Indian has fought his last battle
in the contest with a superior race for the survival of the fittest.
Here he has made his last but hopeless stand, impelled by the intu-
itive law of self-preservation, for the survival of his race and racial
traditions, customs, and religion. Here he has been vanquished
in the unequal contest for the sovereignty of the land over which
he roamed and the soil from which he gathered his sustenance.”58
In assessing the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, Bebok embraced
masculine savagery and belittled themes of progressive domestic-
ity. He was dismissive of Fletcher’s display in the U.S. Government
Building and instead focused on the Indian Congress as the great
educational venue, not just for white visitors but for the Indians
themselves. The Congress, he bragged, “was not a [mere] indus-
trial and school exhibit [like Fletcher’s], but the very antipode of it.”
The real schooling, Bebok asserted, was to be found at the Indian

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Congress. “There was here no vast auditorium in which took place
learned discussions on dynamics, didactics, economics, and reli-
gion in the manner of the white race, but here, in the open audi-
torium of nature, under the star-lit dome of a western sky, these
heroes of the plains, these survivors of a thousand battle-fields,
in which they contested with each other, or against the aggres-
sions of the whites, met in the first assembly of the kind known to
recorded history.” And in his static conception of Indian history,
this was an opportunity to resolve enmities, which he believed
dated to time immemorial: “Those animosities were brought from
the four quarters of the continent and buried in an open grave [at
the Congress], covered o’er with the ashes of peace from the curl-
ing smoke of the tepees of nearly fifty tribes.”59
Despite his sentimental celebrations of Indian savagery, Bebok
was actually a progressive reformer who believed it his responsi-
bility, and also in the Indians’ best interest, to dismember historic
Indian societies, a process in which he took an active hand. Thus he
could describe as “erroneous” the presumption “that [the] ‘Indian
Problem’ will solve itself by the gradual extinction of the race.”
Furthermore, he believed bringing Native people to the Trans-
Mississippi Exposition’s Indian Congress was an act of progressive
inclusion. He marveled that “day after day, small groups of men
and women could be seen, usually in the beginning accompanied
by an interpreter, passing slowly through the main buildings of
the exposition, and making careful observations of the exhibits.”
The education they received even outside the official exhibits on
manufacturing and agriculture was equally crucial: “One evening
on the Midway convinced him [the proverbial Indian] that he was
no inconsiderable part of the cosmopolitan panorama of life here
thrown against the western landscape.” He accordingly admon-
ished critics of the Indian Congress by asking, “And who will pre-
scribe the object lesson they were here learning?” For reformers
like Bebok, Indian presence at the fair was an act of assimilation-
ist education in the progressive sense, preparing Native people
for the future. “The Indian was learning new lessons, making new
observations, getting new ideas, and reaching new conclusions to
fit him for the new part he is destined to play in the events of the

284 akim reinhardt

twentieth century.” Octave Thanet (Alice French) drew a similar
conclusion, asserting: “It cannot, whatever the other aspects of the
congress, work anything but good for red men and white to have
an opportunity of meeting under new conditions.”60
Bebok’s interpretation of the exposition as a learning place for
Indians on the road to civilization is reflected in an illustration
(fig. 45) by exposition architect Thomas Kimball. Half-naked in
buckskin leggings and feathers, a Native man kneels on a bluff,
next to a standing Native woman with a baby on her back. Backs
to the viewer, both look forward with the stereotypical Indian
gaze: a hand extends from the top of the brow to block the sun.
But in this case, it is the scintillating glory of the Omaha world’s
fair, casting rays across the Missouri River.61 The vignette is framed
by the U.S. flag, and one of the man’s feet breaks the frame and is
silhouetted against the stripes. Will this Indian family continue
their journey toward civilization, rather than away from it? Will
they literally and figuratively raise themselves up to approach the
shining splendor of the imperial celebration and begin the civiliz-
ing process by immersing themselves in its power and brilliance?
Agent Bebok’s inclination to adapt Capt. William Mercer’s Indian
Congress to progressive iconography is well illustrated by a view
of the Indian Congress in a Harper’s Weekly special edition on the
Omaha fair (fig. 46). With eclectic highlights of the exposition
architecture as a backdrop, including Thomas Kimball’s medie-
val administration arch and the domes of the Moorish Palace, the
Congress is presented as a busy but idyllic space, in which two
angelic, moccasin-wearing children walk hand in hand through
the grass, the littlest one holding a toy bow and arrows. In line
with Mooney’s emphasis on documenting traditional dwellings,
a Native woman easily assembles a wikiup not much taller than
she is, while a man conforms to stereotypes of idle Native men
by lazing upon a nearby chest. A group of tipis on the right bal-
ance the skeleton of the wikiup, and the contrast between prim-
itive and civilized is discreetly underscored by the timber of the
tipis, which project into the air like the branches of one of the
only trees in the scene. Their lines echo the flags flying from the
turrets, domes, and towers of the European and Middle Eastern

indigenous identities 285

Fig. 45. Thomas Rogers Kimball, sketch for the Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition, undated. Artwork in the public domain. Thomas
Rogers Kimball Papers, rg3607, Nebraska State Historical Society.
architecture lining the horizon. As Mary Alice Harriman wrote,
“Indians encamped in juxtaposition to the high marvels of sci-
ence and art as exemplified by the Omaha exposition” only rein-
forced the image of Indian savagery.62
Central to the image is a single Indian horseman in a stunning
array of regalia. He is isolated in the foreground, given the most
detail and the strongest chiarascuro, and like the small child who
carries miniature versions of his weapons, he gazes directly at the
viewer. The black-and-white engraving still suggests the mag-
nificent color of his war dress. In spite of his martial attire, he is
unthreatening, in part because his presence is explained by the
procession of riders calmly moving off behind him. But there is
perhaps a hint of humorous parallel between his finery and that of
the elaborate if less colorful frills, decorated hat and parasol of the
Victorian woman in the foreground, who stands in profile with a
male companion in conversation with a Native man. As her cos-
tume contrasts with the more sober and simple lines of her part-
ner, so the warrior’s pageantry contrasts with the plainer style of
the Native man who seems to be addressing the couple. Though
without a translator, their body language suggests an exchange. The
Native man, though taller than the white couple, is a bit hunched
at the shoulders, perhaps with age, tilting his head downwards,
and his hands are clasped in front of him, suggesting deference.
These are noble savages on display for the white audience to learn
from before they disappear, but the Indians are learning, too, sup-
porting Bebok’s assertion that the Indian Congress is a progressive
moment. The pair of children in the foreground, standing apart
from any family, may or may not have new choices.

Conclusion
Mary Alice Harriman wrote an article for Overland Monthly based
on her visit to the Indian Congress. It managed to espouse every
imaginable trope, from the bloodthirsty and noble savages to
the domesticated, civilizing Indian. Obsessed with the language
of blood and racial determination and hierarchies, she offered
a cacophony of contradictions. “Centuries of rapine and blood
have changed their gentle childlike natures into malignant sav-

indigenous identities 287

Fig. 46. William Allen Rogers, The Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha—
Scene from the Indian Congress, from Harper’s Weekly, October 8, 1898, 987.
Artwork in the public domain.
agery,” she asserted, while also maintaining that within their “veins
flowed the independent blood of the patrician” and “the blood of
kings.” The Sioux are “treacherous,” even as she admired “their
dark-blue blankets, which they wore draped as classically as ever
did a Roman Senator,” and called them “born rulers.” Drawing dis-
tinctions between the tribes, the Apaches, against whom the Army
had campaigned as recently as 1896, are “devilish” and “implaca-
ble,” and the Omahas of Susette La Flesche Tibbles’s tribe are “the
most civilized Indians at the encampment.”63
After bouncing between tropes of bloodthirsty and noble sav-
ages, Harriman added literary images of the civilizing Indian. She
wondered of the Indian Congress “what great results this assem-
blage of red men may effect in the minds of the American Indi-
ans . . . this little band of a few hundred of a fast expiring race
[who] were once lords of the continent.” Like Bebok, she main-
tained that the gathering of Native people had achieved a pro-
gressive end, engendering “[Indians’] Respect for and admiration
of the wonderful accomplishments of the white race, and under-
standing of the value of education to their own children. . . . We
should know that they are not wholly bad.”64
Stitching together Harriman’s patchwork of imperial iconog-
raphy was a consistent thread of Indigenous inferiority. The full
gamut of stereotypes, girded by racism and ethnocentrism, were
evident in her account of interacting with a Sac Indian woman,
Sarah Whistler, from the same reservation as Bebok (fig. 47). Har-
riman begins by invoking the cultural and racial markers of Indian
savagery, speaking of “her mocassined feet, dusky skin, and Indian
garb.”65 Harriman then blends older savage tropes with progressive
themes of modernity and adaptation. She simultaneously promotes
images of doomed Indians on the road to oblivion and adaptive
Indians moving into the future, particularly by learning lessons
at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition. Harriman
thus celebrates how Whistler, a teacher in the Indian school in
Oklahoma and the widow of an Oklahoma state legislator, is able
to “speak in pure and grammatical English of the probable era-
sure of her people from the earth’s inhabitants, and of the good the
gathering of many tribes far-separated geographically would be to

indigenous identities 289

the Indians in acquainting them with the white men’s accomplish-
ments, as taught by the exposition, as well as seeing each other,
often one time enemies.” Harriman’s dual image of Whistler as both
fading savage and progressive Indian who befriends former ene-
mies is then filtered through the Spanish-American War, replete
with a Rudyard Kipling reference. Harriman notes that Whistler
“discussed Helen Hunt Jackson’s ‘Ramona,’ and spoke sadly of the
truths in ‘A Century of Dishonor,’ as well as compared Kipling’s
vivid style with other well-known verse, and spoke of the result
of the war with Spain.”
In Rinehart and Muhr’s portrait of Whistler, her confidence
and ability to meet Harriman and the photographers as equals is
similarly evident. And Harriman goes on to acknowledge Whis-
tler’s degree of civilization, despite those aspects of Indian-ness
she retains (“moccasined feet” and “Indian garb”) or cannot escape
(“dusky skin”), by comparing Whistler favorably to “a lady, whiter
of complexion.” But what does Harriman use to mark Whistler as
superior to this lighter-skinned woman? Knowledge of America’s
recent overseas imperial ventures. The white woman, whom Har-
rison had also met at the exposition, “has asked me on the day
when everyone was reading of the [U.S. Army’s] heroic advance up
San Juan Hill [in Cuba], if I would let her look at my newspaper,
she had heard that ‘there was to be a sale of ribbons at ——,’ and
she wanted to know how cheaply she could buy streamers for her
pet poodle! Needless to say who suffered from the comparison.”66
The 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition pro-
vided Americans with a venue in which to cast and recast their
imperial iconography. Most common were the older, established,
masculine tropes of savage Indians, whether noble or bloodthirsty,
that alternately stood in opposition to, overshadowed, and even
intermingled with newer progressive tropes of Native people who
embrace modern American civilization by unshackling themselves
from cultural and social Indian-ness. And as Native North Amer-
icans became one among the many Indigenous peoples the United
States conquered and claimed around the world in the aftermath
of the Spanish-American War, the older iconography was both
reinforced and revised to reflect contemporary concerns.

290 akim reinhardt

Fig. 47. F. A. Rinehart and Adolph F. Muhr, Mrs. Sarah Whistler, Sac & Fox,
Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, Omaha, 1898. The J. Paul
Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Distinct nations, the Sac and Mesquakie (also
known as Fox) are often perceived as one because of their close historical ties
and a shared reservation. Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of the
Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.
unl.edu.
 American gender dynamics were a driving force in this mael-
strom of imperial iconography. Men like Capt. William Mercer often
helped create and even insert themselves into images of Native sav-
agery. When men like Indian Service agent Horace Bebok actively
worked to advance the progressive assimilationist agenda, they
still sometimes blended savage tropes into their understanding
of Native people. Women too played vital roles in the design and
implementation of imperial agendas. Just as white men often added
savage elements to progressive images, white women often added
elements of domesticity to images of savagery. And assimilation-
ist women on both sides of the culture line, whether professional
progressive policy advisers like anthropologist Alice Fletcher or
successful Indigenous women such as Susette La Flesche Tibbles
and Sarah Whistler, each in their own way advanced conceptions
of Indian progress, which in turn complicated the literary images
that female writers like Mary Alice Harriman and Alice French
produced at the exposition. Thus literary texts promoting devel-
opment of either the old or the new “West” both often evinced a
curious intersection of varied colonial imagery. In these settings,
images of American Indians are presented as urgent objects for
whichever lesson about colonialism and imperialism authors, pho-
tographers, and artists wished to advance.

Notes
1. Mary Alice Harriman, “The Congress of American Aborigines at the Omaha
Exposition,” Overland Monthly 33, no. 198 (June 1899): 505–12; 507, 509, 510. On the
San Francisco–based Overland Monthly’s brand of liberalism, which included writ-
ers John Muir and Mark Twain, see Stephen J. Mexal, Reading for Liberalism: The
Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2013). Johnson Brigham, editor of the rival regional (Iowa) peri-
odical Midland Monthly Magazine in 1897, described Overland Monthly as “owned
and run for fun by a company of millionaires.”
2. Harriman, “The Congress of American Aborigines,” 510. For foundational
texts on European and American constructions of Indian identity, see Robert F.
Berkhoffer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus
to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) and Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing
American: White Attitudes and Policy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1982).
3. On constructions of Indian identity, see Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Phil-
ip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Philip
J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Alan Trachten-

292 akim reinhardt

berg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930; Thomas
H. Guthrie, “Good Words: Chief Joseph and the Production of Indian Speech(es),
Texts, and Subjects,” Ethnohistory 54, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 509–46; John M. Cow-
ard, The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press, 1820–90 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1999); and Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, eds.,
Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film (Lexington: Uni-
versity Press of Kentucky, 2003). On Progressive Era Indian reformers, see Freder-
ick Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1984). On post–Civil War racial constructions of Afri-
can Americans, see Edward L. Ayres, The Promise of the New South: Life after Recon-
struction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race,
Ethnicity, and Urbanization: Selected Essays (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1994); Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New
York: Vintage Books, 1979), and Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southern-
ers in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Random House, 1998). On the integration of
immigrants, see Martha Gardiner, The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration,
and Citizenship, 1870–1965 (Princeton nj: Princeton University Press, 2005); John
Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New
Brunswick nj: Rutgers University Press, 1963, 2002). On American attitudes about
race more generally during the period, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Vir-
tues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). For an early elucidation of the draft animal/wild
animal metaphor, see “The Red and the Black,” in Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for
Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 168–98.
4. Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Phil-
ippine Islands, 1899,” McClure’s Magazine 12 (February 1899): 290–91, was a direct
reaction to the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and became per-
haps the most famous example of imperial iconography advocating the progressive
model of cultural genocide. The poem’s title became shorthand for the proposition
and, as Nancy Parezo mentions in this volume, a term for the Indian display at the
Greater America Exposition in Omaha in 1899.
5. The most important work on the role of American (and Australian) women in
designing and implementing progressive assimilation policies on Indigenous peo-
ples is Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Darker Race: Settler Colonialism, Mater-
nalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia,
1880–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). An important recent work
that shows, among other things, the role of Indian female participation in progres-
sive assimilation programs is Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A
Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 2011). For women reformers during the Progressive Era
more generally, see Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women
and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton nj: Princeton University Press,
2002). With regard to race, see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow:
Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
6. Jacobs, White Mother, xxix.

indigenous identities 293

 7. See also Bonnie M. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and
Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898 (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 2011), and David Brody, Visualizing American Empire:
Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2010).
8. Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American Inter-
national Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 108.
9. James Mooney, “The Indian Congress at Omaha,” American Anthropologist 1,
no. 1 (January 1899): 127–29; Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 106, 111–14, 127; Lester G.
Moses, “Indians on the Midway: Wild West Shows and the Indian Bureau at World’s
Fairs, 1893–1904,” South Dakota History 21, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 222; Josh Clough, “‘Van-
ishing’ Indians? Cultural Persistence on Display at the Omaha World’s Fair of 1898,”
Great Plains Quarterly 25, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 67–70, 72–73; Robert Bigart and Clar-
ence Woodcock, “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition and the Flathead Delegation,”
Montana: The Magazine of Western History 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1979): 16; Kenneth
G. Alfers, “Triumph of the West: The Trans-Mississippi Exposition,” Nebraska His-
tory 53 (1972): 312–29. James B. Haynes, History of the Trans-Mississippi and Inter-
national Exposition of 1898 (St. Louis: Woodward and Tiernan Printing Co., 1910),
221; Omaha Bee, July 31, 1898, 1.
10. Moses, “Indians on the Midway,” 205, 208–10; Rosewater, quoted in Rydell,
All the World’s a Fair, 111; Allen, quoted in Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 112, 124;
Clough, “‘Vanishing’ Indians?” 67–70.
11. Clough, “‘Vanishing’ Indians?” 70–71; Jones, quoted in Mooney, “The Indian
Congress at Omaha,” 128; see also Bonnie M. Miller, “The Incoherencies of Empire:
The ‘Imperial’ Image of the Indian at the Omaha World’s Fairs of 1898–99,” Ameri-
can Studies 49, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2008): 45–46.
12. Mooney, “The Indian Congress at Omaha,” 128–29; Rydell, All the World’s
a Fair, 115; Haynes, History of the Trans-Mississippi, 51, 81; Moses, “Indians on the
Midway,” 208; quotes in Clough, “‘Vanishing’” Indians?” 67, and David F. Littlefield
and James W. Parins, eds., Native American Writing in the Southeast: An Anthology,
1875–1935 (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), xiv.
13. Official Program and Exposition Bulletin, tmie, Omaha, 1898, August 21–27
(Omaha: Rees Printing Co., 1898), 17. Omaha Public Library, available at the Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
14. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 114.
15. Mooney, “The Indian Congress at Omaha,” 147; Bigart and Woodcock, “The
Trans-Mississippi Exposition,” 14–18, 20–21; Clough, “‘Vanishing’ Indians?” 70–72,
78–84; Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 114–16; Haynes, History of the Trans-Mississippi,
228–29; Miller, “The Incoherencies of Empire,” 52.
16. Omaha Bee, August 1, 1898, 1; Omaha Evening Bee, August 2, 1898, 1; Omaha
World-Herald, August 2, 1898, 2.
17. “Indians to Be on Review,” Omaha Bee, August 4, 1898, 5. Rinehart’s photo-
graphs of Native Americans sometimes name the man in a couple, while describ-
ing the woman only as a squaw, as in Chief American Horse & Squaw—Sioux, 1898,
Omaha Public Library, available at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposi-
tion Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.

294 akim reinhardt

 18. “Going Out in Glory,” Omaha Bee, October 26, 1898, 1; “Shoshones Armed to
Fight,” Omaha Bee, October 26, 1898, 1.
19. “Realistic Sham Battle,” Omaha Bee, August 10, 1898, 7; Haynes, History of
the Trans-Mississippi, 230.
20. Octave Thanet [Alice French], “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition,” Cosmo-
politan 45, no. 6 (October 1898): 613.
21. Danika Medak-Saltzman, “Transnational Indigenous Exchange: Rethinking
Global Interactions of Indigenous Peoples at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition,” American
Quarterly 62, no. 3 (September 2010): 591–615; Nancy J. Parezo and John W. Trout-
man, “The ‘Shy’ Cocopa Go to the Fair,” in Selling the Indian: Commercializing and
Appropriating American Indian Cultures, ed. Carter Jones Meyer and Diana Royer
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001), 3–43; Melissa Rinehart, “‘To Hell with
the Wigs!’ Native American Representation and Resistance at the World’s Colum-
bian Exposition,” American Indian Quarterly 36, no. 4 (Fall 2012): 406.
22. Albert Shaw, “The Trans-Mississippians and Their Fair at Omaha,” Century
56, no. 6 (October 1898): 868.
23. “Indian Loses His Scalp,” Omaha Bee, August 29, 1898, 5.
24. Official Souvenir Program: Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition,
tmie, Omaha, 1898, June 19–25 (Omaha: Samuel J. Howe, 1898), 31, 22.
25. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 119; The Moorish Palace: A Temple of Art and
Amusement (Omaha: A. I. Root, Printer, 1898), Omaha Public Library. Available at
the Trans-Mississippi and International Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
26. Rosewater, quoted in Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 118.
27. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 121.
28. Haynes, History of the Trans-Mississippi, 231–32, Rydell, All the World’s a Fair,
108, 120–21; Clough, “‘Vanishing’ Indians?” 80; Bigart and Woodcock, “The Trans-
Mississippi Exposition,” 20–21.
29. Miller, “The Incoherencies of Empire,” 39–40; Mooney, “The Indian Congress
at Omaha,” 145–46; Geronimo, quoted in Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 117.
30. W. M. Maupin, “’Twas West Point Day in Omaha,” Hatchet, March 1898, 3–4.
Omaha Public Library, available at the Trans-Mississippi and International Archive,
trans-mississippi.unl.edu. Will M. Maupin was a reporter for the World-Herald who
covered the exposition in a column called Snap Shots at the Passing Throng. He also
published poems in his column Limnings. Patricia Gaster, “Nebraska Newspaper-
man Will M. Maupin,” Nebraska History 69 (Winter 1988): 184–92.
31. May Blachley, “A Leaf from a Tree’s Diary,” Hatchet, March 1898, 9. The mag-
azine was published as a fund-raiser for the Girls’ and Boys’ Building.
32. M. R. (Mary Rogers) Kimball, “How They Captured a Live Bald Eagle: A True
Story,” Hatchet, March 1889, 14.
33. Thanet, “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition,” 612.
34. Omaha Bee, October 8, 1898, 5.
35. Harriman, “The Congress of American Aborigines,” 507.
36. Harriman, “The Congress of American Aborigines,” 512.
37. “Glimpses of Indian Life at the Omaha Exposition,” American Monthly Review
of Reviews 18 (October 1898): 436, 438, 439–40. The article originally appeared in
the Nebraska City Conservative and may have been written by its editor, J. Sterling

indigenous identities 295

Morton, an early (1854) settler in Nebraska Territory, a former U.S. secretary of agri-
culture, and founder of Arbor Day. It was also reprinted in the Omaha Bee, Sep-
tember 4, 1898, 19.
38. Robert A. Trennert Jr., “Selling Indian Education at World’s Fairs and Expo-
sitions, 1893–1904,” American Indian Quarterly 11, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 204; David
Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School
Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995).
39. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 7–8; Commissioner Thomas J. Morgan quoted
in Trennert, “Selling Indian Education at World’s Fairs,” 204–5.
40. Mooney, quoted in Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 117.
41. Robert Bigart and Clarence Woodcock, “The Rinehart Photographs: A Port-
folio,” Montana: The Magazine of the West 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1979): 24–37; Bigart
and Woodcock, “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition,” 18, 21–23; Haynes, History of the
Trans-Mississippi, 8, 225–26, 402–3; Mooney, “The Indian Congress at Omaha,” 131–
32, 147; Clough, “‘Vanishing” Indians?” 74; Miller, “The Incoherencies of Empire,”
46; Alicia L. Harris, “Many Worlds Converge Here: Vision and Identity in Ameri-
can Indian Photography” (Master’s thesis, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2013),
9–12. For modern Native considerations of Rinehart, see Simon J. Ortiz, ed., Beyond
the Reach of Time and Change: Native American Reflections on the Frank A. Rinehart
Photograph Collection (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004).
42. Allen, quoted in Bigart and Woodcock, “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition,” 16.
43. Moses, “Indians on the Midway,” 222–23.
44. Harriman, “The Congress of American Aborigines,” 510.
45. Omaha World-Herald, August 5, 1898, 1–2.
46. Thanet, “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition,” 612; Harriman, “The Congress
of American Aborigines,” 510–12.
47. Trennert, “Selling Indian Education at World’s Fairs,” 212. See also Joan Mark,
A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fletcher and the American Indians (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1988).
48. The Hampton Institute was established in 1868 as a freedman’s school for for-
mer slaves. However, before the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania was founded in 1879,
Hampton received a number of Indian students. Alice C. Fletcher, “The Indian at
the Trans-Mississippi Exposition,” Southern Workman 27 (November 1898): 216–17.
49. Moses, “Indians on the Midway,” 222; Miller, “The Incoherencies of Empire,” 49.
50. Fletcher, “The Indian at the Trans-Mississippi,” 216–17.
51. Fletcher, “The Indian at the Trans-Mississippi,” 217. See also Suzanne Alene
Shope, “American Indian Artist Angel DeCora: Aesthetics, Power, and Transcul-
tural Pedagogy in the Progressive Era” (PhD diss., University of Montana, 2009).
52. Fletcher, “The Indian at the Trans-Mississippi,” 217.
53. Alice C. Fletcher and Francis La Flesche, The Omaha Tribe (Washington dc,
1911; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).
54. Thomas Tibbles, “Public Pulse: The Progressive Indian,” World-Herald, August
15, 1898, 4. By 1898 Tibbles was editing a Populist newspaper in Lincoln.
55. Fannie Reed Griffin, with Susette La Flesche Tibbles, Oo-mah-ha Ta-wa-tha
(Omaha City) (Lincoln: privately published, 1898). A patchwork of federal edicts

296 akim reinhardt

would grant many Native people citizenship around the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury. Those not yet covered were swept up by the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act.
56. David H. Dejong, “‘Unless They Are Kept Alive’: Federal Indian Schools and
Student Health, 1878–1918,” American Indian Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 256–82.
57. Horace M. Bebok, “The First Continental Congress of North American Indi-
ans,” Midland Monthly Magazine 11 (February 1899): 102–11; Horace M. Rebok,
“Report of Agency in Iowa, Report of Sac and Fox Agency,” September 15, 1898, in
Annual Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30,
1898: Indian Affairs (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1898), 161–62. Note:
Bebok’s name is misspelled as Rebok in this document.
58. Bebok, “The First Continental Congress,” 103–4. The Midland Monthly Maga-
zine also supported the annexation of Hawai‘i and American intervention in Cuba.
59. Bebok, “The First Continental Congress,” 107–8.
60. Bebok, “The First Continental Congress,” 108–10; Thanet, “The Trans-
Mississippi Exposition,” 614. Bebok lauded the federal government’s 226 Indian
schools with their nearly 23,000 students and bragged that more than 37 percent of
the schools’ employees were Indian.
61. Another, less finished sketch by Kimball, in the same format, featured a clas-
sicized woman, a personification of the city of Omaha, holding a torch and standing
atop the globe. Thomas Roger Kimball Papers, rg 3607, Nebraska State Historical
Society. The last picture in Griffin and La Flesche Tibbles’s “souvenir,” Oo-mah-ha
Ta-wa-tha, is of the American flag.
62. Harriman, “The Congress of American Aborigines,” 506–7.
63. Harriman, “The Congress of American Aborigines,” 508, 509.
64. Harriman, “The Congress of American Aborigines,” 512.
65. Sarah A. Whistler was born circa 1845 in Iowa. Her mother was Sac (Sauk),
and her father was a white interpreter for the Sac and Fox. According to Luther B.
Hill, A History of the State of Oklahoma, vol. 2 (Chicago: Lewis, 1910), 112, she was
educated at an Indian school in Westport, Missouri, and married William Whistler
at age fifteen. She worked as a government interpreter at the Sac and Fox agency in
Oklahoma after teaching in the Indian school there, and she owned land and busi-
nesses including a store and restaurant.
66. Harriman, “The Congress of American Aborigines,” 510.

indigenous identities 297

 7
Exposition Anthropology
nancy j. parezo

Since the 1876 Centennial, visitors to American expositions had

seen thousands of items produced by Native Americans, both
material culture as well as innumerable natural history specimens.
The federal government, through the Department of the Interior,
which supervised the Office of Indian Affairs and the Geological
Survey, and the Smithsonian Institution, which operated the U.S.
National Museum and the Bureau of American Ethnology, had
produced extensive displays on eleven occasions before the Omaha
exposition. The board of directors of the Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition thus presumed that the federal building
at the exposition would include static exhibits of Native Amer-
ican artifacts, just as they expected federal underwriting for the
entire endeavor. They argued such support was legitimate, because
an exposition encouraged regional economic growth. The nation
had a fiduciary duty to ensure its citizens’ welfare. Their organiza-
tional model for the exposition, a stockholding corporation receiv-
ing government funding and infrastructural support for the host
city and an impressive temporary exhibition hall, had been suc-
cessfully used by other cities.1 The Trans-Mississippi and Interna-
tional Exposition, the name of the corporation (hereafter tmiec)
as well as the name of the fair, assumed it would be the same in
Omaha: the fair would help modernize Omaha, and in return,

299
the federal government would have a showcase to illustrate how
it spent taxpayer monies.
The exposition corporation was a business that wanted to turn
a profit for shareholders, so producing an effective return for their
investments required strategies to ensure high ticket sales. In addi-
tion to highlighting America’s progress through electric lights,
improved machines, the finest livestock, abundant crops, and thou-
sands of consumer goods for sale, the tmiec decided to attract
visitors by marketing domestic colonialism (the marginalization
of Native peoples) as a government policy, using American cul-
tural expectations about Indians. Since others had used this strat-
egy as well, they decided to rely not simply on a static display of
Indian-produced material culture. Edward Rosewater, publisher
of the Omaha Daily Bee and chair of the exposition’s publicity
department, proposed a corporate-sponsored and managed living
exhibit: “The Indian Congress” would enable visitors to see “the
last gathering of these tribes before the bronzed sons of the for-
ests and plains . . . are gathered to the happy hunting grounds.”2
Rosewater argued that Congress should underwrite this “educa-
tional” exhibit because Indians were federal wards. To encourage
this hypothetical obligation (i.e., make it a foregone conclusion),
Rosewater included in a newspaper article promoting the expo-
sition a heading, government aid expected. Arguing that
the undertaking was legitimately in keeping with Department of
the Interior policy, though it was exactly the opposite, Rosewater
insisted the Omaha gathering would not be a Wild West show or
profit-making Midway concession like the ubiquitous Old Plan-
tation, but part of the corporation’s formal exhibitionary struc-
ture, expressing the tmiec’s fundamental vision, as discussed in
this volume’s introduction. He also announced that the exposi-
tion’s board was already making this happen by working with the
Bureau of American Ethnology in planning the living exhibit.
Unfortunately, no one had told the Bureau.
Rosewater repeatedly announced in his newspaper that the
exposition would provide visitors with “the last opportunity of
seeing the American Indian as a savage,” even though the expo-
sition’s directors had no actual plans or money to ensure it would

300 nancy j. parezo

occur. On one level Rosewater’s arguments seem to constitute
wishful thinking, yet on another they represent the essence of
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century marketing, produc-
ing a desire where none had existed before. Rosewater intended
to box the federal government into a corner so that Congress
would have to approve funds or lose face. It was not subtle polit-
ical manipulation but cultural essentialism based on a powerful
concept: the Indian of the western imagination. He reiterated one
of the great American turn-of-the-century myths to create time-
liness and urgency: the inevitability of Indians vanishing because
the federal government was successfully transforming remnant
Native populations into American yeoman farmers.
Rosewater also utilized a self-education argument, another
American conceit symbolizing the nation’s spirit of independence
and initiative. The Omaha exposition would allow visitors to con-
duct their own “salvage ethnography” (the anthropological term
for recording traditional customs and oral traditions before they
disappeared).3 Visitors would meet the last traditional Indians who
had received no government education, a sign that they were “pass-
ing into history.”4 Rosewater repeatedly argued that the Omaha
exposition would be middle- and working-class America’s last
opportunity to witness firsthand what the country was like prior
to Euroamerican intervention. Old Indians were the “before” to
Euroamerican progress, the “present” and the “future.” The Trans-
Mississippi Exposition would provide a unique opportunity to see
how far American civilization had come as one race “naturally”
and “inevitably” displaced another.5 It was an argument that rein-
forced national identity, using an “us” versus “them” dichotomy
with the “us” having a future. Omaha was the last chance to learn
from those who had lost to imperialism’s forces, or so Rosewa-
ter publicized.
The tmiec needed traditional Indians for another reason: to
lure potential ticket buyers to Omaha. It was well known that
expositions required a touristic hook besides evidence of prog-
ress and allusions to national identity to entice people to pay the
entrance fee. The hook had to be what no other exposition had
offered. The tmiec faced the problem that American expositions

exposition anthropology 301

were becoming common, occurring frequently in different parts
of the country, countering claims to uniqueness. Exposition cor-
porations had used significant historical celebrations as a lure,
but there was nothing available for 1898. Another possible selling
point was locale and place. This was a possibility because there
had been no major fair in the Midwest except for Chicago. Many
midwesterners had probably not been to a fair recently and could
be enticed to Omaha, especially if it incorporated popular state
fair features. But the specific site was still problematic. Chicago
had a magnificent lake as a background, and it was close enough
to tempt visitors from Boston or Buffalo. Omaha, however, was
farther from the East Coast and had no lake. It sat on flat agri-
cultural lands. Omaha was a railway stop on the way to vacation
destinations. How could the tmiec sell Omaha as different from
Nashville, New Orleans, or Atlanta and as alluring as Chicago?
The answer for Rosewater was traditional Indians, an argument
that presaged late-twentieth-century cultural and ethnic tourism.
The eastern target audience contained people who had never met
an Indian due to population decimation and removal. Therefore,
Rosewater argued, living Indigenous peoples and their authentic
cultures were the scenic and marketing lure, the reason Omaha
was a tourists’ destination.6 Interacting with real Indians would
provide a memorable, once-in-a-lifetime experience.
This was not unprecedented. By the late 1890s, exposition cor-
porations had concluded that live Native Americans (performers,
demonstrators, and sellers of authentic souvenirs) in association
with legitimizing static anthropological exhibits increased ticket
sales. Unfortunately, using Indigenous peoples as a visitor lure
was very expensive, and the expenses began long before an expo-
sition started and continued long after it ended. In fact, fair corpo-
rations and the federal government had repeatedly turned down
plans for extensive Indigenous exhibits at every exposition since
1876.7 In addition, the tmiec was stingy with all infrastructure
and operating funds; they might utilize a living demonstration,
but it had to be presented without threatening anticipated prof-
its. This was a real problem for Rosewater, who, with corpora-
tion approval, had created an audience expectation before he had

302 nancy j. parezo

obtained funding or worked out the difficult bureaucratic intrica-
cies of securing participants. For the entire year before the expo-
sition opened, one question remained: how could the tmiec use
Indians without cost? How could they make good on their mar-
keting promises without jeopardizing stockholder investments?
As discussed below, several options were explored, including
heavily investing in anthropology, as Chicago had in 1893, and
producing a permanent institution for the city that would draw
future visitors. Another was to rely on states, historical societ-
ies, and individuals to produce exhibits that would go into state
pavilions or, if needed, corporation buildings. A third option was
for the tmiec to hire an anthropologist to organize and produce
exhibits for the corporation. This would guarantee that contextu-
alizing and legitimizing exhibits were part of the Indian Congress
complex. The fourth was to leave it all to the federal government,
try to persuade them to follow Rosewater’s plan, but in the end to
take what they got and hope for the best.

The Contextualizing Static Anthropology Exhibits

Having anthropology displays—as static or performative exhibits—
was not a foregone conclusion in spring 1897. Some exposition board
members argued that focusing on the past or anything that did
not demarcate “progress” was not within the corporation’s scope.
Others felt that anthropology or “Indians” had little to contribute
to increasing trade or encouraging economic development, the
underlying reason for American expositions in this time period.
But these men were outvoted as Rosewater developed his plan and
built public expectations for an ethnographic display.
Though the tmiec said they wanted the Omaha fair to be better
than the 1893 Columbian Exposition, they did not want to imitate
Chicago business leaders’ investment in anthropology and natural
history. They accordingly decided against a separate anthropology
building, equivalent to mining or the liberal arts, and against spon-
soring research expeditions to obtain artifacts and demonstrators.
This had been successful in generating audience interest in Chi-
cago, but it had been a very expensive enterprise, undertaken with
the express purpose of founding a permanent world-class natural

exposition anthropology 303

history museum equivalent to the famous American Museum of
Natural History in New York City. The resulting institution became
the Field Columbian Museum, an important cornerstone of Chica-
go’s urban expansion and modernization strategy. But it had been
sponsored and financially underwritten by a group of prominent
citizens who wanted Chicago to be cosmopolitan and sophisti-
cated. No subsequent exposition corporation even attempted it.
tmiec records provide no evidence that a permanent natural his-
tory museum was seriously considered. And Omaha had no fabu-
lously wealthy mover-and-shaker enamored with Indian cultures
who wanted his name on a new museum. It is also unlikely that
anyone in Omaha had the type of disposable wealth required to
pursue such a project.
Erecting a separate specialized building for anthropology does
not seem to have been seriously considered either. As part of min-
imizing operating expenses, the Trans-Mississippi and Interna-
tional Exposition had fewer separate departments and buildings
than similar expositions. The few Native-made items that did make
it into corporation-sponsored exhibition halls were scattered in
the Mining and Liberal Arts Buildings or, in the case of Hawai‘i,
in the International and Agriculture Buildings (fig. 56). The fair’s
official catalog mentions a few categories where ethnographic or
archaeological displays could have been included for award con-
sideration (table 7.1), but nothing anthropological earned an official
award, and there was no separate category specifically for ethnog-
raphy. As a result, the main areas that included Indigenous mate-
rial culture were either the U.S. Government building or Midway
concessions which, since they were economic and entertainment
based, did not have to conform to standards of scientific authentic-
ity. Neither of these two sections was eligible for standard awards.
Organizers assumed they could count on states to bring anthro-
pological materials at their own expense, but compared with other
expositions, the amounts shown by states appear to have been min-
imal. Exposition histories do not mention archaeological treasures
displayed by state and local historical societies.8 While some states
and Nebraska’s counties might have initially conceptualized dis-
plays of relics, archaeology exhibits seem to have been bumped.

304 nancy j. parezo

Table 1. Ethnology and archaeology award categories
Category Description
Group 122 Plans or models of
prehistoric architectural
monuments and
habitations.
Group 123 Furniture and clothing of
aboriginal, uncivilized,
and but partly civilized
races.
Group 124 Implements of war and
the chase.
Group 125 Objects of spiritual
significance and
veneration.
Group 126 Historic archaeology.
Objects illustrating the
progress of nations.
Group 127 Reproductions of ancient
maps, charts, and
apparatus of navigation.
Group 128 Models of cities, ancient
buildings, or monuments
of the historic period
anterior to the discovery
of America.
Group 129 Models and representa-
tions of habitations and
dwellings built since the
discovery of America.
Group 130 Objects illustrating gen-
erally the progress of the
amelioration of the condi-
tions of life and labor.
Source: Official Guide Book to Omaha and the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition
(Omaha: Megeath Stationery, 1898).
Subgroups available for awards
Class 648: Models of cliff dwellings,
shelters, skin lodges, yurts, huts
(of bark, grass, etc.), wooden houses;
Class 649: Appurtenances, models of
sweat houses, totem posts (originals
and models), gable ornaments, and
locks.
Class 654: Gathering and storing food
other than game, water vessels; Class
655: Articles used in cooking and
eating; Class 656: Apparatus of making
clothing and ornaments and of weaving.
Group 124-2: Athletic exercises and
games.
Representations of deities and
appliances of worship.
Group 126-1: Models and representa-
tions of ancient vessels, particularly of
the period of the discovery of America.
No subgroups.
No subgroups.
Originals, copies, models, or graphic
representation of notable inventions.
Evolution of plow, furniture, etc.
For example, the decorator for the Nebraska State building ousted
the state historical society’s archaeological exhibit in favor of her
art display. Avocational archaeology and local history seem to
have been allotted little if any space.9 Even the one structure on
the fairgrounds that made an allusion to Native Americans, the
Pottawattamie County Building (fig. 48), contained no anthro-
pological exhibits.

Relying on an Outside Organization

Leaving static anthropological displays to the initiative of individ-
uals, or state or local or organizations, as the tmiec also did for
liberal arts and scientific exhibits, and even for the Indian Con-
gress (which they “sponsored” only in the sense of providing visi-
tors with access to Indians as living historical artifacts), was not in
this case successful, though it minimized the corporation’s host-
ing expenses. But it was an error, as these exhibits were needed to
accomplish one of the exposition’s main marketing hooks. Since
all exhibitors had to register for space and identify their exhibi-
tion categories, the tmiec must have noticed there was a prob-
lem. There would be no anthropological exhibits to legitimize the
Indian Congress and distance it from Wild West shows. This made
the job of finding an entity or individual to conceptualize anthro-
pology and implement the marketing scheme critical.
The work of conceptualizing and implementing static and par-
ticipatory exhibits was immense and there is no indication from
tmiec records that Rosewater or any Board member had any idea
of what was involved. For a static exhibit, an organizer had to col-
lect objects, think of exhibit themes and build the displays—as
well as figure out where to put them. This meant negotiating with
space holders for valued territory. For a participatory exhibit, an
organizer had to obtain the services of demonstrators and trans-
port them to the fair, even if like concessionaires, it was held that
demonstrators and their families would fend for themselves. Other
expenses could not be avoided. The tmiec at a minimum would
have to provide a minimally graded site on the fairgrounds (fig.
8). Here the Indians could themselves build temporary houses at
no expense to the corporation. The openness (unimproved char-

306 nancy j. parezo

Fig. 48. F. A. Rinehart, The Wigwam: Pottawattamie County (Iowa) Building,
Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, Omaha, 1898. Located on the
Bluff Tract, south of the Star Tobacco building, it displayed fruit. From the
collections of the Omaha Public Library. Artwork in the public domain, scan
courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Archive, trans-
mississippi.unl.edu.
acter) of the grounds was held to be an advantage because Indig-
enous peoples were close to nature and should not be confined to
a building where beds were provided. But tmiec records make
it appear as if the marketing department had not considered that
the Indians needed to be provided with minimum sanitation facil-
ities and fresh water.
The tmiec evidently did not think through the issues of the
Indian Congress during the summer of 1897. Living demonstra-
tions even without buildings were not cost free. Indians had to
be convinced to come, and compensated for their time, effort and
the crops that would not be planted if they participated. Demon-
strators had to be transported to and fed while in Omaha. Most
would need shelter, even if it were canvas tents. These had to be
purchased or rented.10 The tmiec needed someone to devise a
detailed and realistic operational plan.
tmiec’s remaining choice was to convince some non-commercial
entity to bear the costs and undertake the work. But museums, uni-
versities or similar organizations did not have the money for this
kind of endeavor unless they had a patron. Rosewater had decided
against an outside concessionaire because of issues of entertain-
ment inauthenticity, Office of Indian Affairs’ disapproval, and the
need to produce exhibits that would legitimize and theoretically
contextualize Native peoples in the dominant theories and ratio-
nales for colonization. These exhibits had to support the conten-
tions that one, Indigenous peoples had been “naturally” displaced
in the name of Manifest Destiny and efficient regional economic
development (i.e., Indians did not know how to use the land);
and two, natural selection was at work. These ideas could be con-
ceptualized as directional unilinear evolution and technological
advancement, which organizers called American Progress. Such
preconceptions held sway in the popular imagination anyway,
where they relegated Native Americans to the past if they did not
assimilate. Under this model, Indians were living fossils.
As peoples who were marginal to mainstream society, Native
Americans could be exploited for entertainment-educational-
research activities, that is, used by any private economic enter-
prise that paid the Exposition corporation a fee and a percentage

308 nancy j. parezo

of ticket sales to participate. For these commercial establishments
there were no constraints to stop concessionaires using perform-
ers who were not Indians to play caricatures, or to stop Indians
from one culture from pretending to be members of other Native
societies. Since the tmiec had already promised authenticity in
their ads, they needed scientific anthropology to assure authen-
ticity and legitimize their educational efforts. Organizers needed
an involved anthropologist who would authenticate that the Indi-
ans in the “Indian Congress” were real. Rosewater looked to the
federal government for his anthropologist.

Obtaining the Services of a Government Anthropologist

Like many exposition managers before him, Rosewater visited an
ongoing exposition to gain ideas and talk to organizers about what
worked and what did not, what drew visitors and what they ignored.
He went to the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in the summer
of 1897 and spent a great deal of time in the government exhibits.
He viewed the Smithsonian’s U.S. National Museum displays of
“Eskimo” [Yupik] and Pueblo cultures, designed to illustrate cul-
tural contrasts in adapting to distinct environments. He also saw
exhibits where ethnology curator Otis T. Mason had arranged an
illustration of the budding culture area approach, which showed
regional differences, as well as archaeological curator Thomas Wil-
son’s huge typological display of over 1,000 tool specimens. Rose-
water closely studied James Mooney’s Kiowa Camp Circle (fig.
49), an ethnographic exhibit of dwellings, sited in the appropri-
ate social arrangements of the time of the 1867 Medicine Lodge
Treaty. It was the first exhibit to visualize social organization and
it was impressive. Rosewater enjoyed it immensely. He thought
it would be a perfect centerpiece at the Omaha exposition, espe-
cially because there should be no preparation costs. He just had
to convince the National Museum to send it.
Upon his return to Omaha, Rosewater wrote the article referred
to in the introduction promoting the Indian Congress and con-
tacted Mooney. An employee of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Amer-
ican Ethnology who had worked extensively with Plains tribes,
Mooney (1861–1921) had a great deal of exposition experience and

exposition anthropology 309

Fig. 49. Kiowa Camp Circle, Tennessee International Exposition, Nashville,
1897. The first ethnohistory exhibit in the nation. Erected by James Mooney
with reproductions made by Kiowa men and approved by the community.
A semicircle with a 25' radius on which 50 reproductions of the possible
250 tipis were displayed. Models were 3' × 3'. Each tipi label identified its
hereditary owner. Exhibit of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian
Institution. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image # mnh- 12763.
many novel ideas about how Indian cultures should be displayed.11
Rosewater asked Mooney to be an adviser for the Exposition.
Mooney gave a provisional acceptance. He discussed the matter
with the Bureau’s director John Wesley Powell and his assistant
WJ McGee, after Rosewater sent a formal request for his services.12
Powell and McGee approved Mooney meeting with and advising
Rosewater in Omaha as part of his regular duties, but noted that
long-term acceptance would require he be placed on temporary
furlough and his salary come from other sources. Omaha would
have to pay for his labor. Rosewater knew this would be a chal-
lenge given the tmiec Board’s stance.
Mooney traveled to Omaha in September, 1897, (while on his
honeymoon) to see how serious Rosewater was about basing his
living demonstration on scientific anthropology. Rosewater con-
vinced Mooney he wanted to include only “genuine representations”
of Indian life rather than those of the “dime museum variety.”13
Mooney decided that the Omaha Exposition could provide him
with an opportunity to finish the Kiowa Camp Circle and display
it in its entirety, without being confined to a small space within
an exhibition hall. With its erection in Nashville Powell had con-
sidered it done and had ordered Mooney to write up his analy-
sis, whether Mooney thought it complete or not. Mooney decided
the Omaha fair was his only opportunity to finish it. Mooney felt
this type of ethnographic exhibit, what would come to be known
as the culture area approach, made a lasting impression on visi-
tors.14 However, Rosewater’s plan for the Congress was grandiose
but unfocused, including representatives from all Native Ameri-
can societies who would live around a gigantic wigwam. Mooney
convinced him the scale was too large and the organization repet-
itive; it would cause confusion.
During October Mooney devised a plan for a focused but still
extensive exhibition. The tmiec’s Board of Directors approved
the revised plan and published it in the November 15, 1897, issue
of the Omaha Bee. The Indian Congress as an anthropological
exhibit would need fifty acres of land, centered around a giant
relief map of the United States painted on the ground. Groups
would build their typical houses and be located on the map that

exposition anthropology 311

indicated where they had lived at contact, not after removals. Path-
ways would represent real trails across the continent.15 As a conti-
nental geo-cultural lesson, Omaha would require more than the
eight demonstrator groups that had been presented at Chicago’s
world fair. The larger assembly would be a representative sam-
ple of North America’s Indigenous cultures, one based on envi-
ronmental adaptation, linguistic affiliation, and housing type. In
addition, Mooney proposed that legitimizing ethnographic arti-
facts would be taken from the Smithsonian and placed in an over-
sized tipi-shaped exhibit hall in the heart of the map, which was
the present day site of Omaha. Contextualizing maps and photo-
graphs would adorn its walls. There would be no need for collect-
ing expeditions. There would also be a series of oversized Indian
style dwellings where demonstrators would produce the new crafts
learned in Indian schools, including Cherokee and Sioux print-
ers who would provide newspapers. This was a feature designed
to entice the Office of Indian Affairs into participating.
Mooney’s plan, to the realization of which his services were
key, was an extremely expensive venture. It was apparent that the
tmiec did not consider the cost or labor when they approved the
revised plan—without funding it. It would happen only if the fed-
eral government paid for it. Rosewater and now Mooney would
have to obtain the funds. Mooney knew Powell would not simply
approve such an assignment because he did not think it advanced
anthropological knowledge.16 Now Rosewater had to convince
Powell or some other federal official to make the anthropological
Indian Congress a reality.
The first issue was to obtain Mooney’s salary and hopefully his
expenses (i.e., travel and per diem). Rosewater formally approached
Powell asking that Mooney be assigned to facilitate the Indian Con-
gress with or without a Congressional appropriation. Rosewater
also elicited political support. Nebraska’s senior Senator, William
V. Allen (serving from 1893 to 1901), a member of the Populist
Party and proponent of preserving forests as well as opening pub-
lic land to privatization, was asked to convince Powell. Allen also
served on the Senate committees on Indian Affairs, public lands,
agriculture, forestry and interstate commerce. He had successfully

312 nancy j. parezo

shepherded the initial authorization bill for the Trans-Mississippi
Exposition through Congress, obtaining $200,000, even though
the Indian Congress funds had been cut. He now sponsored Rose-
water’s second request for an additional appropriation of $100,000
[adjusted for inflation this would have been $2,871,961.46 in 2015
funds] for the Indian Congress. It was again voted down as a non-
essential government expense.
Powell was now doubly skeptical and refused to allow Mooney
to participate until secure funding had been obtained. Rosewa-
ter and Allen brought more pressure. On December 4, 1897, Allen
wrote Powell about the need for live Indians. The basic text of his
letter was supplied by Rosewater:
Groups of Indians from selected tribes of the United States could be
made very attractive and instructive by installing them in domiciles
of their own construction made of the materials of their own collec-
tion. The structures themselves would be a novel feature and exhibit
the deftness with which they protect themselves from the inclem-
ency of the weather. If, then, they were induced to bring the materi-
als necessary for carrying on their primitive arts and engage in the
making of articles for sale on the ground, the arts themselves would
be of great interest. Living on the ground they would necessarily
engage in their games and ceremonial institutions and the exhibition
of Indian life thus produced would be of supreme interest. By such
means the arts and institutions of savage life would be vividly por-
trayed to a large body of the people of the United States who would
thus be able to understand more clearly the nature and characteris-
tics of savagery and the problems which are presented to the Indian
department in the endeavor to lift the aboriginal inhabitants of the
country into the status of civilization.17

An astute Washington powerbroker who curried favors from pol-

iticians, Powell knew when he was cornered, but was not pleased.
Powell agreed to let Mooney work on the project but he held firm on
the issue of Mooney’s salary. And Mooney would not work for free.
Rosewater then searched for money to pay Mooney’s salary
and “research” expenses and with Allen’s political pressure, suc-
ceeded. The commissioner of Indian Affairs was also a politically

exposition anthropology 313

astute man and did not wish to jeopardize his upcoming appro-
priation. The Office of Indian Affairs would pay Mooney’s sal-
ary for a short time period and some field expenses. Early in 1898
an agreement (similar to what is now called a memorandum of
understanding) was effected and Mooney was furloughed to the
Office of Indian Affairs. His orders were to obtain agreements
from potential participants, collect material culture, and over-
see the installation and conduct of the Indian Congress and any
other installations in Omaha. There was no mention, however, of
who would supply the funds for collecting or what materials were
desired to enhance the Indian Affairs exhibit in the exposition’s
Government Building.
Even though there was no mention of working on the Kiowa
Camp Circle, Mooney found his orders acceptable, for they gave
him funding to work in Indian and Oklahoma Territories. Because
his furlough from the Bureau of American Ethnology did not
last for the length of the exposition, it was not clear who would
actually manage what was now being called the Indian Encamp-
ment. Mooney did not think it would be him. He left for Indian
Territory to find participants, planning to spend the majority of
his time with the Kiowa, though it was unclear whether this was
approved by Indian Affairs.18
Rosewater had his anthropologist but still needed money. Allen
repetitioned Congress, this time for $40,000 as a supplement to the
original appropriation. It was still a significant amount of money,
but it meant that Rosewater and Mooney had scaled back their
plans while retaining the exhibit’s complex original goals. The bill
was tabled because of the Spanish-American War. Mooney tried
to persuade people in Indian Territory to participate, but without
financial support none were willing to take the financial risk, which
was significant for people forced to live in poverty. Mooney still
wanted cultural representatives to produce different housing types
centered on a giant relief map of nations, but no one was scour-
ing the country or making the individual overtures to potential
participants. By February 1898 it was obvious there was no time
to make the map and no orders for Mooney to go anywhere but
Oklahoma and Indian territories. Nor was anyone arranging the

314 nancy j. parezo

static legitimizing exhibits. Most important, there were no places
to put them; no infrastructure for any of the Indian Congress had
been built except for the initial grading of the land. There was no
time to build the exhibit houses in Mooney’s initial plan.
As the June 1 opening of the exposition neared, Mooney and
Rosewater eliminated all collecting and separate exhibits, designat-
ing the federal exhibits in the U.S. Government Building the sole
authorizing infrastructure, even though this would force visitors
to make connections over a long distance. This would also affect
the Indian Affairs exhibits because Mooney had collected nothing
for them, as funds for doing so had never been released. Ambi-
tions for representation of Native American geographic, cultural,
and linguistic groups shrank; participants would only come from
the northern Plains at one point. It never got quite that bad, for
the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and the Assistant Secretary of
War George de Rue Meiklejohn agreed to recruit army officers to
act as Indian agents to secure the services of Indian participants.
Everything was not lost, but neither Mooney nor Rosewater had
time to work through the federal bureaucracy. By April, Mooney
acknowledged their plan was dead. Mooney still wanted his Kiowa
Camp Circle exhibit, and Rosewater still wanted his Indian Con-
gress, essentially ignoring that there had not been sufficient prepa-
ration for an Indian encampment.19 They both lost control of the
endeavor, with results that undermined all their educational efforts.
However, all the anthropological exhibits were in place in the fed-
eral government’s building, ready for opening day.

The U.S. Government Building: The Legitimizing

Anthropology Exhibits
Congress had appropriated funds on June 10, 1896, for federal par-
ticipation, although the amount was small compared with other
expositions, only $200,000, of which $62,500 was obligated to
build a temporary structure. The remaining funds were earmarked
for exhibits, salaries for individuals furloughed from their regu-
lar positions, transportation, per diem, and other administrative
expenses.20 The Smithsonian received less than $15,000 to be shared
among all divisions. Luckily the curators had dealt with this situ-

exposition anthropology 315

ation numerous times. They simply updated exhibits used at pre-
vious expositions and raided the National Museum’s permanent
galleries. Under the direction of the museum’s executive curator,
Frederick W. True, the staffs knew how to illustrate government
scientific operations. And according to a reporter for Scientific
American, they did it well: the Government Building was “one of
the most important factors in the Omaha Exposition. Its exhibit
is not only unquestionably the best on the grounds, but it is the
best selected collection of exhibit material and the best installed of
any previous government exhibitions, not excepting that of Chi-
cago.”21 Fairgoers agreed.
The government’s anthropological exhibits were designed to
educate Americans about humanity’s technological development
using Native American material culture. Produced by Otis T. Mason,
William Henry Holmes, Walter Hough, and James Mooney, they
have been largely overlooked by scholars.22 Most scholars ana-
lyzing the Trans-Mississippi Exposition’s ethnological endeavors
have focused on the performative Indian Congress and its infa-
mous sham battles (fig. 44), analyzing the program’s formation,
administration, resemblance to Wild West shows and powwows,
and the concerns of the Office of Indian Affairs. They also sought
to understand what it was like to be a participant. These thought-
ful authors have focused on the irony of an Indian Service agent
turning an educational endeavor into a sideshow—and well they
should.23 The story of how the living display was conceptualized,
repeatedly altered, and promoted is compelling. Authors, including
Akim Reinhardt in this volume, teach us about the Indian of the
western imagination and fights for control over the Native assem-
blage, stressing issues of authenticity and social agency within a
“broader universe of White supremacist entertainment.”24 Schol-
ars, including myself, have also looked at the phenomenon of
“colonial villages” as historic museological endeavors, similar in
intent to zoological and botanical gardens. Others have analyzed
the work of Frank A. Rinehart, the official exposition photogra-
pher who took hundreds of photographs of Native participants
(figs. 39, 47).25 Since the resulting extravaganza confirmed popu-
lar assumptions about American imperialism, national identity,

316 nancy j. parezo

and feelings about race, the attention of visitors and newspaper
reporters was focused on the Indian Congress and its participants
rather than the static government anthropology displays. But the
Indian Congress as an exhibition site was always intended to be
seen in conjunction with the federal displays.
Since 1876 Smithsonian Institution staff had spent much of their
time preparing displays for international expositions. This effort
was part of its mandate for the increase and diffusion of knowledge
and focused on effective education, access to science and attrac-
tive displays.26 The Smithsonian’s institutional goals also sought to
demonstrate the work of the U.S. National Museum and its con-
stituent branches and bureaus, including the Bureau of Ameri-
can Ethnology. Displays varied in size depending on the size of
the congressional appropriation, which determined the size of
the Government Building and so how much space was available.
The Government Building was always a dominant, central fea-
ture in America’s international expositions. In Omaha it was at
the west end of a half-mile-long reflecting lagoon called the Grand
Court (fig. 2). It was the largest building on the grounds, 504 feet
in length, with three sections each having a depth of 150 feet. The
208-foot-long center section fronted the lagoon’s basin (fig. 9). It
was topped with a 150-foot central dome, itself capped by an illu-
minated figure of “Liberty Enlightening the World.”27
The structure of staff-covered wood and steel had over 46,000
feet of floor space. Rinehart’s photograph of the interior (fig. 50)
shows a long building with a central aisle, flags hanging from ceil-
ing beams, and glimpses of displays that can be seen from that
central aisle. Rinehart’s photographs rarely show the cases lin-
ing the building’s exterior walls, and they are never taken closely
enough to read labels or to make out individual artifacts, though
perhaps they serve to suggest the impression of contemporaries:
“Entering through the main portal the visitor beheld an immense
hall literally full of curious, rare, and highly interesting objects
in such great numbers as to be confusing in the first impression
made upon the mind.”28
From the north entrance visitors viewed the Fish Commission
exhibits, followed by the Post Office Department with its stamp

exposition anthropology 317

collections and dead letter office reconstruction, the State Depart-
ment, and the Executive Mansion exhibits. Then came the Treasury
Department with a coin press for the Trans-Mississippi and Inter-
national Exposition’s Souvenir Coin Medal near the central dome.
Moving south from the center was the Marine Hospital Service
exhibit highlighted by a new X-ray machine, the Coast Guard Life
Saving Service, the Agricultural Department, the Weather Bureau,
Customs Bureau, Forestry Division, and the Office of Fiber Inves-
tigation at the south entrance. Across from the center aisle were
the War Department, the Patent Office, the General Land Survey,
the Bureau of Education, and the U.S. Geological Survey with its
large models of the state of Nebraska and Yellowstone National
Park. The center was reserved for the Treasury Department’s large
revolving lens, which helped ships find their ports.29
The Department of the Interior’s contributions included the
Office of Indian Affairs’ special exhibit on Alaska. Prominent were
lay figures (fig. 50), including a Yupik man on a reindeer-drawn
sled positioned on a platform covered by artificial snow. As at the
Atlanta and Nashville expositions, schoolwork by Native children
illustrated their “progress.”30 These pieces were organized by board-
ing school and lacked a main label to orient the visitor. They were
supplemented by charts, maps, photographs of reservation board-
ing schools and other pedagogical aids. Examples of trade work
were interspersed: a farm wagon bolt, cabinet, harness, shoes, nee-
dlework, tinsmithing, printing, and painting. Also featured was
the work of Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) artist Angel DeCora, who
already had a well-deserved reputation in American art. Missing
were the new pieces that Mooney had been expected to collect.
The Indian School display, however, was redesigned by anthro-
pologist Alice C. Fletcher in response to the antics introduced into
the Indian Congress. Fletcher was a noted ethnographer who had
worked extensively with the Omaha tribe. She was an assimila-
tionist who had helped conceptualize, write, and implement the
1887 Dawes Act, which redistributed communal land to individ-
uals. Fletcher took pains to produce an ethnological/art display of
contemporary textiles, matting, baskets, pottery, pipestone, and
beadwork, “the things that the Indian mind was capable of,” that

318 nancy j. parezo

Fig. 50. F. A. Rinehart, U.S. Government Building, Interior, Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition, Omaha, 1898. From the collections of the
Omaha Public Library. West side of the building: Smithsonian anthropology
displays to the right of Department of Interior (Indian Affairs) displays,
which include the reindeer life group. The combined Smithsonian exhibits
filled every inch of space, including the structural supports. Note the baskets
on the top of the life figure cases flanking a model of a Mexican temple and
the canoe on the wall. Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of the
Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.
unl.edu.
is, what people were making today rather than examples of tra-
ditional arts salvaged to present an idealized past as seen in the
Smithsonian’s displays. It was an exhibit designed to demonstrate
that Indians as a race were capable of assimilation.31 But of more
immediate importance to the Office of Indian Affairs was coun-
tering the extensive publicity being given to the Indian Congress
and its sham battles.
Fletcher had two other goals: the first dealt with economic devel-
opment, to demonstrate how traditional Indian artifacts could dec-
orate “cozy corners” in middle-class American homes, an early
attempt to develop art industries on selected reservations.32 In
this way she moved Indigenous tradition into the new economic
realm available in a colonial environment, integrating art into the
wider society’s aesthetic desires. The second goal was to present
representative samples of children’s schoolwork as qualitative evi-
dence that Indian children were intellectually and racially capable
of assimilation and citizenship, using a display technique common
at teachers’ conferences. As Fletcher wrote in Southern Workman,
many former students and their families visited her at the exhibits
as she stood there day after day, and “one and all recognized that
the past life of the Indian was a closed book.”33 Her exhibit was
intentionally designed to support federal Indian educational policy.
But the largest government exhibit was that of the Smithsonian
Institution and its National Museum. There are verbal descriptions
of what the Smithsonian anthropologists produced that provide
a basic idea of the objects visitors saw and the stories the exhibits
conveyed, though even these descriptions, found in memos and
shipping inventories, are meager because materials from the Nash-
ville fair were reused with few changes. Visitors, however, wrote
favorably about these displays and often mentioned their com-
prehensiveness.34 From the standpoint of the Smithsonian staff,
though, the exhibit was barely acceptable. It was cramped (fig. 50).
No department had enough space to really educate or discuss even
a miniscule part of their research activities. It was a slice of what
they had shown at the Columbian Exposition or what was on dis-
play at the U.S. National Museum in Washington. Curators could
not even replicate what they had shown in Nashville the previous

320 nancy j. parezo

year. The Smithsonian was allotted 4,000 square feet, with front-
age on the main aisle of about 84 feet and a depth of 42 feet. The
strict space limitations meant representative rather than exhaus-
tive displays, ones that could only illustrate “the leading faces of
human efforts and progress.”35
The majority of space was allotted to the U.S. National Museum.
Curators used it to outline the museum’s scope and demonstrate
how materials were arranged, essentially duplicating the Muse-
um’s own organizational scheme. As a result, the exhibits were
divided into three departments: anthropology (ethnology, archae-
ology, history, mechanical technology, electricity, photography),
biology (zoology and botany), and geology (mineralogy, applied
geology, paleontology).36 The largest department, anthropology,
had nineteen cases divided into three series. Each showed how the
discipline preserved and studied “varied phenomena of man and
culture” and presented to the public “the leading facts of human
effort and progress” especially as it pertained to Native American
cultures and American history, all within the context of “a clear
and symmetrical presentation of race history” to which “all times
and all races were to contribute.” Since expositions celebrated prog-
ress, curators True and Mason focused on technological develop-
ment symbolized by tool types used by Indigenous and colonized
peoples, and special exhibits that showed evolutionary develop-
ments in “industries” and their “products.”
Most displayed artifacts had been obtained on Bureau of Amer-
ican Ethnology research expeditions and were shown as individ-
ual decontextualized pieces or included in Holmes’s life groups
that demonstrated industries. For example, while in southern Ari-
zona and northern Mexico, McGee collected materials for Seri
and Tohono O’odham multifigured life groups for the 1895 Atlanta
fair while Mooney had collected objects for a Navajo silversmith
life group shown in Chicago before being placed in the National
Museum on permanent display. Because many of the exhibits
used in previous fairs had been seen by so many people, Mason
and Holmes produced a duplicate series, limited in scope, of sin-
gle figures clothed in Native attire (fig. 51). These life groups were

exposition anthropology 321

seen in Nashville and in Omaha and continued to be used at fairs
through 1906.37

Series 1: The Arts of Industry Displays

Racialized evolution and cultural development were key themes
of nineteenth-century anthropology. Predictably the Smithso-
nian’s main display, “The Arts of Industry,” focused on “inven-
tion” and racial achievements, using the comparative method. At
earlier expositions this series had been called the synthetic prim-
itive technology exhibits. Producer Walter Hough felt this series,
sited along the Government Building’s side wall, was “one of the
most attractive the museum possesses.”38 It illustrated “the devel-
opment of invention” or the evolution and technological progress
Native Americans had achieved producing tools, combining what
today would be classified as anthropology, history, arts and indus-
tries, and the history of technology. Using a unilineal evolutionary
framework where human technological advancement stood proxy
for human (mental) and cultural growth, these exhibits served as
the “before” or “traditional” picture to the industrial progress (the
“contemporary” or “modern” picture) seen at the rest of the fair.
Artifacts from Mesoamerica symbolized proto-civilization emerg-
ing from North American barbarism.
Each case illustrated progressive steps reduced to essential-
ized components—something that could be grasped easily by a
quick review—moving from the simplest tool to the most com-
plex. All objects were accompanied by a small standardized label
that listed artifact name, cultural affiliation, collector’s name, and
the date the object was accessioned. The label copy for each arti-
fact followed a standardized U.S. National Museum format that
supposedly stated why it was chosen for display but which actu-
ally required the viewer to make a number of inferences. Accord-
ing to the museum’s chief administrative officer, each label stood
in place of an informative curator conducting a gallery tour and
contained:
1) Common and technical name for the object;
2) Important features the viewer should notice;

322 nancy j. parezo

 3) The object’s meaning to science and its relationship to other
objects in the case;
4) Collecting information: location where obtained, date of col-
lection, and name of collector;
5) Specimen dimensions or weight; and,
6) Museum identification number.
For ethnological objects additional information was required:
1) Construction explained;
2) Raw materials named (if they were not obvious);
3) Appropriate age (archaeological, ethnological) provided;
4) Whether the artifact was obtained in trade or made by the
source community from which it was collected; and,
5) The culture’s name, language group, and geographic affili-
ation given (addressing present location and earlier historic
affiliation).39
Emphasis in label copy was on raw materials, in keeping with
curator Mason’s research on production.40 There was no opportu-
nity to include ethnographic information because the labels had
a strict word limit.
Predetermined theoretical (curator-conceptualized) specimens
or archetypes that corresponded to scientific taxonomic categories
were shown. The objects were not linked to specific cultures viewed
holistically as would be done in an ethnography exhibit. Instead
objects were decontextualized and treated as acultural/ahistori-
cal equivalents so they could be compared across time and space.
Objects were types, regardless of when or where they were made,
for in this natural history approach Indigenous people were con-
ceptualized as the preindustrial or precivilized before—categorized
as primitive, savage, or barbarous. Thus materials from all time
periods were interspersed and used interchangeably. Objects illus-
trated steps in industrial or technological development and, by
extension, the intellectual evolution of humanity.41
Each “industry” was in a single wall case so the entire devel-
opment sequence could be seen at a glance. A large framed label

exposition anthropology 323

atop each case announced the topic. At the lower left was a framed
label explaining the tool’s history—basically a guide on how to
sequentially read the objects like a book, that is, from top to bot-
tom, left to right. “The scheme of treatment of presentation is just
as the systematic student would adopt in writing the history of
the subject, beginning with the inceptive stages and moving for-
ward step by step to the highest development,” which was inev-
itably American tool use.42 Labels describing individual objects
were next to each specimen.
The arts and industry series had been used at previous inter-
national fairs and in the National Museum for years to document
government science methods, in this case, how anthropologists
transformed Indigenous material culture into scientific data using
natural history protocols. And they had done it well: “No one can
examine the cases containing the tools and utensils, arranged as
they are in series . . . without a clearer perception of what civiliza-
tion means.”43 The transformed anthropological artifact was crit-
ical: “Every article which is the result of human action should be
studied, first, in the mode of its manufacture (ontogeny); secondly,
in its relation to other products of human action of the same class
or similar classes (phylogeny); thirdly, in its historical evolution;
fourthly, in its geographical, original, and national distribution.”44
The result was natural history taxonomy, where artifacts (e.g., a
drum) were treated as species grouped into larger genera (musical
instruments). Individual objects were placed within these series,
irrespective of cultural origin, as equivalent units facilitating com-
parisons (table 7.2). Culture was held constant to eliminate the
potential “chaos” of cultural meaning being more important than
production techniques and abstract types. Visitors became citizen
scientists, exploring the revaluated objects placed in a “dignified
and systematic order.”45 Object juxtaposition was presumed to lead
visitors to conclusions regarding overall human cultural evolution.
Even if they had had the space, Mason and Hough would not have
provided any information on the cultural history of any specific
object. It was abstract, universalizing ethnology, not ethnography.
There was no attempt to geographically limit the objects shown
to the emphasis area of the Omaha fair—the Great Plains—although

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Table 2. Arts of Industry section themes
Industry Development Story Objects
Case 1: The discovery and making of fire by Rubbing sticks, kindling,
Fire-making artificial means. From volcanoes and revolving drills, flint and
lightning to firebrands, firemaking steel, Lucifer match.
tools to the electric spark.
Case 1: Torches to electricity in two series: Torches: lamps: stone
Illumination (1) torches and (2) lamps. cup with oil and wick
to argand burner and ac
light.
Case 2: History of essential tools used for (1) Splinters and masses
General use making things arranged in series of stone, (2) hammer,
tools starting with simplest tools and (3) ax, (4) adz, (5) knife,
ending with machine-operated tools. (6) saw, (7) drill, and
Consists of eight series. (8) scraper.
Case 3: Progression from the stone and club (1) Weapons held in
Weapons of war via the steel sword to the compound the hand: stones, clubs,
machine gun in two series: piercing and slashing
(1) piercing and slashing weapons weapons.
held in the hand and (2) projectiles. (2) Projectile points: bow
and arrow, crossbow,
pistol and gun.
Case 4: Illustrates progression in food Darts, toggles, hooks, and
Exploitative procurement activities in fishing only sinkers.
industries in four series: (1) darts, (2) toggle
devices, (3) hooks, and (4) sinkers.
Case 5: Items used in the household for Drinking cups; spoons;
Domestic arts eating utensils only in three series: knives and forks.
(1) cup, (2) spoon, and (3) knife and
fork.
Case 12: History of water transportation in Models
Transportation; four series: (1) development of the
marine hull, (2) methods of propulsion, (3)
wheel, and (4) screw propeller.
Case 13: In six series: (1) burden bearers, man Models
Transportation: and beast, (2) sliding load,
land (3) rolling load, (4) wheeled
vehicle, (5) steam locomotive,
and (6) railroad.
Case 14: Inventions of the “youngest and most Apparatus
Electricity marvelous branches of
human activity” in three series:
(1) experimental apparatus,
(2) transmitting apparatus, and
(3) recording apparatus.
it would have been possible given the depth of the Smithsonian
collections. Nevertheless geography—the beginnings of the culture
area approach and environmental determinism—complicated the
basic message. As visitors read from left to right and downward,
they traveled from North to South. This made the “Eskimo” the
simplest and the Southern Plains the most “complex” tool maker.
An example of a case will demonstrate this point. Case I, “Speci-
mens of Arrows from North America,” started with the Arctic in
the upper left hand corner, moving geographically across the row,
then jumped south within the Great Plains until the visitor saw
arrows made by people from Texas. Mason’s notes on the display
layout show that rows were meant to be similar to paragraphs and
boxes equivalent to sentences.
Note the numbers on each cell in Mason’s scheme (table 7.3).
These indicators were practical inventory markers to assist the
installer, which was supposed to be Mooney, who was in Indian
Territory. Mason began to use this flexible modular model in 1891
to manage the influx of objects for the Columbian Historical Expo-
sition in Madrid in 1892 and the Columbian Exposition in Chi-
cago in 1893. The standardized boxes addressed the problem of
insufficient storage space: “Once the specimens are mounted and
labeled and sealed up in these exhibition boxes, they may be filed
away on shelves or racks like books in a library.”46 In addition,
the versatile boxes could be substituted easily to produce a “new”
exhibit. Individual pieces could be substituted periodically as the
U.S. National Museum accumulated new collections. The press
commented on the efficiency of this method, describing how the
Nashville exhibits had been dismantled and transported to Omaha
in a matter of hours rather than weeks.47
The most talked about of this exhibit series were the fire-making
and illumination cases. These displays illustrated the steps by which
humanity had learned to use fire for both heat and light. The tools
were organized on a complexity scale, running from a simple fire
drill to phosphorus matchsticks. Each tool represented a named
stage of development, which stood for advancement in intellectual
development. The fire drill and fire-pump represented the earliest.
Next were examples of increasing technical difficulty: the use of

326 nancy j. parezo

Table 3. Case 1a. Costume case: bows, quivers, and shields
Typical Bows Eskimo Quivers Nez Perce Bows, Arapaho Bows,
(Left side) and Bows Quivers, etc. Quivers, etc.
a1 a2 a3 a4
Kiowa and Apache Arapaho Shields Cheyenne Shields Tonkawa Bow,
Shields Quiver, and Arrows
(Right side)
a5 a6 a7 a8

Source: record unit 70 Expositions, box 30, Madrid folder, smithsonian institution
archives. Otis T. Mason’s notes for case layout at the Columbian Historical Exposition (1892) in
Madrid, Spain, a layout used intact at subsequent expositions.

pyrite (or fire-stone) tools, flint, steel and tinderbox, sulfur stick
and phosphorus matches. The last two represented the stage in
which fire was recognized as a chemical process. The sequence was
used in all U.S. National Museum exposition venues, only altered
if they needed to be directly related to a contemporary event.
And Omaha had a contemporary event—the Spanish-American
War. That allowed curator Hough to update the weapons case to
acknowledge America’s victory, due in part to its advanced weap-
onry. The museum secured a “Mauser rifle, such as are used by the
Spaniards in Cuba, and also one of the new rifles of our own sol-
diers in vise of the interest taken in these matters by the Ameri-
can people at the present time” from the War Department.48 The
versatile boxes could accommodate America’s newest and most
efficient of tools linked to contemporary events.

Series 2: Technological Development in the Arts

A second set of exhibits focused on decorated artifact forms, add-
ing aesthetic value as a variable in evolutionary sequences. The
label copy mentioned what aesthetic feature the visitor should note
in addition to the standard information provided for artifacts in
series 1. Series 2 contained fewer artifacts made by Native North
Americans and more artifacts from early European civilizations.
There were also more items that today would be found in a history
or decorative art rather than in an anthropology display. Indig-
enous items in this series could be thought of as the “before” for

exposition anthropology 327

the “contemporary” objects that visitors could buy in the Man-
ufacturing Building. It provided a history for consumer items.
For Mason these series told stories of invention—the art of
invention and the advanced “inventive faculty” of humanity. Like
the previous series, the display cases (table 7.4) told the story of
how men and women create things. “Between the first ‘happy
thought’ and the latest protected invention there is a long series of
inventive processes related and developed into higher and higher
forms.” If the first series showed the earliest stages of invention
via “accidental discovery,” “mere observation and appreciation,”
and “happy thought” (utilization of natural resources), the second
series showed intentional design, experimentation (trying two or
more ways), patents and monopolies, and cooperative invention.
Each step in this invention process required great social skills.49

Series 3: The Practice of Primitive Arts: The Life Figure Series

Reused from previous fairs were also a series of life-sized single
figures, which had originally been constructed for earlier expo-
sitions (table 7.5). These were entitled the “Practice of Primitive
Arts,” for they emphasized decorative tool production and use in
pseudo-action. Modeled in plaster and appropriately dressed, the
figures were “intended to illustrate the practice of the arts in their
primitive stages. They give a vivid impression of primitive pro-
cesses and serve to contrast these with the methods and machin-
ery of advanced civilization.”50
Life groups had been developed for the Madrid and Chicago fairs
as a joint Bureau of American Ethnology/National Museum effort,
because they contextualized pieces of material culture isolated in
other display techniques into a functioning unit and embedded
them in individual cultures. They were designed to illustrate the
life and habits of North American Indians. The original exhibits,
prepared under the direction of Powell and Holmes, illustrated
the agency’s scientific methods and investigative results, displayed
on clothed mannequins, in portraits of prominent chiefs, house
models, and domestic and artistic collections. These exhibits were
intended to be surrounded by photographs of material culture in
contextual action. And they did just this, according to fair pub-

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Table 4. Decorated material culture cases including manufacturing tools
Industry Development Story Objects
Case 6: Four series: (1) implements and Manufacturing tools:
Ceramic arts manufacturing devices, (2) vase modeling tools,
showing progressive steps in decorating tools, stamps,
shaping, decorating, and the results molds, throwing wheel.
of firing on the paste and surface
finish, (3) glass, and (4) enamel.
Case 7: Textiles Three series: (1) spindles, (2) shut- Weaving tools and
tle, and (3) loom. sample textiles on looms.
Case 8: Stone shaping arts from simplest Carving and shaping
Sculpture known artificial modifications of tools, examples of
natural forms to the highest ideals sculptures.
represented in Greek art. Four
series: (1) prehistoric stone shaping
from Europe, (2) aboriginal Amer-
ican sculpture, (3) sculpture of
civilized nations, and (4) tools.
Case 9: A limited series devoted to the his- Tablets, pages, tools to
Books tory of the book and the method of assemble a book.
assembling the parts starting with
tablets and sheets.
Case 9: Metal Three series: (1) metal reduction, Tools: no finished pieces.
working (2) products showing progressive
order in processes, forms, and
embellishments, and (3) tools.
Case 10: Four series: (1) wind instruments, Instruments.
Musical (2) reed instruments, (3) stringed
instruments instruments, and (4) percussion
instruments.
Case 11: Two series: (1) cameras, (2) lens, Cameras, lenses, examples
Photography and (3) pictures. of developing pictures.
Table 5. Life figures illustrating manufacturing processes
Name Description
The Driller Eskimo man in reindeer-skin attire using a bow drill to
carve ivory.
The Fire Maker Ute making fire by twirling, between the palms of his
hands, a wooden shaft with its point set into a second piece
of wood.
The Flint Flaker Powhatan Indian roughing out stone tools from quartzite
boulders.
The Hominy Huller Southern Indian woman pounding corn in a wooden mor-
tar. Plaster figure with attire restored from drawings made
by members of the Virginia colonies.
The Skin Dresser Sioux woman using a scraping or graining tool in preparing
a buffalo robe.
The Potter Tohono O’odham woman modeling an earthen vessel.
The Metal Worker Navajo man making silver ornaments. Labels state that
the processes were probably introduced at least in part by
whites.
The Belt Weaver Zuni girl with primitive loom weaving a belt.

licists for the Chicago exposition: “Here is afforded us the best

possible opportunity to study the facial characteristics of Indian
races, as also their dress and occupations; whole families are rep-
resented in cases, or singly, both men and women engaged in
some useful art. One woman is shown weaving a blanket, of the
kind made by the Navajoes, another is cooking a fish.”51 Each life
group unit was ethnographic but as distinct units could be mixed
in various ways for use in ethnological exhibits (fig. 51). Figurines
were felt to be the next best technique to having real Indigenous
people engaged in real labor present in the exhibit. They were a
proxy for the Native people with whom anthropologists worked.52
There were good reasons why life figures and life groups were
preferred anthropological display modes. They acknowledged the
importance of culture and individuality. Life groups and single fig-
ures were based on known individuals who modeled for them or
anthropologists standing in for Native individuals, posed to sim-
ulate motion while performing a typical activity. The goal was to
visualize how groups of objects go together producing suites of

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Fig. 51. William Wallace lantern slide from F. A. Rinehart photograph,
Interior of Government Building, Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition, Omaha, 1898. From the collections of the Omaha Public Library.
U.S. National Museum (Smithsonian) life group of The Potter, a Tohono
O’odham woman making pottery, and The Driller, an “Eskimo” man carving
ivory. Acoma pot on top of case. Artwork in the public domain, scan
courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Archive,
trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
objects used in activities such as riding a horse, steering a canoe,
writing, making pottery, grinding corn meal for bread, or weaving
a blanket. This pedestalled technique, which could be seen from all
sides, was considered an exhibitionary innovation, more realistic
and educational than simply placing individual pieces of clothing
and objects on flat surfaces. These latter were disassociated from
people and from each other. Mannequins allowed the exhibitor
to use a facsimile of the human body and thus place clothing and
objects in the sight planes in which a viewer would see them in
reality. Thus grinding stones were on the ground and a clothed
woman bent over while she worked pushing a mortar stone, but a
hunter letting loose an arrow stood focused on his imagined prey.
This helped the viewer imagine activity and envision people and
things interacting to form a more complex and active viewing field.
Life groups were a museological innovation in the quest to asso-
ciate anthropological materials with real people when represen-
tatives from the highlighted culture were not present.
Life figures and life groups were more compelling than the syn-
thetic and technology series because they gave the illusion of being
less static, requiring less work by the visitor to understand their
main purpose. They were always placed on the central aisle in
order to draw people into the rest of the anthropology exhibit.
The same was true for the Office of Indian Affairs exhibit with its
man in a sled placed so as to draw attention.
By 1898 this Smithsonian scheme of life groups was standard-
ized, and while it permitted the replacement of individual figures
when needed, it was basically set. Like the object boxes, changes
to the models were mainly due to constraints of space, for differ-
ent units could be conceptualized as fulfilling the basic messages of
illustrating the scientific method and educating about the world’s
peoples. Until 1915 there was an emphasis on Native North Amer-
ica with a concentration on either the peoples of the region where
the exposition was held or artifacts from the most recent research
expedition. These displays could legitimize almost any other exhib-
its, including the Indian Congress. But this standardization left little
room or funds for museological creativity, such as Mooney’s Kiowa
Camp Circle or his giant map of America on which Native peoples

332 nancy j. parezo

would live. And as the opening date for the Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition came and went, there was still no Indian
Congress, and the Kiowa Camp Circle display sat in boxes. The
only evidence was an empty graded area. But there was still hope.

The Indian Congress Encampment as Exhibit

The bill to support the Indian Congress and its housing display
finally passed on June 30, 1898, as a rider to the Indian Appropri-
ation Bill. This was one month after the opening of the exposi-
tion. The bill authorized $40,000 to cover all expenses and gave
permission for Indians to attend. However, there was essentially
only $20,000 available for the Indian Congress because half of
the funds were to be used by the Office of Indian Affairs to build
a model schoolhouse to demonstrate progress in assimilating and
acculturating Native children. This building was not completed
until the Greater America Exposition in Omaha in 1899. Earlier
riders to other bills for authorization requested more money, but
they were always tabled or eliminated. The final authorization as
well as the Indian Appropriation Bill were side-tracked during
the Spanish-American War and subjected to political manipula-
tion about western land and water rights as well as an attempt to
extend the Dawes Act and highlight assimilation.53
The federal money had not been turned over to the tmiec, but
remained under the control of the Office of Indian Affairs, which
meant that Rosewater had no say in how it was spent. Rosewater’s
goal was still anthropological in intent, to “represent the different
Indian tribes and their primitive modes of living; to reproduce
their dances and games; show their manner of dress, illustrate their
superstitions; and to recall, as far as possible, their almost forgot-
ten traditions.”54 The plan was still to arrange the groups accord-
ing to Mooney’s categories, but there would be no giant relief map.
The more limited scope also meant that innovative museological
techniques and the idea of completeness were eliminated. Mooney
began to revise the exhibit’s scope in early July—but he did it from
Indian Territory.55 What was missing was time and someone on
the exposition grounds with authority to spend money.
However, Mooney worked rapidly locating potential demon-

exposition anthropology 333

strators. Indian agents were contacted to look for “full blood”
families with good morals and habits; all members were to be
temperate (i.e., not drink). Luckily, the Office of Indian Affairs
had sent circulars to Indian agents earlier in the year asking for
assistance in recruiting knowledgeable individuals—men and
women and perhaps families—who could illustrate their modes
of life, Native industries, and ethnic traits. Demonstrators were
instructed to bring their most picturesque formal attire, house-
hold goods needed for daily living (typical furniture, household
utensils) in the old way, items to decorate the interior and exte-
rior of their living spaces, and implements and emblems of war.56
Over Mooney’s objections, the demonstrators were not to be paid
but only provided with travel and living expenses. It was expected
that they should wear their Native dress, especially their special
occasion clothing. Participants theoretically had to be able to con-
struct their traditional houses and needed to bring raw materi-
als and tools for these and other demonstrations. They were also
instructed to bring reasonable quantities of articles for sale and
raw materials to make more. They were to be allowed to keep all
the money from tourists seeking souvenirs, decorations for their
homes, ethnic art, and collectible heirlooms. Most people turned
this offer down realizing it was an economically risky venture.
Others considered it because it would allow them to leave their
reservations with the Indian agent’s permission. This was a con-
sideration during a period when Native freedoms, including the
freedom of movement, were curtailed.
Mooney was theoretically in charge of administration and policy
over the Indians assembled on the grounds. He was to be assisted
by a temporary Indian Office employee, Capt. William A. Mercer,
Eighth U.S. Infantry, the agent for the Omaha and Winnebago.
Mercer was appointed on July 11. On July 13, J. R. Wise, a clerk in
the Washington Indian Affairs office, was appointed to supervise
the actual installation on the Indian area.57 But with Mooney in
Indian Territory, there was an administrative vacuum and basically
only two weeks to set up a living exhibit. Mercer quickly stepped
in with Indian Affairs approval to oversee Wise and the Indian
encampment. As he wrote to Indian agents and asked them to invite

334 nancy j. parezo

old men and their families to attend, he worked hard during July
to ensure that the camping area was cleared of brush and debris.
Spaces to place tipis and tents under cottonwoods, maples, and
box elders were prepared so that each group would have shade.
He called on his Army colleagues to lend him sufficient tents for
four hundred people. Mercer also ensured that there was fresh, fil-
tered water, extending the water pipes, building bath houses and
sanitary facilities, and setting up a system for food distribution.
There is no evidence that Mercer consulted with Mooney or
that he followed the Mooney-Rosewater plan. Given his anger
at Mooney later, he probably tried. Essentially Mercer ran the
endeavor, and he let everyone know it. His name was appearing
in print by July 25.58 According to the Omaha Bee, which seems to
have interviewed him just before the Indian Congress and Encamp-
ment opened, Mercer had established himself as the sole authority.
While all of the Indians on the exposition grounds do not know Cap-
tain Mercer, they all look upon him as the man who stands next to
President McKinley, and consequently all of them come to him and
pour their joys and troubles into his ears. The captain is a patient lis-
tener and never turns a deaf ear to appeals and entreaties, no mat-
ter how insignificant they may be. As a result of this he has suddenly
bounded into popularity with the Indians from the most remote parts
of the country and those who have not heard of him before. If an
Indian wants a pail of water or a pipeful of tobacco, Captain Mercer
must be consulted before an effort is made to secure the same. While
he is not at all times able to [word missing in original] the demands
made upon his time, he is always pleasant and has some person ready
to attend to the wants of the red men who are about him.59

This statement was a hope more than a reality, but it shows that
Mercer was establishing himself as the Indians’ enabler and bar-
rier, leaving participants little opportunity but to work through
him and no one else. It was an extension of the Indian agent role
and relied on the same authoritative stance.
It seems that Mercer liked publicity as much as Rosewater, and
his activities were often noted by the press. Indeed, one article,
after a florid description of the spectacular event he organized

exposition anthropology 335

for President William McKinley, said he had “the art of a stage
master.”60 Even more than applause, Mercer liked authority, and
he quickly shut out both Mooney and Rosewater. Rosewater and
Mercer clashed from early July and Mercer and Mooney from the
day Mooney arrived. Mercer made Mooney pay for trying to do
his job from Oklahoma and not taking care of his Omaha duties.
Mercer as acting agent of the Omaha and Winnebago Agency was
used to being obeyed and not having to work with others, espe-
cially those with different goals. Mercer appears to have held typi-
cal Army ideas about Indians and was certainly no anthropologist.
He had little tolerance for an ethnographic perspective, nor did he
feel he needed to teach visitors about Indian cultures. And most
important, Mercer and Wise retained control of the money and
so could marginalize Mooney and Rosewater.
If Mercer disliked Mooney or felt he was unreliable, Mooney
found Mercer’s orientation distasteful, especially for one suppos-
edly working on an anthropological exhibit. According to Mooney,
Mercer was unfortunately “unacquainted with tribal characteris-
tics, arts or ceremonies. As a result, not one of the leading Native
industries was represented—blanket weaving, pottery making,
silver working, basket making, bread making, or skin dressing.
Not even the characteristic earth lodge of the Omaha Indians was
shown, although such houses are still in occupancy on the reserva-
tion less than sixty miles distant. The ethnologic results obtained
were the work of an expert [Mooney himself] detailed at the spe-
cial request of the management and were paid for outside of the
appropriation.”61 Mooney remained on the grounds from late July
through the rest of the exposition, despite being embarrassed by
the entire Indian Congress endeavor, because he was under orders
and wanted to ensure that his Kiowa Camp Circle was correctly
repacked and shipped to Washington dc in December.
Given that the Indian Congress and Indian encampment were
last-minute undertakings and that Mooney’s plan was undermined
by two Office of Indian Affairs personnel, how much anthropol-
ogy remained? Was there still a geocultural lesson to be learned?
Could Mooney still provide an interpretive framework that met
tmiec needs for paying visitors and legitimacy?

336 nancy j. parezo

Displaying Native Cultural Diversity
Indians from Plains reservations began arriving in late July, includ-
ing those who came with Mooney. More from other parts of the
nation arrived in time for the official encampment opening on
August 4, 1898.62 For opening day there was a 25¢ fee to visit the
encampment, see the houses, witness athletic contests, hear music,
and see dances, the same amount charged by most concessionary
entertainment.63 Later, visitors could see the encampment and its
houses for free. Mercer tried to control all entertainment that was
to be held in the encampment during official times and for a fee,
but many participants did not adhere to this official requirement
and held spontaneous events over which they had complete control.
A graded level site was provided for thirty-five tribes, and each
group was assigned a location when they arrived. A banner with
the group’s name was placed in front of their canvas tents, tipis,
or traditional dwellings. This must have been a logistical problem,
for participants arrived singly without housing or sleeping mate-
rials as well as in better prepared delegations. Since new individu-
als came until the day before the fair’s closing, neither Mercer nor
Mooney ever knew who was coming or for how long they were
staying. Some participants went home after a short period, but the
majority stayed for the Exposition’s duration. The number of men,
women, and children in the encampments varied from 400 to 550
(table 7.6), though there was never an official count or any listing
of the names of participants.64 The best partial list must be com-
piled from Rinehart’s official photographs. Significantly missing
from these were the Pawnee, the original residents of Nebraska.
The encampment was a study in traditional Native dress, even
if the participants no longer wore such clothing in their daily
lives. Indian agents spoke of the difficulty of even finding such
attire. Many Natives mired in poverty had pawned their family and
personal heirlooms for food. Nevertheless, as one visitor noted,
“Everyone here is picturesque.”65 The Chiricahua Apache men, for
example, wore red turbans, close-fitting buckskin leggings, turned
up moccasins, and a mixture of fitted sleeved shirts. The Pueb-
los did not bother with the attire they wore for ceremonials but

exposition anthropology 337

Table 6. Participants and actual housing in the Indian Congress
Group (self-identification Encampment place/
used by Mooney) housing type
Apache (Ndě): Chiricahua Chiricahua in regular
(Hák’áyé) from Fort Sill army tents accompanied
and relatives from White by soldiers because
Mountain and San Carlos they were prisoners of
reservations. war. Arizona group live
in round-top canvas
wikiups.
Apache (Ndě): Built cloth-covered wick-
Jicarilla (Haisndayin) iups that were destroyed
by the rain on opening
day and switched to
canvas tents.
Apache (Ndě): Plains Camp next to Wichita;
Apaches who live with live in canvas tipis
Kiowa (Ns’idhs or enclosing one in a willow
Nad-ishañ-dina). Kiowa branch windbreak to
call them Taugui. Indian represent winter camp.
agent would not allow Placed in front of one tipi
Kiowa to attend. was a real “buffalo shield”
Mooney had purchased
for the usnm in 1893.
Arapaho (southern) Camp with Southern
(Inû'na-ína) Cheyenne.
Assiniboine (Watópana) Camp with Yankton
Dakota; live in canvas
tipis covered with paint-
ings; bring and erect one
deerskin-covered heraldic
tipi with a red band near
the top and figurative
symbols.
Blackfoot (Sĭ'ksika)- Erect old-style ornament-
Piegan division ed cowskin tipi which
they brought.
Cheyenne (southern) Camp with the Southern
(Dzĭtsĭ'stäs) Arapaho. Reside in can-
vas tipis and tents.
Member numbers and
their roles; souvenirs
produced
Two delegations; 22 from
Fort Sills including
Geronimo; 21 from
Arizona includes Naichi
and Go-zhazh (Jingling
or Josh) hereditary band
leaders. Have a brisk
business in baskets, canes
and beaded work.
From Jicarilla Apache
reservation, New Mexico
(12 people); make pottery
and weave baskets.
22 peoples from Indian
territory reservation;
no indication produced
souvenirs. Spent time
protecting Kiowa camp
circle exhibit.
From Indian territory (24
people).
Fort Peck reservation
(25 people); women hold
traditional dance on
August 6; make bows and
arrows and moccasins
for sale; reports mention
highly skilled artists.
Blackfeet reservation
(22 people).
From Indian Territory
(43 people).
Chippewa (Anishinabee) Reside in canvas tents. Algonquian speakers
from Lac de Flambeau
(25 people) and Bad River
(5 people) reservations.

Crow (Absάdrokě) Undecorated canvas tipis 26 members from Crow

set in a circle. reservation, Montana.

Flathead (Sélĭsh), Camp with Lower Interior Salish groups

Spokán (Sĭ'nqomé'n) Kalispel in undecorated from Columbia Plateau
canvas tipis. Arrive region; from Colville
August 9. reservation; no numbers
given in report but proba-
bly 15 including Kootenai
and Kalispel; some Spokan
(Sihqomen) and Kalispel
(Coeur d’Alene).

Fox (Mûskwákiûk) Brought sufficient finely From Sac and Fox reserva-
woven rush mats to cover tion, Oklahoma Territory,
the framework of several and a small second group
long, round-top wigwams from Iowa (16 people);
and cover the floor; camp Algonquian speakers;
with Sac. made mats and beadwork
for sale.

Iowa (Páhoché) Come with Sauk and Small Siouan group

camp with them in (4 people); live with Sauk
canvas tents. in Oklahoma Territory.

Coeur d’Alene (Kä'lispěl), Camp with Flathead in Washington, Plateau

Kalispel (Lower Kalispel canvas tents. area—people of the Pend
or Pend d’Oreille) d’Oreille; Interior Salish;
(no number of partici-
pants given in reports).

Kootenai (Ktunaxa) Camp with Flathead From Flathead reservation

delegation in undecorat- in Montana (15 members).
ed canvas tipis.

Mohave (‘Aha Makhav) Camp with San Carlos Several participants from
Apache in canvas tents. Mohave reservation, Ari-
zona; came late in season;
Yuman speaking group.
Omaha (Omañ' hañ) Camp with Oto and Pon- First group to arrive: (31
ca in canvas tents. participants from reserva-
tion in Nebraska; Siouan
speaking group; Second
group: 150 individuals
come for Indian Opening
Day on August 4 but only
stay for 10 days.
Oto (Jiwere) Camp with Omaha and Siouan speaking group (11
Ponca in canvas tents. people) from Oklahoma
Territory reservation.
Ponca (Usni) Camp with Omaha and Siouan speaking group;
Oto in canvas tents. from Ponca reservation,
Oklahoma territory
(30 people).
Potawatomi Come with Sauk and Fox Several individuals,
(Potewdtmik) and camp with them in no specific number in
canvas tents. reports.
Santa Clara Pueblo Make over 2,000 adobe Tewa speaking (15 or 20
(Owí'né) bricks and build a 16' × men). Agent instructed
20' rectangular house to send no women, so
with brush rook, mud no demonstrations of art
fireplace and chimney; production; only sell some
had holes for windows pottery they brought.
but no glass. Took one No ceremonies; no partic-
week of labor. Also hired ipation in sham battles or
to build a replica of dances.
Sitting Bull’s log cabin
when Standing Rock
Sioux refused to do this.
Sauk (Sac; Ságiwûk) Brought sufficient finely From Sac and Fox reserva-
woven rush mats to cover tion, Oklahoma Territory,
the framework of several and a small second group
long, round-top wigwams from Iowa (33 people);
and cover the floor; camp Algonquian speakers;
with Fox. produce mats and
beadwork for sale.1
Sioux: Dakota (Yankton) Bring one old heraldic Most numerous group but
(Ikhanktonwan Dakota tipi. Stay in canvas tipis not separated in Mooney
Oyate) set in a circle. account. From Yankton
Sioux and Standing Rock
reservations (9 people).
One group brings travois
to use with a horse.
Sioux: Santee
“Mdewakantonwan,” a
member of the Isanti
division of the Great Sioux
Nation; Dakota
Sioux: Lakota and Oglala
Lakota
Sioux: Brulé
(Sicangu Oyata)
Tonkawa
(Tĭ'chkan-watich)
Wichita (Kĭtikĭtísh)
Camp with Dakota and
live in canvas tipis set in
a circle.
Live in undecorated
canvas tipis set in a circle.
Undecorated canvas tipis;
one of first groups to
arrive ca. July 20.
Come with Ponca.
Build earth lodge in first
week; most live in canvas
tents.
Flandreau Reservation,
South Dakota; bring
a brass band from the
Indian School that plays in
parades. Not mentioned
by Mooney—probably
included in Dakota group.
Cheyenne River reserva-
tion (9 people); Pine Ridge
reservation (10 people);
Crow Creek reservation
(5 people). Always dressed
in their finest apparel and
like to walk around the
grounds in their feathered
bonnets.
Lower Brule reservation
(7 people) and Rosebud
reservation (48 people).
Ten people originally from
southern Texas, small but
notable group supposedly
on the verge of extinction.
From Ponca reservation in
Oklahoma territory.
From Kiowa and Co-
manche reservations
in Indian Territory (36
people); two of the last
Kichiai and Tonkawa;
delegation includes single
Lipan Apache woman; 15
lived in the grass lodge.
Discussed corn agricul-
ture and demonstrated
corn grinding with stone
metates and wooden
mortars, pottery making,
and cooking in pottery
vessels.
Winnebago Live in canvas tents but
(Hochû'nka-ra) produced an eastern style
wigwam house type of
woven rush mats over
pole framework.
First group to arrive for
Indian Opening Day;
45 come and stay for 10
days; 9 people come from
Nebraska reservation and
stay for entire exposition;
Siouan speakers; wear
turbans, beaded garters,
and short breechcloth.
Play lacrosse and bring
100 ponies.

Source: “The Trans-Mississippi International Exposition,” in W. A. Jones, Annual Report of the

Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1898), 27–32; James
Mooney, “The Indian Congress at Omaha,” American Anthropologist 1, no. 1 (January 1899); and John
Wakefield, “A History of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition” (Omaha, 1903), 632. The
number of tribes varies by author, depending on how groups are combined. This is partly a result of
the fluctuating numbers throughout the fair and the date of the census. Indications of whether each
group made and sold souvenirs is inconsistent. If nothing is listed in the table, this does not mean
that the participants were not producing art; it simply means that it was not listed in the reports
consulted. The Tonkawa were “said to be on the verge of extinction—only 53 members left.” James
B. Haynes, History of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898 (Omaha: published
under the direction of the Committee on History, 1910), 224.

1
One man, Nah-tow-waw-pe-moh, died of malaria and was buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery on
October 2. “Burial of a Dead Brave,” Omaha Bee, October 3, 1898, 2. Unfortunately, the article begins
with typical ethnocentric stereotypes. However, it provides some indication of the clothing and
material culture the man brought with him—all of which was buried with him: ribbons braided
into the hair, ending in beaver tails, earrings in the form of tiny tomahawks, blanket decorated with
beads; buckskin breeches, with blue silk trimming, moccasins decorated with shells and beads, lunch
pail, long-stemmed pipe, soup bowl, and spoon.

donned their daily wear. Accounts contain more descriptions of

male specialty clothing, what would now be called regalia, than
female dress. Men had large earrings, turkey-feather fans, a vast
array of headgear, and “silver medals as big as stove-lids” as signs
of authority and honor. Women “wear most wonderful moccasins
and are sometimes covered with bracelets, brass rings, and other
valuables.” There were also descriptions of attire that contained
mixtures of trade and traditional wear: “One boy has a red hand-
kerchief over his head, his face painted yellow, and wide yellow
buckskin breeches with farmer-boy suspenders.”66 He was dressed
to shoot arrows at nickels that visitors supplied.

342 nancy j. parezo

 Families had been instructed to bring “the necessary articles with
which to furnish and decorate their teepees and other domiciles.
As this will be a most interesting part of the exhibit the furnish-
ings should be as attractive and complete as possible. . . . Neces-
sary cooking utensils should be brought, and these should be as
primitive as possible.”67 Since the ethnographic present was being
displayed, and this required pure cultures uncontaminated by
Euroamerican-derived cultural materials, manufactured articles
obtained through trade or as rations from the government were
to be avoided. Regrettably, no inventories were made, so we have
incomplete information on what items visitors saw. The same is
true for the art Natives produced to sell. But we do know that no
one apparently took the regulation to not bring metal cooking pails
seriously. One visitor (unfortunately anonymous) described early
morning cooking fires in the Assiniboine camp, “a pole is fixed at a
proper distance above the fire and three or four of the white man’s
tin pails, with lids, are suspended from it, all steaming.”68 And as
the days progressed, more and more goods obtained at the expo-
sition adorned the encampments. Bicycles leaning against tipis
were not uncommon.
Some Native participants lived in houses of their own construc-
tion and adhered to their aboriginal type to a good degree. Those
who could not build traditional homes resided in canvas tents
and canvas tipis (fig. 52). Mooney’s idea was to provide visitors
with an exhibit of Native house-building techniques that would
include the ceremonies connected with sanctifying or blessing
each structure. Regrettably, from Mooney’s perspective, four-fifths
of the participating groups had lived in tipis on the Great Plains,
and in Omaha they were domiciled in undecorated canvas tipis,
limiting their ethnological usefulness. Thus there was little vari-
ation to show housing and environmental adaptation across the
country, except for the number of poles used (three or four) which
Mooney did not find very significant. There was the possibility of
comparing the groups in the Southwest to the groups from the
Great Plains, but there were no materials for the Pueblos to build
a structure, although the Pueblo men spent a good deal of their
time in Omaha making adobe bricks. It is questionable whether

exposition anthropology 343

Fig. 52. F. A. Rinehart, Ponca Camp, Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition, Omaha, 1898. From the collections of the Omaha Public
Library. Note the typical canvas cover and the smaller wigwam or wickiup
style lodgings for an individual family. Artwork in the public domain, scan
courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Archive,
trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
groups that had been removed from their homelands could have
found house-building materials, even if they had been instructed
to do so. There were certainly not enough buffalo skins available
to construct the necessary tipis. The best prepared were the Plains
Apache (referred to as Kiowa in reports) and the Wichita, both of
whom Mooney accompanied from Oklahoma.
Despite the lack of geocultural variation for a complete eth-
nological comparison of traditional clothing, material culture,
and housing, there was still an opportunity for visitors to learn
something from where each group camped. This was possible for
three culture areas (Plains, Prairies, and Southwest), and varia-
tion within the Plains was easy to display. However, Mercer’s next
decisions eroded any semblance of the encampment as a geocul-
tural or anthropological lesson by introducing the entertainment
fictions that Rosewater had assured visitors they would not see.
When any group arrived, Mooney had located them accord-
ing to his model: families from the Great Lakes to the north and
east of the Sioux groups, participants from the Southern Plains
to the east of the Apaches, Navajos, and Pueblos. This plan lasted
for only five days or until August 10, when Mercer made a dras-
tic decision to change the entire focus of the Indian Congress.
Mercer thought that attendance after the opening was too low
and decided that visitors were not interested in a boring ethno-
logic approach. What they wanted, he decided, was a version of a
Wild West show, with gripping entertainment, tall tales, and the
American male quest, including interacting with the Indian of the
western imagination. To facilitate this new vision, he developed
a pageant that he called a sham battle (fig. 44). The Omaha Bee
described the first such battle, noting how Mercer played the piv-
otal role of white hero: “The battle will occur on the open ground
just west of the Transportation Building. Captain Mercer will com-
mand the Indians. He will not wear the blanket and the breech
clout, but will ride a horse and will direct the movements of his
savage followers. For the time being he will act the part of a ren-
egade white who is not inclined to give any quarter . . . who will
be known by the Indians as Wyoki Nicyople Tigurebli Acolthk, or
Great Man Who Fights Them All.”69 Full of stereotypes, the extrav-

exposition anthropology 345

aganza could have been scripted for many Hollywood westerns
(such as Dances with Wolves), with the American culture hero
helping the maladroit Indians defend themselves, while ensur-
ing the political might of the American government triumphed
via military force—the cavalry rode in to save the retreating and
defeated white men before they could be burnt at the stake.
Mercer’s sham battle presented intentional racial genocide
as natural selection disguised as imaginative showmanship; the
white men joining the action are told to kill every Indian among
the camp of warriors and families. It also highlighted American
manifest destiny and fit well with the tmiec’s ideas about prog-
ress and even Senator Allen’s ideas about land redistribution to
whites. It was theater made for an exposition occurring just after
the Spanish-American War as the U.S. government moved into
overseas imperialism. But it was not ethnography or history; it was
the antithesis of what Rosewater had advertised or what Mooney
had agreed to legitimize with his name and government research
association. Rosewater and Mooney asked Mercer to stop, but he
refused. They complained more than once to the Commissioner of
Indian Affairs, William Jones. Mercer defended himself. He wrote
to Jones in September, asserting that the ethnographic aspects of
the encampment (housing and watching daily life) were
of comparatively little interest to the average visitor, who, having seen
one or two camps has seen them all. In other words, the real differ-
ences and characteristics of the Indians were of very little interest to
the average visitor. A scientific exhibit appeals to but a small percent-
age of the Exposition. The greater portion of the people coming to
the Exposition visit the Indian Congress, and invariably express the
fullest satisfaction. However, what they really desire is amusement;
they prefer to see the Indians in their full dress on parade, conduct-
ing their ceremonies, their dances, or participating in sham-battles.
All of these are being provided so far as practicable, to the delight of
the eager crowds which are often larger than the grounds can com-
fortably accommodate.70

Mercer effectively eliminated Mooney, Rosewater, and any claim

to ethnographic authenticity from the Congress, but this did not

346 nancy j. parezo

stop him from claiming it. An advertisement announcing his coup
was placed in the Omaha Bee on August 10. In the upper right
hand corner it caught readers’ eyes as it proclaimed: “Realistic
Sham Battle. Clash of Arms by Members of the Red Men’s Order
and Capt. Mercer’s Indian Warriors. Exposition Grounds, Today,
Wednesday, Aug. 10.” The ad went on to announce the fictive out-
come as well as entice visitors: “Savage Attack Upon White Man’s
Settlement. Heroic Defense and Defeat of Whites. Indians Will
Burn Victims at the Stake. Battle at 6 O’clock This Evening in the
Indian Encampment Grounds.”71 It was theater, everything Mooney
had wanted to avoid.
But could something be salvaged? It would certainly not be
geographic or environmental accuracy. Mercer needed a central
stage for his sham battle: “The plan of battle is this: The Indian
lodges that are now in the center of the encampment will be moved
into the timber at the west end of the grounds.”72 In addition, he
wanted to accommodate the Improved Order of Red Men, a white
middle-class fraternal organization who liked to play Indian and
who wanted to camp on the fairgrounds. The only available area
was in the Indian encampment. Mercer moved the tipis without
informing Mooney.73
While the housing display as a geocultural lesson was a disaster,
Mooney found several camps ethnologically interesting. The most
important was a Wichita grass lodge (fig. 53), the most substantial
building in the Indian encampment. Mooney paid the group to
repair the oldest Wichita house remaining in Indian Territory, take
it down, transport it, and reconstruct it on exposition grounds. The
work was undertaken by several women over a week, after which
they built a sweat lodge and a grass-thatched summer ramada (a
porchlike structure). The lodge was a dome-shaped construction
of grass thatch over a square, upright pole framework supported
by stout log crosspieces set in notches at the top. After half tim-
bers were bent over the top, flexible poles were placed around
the whole structure before it was covered with grass. Earth was
banked around the base. Several families lived in the structure; the
remaining Wichita participants lived in canvas tents. Inside visi-
tors saw a central fire pit with a metal pot. At the close of the fair,

exposition anthropology 347

Mooney purchased the lodge, the stone grinding tools, and all the
house furniture from the owners for the U.S. National Museum
and shipped them to Washington. Mooney planned to install the
Wichita structures in Columbian Park, but this never happened.
Subsequent National Museum annual reports do not mention it.
Mooney singled out several tipis from Northern and Southern
Plains groups as meritorious. First, he liked two decorated and
painted Blackfeet skin tents, even though cow hides had been sub-
stituted for buffalo hides (which were not available). The tipis were
supplemented by deer hides and attracted a good deal of visitor
attention. Second, he noted a “Kiowa” winter tipi with a circular,
willow windbreak built by the Plains Apache who lived in canvas
tipis next to the Wichita encampment. Mooney placed in front of
the winter tipi an old buffalo shield that he had collected from the
Kiowa in 1893 and had shown at the World’s Columbian Exposi-
tion. Third, Mooney was impressed with several Sioux tipis that
he said were “tastefully decorated” and set in a circle following the
“old customs of the plains tribes.”74 Also of special architectural
interest were Yavapai-style wickiups erected alongside San Car-
los Apache round-tops in a style still used on the Arizona reser-
vation. In his summary article on the Indian Congress, Mooney
mentioned the Sauk and Fox mat-covered wigwams, but inexpli-
cably not the Anishinabee (Chippewa) small birch bark–covered
long house, their deerskin decorated tipi, or the Flatheads’ two
skin-covered tipis. This implies that these housing units did not
meet some level of ethnographic or aesthetic merit.
Despite the issues, Mooney still tried to incorporate some ethno-
graphic accuracy. On the identification banner and label for each
group Mooney provided their tribal names in phonetic spelling as
well as the identification by which the press referred to the dele-
gation. This was unusual labeling and spoke to Mooney’s cultural
sensitivity as well as to identification politics and how the people
wanted to represent themselves.

The Kiowa Camp Circle

As the Indian Congress deteriorated into a side show, Mooney
still held out hopes that his Kiowa exhibit would salvage some of

348 nancy j. parezo

Fig. 53. F. A. Rinehart, Wichita Men Constructing Thatched Ramada in Front
of the Grass Lodge in Their Encampment, Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition, Omaha, 1898. From the collections of the Omaha Public Library.
Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
his endeavor. But the Kiowa Camp Circle (fig. 49) almost did not
appear due to Mercer’s refusal to endorse payment receipts for
its transport, as had been agreed, so it sat in a railroad depot for
weeks. Nevertheless, when it was finally erected near the exposi-
tion’s close, it was one of the more interesting features of the Indian
encampment (fig. 54).75
As mentioned earlier, the Kiowa Camp Circle was an ethno-
historical and collaborative display of an historic event: the June
1867 Sun Dance encampment, the last held before the Kiowa and
their allies, the Plains Apache, were confined to a reservation in
Indian Territory. Eighty small three-foot-high model tipis were
placed inside an enclosure at the east end of the Indian encamp-
ment, according to kinship, band, and social status.76 The commis-
sioned models had been made under community supervision and
with the permission of the original owner and his descendants,
thus ensuring accuracy.
Mooney’s main label was long compared to the U.S. National
Museum labels and included culturally specific information Mooney
felt visitors needed to understand the display.
The Kiowa camp circle—a series of miniature heraldic tipis in buck-
skin, with the central medicine lodge and all the necessary shields, tri-
pods, and other equipment to make it complete—was brought from
Washington and set up within a canvas corral of eighty feet diameter.
This presentation of the old camp circle of the plains tribes is a com-
plete reproduction, on a small scale, of the last great sun-dance camp
of the Kiowa Indians, just previous to their signing of the historic treaty
of Medicine Lodge in 1867, by which they gave up their free life and
agreed to be assigned to a reservation. It is the property of the National
Museum and was prepared on the reservation under direction of the
Bureau of American Ethnology, every miniature tipi and shield hav-
ing been made by the hereditary Indian owner of the original.

Note the ownership claim as well as the shifting of the object and
the knowledge (anthropological and historical) from the Kiowa
to the Euroamerican scientist and his governmental institution.77
In this way, the reproductions were like photographs.

350 nancy j. parezo

Fig. 54. F. A Rinehart, James Mooney’s Kiowa Camp Circle, Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition, Omaha, 1898. From the collections of the
Omaha Public Library. Dairy Building, bleachers, and Indian Congress
encampment in background; Kiowa man near entrance. The heraldic shield
reproductions and other war implements of the owner were to be placed
in front of each tipi. The shields, however, were grouped in front of the
Medicine Lodge, since all were not completed. Artwork in the public domain,
scan courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Archive,
trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
 Mooney was pleased with the display but still saddened that it
was incomplete. But visitors would not know this. So how did they
react to the novel exhibit? There were few magazine or newspaper
reports on the Kiowa camp circle, probably because most articles
were written before the display opened. The camp circle was not
erected until mid-October, only three weeks before the exposi-
tion closed. Rosewater did write a series of articles that included
Mooney’s explanations of the cultural symbolism embedded in
the display. At least one visitor understood Mooney’s educational
goals. She stated that the miniature historical reproduction “was
perfect in every detail, even to being made by descendants of those
participating in the great dance.”78

Ethnographic Teaching Possibilities and Touristic Souvenirs

Despite the lack of a credible overall ethnological comparison,
there was still the possibility that individual encampments could
teach ethnography. But by September Mooney was telling McGee
that Mercer had undermined all attempts to permit legitimate
demonstrations in favor of his sham battles as well as thwarted
his attempts to give docent-style lectures. “There is no attempt
at representing Indian industries, skin dressing, hide smoking,
corn growing, buckskin painting, weaving, or silver work. Suc-
cess is measured by the amount of noise and ticket sales.”79 And
since the Native men and women were paid to participate in Mer-
cer’s events, there was no economic incentive to perform unremu-
nerated labor in museum-style demonstrations or even to talk to
visitors. People might learn something about material culture by
comparing regalia, but it was a superficial endeavor, for there was
no guide to help visitors understand what was culturally impor-
tant. Mooney also told McGee that Mercer had filed an injunc-
tion against Rosewater and the tmiec for harassment for their
repeated communications to him that he stop the sham battles.
In addition, there was the issue of the admission charges: there
was no oversight of what Mercer did with the money, although
one hopes it went toward food bills or was put back into the cof-
fers of the Office of Indian Affairs. In retaliation the corporation
refused to announce any of Mercer’s Indian Congress events. It

352 nancy j. parezo

was a nasty situation. Mooney wanted to leave, but he had to stay
to secure the Bureau of American Ethnography’s set of documen-
tary photographs taken by the fair’s official photographer.
A single individual with government authority—Mercer, not
Mooney—had delegitimized anthropology and undermined Rose-
water’s claim that the Indian Congress was not a Midway conces-
sion designed simply to make money. By emphasizing exhilarating
but fictional entertainment over drier museum anthropology, the
Indian of the Western imagination who met the needs of Ameri-
can conquest held sway. On the surface, Mercer’s actions were in
direct opposition to the Office of Indian Affairs’ assimilationist
policy, but a closer review demonstrates it actually reinforced it.
By displaying screaming savages, Mercer paternalistically demon-
strated the need for education if American Indians were to be more
than a fading memory, like the cowboy and the buffalo. But few
people saw the irony.80
Overall the fair constituted a space in which “an ethnologist’s
time is wasted and his labor lost,” Mooney concluded.81 Neverthe-
less he spent several days conducting fieldwork through focused
interviews with selected participants. He described what he learned
in his account of the Indian Congress in the American Anthropol-
ogist. He thought the Caddoan-speaking Wichita, who now lived
on a southwestern Oklahoma reservation, provided him with the
most important information.82 Mooney obtained his first lesson
in Wichita and Kichai. He also interviewed several noted runners
who were distinguished in ceremonial foot races and watched their
running demonstrations. These informal races were precursors to
the Anthropological Games held during the Louisiana Purchase
Exposition in 1904.83
In his accounts Mooney did not simply focus on representative
cultural models, but noted culturally important individuals: lead-
ers, preservationists, orators, and cross-cultural educators. Many
were historically important figures who now served as culture
brokers. The Plains Apache delegation was led by their hereditary
chief, Whiteman, aged seventy, who had twice been to Washing-
ton. He was “a kindly, dignified gentleman,” according to Mooney.
“In spite of years he sits his horse as firmly and bears his lance

exposition anthropology 353

as steadily as the youngest of his warriors.”84 In his younger days
Whiteman had been one of two war leaders deemed worthy to
carry the beaver-skin staff when he pledged never to avoid dan-
ger or turn aside in the face of an enemy. Another was Big-Whip
(Pablino Dias), taken captive at age eight during an Apache raid
in Parral, Chihuahua, Mexico. Since he spoke Spanish, he often
served as a translator. Mooney specifically mentions White-swan
(Crow), who was shot and left for dead during the 1876 battle of
the Little Bighorn. Although deaf, he had been a well-known sto-
ryteller who used sign language to recount his war experiences.
Santa Clara governor Diego Naranjo brought and constantly car-
ried an inscribed silver-headed cane from President Lincoln, “an
emblem of his sovereign authority.”85 It is clear that several dele-
gates used the exposition to declare their rights to self-identity and
political freedom to each other and to Americans who would lis-
ten. Mooney was beginning to recognize the importance of orator-
ical skills and that providing a platform was an important feature
of pan-Indian gatherings. Mercer, however, refused to listen and
downplayed any features that required ethnographic knowledge.
From the standpoint of generating publicity, securing the ser-
vices of the famous Chiricahua Apache warrior from the Bedon-
kohe band, Geronimo (Goyathlay or Goyaalé), was a major coup.
This took a great deal of negotiation with the U.S. Army as well as
the Office of Indian Affairs because the Chiricahua Apache living
at Fort Sills were still considered prisoners of war. Accompanied
by soldiers, which gave the impression the men were still dan-
gerous and had to be controlled, the group garnered more media
attention than any other Native delegation. It was a “hand-picked”
contingent and included a traditionalist Naichi, the hereditary
band leader, “a man of soldierly air and figure,” and an assimi-
lated Goyathlay, “the old war captain, a natural leader of warriors,
but withal a most mercenary character,” according to Mooney.86
Mooney’s comment critically acknowledged that Goyathlay and his
group had become good entrepreneurs, people who did not simply
give away their labor or knowledge without appropriate compen-
sation. It was not very “traditional” behavior in Mooney’s estima-
tion, even though it actually was an extension of Apachean values

354 nancy j. parezo

of reciprocity. And it was a boon for tourists who wanted souve-
nirs. Goyathlay, who refused to play a costumed Indian, dressed
in typical American middle-class clothing (dark suit) and diplo-
matically interacted with tourists as an elder statesman, engaging
them in conversation through an interpreter. He sold his signa-
ture for 10¢ and photographs for 25¢. It was the beginning of a
new period in Goyathlay’s celebrity, one that was done partly on
his terms, with him manipulating the Geronimo reputation as well
as playing with Euroamerican stereotypes to benefit his family.
Benefits came in another form for demonstrators who produced
and sold souvenirs. The Chiricahua Apache, who were joined by
relatives from San Carlos, produced toy bows and arrows and sold
everything they produced. And they needed to, since they were not
given wages for attending; performance had not yet developed into
wage work paid by the sponsoring organization, despite Mooney’s
efforts. It was expected that the Apache men who performed a gans
dance would receive tips, usually in the form of nickels cast on the
dance ground during or after the performance. The entire encamp-
ment went home with much needed cash. They could have made
more by selling their performance attire and accoutrements, espe-
cially the gans masks, at the end of the exposition, but they chose
to follow traditional rules instead. They buried “the medicine head
dresses” on the morning they departed for Arizona Territory. “It
is an unwritten law with an Apache that one of the medicine head
dresses shall never be sold, given away or destroyed, so there is
nothing left but to bury them.” As the reporter noted this was for
everyone’s protection: “There is also a belief with the Apaches that
if a man digs up and touches one of these ornaments, bad luck will
follow him to the end of his days.”87 The San Carlos Apache had
already decided some of their material culture would not become
collectibles or souvenirs.
Goyathlay’s celebrity helped tmiec’s sales, because their pub-
licity department and reporters constantly referred to him as the
great warrior, murderer, bloodthirsty savage, and any number of
other stereotyped monikers that could signify an opportunity to see
the last of the Indian “renegades” or great fighters. One newspaper
even referred to him as “one of the attractions of the Indian con-

exposition anthropology 355

gress,” which meant his presence probably helped Mercer’s ticket
sales as well. But it was his words rather than his artefactual sou-
venirs that were most highly valued. Goyathlay’s speeches were
considered news, and special accounts of his stories were recorded
in the Omaha Bee. He also served as the resident “expert” on all
things Indian, for “he is looked upon as a great man and what he
says consequently carries a good deal of weight.” He was trans-
formed into a political commentator. His views on an “Ojibway
uprising” being suppressed in Leech Lake, Minnesota, during the
summer and autumn of 1898 demonstrated that he had suppos-
edly learned his place in the Euroamerican social structure and
the futility of Native armed resistance to the militarily superior
U.S. government. “I want to say that the Indians are a lot of red
fools for going into this fight against the white men. They will get
the worst of it in the end and then they will be sorry. . . . There is
no country that can whip the United States.”88 One could inter-
pret this observation as saying that Euroamericans used violence
to enforce their will or simply that people needed to recognize that
the military was unstoppable. This was a noteworthy statement
that could be used to justify the new American imperialism and
overseas expansion as well as domestic imperialism.
Except for the Apache materials, visitors were supposed to obtain
souvenirs in a tmiec-Mercer controlled curio shop, a wooden
building erected next to the Indian commissary where rations
were distributed.89 Mooney states that the Chiricahua and Yavapai
[probably Western Apache] did a brisk business in making bas-
kets, canes, beadwork, and miniature bows and arrows to which
the name Geronimo was attached, increasing their value.
Mooney never understood the importance of selling tourist or
ethnic art as a cash-producing alternative to previous subsistence
patterns. He saw this as a threat to traditional cultural purity just
as he saw Mercer’s performances as a threat: “Some tribal cere-
monies were arranged, but were discontinued owing to an evident
purpose to reduce everything to the level of a ‘Midway’ perfor-
mance. Among those given were the noted ghost dance of the plains
tribes, the mounted horn dance of the Wichita, and the unique
and interesting war dance and devil dance of the Apache, the last

356 nancy j. parezo

being performed at night by the light of a fire, with a clown and
other masked characters, after the manner of the Hopi dances.
There were also foot-races by picked runners from several tribes.90
Mooney misses an important feature in his assessment: the inter-
action among delegations. As occurred at established markets and
as would occur in the future at powwows and other intertribal
gatherings, the bartered exchange of material culture was brisk
and often involved the transfer of items that could become val-
ued family heirlooms.
One unnamed visitor witnessed one such interaction when the
Flathead delegation arrived and wrote that several young men from
different tribes stood around, “receiving civilities and grinning.
Two of them produce beautiful war-clubs armed with shirt pol-
ished black horns. ‘Buffalo?’ said an investigating Indian, and an
affirmative grunt being given, the clubs were handed about with
much curiosity.”91 Other similar interactions involving the dis-
play and admiration of family heirlooms must have occurred and
real anthropological learning occurred in such intertribal inter-
actions. Congress participants were constantly receiving Native
visitors in their encampments, but unfortunately there is no infor-
mation on visiting patterns, what objects were in each camp, or
what was exchanged.

Photographs as Racialized Souvenirs

While Mooney was not himself an economic participant in the eth-
nic art market, his position as an authority figure legitimized the
portrait photographs, postcards, and prints that were a significant
product of this fair.92 Many souvenirs were miniaturizations, replicas
of toys rather than objects used by adults. Authenticity was espe-
cially important for the sale of souvenirs by celebrities. Mooney’s
presence theoretically ensured that the souvenirs and art that visi-
tors bought from Native participants were real, not fabrications. But
Mooney was not particularly interested in such productive work.
One souvenir not questioned by Mooney was photographs.
One purpose touted for the Indian Congress was to show pheno-
types, what the people looked like and what constituted the race
and their temperament. As the headline writer for the Omaha Bee

exposition anthropology 357

announced, one could see Native peoples in “pristine magnificence”
in the Indian Congress.93 According to Mooney, participants were
all of “fine physical type, as might be expected in a race of war-
riors and horsemen.” The typical body is “sinewy and the features
thin and clear-cut, excepting [for] the semi-agricultural Omaha
and Ponca, who show the effect of a partial grain diet in rounder
faces and portlier figures.” He typically described build, skin color,
and “character,” noting good humor, erect posture, steadiness and
alertness, intelligence, athleticism, and occasionally identified a
tribe as likely to become self-supporting or adopt American pat-
terns of civilization in part based on physical characteristics. This
was a common assumption of nineteenth-century anthropologists.
Mooney also identified tribes, like the Sauk and Fox, which pre-
served traditions, based on genetic heritage: “In person they are
tall and strongly built, with faces indicating thoughtful character
and firm will. With proud conservatism they hold fast their forms,
legends, and complex social organization, and are today probably
the most interesting study tribes of the whole existing Algonquian
stock.”94 The easiest way to see these combined physical-cultural
features was in documentary portraits.
The manifestations of this concept were the photographs of
Adolph F. Muhr, which Mooney and the Bureau of American
Ethnology had arranged to be taken through the offices of the
exposition photographer Frank A. Rinehart. Shot under Mooney’s
supervision, these were formal portraits of Indian delegates fol-
lowing the guidelines by which Indian delegates to Washington
dc were portrayed by the U.S. Geological Service and Bureau pho-
tographers. Mooney recorded individual information—names and
tribal affiliation as well as basic biographical and kinship data—for
each model as he or she sat for a frontal bust shot, a profile head
shot, and a full-length portrait (figs. 39, 47). Over 270 pictures of
seventy individuals from ten tribes were taken.95
These photographs constituted significant anthropological data
but also generated a good deal of controversy and confusion over
their eventual ownership, even though the commission was part of
the formal Bureau of American Ethnology and Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition agreement for Mooney’s services. The

358 nancy j. parezo

agreement held that the Bureau would pay part of the expenses and
the tmiec would pay the rest. The Bureau would receive all the
negatives and would give the tmiec two sets of prints. Rinehart
and Muhr seem not to have been consulted when this agreement
was made, nor did they honor it. Instead, Rinehart kept many of
the negatives of the best (the most “Indian” looking) pictures and
copyrighted them under his name, so that he could sell prints, post-
cards, and books, which he did. Mooney also took photographs
at the exposition, but unlike the formal portraits, these must be
seen as field research photographs. He photographed the Wichita
erecting their grass lodge and recorded all types of finished dwell-
ings including sweat lodges and brush arbors.96

An Ethnology Disappointment but a Publicity Success

How were the static and living anthropology exhibits at the Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition received? Did they work as
Mooney and Rosewater intended, and did a live Native anthropo-
logical exhibit serve as a successful marketing tool for the tmiec?
With only indications rather than qualitative data, it’s easy for lack
of information to skew an assessment. Few people wrote about the
anthropological displays in the U.S. Government Building; most
reports only discussed the building and the exhibits as a whole.
William C. Mains, however, felt that the Smithsonian exhibits
about Indians summed up the entire exposition: “Right at this
point [after seeing the Post Office exhibit] the truly remarkable
character of the entire exposition is brought home to the thinker.
Fifty years ago the entire region around the city of Omaha was a
prairie belt, uninhabited by white men, and over which the gov-
ernment mails were taken in stage coaches, at risk of destruction
by Indians and highwaymen. Today this truly magnificent exhi-
bition of Western industry and progress [the entire exposition] is
opened, and the world takes it as a matter of course.”97 Another
anonymous author noted that the Indians portrayed in the gov-
ernment exhibit and the Indian Congress will “link the present
with the past,” and this was needed because Omaha as a city was
less than fifty years old.98 Some of Rosewater’s messages were get-
ting through to a national audience.

exposition anthropology 359

 Mooney did not discuss the government exhibits with his col-
leagues or in print, but focused his assessment on the living dis-
play. In his opinion the Indian Congress resembled a Wild West
show more than the dignified educational demonstration he had
envisioned.99 Even the few ethnographic events which the Native
participants organized themselves, such as foot races and a Ghost
Dance held on October 7, failed to overcome the monotony of the
sham battles.100 Also reflecting this view but trying to save some
face, M. V. Cox, secretary of the Government Exhibit Board, wrote
in his final report:
The project was one in which the whole American people became
interested, for but recently the Indian held sway throughout this
region. There had also been manifested for some years a growing
public attention to the science of anthropology. . . . Despite the lim-
its of the appropriation and of the time to prepare for the encamp-
ment, and notwithstanding the necessity of largely abandoning the
making of an ethnologic exhibit, the project resulted most satisfac-
torily. . . . It was the strangest, most original, most interesting special
feature of the exposition. It was realized by the Government author-
ities in charge of the exhibit that the people at large held little interest
in the educated Indian of the time. . . . They were curious to witness
the foot races, the fire dances, the native games of the Indian of sav-
agery, and cared little to see him if not wrapped in a blanket of prim-
itive weaving and decked out with paint and feathers. The authorities
endeavored to meet these ideas, but of course the Indian of the peo-
ple’s fancy had passed away.101

The Indian Congress did more to reinforce the Indian of the Amer-
ican imagination than to counter it, as this was really what the
tmiec (if not Rosewater) wanted, as long as it encouraged ticket
sales. Would it be useful again?
Omaha decided to try to capitalize on its success a second time,
still using Native Americans as a drawing card but without the
anthropology. The Greater America Colonial Exposition, staged
in Omaha the following year, reused much of the infrastructure
of the first exposition. Again they relied on live Indians as a draw-
ing card. Now, however, they billed the proposed Indian Congress

360 nancy j. parezo

as “The White Man’s Burden.”102 With government funds spent or
obligated and still not wanting to take on operating expenses when
they could convince someone else to, they approved a for-profit
corporation to organize another “Indian Congress.” The conces-
sionaire paid the Greater America corporation a percentage of
their gate and assumed all operating costs. The results were the
same. Many in Indian Affairs were again appalled by the under-
taking. The Office of Indian Affairs was reluctant to let Native
men and their families participate, but political pressures com-
pelled them to comply, though the numbers involved (approxi-
mately seventy-five) were significantly smaller.103 The head of the
Carlisle Indian School, Richard Pratt, stated it was a “Wild West
show of the most degenerate sort.”104 Counter to the Indian Con-
gress was the mock Indian School that had been approved for the
previous fair. It was led by Samuel M. McCowan, superintendent
of the Phoenix Indian School. Students from Phoenix, including
an entertaining forty-piece band, demonstrated the future of edu-
cated and civilized Indians.
McCowan, who would run the Indian School exhibit at the St.
Louis exposition in 1904, realized that the school needed a con-
trolled contrast between the old and the new as a way to visual-
ize assimilation. He obtained the services of seventy-five Lakota
Sioux from Pine Ridge Reservation to conduct their own sham
battles and theoretically re-create a “traditional” lifestyle, includ-
ing much publicized but staged feasts of roasted dog. McCowan
also had representatives from several Arizona tribes whom he used
as a contrast to the “wild and savage” Sioux. Most of these south-
western participants were older schoolchildren who donned cos-
tumes rather than their school attire as they demonstrated craft
production. McCowan’s idea was to show that there was a future
for American Indians and that there were safe as well as unsafe
Indians.105 The Office of Indian Affairs made America safe through
domestic colonialism conceptualized as domestication.

Conclusion
It had long been a dream of many foundational museum anthro-
pologists to have Native people participate in world’s fairs. It was

exposition anthropology 361

considered the best way for visitors to learn about different cul-
tures and societies, to see them in action, even if the action was
staged. But it was expensive. For the 1876 centennial in Philadel-
phia, Spencer F. Baird, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian,
wanted to bring distinguished Indian men and their families to
create good museological impressions and enlighten the Ameri-
can public. There would be groups from twenty principal tribes,
grouped onto a reservation. These families would carry out their
daily occupations and produce art. But the Office of Indian Affairs
did not give permission, fearing Indian “uprisings,” plus the under-
taking was considered too complex and expensive; Congress never
appropriated the funds. Then and at subsequent expositions, the
Native participants wound up in the Midway’s commercial zone
or outside the exposition gates in Wild West shows.
The inclusion of Indian encampments occurred at almost every
exposition between 1876 and 1915, and there was always a ten-
sion as to whether a commercial enterprise like William “Buffalo
Bill” Cody’s extravaganza would have the exclusive franchise to
showcase Native Americans.106 Or should the exposition compa-
nies underwrite them, making anthropology a necessary topic to
be covered, like horticulture, forestry, or education? Or was this
a government responsibility, as Rosewater had argued, willingly
supported by government anthropologists? The idea was always to
give the general public the chance to see real Indians in a pseudo-
daily setting.
And who would benefit? Certainly anthropology, for it would
gain a public forum for the new discipline. For many participants,
working at expositions would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience,
while for others it would become a new form of economic activity
as groups became part of a money-based economy. For visitors it
was a unique experience to interact with real Native peoples. For
exposition corporations it provided a marketing hook and helped
generate higher ticket sales. And it also gave exposition organizers
the chance to support American imperialism. To again call upon
historian Robert Rydell, Omaha fit into this model: “From the
moment it opened in June, the fair provided ideological scaffolding
for mass support for the government’s imperial policies. Through

362 nancy j. parezo

a massive gathering of Indians into an ethnologically validated
Indian Congress, located on a multiacre site adjacent to the Mid-
way, the exposition’s promoters explained past and future national
and international expansion as the natural outcome of Ameri-
ca’s westward expansion and Anglo-Saxon racial development.107
Although Rosewater and Mooney would have privately disagreed,
considering it a failure, the Indian encampment and the exhibits
in the Government Building were assessed as just the opposite in
official histories. John Wakefield, secretary to the board of direc-
tors of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, wrote
that the U.S. government exhibit contained “objects of more than
usual interest and concern, and from the educational and instruc-
tive points of view, were of greatest value in securing permanent
results in the broadening and uplifting of the minds of exposition
patrons.” The building “was constantly thronged with the studi-
ous, old and young, and the scholars from the schools, showing
the greatest interest in the exhibits, curious to learn all about the
functions of government in War and Peace.” The government offi-
cials were also praised: “The officials and parties in charge were
at all times courteous and kind to visitors and nothing but words
of praise and commendation came from those who visited and
attentively examined and studied the exhibits.” But of even greater
import to Wakefield was the Indian Congress. “There was no one
feature of the government exhibits more generally interesting to
exposition patrons than the Indian Congress. The spectacular
sham battles aroused attention and enthusiasm and led to the
more careful study as to habits, modes of life, and customs of our
red brothers. The Indian Congress was certainly one of the great
features of the Exposition.”108 It seems unlikely that either Rose-
water or Mooney would have agreed that an inauthentic hook to
entice paying visitors led to serious study.
At the end of the exposition, Mooney wrote up his impressions
for the American Anthropologist without revealing all the messy
details. Like a good bureaucratic report, his prose was celebratory
in nature; problems were ignored or underplayed. To do otherwise
would have undermined the authority and legitimizing power of
government-sponsored anthropology. He stated that Omaha was

exposition anthropology 363

the most successful world’s fair in the country, outshining Phil-
adelphia and Chicago. And it had been done under great odds:
Conceived in a period of widespread business depression and car-
ried through in the face of a foreign war, it closed with a record of
over two and a half million paid admissions and a balance of several
hundred thousand dollars in the treasury. Such a showing, in a town
whose citizens only thirty years ago were called upon to barricade
their homes against an attack of hostile Indians, well illustrates the
rapid growth and tremendous energy of the west, and the grit and
determination of the exposition managers, foremost among whom
was Edward Rosewater, proprietor of the Omaha Bee. The successful
outcome was due chiefly to his tireless activity and unfaltering cour-
age. The ethnologic project was the child of his brain, and in spite of
serious imperfections, the general result was such—particularly from
the practical standpoint of the ticket seller—that we may expect to
see ethnology a principal feature at future expositions so long as our
aboriginal material holds out.”109

Mooney was correct in his assessment, for ethnic tourism was

profitable. The fairs in Buffalo (1901), St. Louis (1904), San Fran-
cisco (1915), and San Diego (1915) would include Indian villages
and live demonstrations as well as revised versions of the static
Smithsonian anthropological displays. Americans would see the
same authoritative legitimizing message as well as exposition cor-
porations using Indians as their marketing device—including the
seemingly never-ending fascination with Geronimo.
By using Indians of the western imagination as well as authentic
Native participants, the Trans-Mississippi and International Expo-
sition corporation created an important tourist attraction, using the
supposed legitimacy that came with federal government backing.
This produced a combined performative/static exhibit and mes-
sages about Indigenous peoples that were grounded in the assur-
ance of ethnographic accuracy and racial representativeness, that
is, specialized professional knowledge that came from the con-
ceptualization and oversight of a government anthropologist. It
simultaneously legitimized the fair’s entertainment activities and

364 nancy j. parezo

its souvenirs, such as photographs of “real” Indian celebrities. But
that was the ideal; the reality was much messier. By not being in
Omaha at a crucial time, Mooney permitted another government
employee, one who cared nothing about anthropology, to gain
control over the endeavor and pursue ticket sales. But if Mooney
failed to ensure that Native peoples would be seen by Euroameri-
can ticket buyers as modern Indigenous peoples, not remnants of
a dying past, and their art and material culture as contemporary,
rather than rare or exotic heirlooms, the Indian Congress did bring
Plains tribes together in just that way, for a social exchange that
demonstrated the value of their material traditions. Their pres-
ence not only in the encampment, but on the grounds and in the
city itself created a tension and counternarrative to Mercer’s and
the tmiec’s business-based message of the Vanishing Indians.
And it is a tension that continues to be seen in almost all forms
of Euroamerican produced messages about Indigenous peoples,
from entertainment and advertising to museum exhibits today.

Notes
1. Robert Rydell, “The Culture of Imperial Abundance: World’s Fairs in the Making
of American Culture,” in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in
American, 1880–1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 191–216.
2. “History of the Indian. Planning for an Interesting Exhibit at the Transmissis-
sippi Exposition. Assembling of the Numerous Tribes,” Omaha Bee, August 16, 1897, 8.
3. Salvage ethnography is an empiricist and highly detailed methodology designed
to quickly acquire information from rapidly changing or disintegrating cultures
thought of as distinct but holistic units, in order to record human diversity before
it disappeared in the onslaught of westernization. Anthropologists considered it a
moral and scientific necessity to collect and preserve information for endangered
cultures or the remnants of cultures already fundamentally altered by European
contact. See Jacob W. Gruber, “Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthro-
pology,” American Anthropologist 72 (1970): 1289–99.
4. Official Guide to Omaha and the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition
(Omaha: Megeath Stationery, 1898; reprint, Omaha: Omaha History Center, 1998), 97.
5. Other adjectives and phrases that Rosewater and later the tmiec publicity
department used for the proposed exhibit included “most remarkable,” “most instruc-
tive,” “extensive,” “last gathering,” “grand,” “ethnological,” “rare,” and “interesting.” The
choice of words to describe the proposed Native participants included “scattered,”
“descendants,” “bronzed sons of the forests and plains,” “resisters,” and images that
they were the last of the old pure race who had not picked up the vices of civilization.

exposition anthropology 365

 6. “As many eastern people had never seen Indians in their semi-savage state, it
was argued that this Indian Congress would be a great drawing feature that would
bring many eastern people to visit the Exposition.” John Wakefield, “A History of the
Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition” (Omaha, 1903), n.p., transcribed
by the Omaha Public Library; available at the Trans-Mississippi and International
Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
7. Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The Louisi-
ana Purchase Exposition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).
8. James B. Haynes, History of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition
of 1898 (Omaha: published under the direction of the Committee on History, 1910),
192, describes a small group of Natives in “primitive huts” as on display, includ-
ing household furniture and costumes, along with an exhibit of agricultural goods.
Haynes’s description seems to conflate the Hawaiian village at Omaha’s Greater
America Exposition of 1899 with the educational exhibit Hawai‘i sent in 1898; see
Stacy Kamehiro’s and Danielle Crawford’s essay in this volume.
9. My thanks to Wendy Katz for this information. In addition, General Crook’s
personal collection of artifacts was proposed but never shown. This is very different
from the Philadelphia, Chicago, Buffalo, and St. Louis expositions.
10. In one newspaper article, Rosewater assumed that Native participants would
be drawn to the fair because they would be the people “who have adopted the ways
of their white brother and are now called “civilized.” Those who would be drawn
would be “men of the highest intelligence and great business ability.” They would
not be the lazy males of American stereotyping but visionary entrepreneurs, like
Omaha businessmen. “History of Indians,” Omaha Bee, August 16, 1897, 8. Such rea-
soning rationalized not paying Native participants for their work.
11. Nancy J. Parezo, “Collaborative and Non-Collaborative Exhibits: James Mooney
and Displaying Kiowa Culture,” Collaborative Anthropology 7, no. 2 (2015): 72–114.
12. William John McGee identified himself as WJ without punctuation.
13. Mooney to McGee, October 17, 1897, Bureau of American Ethnology (bae)
incoming correspondence, box 14, National Anthropological Archives (naa). Mooney
and his new wife, Ione Lee Gaut, were on their way to Albuquerque and Santa Fe so
that Mooney could discuss the use of peyote with Rio Grande Pueblos. Mooney to
McGee, June 9, 1897, bae incoming correspondence, box 14, naa.
14. Curtis M. Hinsley Jr., Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and
the Development of American Anthropology, 1846–1910 (Washington dc: Smithso-
nian Institution Press, 1981). This was a concept that has been credited to Franz Boas
and Clark Wissler but was actually first developed by Smithsonian anthropologists
before being expanded by the American Museum of Natural History.
15. “Indians at the Exposition. Mooney of the Ethnological Bureau Has a Unique
Plan,” Omaha Bee, November 15, 1897, 8. To date I have found no record of this plan
in Mooney’s records at the naa, so must rely on the newspaper account. Mooney
had long wanted to build his exhibit complex and indeed had proposed it repeat-
edly as a permanent display in Washington but without success.
16. James Mooney, Outline for a Plan for Ethnologic Museum Collections, 1894,
bae folder 4788, naa. After the 1893 Chicago world’s fair, Mooney had written an
outline for a museum exhibit of Indian dwellings, constructed by members of dif-

366 nancy j. parezo

ferent linguistic families who would periodically come to demonstrate. He proposed
that the permanent display of Native housing be erected in Columbian National Park
(now Rock Creek Park) in Washington dc. The plan called for an adaptational cat-
egorization with houses and modes of life determined by people’s environments.
This would show categorical differences from the technological, linguistic, and cul-
tural classification schemes seen in the U.S. National Museum (usnm) exhibits.
17. William V. Allen, chairman of a committee on forest reservations and pro-
tection of game, to Powell, December 4, 1897, folder 3322, Powell correspondence
(1893–1902), naa.
18. John Wesley Powell, “Report of the Director,” Sixteenth Annual Report of the
Bureau of American Ethnology for 1898–1899 (Washington dc: Government Print-
ing Office, 1903), xi; John Wesley Powell, “Introduction,” Twentieth Annual Report
of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington dc: Government Printing Office,
1903), vi. Mooney was furloughed from the bae without pay to oversee the installa-
tion of participants in the “Indian Congress” compound. Such temporary furloughs
to other departments was a common practice with Powell. bae and U.S. Geolog-
ical Survey personnel were transferred back and forth all the time, depending on
their project. Personnel transfers with the Office of Indian Affairs were not as com-
mon but did occur, facilitated by the fact that both agencies reported to the secre-
tary of the interior.
19. Mooney to Rosewater, April 4, 1898, Rosewater Collection, Omaha Pub-
lic Library; Meiklejohn to Officers of the Army on Duty as Acting Indian Agents,
August 22, 1898, rg 75, letters received, na; Bonnie M. Miller, “The Incoherencies
of Empire: The “Imperial” Image of the Indian at the Omaha World’s Fairs of 1898–
99,” American Studies 49, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2008): 39–62; Lester G. Moses, The
Indian Man: A Biography of James Mooney (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1984); Charles Howard Walker, “The Great Exposition at Omaha,” Century 55, no.
4 (February 1898): 518–21; James Mooney, “Indian Congress at Omaha,” American
Anthropologist 1, no. 1 (January 1899): 126–49, 128.
20. Kenneth G. Alfers, “Triumph of the West: The Trans-Mississippi Exposition,”
Nebraska History 53 (1972): 312–29, 316; U.S. Congressional Records, 54th Cong.,
1st sess., XXVII, Part 2 (Washington dc: Government Printing Office), 1822. This
$200,000 is the equivalent of $412,195 in 2016 dollars.
21. “The Government Exhibit at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposi-
tion,” Scientific American 79, no. 11 (September 10, 1898): 168; F. W. True, “Report of
the Representative of the Smithsonian Institution and National Museum,” in Wake-
field, “History of the Trans-Mississippi,” n.p.
22. Information on these exhibits was obtained from published and unpublished
reports, material inventories, fiscal records, and correspondence in the Smithsonian
Institution Archives and the National Anthropological Archives supplemented with
newspaper accounts and tmiec papers in the Nebraska State Historical Society and
the Omaha Public Library.
23. Robert Bigart and Clarence Woodcock, “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition
and the Flathead Delegation,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 29, no. 4
(Autumn 1979): 14–23; Josh Clough, “‘Vanishing’ Indians? Cultural Persistence on
Display at the Omaha World’s Fair of 1898,” Great Plains Quarterly 25, no. 2 (Spring

exposition anthropology 367

2005): 67–86; Alexia Kosmider, “Refracting the Imperial Gaze onto the Colonizers:
Geronimo Poses for the Empire,” atq 15, no. 4 (2001): 317–31; Miller, “Incoheren-
cies of Empire”; Sarah J. Moore, “Mapping Empire in Omaha and Buffalo: World’s
Fairs and the Spanish-American War,” Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingue 25, no.
1 (2001): 111–26; Lester G. Moses, “Wild West Shows, Reformers, and the Image of
the American Indian, 1887–1914,” South Dakota History 14 (Fall 1984): 193–221; Lester
G. Moses, “Indians on the Midway: Wild West Shows and the Indian Bureau at the
World’s Fairs, 1893–1904,” South Dakota History 21, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 205–29; Robert
W. Rydell, “The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition: ‘To Work Out the
Problem of Universal Civilization,’” American Quarterly 33, no. 5 (Winter 1981): 587–
607; Robert W. Rydell, All The World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American Interna-
tional Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Robert
A. Trennert, “Selling Indian Education at World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1893–1904,”
American Indian Quarterly 11, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 204.
24. Peter Bolz, “More Questions than Answers: Frank A. Rinehart’s Photographs
of American Indians,” European Review of Native American Studies 8, no. 2 (1994):
35–42, 35; Paula Fleming and Judith Luskey, The Shadow Catchers: Images of the
American Indians (London: Laurence King, 1993).
25. Mooney commissioned portraits as partial payment for his services. They went
to the bae and still serve as a research tool. Mooney, “Indian Congress at Omaha,”
147. The bae received 326 negatives, some taken by Adolph F. Muhr, Rinehart’s
employee. According to Bolz, “More Questions than Answers,” 38, Rinehart kept
the most “Indian-looking” photographs because he thought they had commercial
value; he sold them as prints or turned them into postcards and books. Some por-
traits were also taken at the Greater America Exhibition in Omaha in 1899.
26. Sally Kohlstedt, “Otis T. Mason’s Tour of Europe: Observations, Exchange,
and Standardization in Public Museums, 1889,” Museum History 1, no. 2 (2008):
181–207, 184.
27. Haynes, History of the Trans-Mississippi, 143.
28. Haynes, History of the Trans-Mississippi, 144.
29. “Allot Space for Exhibits. Government Board Ready for Business at Expo-
sition,” Omaha Bee, November 1897, and “Plans for Government Exhibit,” Omaha
Bee, November 22, 1897 (si Archives newspaper scrapbook for Omaha fair, ru 70).
30. See also Kamehiro and Crawford in this volume for discussion of displays of
work by Indigenous schoolchildren.
31. Alice Fletcher to Miss Mead, June 2, 1898, F. W. Putnam Papers, Harvard
University Archives. Fletcher also gave lectures in the Music Congress in late June,
talking on “Indian Music and Ethnology” as did ethnomusicologist John C. Fillmore
(Pomona College), who spoke on “The Harmonic Basis of Indian Music.” “Music at
the Exposition,” Omaha Bee, June 1, 1898, 7. Francis La Flesche sang Omaha songs
as part of Fletcher’s lecture. I assume that Fillmore wanted to obtain more songs
from Indian participants, as he had at the 1893 Chicago fair, but the Indian Con-
gress was not ready. As part of the Office of Indian Affairs exhibit, July 7 was named
Indian Music Day.
32. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report for Year Ending June 30, 1898,
Annual Reports of the Department of Interior, 55th Cong., 3rd sess., House of Rep-

368 nancy j. parezo

resentatives, doc. 5 (Washington dc: Government Printing Office, 1898), 30–31; on
the development of Indigenous art as decor for Euroamerican homes, see Elizabeth
Hutchinson, The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in
American Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). For an excellent introduction
to Office of Indian Affairs policy, see Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Cam-
paign to Assimilate Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001).
33. Alice Fletcher, “The Indian at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition,” Southern
Workman 27 (November 1898): 216–17.
34. “The Government Exhibit at the Transmississippi and International Expo-
sition,” Scientific American 79, no. 11 (September 10, 1898): 168; “Its Exhibits Read.
Government Does Its Part for the Omaha Fair. Details of the Fair,” Chicago Daily
Tribune, April 17, 1898, 30.
35. To Frederick True and his staff, one of the more important outcomes of the
display was museological rather than content. Visitors would see how to properly
classify, label, and mount objects and how installations could show scientific materi-
als to their best advantage. No reviewer ever mentioned this accomplishment, how-
ever. Haynes, History of the Trans-Mississippi, 153. Other si sections included the
Astrophysical Observatory, Bureau of International Exchanges, National Zoologi-
cal Park, Smithsonian Administration and Castle.
36. The bae did not produce a separate exhibit because its funds had been obli-
gated to Mooney, his Kiowa Camp Circle, and the Indian Congress. However, McGee
did send three large panels of illustrations from the Bureau’s annual reports to doc-
ument their work. Despite its limited nature, the tmiec awarded the bae a certif-
icate of merit. (Frederick True to John Wesley Powell, February 20, 1899, Bureau
incoming correspondence, naa). In addition, the si’s library exhibit contained a
complete set of the bae annual reports.
37. Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair. One national columnist
began her tour of the si exhibits with the anthropology department’s life figures but
quickly “sneaked away to stare at the uniforms and terra cotta soldiers taking over
the Mexican war.” She spent almost all her time in the War Department. “As Viewed
by Octave Thanet,” Omaha Bee, July 31, 1898, 19.
38. Walter Hough, Historical Sketch of the Division of Ethnology, U.S. National
Museum, 1906, ms 4787, naa, quote 57.
39. George Brown Goode, Annual Report of the United States National Museum
for 1893 (Washington dc: Government Printing Office, 1895), 37.
40. Otis T. Mason, “The Scope and Value of Anthropological Studies,” Science
2, no. 32 (1883): 358–65.
41. Goode, usnm, Annual Report for 1898, 30.
42. Goode, usnm, Annual Report for 1898, 30.
43. “As Viewed by Octave Thanet,” Omaha Bee, July 31, 1898, 19. Aesthetics also
factored in artifact choice. Mason and Hough selected items for their artistic or
unusual character as well as their ability to illustrate human progress. This is part of
the almost unconscious use of “museum quality” as a selection criterion.
44. Walter Hough, Catalogue of the Ethnological Exhibit from the United States
National Museum (Washington dc: Government Printing Office, 1895), 143–44.
45. Goode, usnm, Annual Report for 1898, 56.

exposition anthropology 369

 46. Otis T. Mason, “Report on the Department of Ethnology,” in George Brown
Goode, Annual Report of the U.S. National Museum for 1892 (Washington: Govern-
ment Printing Office, 1893),106.
47. Omaha Bee, November 22, 1897. For example, a Chippewa white cedar, spruce,
and birch bark canoe from White Earth Reservation was made and purchased in
1895 specifically for the Atlanta exposition, then shown in Nashville (1897) and
Omaha (1898). It was damaged in Omaha during a storm but then was exhibited in
the Smithsonian Institution.
48. Hough to Holmes, May 25, 1898, folder 4, ru 201, sia.
49. Otis T. Mason, “The Educational Aspect of the United States National Museum,”
Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science 4 (1890): 4. Mason recog-
nized that women played critical roles in invention processes and had done ground-
breaking exhibits at the 1893 Chicago exposition on women’s roles as a tool maker
and a conceptualizer of technological development.
50. Goode, usnm, Annual Report for 1898, 31.
51. W. Shepp and Daniel B. Shepp quoted in Moses, “Indians on the Midway,”
75; Walter Hough, Historical Sketch of the Division of Ethnology, U.S. National
Museum, 1906, ms 4787, naa.
52. The ideal for all si anthropologists was having Indigenous people attend the
fair and demonstrate either within the Government Building or at a distinct encamp-
ment. Holmes had made a formal request for real people as part of the usnm exhibit
for Omaha. He, as well as Mason, Hough, Mooney, and McGee, requested funding
every time they were asked to submit a budget for an exposition, but it was always
turned down as too expensive.
53. “Indian Congress Scheme. Looks as Though the Red Men Would Assemble
at Omaha. Bill as Amended Passes the Senate,” Omaha Bee, February 12, 1898, 1. The
extremely high cost for Indian nations, so that Omaha businessmen could have funds
for the Exposition, was the loss of Otoe and Missouri reservation lands. While the
Spanish-American War was used as the excuse to delay the Indian Appropriation
Bill and Senator Allen’s request, the real reason was western land and water politics.
Allen was one of the drafters of American land policy. See Hoxie, A Final Promise, 149.
54. “The Omaha Exposition and the Indian Congress,” Scientific American, 1898,
248; “Indians at the Exposition. Mooney of the Ethnological Bureau Has a United
Plan,” Omaha Bee, November 15, 1897, 8.
55. Mooney, “Indian Congress at Omaha,” 128.
56. Basic instruction letter sent to Indian agents by the commissioner of Indian
affairs, W. A. Jones, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1898 (Washing-
ton dc: Government Printing Office, 1898), 27–30.
57. As the nearest agent Mercer was the logical choice to assist at the fair. On
July 4, before the opening of the Indian Congress, he organized 150 Omaha and 45
Winnebago to march in the “Indian Opening Day” parade. Mercer had this contin-
gent remain ten days on the grounds as he worked on improving the camping area.
Then they returned to their reservation to tend to their crops. See Jones, Report of
the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1898, 28.

370 nancy j. parezo

 58. “Details for Indian Congress. Captain Mercer Has the Matter All Worked
Out in Advance,” Omaha Bee, July 25, 1898, 1, 5. See Rydell, All the World’s a Fair,
111–18, for more on this and the administrative issues between Mooney and Mercer.
59. “In His Pristine Significance,” Omaha Bee, August 4, 1898, 5.
60. “Great Father and Indian. President McKinley Makes an Extended Call at
Congress Grounds,” Omaha Bee, October 12, 1898, 1, 5. This is a particularly eth-
nocentric and racist account showing that Indians were still feared, at least by the
reporter, who felt that Captain Mercer actually had limited control over the play-
acting men. “He shouted orders to cease, but the Indians were determined to kill
each other off entirely or use up their entire stock of ammunition.” They were not
civilized nor could they become civilized.
61. Mooney, “Indian Congress at Omaha,” 129.
62. Omaha Bee, August 5, 1898.
63. Rydell, “The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition,” 596.
64. Mooney, “Indian Congress at Omaha,” 129. While filtered drinking water was
supplied, sanitation facilities were negligible, and three individuals died: two babies
and a Sauk warrior, who was buried in his attire. Another woman attempted sui-
cide. In addition, two babies were born.
65. “Glimpses of Indian Life at the Omaha Exposition,” American Monthly Review
of Reviews 18 (October 1898): 436–43; 440.
66. “Glimpses of Indian Life,” 439.
67. Jones, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 28.
68. “Glimpses of Indian Life,” 437. This article originally appeared in Nebraska City’s
Conservative, edited by J. Sterling Morton, who may possibly have been the writer.
69. “Sham Fight with Indians Today. Redmen and Redskins Will Engage in Blood-
less Contest,” Omaha Bee, August 10, 1898, 1, 5. The day after the battle a headline
in the Bee, August 11, 1898, 5, announced “Indians Beaten in Battle. Whites Come
Off Victorious in an Encounter with the Hostiles. Terrible Carnage Marks the Fray.
All the Horrors of Savage Warfare Depicted in Striking Reality by the Indians and
Their Paleface Imitators.” The article’s first sentence noted that it was all due to the
“persistent efforts of Captain Mercer,” who made it “a brilliant success, witnessed by
thousands of spectators.” The sham battle had been a favor to the Improved Order
of Red Men as entertainment for their grand council during the fair. It was almost
a fiasco because before the event, the Red Men said they did not have enough par-
ticipants because their Tennessee delegation had not appeared. Mercer “sent down
town and borrowed a lot of the guns used by the high school cadets, he sent out and
bought blank cartridges and hired horses, enough to equip all of the Indians and
riders in the Wild West show, as well as a greater portion of his own warriors. He
next visited the Wild West show and induced Manager Mattox to take a part him-
self and allow his Indians and rough riders to participate. Thus, with the aid of a few
of the Red Men, who went into the fight, he has some 600 or 700 men lined up for
the fray.” The composition became the Indians attending the Congress, led by Mer-
cer, who posed as a renegade white, against a combined group of white men, cow-
boys, and friendly Indians under Mattox with Rattlesnake Pete, his chief of Indian

exposition anthropology 371

scouts. Mercer was assisted by two others, Wise and Hegge, who also played rene-
gade whites, and Red Dog, a Brule Sioux. The Sioux, Assiniboines, and Flatheads
participated; others soon joined in. Mattox’s group, which had attacked without
provocation, was soundly defeated. Mercer’s Indians drove them to the gates of the
Dairy Building, where “the Indians discovered that they had carried the war a lit-
tle too far into Egypt. It was here that they met their Waterloo.” A squad of infan-
try came up from the Transportation Building and defeated Mercer’s group, which
retreated. The cavalry and infantry combined with Mattox’s group and rescued mem-
bers who had been tied to stakes. The Indians’ leader, Captain Mercer, “agreed to
quit his roving life and settle down and become Indian agent, if given a chance. He
was promised that after the exposition he could have the Omaha agency and that
his Indians could return to the reservation from which they came.” They planned
to repeat the performance regularly.
70. Mercer in Jones, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 633.
71. Advertisement, Omaha Bee, August 10, 1898, 7.
72. “Sham Fight with Indians Today. Redmen and Redskins Will Engage in Blood-
less Contest,” Omaha Bee, August 10, 1898, 1, 5.
73. Omaha Bee, August 19, 1898; J. Brent Etzel, “A Serious Ethnological Exhibi-
tion” (PhD diss., Illinois State University, 2006), 45–46.
74. Mooney, “Indian Congress at Omaha,” 138.
75. Mooney to McGee, September 27, 1898, naa; “Indian Heraldry and Symbols,”
Popular Science News 31 (December 1897): 276; William L. Merrill et al., A Guide to
the Kiowa Collections at the Smithsonian Institution (Washington dc: Smithsonian,
1997), 30. Mason was supposed to display Mooney’s exhibits in the usnm between
exposition engagements, but it appears they sat in boxes in the museum basement.
Perhaps there was not enough space in the cramped usnm display area to erect
them properly. Mooney had hoped the Omaha assignment would provide him with
additional fieldwork time. Unfortunately, Mooney’s other duties, even though tech-
nically furloughed, as well as the disarray he found in Omaha and Mercer’s contin-
uous animosity, meant Mooney had little time for the Kiowa camp exhibits. He did
add a few new items, including a courting flute, to his general Kiowa exhibit in the
Government Building. The Kiowa Camp Circle was the first ethnohistory exhibit
in the country and one of the first truly collaborative display undertakings with a
Native American community. For more information on the history, construction,
and community interaction of this groundbreaking museological exhibit, see Parezo,
“Collaborative and Non-Collaborative Exhibits.”
76. The subdivisions shown were Ree, Elk, Kiowa proper, Big Shields, Kiowa-
Apache [Plains Apache], and Black Boys. The display was erected by the Plains
Apache who came with Mooney. None of the Kiowa came. The Plains Apache did
not reside in the display enclosure but used canvas tents in the Wichita compound.
The Wichita helped erect the display and guard it. It took a week to construct, and
visitors watched the process.
77. Luckily Mooney had used Kiowa values and procedures for the proper passing
on and acquisition of this knowledge, in ways approved by the knowledge owners
and the artists. He appropriately paid for this knowledge as he did for his transla-
tors and interpreter. Mooney’s ethical research protocols can still serve as models

372 nancy j. parezo

for appropriate work with Native nations as sovereign entities and with communi-
ties, family groups, and individuals. According to John Ewers, Murals in the Round:
Painted Tipis of the Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache Indians (Washington dc: Smithso-
nian Institution Press for the Renwick Gallery, 1978), Silverhorn, Charley Ohettoint’s
younger brother, was Mooney’s favorite artist and executed many drawings on paper
and deerskin now housed in the Smithsonian collections.
78. Mooney selected “only those teepees which he thought would prove of great-
est interest in uniqueness of design as well as historically. They were set in the same
relative position to each other as in the original camp, and in front of each hung the
shield emblematic of the family to which it belonged.” Mary Alice Harriman, “The
Congress of American Aborigines at the Omaha Exposition,” Overland Monthly 33,
no. 198 (June 1899): 505–11; Moses, The Indian Man, 108–20; Omaha Bee, October
13, 1898, 14, 16.
79. Mooney to McGee, September 27, 1898, bae incoming correspondence, naa.
Mooney himself missed an opportunity to study the beginnings of a new pan-Indian
movement—the powwow. Led by Outruns the Wolf, men regularly formed drum
groups and sang songs. Women and children sat in a circle around the drum groups,
and in the center of the circle men danced. Men also used these occasions to give
speeches. Unfortunately, no one seems to have recorded them.
80. Newspaper articles in the Omaha Bee beginning with “Indian Congress Is
Open. First Great Gathering of the Different Tribes in Close Communion,” Omaha
Bee, August 6, 1898, 5, are replete with stereotypes and assumptions about American
manifest destiny that did not include Natives having distinctive cultures. They also
reiterated the marketing ploy that under the direction of Mercer, visitors would see
Mercer’s “children of the plains and the forest,” “one of the most remarkable gath-
erings, whether viewed from an ethnological or anthropological standpoint, ever
offered. The North American Indian is surely fading from among the things that are.”
81. Mooney to McGee, September 27, 1898, bae incoming correspondence, naa.
82. Inside the lodge were high bed platforms and a center hole from which hung
a pot. A drum sat near the doorway. Mooney, “Indian Congress at Omaha,” 132. He
also took copious observational notes (at the naa) as the Wichita reconstructed an
earth lodge, attached a grass-thatched arbor strung with corn and dried pumpkin,
and created a willow sweat lodge.
83. Several Native participants also worked in St. Louis in 1904. Chief Tawάkoni
Jim, “a man of commanding presence and fluent eloquence,” had been an Army
scout. Towάkani Jim, his wife, and their son, Grover, also went to the Louisiana Pur-
chase Exposition in 1904, where they supervised the erection of an earth lodge. Two
of the Southern Arapaho families also demonstrated in St. Louis. Mooney, “Indian
Congress at Omaha,” 133; Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair; Nancy
J. Parezo, “A ‘Special Olympics’: Testing Racial Strength and Endurance at the 1904
Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” in The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games:
Sport, Race, and American Imperialism, ed. Susan Brownell (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2008), 59–126.
84. Mooney, “Indian Congress at Omaha,” 136.
85. Mooney, “Indian Congress at Omaha,” 146.
86. Mooney, “Indian Congress at Omaha,” 146.

exposition anthropology 373

 87. Of course others did not respect the San Carlos Apache beliefs. In this case
it was one of the exposition guards, Harry Walker, who followed the two men who
were “sneaking off the grounds and over the hills.” He watched them dig a hole,
prayerfully deposit the masks, and perform a short ritual. After the two men had
started back to camp, Walker investigated and “with his hands he dug out the loose
earth and soon brought up half a dozen of the head dresses, which he took away
with him.” The San Carlos men never knew they had been thwarted in their efforts
to protect the world. Nor does the article say whether Walker had bad luck. “Apaches
Bury Their Head Dress,” Omaha Bee, October 26, 1898, 4.
88. “Geronimo in Indian Wars. Famous Apache Chief Speaks from His Own
Costly Experience,” Omaha Bee, October 10, 1898, 5. See also “Indian Getting Away
for Home,” Omaha Bee, October 25, 1898, p .1; Angie Debo, Geronimo: The Man, His
Time, His Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976); Robert A. Trennert,
“Fairs, Expositions, and the Changing Image of Southwestern Indians, 1876–1904,”
New Mexico Historical Review 62, no. 2 (1987): 127–43.
89. Clough, “Vanishing Indians?” 72–73; Omaha World-Herald, July 1, 1898, 1.
90. Mooney, “Indian Congress at Omaha,” 146–47.
91. “Glimpses of Indian Life,” 441.
92. Some 750 photographs survive and continue to sell today.
93. “In His Pristine Magnificence. Section Heading for Indians to Be on Review.
Gathering of Redmen Will Be Formally Opened at Exposition Today,” Omaha Bee,
August 4, 1898, 5.
94. Mooney, “Indian Congress at Omaha,” 137, 142–43; see also 133–34, 139–45.
95. Mooney to Powell, October 20, 1898, bae incoming correspondence, box 14,
naa; Mooney, “Indian Congress at Omaha,” 147.
96. Ira Jacknis, “James Mooney as an Ethnographic Photographer,” Visual Anthro-
pology 3, nos. 2–3 (1990): 179–212; 209, 197.
97. William C. Mains, “The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition,”
Christian Advocate, August 25, 1898, 34.
98. “The Trans-Mississippi Exhibition,” Youth’s Companion 72 (February 17, 1898): 7.
99. Mooney to McGee, September 27, 1898, bae incoming correspondence, box
14, naa.
100. “Foot Race and Ghost Dance. Novel Intermission in the Round of Sham
Battles by Indians,” Omaha Bee, October 8, 1898, 5. Mooney is now listed as the
Indian encampment organizer, and it is evident from the ethnographic information
in the article that the reporter interviewed Mooney. The importance of running in
Wichita culture and among southwestern tribes is discussed. The Ghost Dance was
held at night and was a religious ceremony for the participants and not intended as
part of the entertainment or demonstration activities. According to the newspaper
account, fifty individuals participated in the abbreviated ritual. They sang Arapaho
and Cheyenne songs. Wichita and some of the Sioux also participated. Three “med-
icine men” participated. They also brought a treasured heirloom, the Ghost Shirt
of Big Foot, the leader of the Sioux group who was killed in the 1890 massacre at
Wounded Knee. The stained and bloody shirt had been cut from Big Foot’s body
by J. H. McKnight of Long Pine, Nebraska (http://digital.omahapublic library.org
/transmiss/congress/activities).

374 nancy j. parezo

 101. M. V. Cox, “The Indian Congress,” in Wakefield, History of the Trans-Mississippi,
n.p.
102. Greater America Colonial Exposition, Omaha, July 1 to November 1, 1899
(Omaha: Klopp and Barlett, 1899).
103. “Greater America Exposition,” Omaha World-Herald, September 14, 1899,
4, noted that the seventy-five Indians of the Congress were paid $10 each in August
and “headed into town.” We do not know if this included women as well as men.
104. Richard Henry Pratt, The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania:
Its Origins, Purposes, Progress, and Difficulties Surmounted (1908; reprint, Carlisle:
Cumberland County Historical Society, 1979), 40.
105. Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair; Trennert, “Fairs, Exposi-
tions, and the Changing Image,” 127–50; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian
Affairs (1899) 39, 384–85; Greater America Colonial Exposition; Samuel McCowan to
Commissioners, April 17, 1899, Letters Received, no. 19189–1899, rg 75, na.
106. Cody did come to the Omaha fair with his “ethnological congress,” “edu-
cational entertainment,” and “dazzling array of dashing horsemen,” but set up his
show two miles south of the fairgrounds near Twentieth and Paul Streets. August
31 was officially “Cody Day” at the exposition, reserved to honor Nebraska’s “cele-
brated son,” beginning with an elaborate parade. An effusive newspaper journal-
ist or fair publicist also referred to it as the Peace among the Indian Nations Day,
when Native peoples on the fairgrounds would “honor their erstwhile enemy and
conqueror.” The remainder of the article contained the standard description of the
fair’s Indian Congress. “Bill Cody’s Day in Omaha,” Omaha Bee, August 28, 1898, 5.
107. Rydell, “The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition,” 589.
108. Wakefield, “History of the Trans-Mississippi,” n.p.
109. Mooney, “Indian Congress at Omaha,” 127.

exposition anthropology 375

 8
Hawai‘i and the Philippines at
the Omaha Expositions
stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

Two nineteenth-century world fairs, the Trans-Mississippi and

International Exposition (1898) and the Greater America Expo-
sition (1899), held in Omaha, Nebraska, mark a pivotal moment
in American history—the beginning of formal extraterritorial
imperialist policies. The expositions coincided with the Spanish-
American War (1898) and U.S. expansion beyond the nation’s
Pacific and Atlantic borders.1 Debates ensued over the desirabil-
ity and feasibility of annexing Spain’s former possessions, partic-
ularly Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, as well as Hawai‘i,
where the white settler oligarchy had been petitioning for annex-
ation by the United States since its overthrow of the Indigenous
Hawaiian monarchy in 1893. Those favoring expansion recognized
the advantages of holding island outposts that would further mil-
itary security and foster economic development through resource
cultivation and international trade. Skeptics, on the other hand,
were largely concerned with managing regions characterized by
“inferior” populations with nonwhite majorities and questioned
their capacity for self-government.
In light of debates between expansionists and anticolonial views,
as they pertain to the Pacific, a comparison of the representation of
Hawai‘i and the Philippines at the two Omaha expositions demon-
strates how white settlers and mainland proponents and opponents
of imperialism negotiated these attitudes. Such attitudes are tied

377
to a longer history of U.S. interest in the Pacific, wherein consid-
erations of economic and territorial expansion had emerged at the
start of the nineteenth century, largely to advance trade relations
with China. In the first decades of the century the United States
had established consular representation and formal diplomatic ties
with both Hawai‘i and the Philippines. By midcentury there was
substantial economic trade, particularly revolving around sugar,
with both island regions. Moves toward formal territorial expan-
sion became more aggressive by midcentury with, for example,
Secretary of State William Marcy’s proposed treaty of Hawaiian
annexation in 1854. And again after the Civil War, the Ameri-
can drive to expand its sphere of influence was evidenced by the
acquisition of Midway Island (1867) and increased U.S. military
involvement in Sāmoa (1870s–1880s).
Although there was a general desire for U.S. economic expan-
sion throughout the Pacific, there was also strenuous opposition
to overseas territorial expansion. Just as the Senate rejected Secre-
tary Marcy’s annexation treaty, they also rejected treaties concern-
ing rights to Sāmoan harbors. Nevertheless, there was uncontested
support for expanding commerce—seeking Asian markets for
American manufactured and agricultural goods as well as devel-
oping the sugar trade, which involved both Hawai‘i and the Phil-
ippines. Henry B. Russell cartographically visualized the United
States’ imperial desire and its reach into Asia in his Illustrated
History of Our War with Spain and Our War with the Filipinos
(1899). A map (fig. 55) identifying shipping routes and distances
marked lines of connection across the Pacific Ocean and linked
the United States and China through the Hawaiian, Philippine,
and Sāmoan Islands.
This chapter explores the agendas pursued by different actors in
fashioning the Hawaiian and Philippine exhibits at both Omaha
expositions. World fair historian Robert W. Rydell argues that
the expositions “provided ideological scaffolding for mass sup-
port for the government’s imperial policies.” But as cultural histo-
rian Bonnie M. Miller notes, the expositions were not determined
ideological systems. The annexation debates, as they played out
in the 1898 and 1899 expositions’ nationalist and internationalist

378 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

Fig. 55. “Map showing the routes and distances between the United States,
Hawaiian Islands, Philippine Islands, China, etc.,” from Henry B. Russell,
The Story of Two Wars: An Illustrated History of Our War with Spain and
Our War with the Filipinos, Their Causes, Incidents, and Results (Hartford ct:
Hartford Publishing, 1899), 549.
imagery, represented divergent interests and sometimes contra-
dictory messages that were conditioned by the varying intentions
and interpretations of planners, participants, and viewers.2 Link-
ing their representation was the emerging geopolitical importance
of Pacific colonies to the United States in its drive to expand its
military and commercial influences westward to China. How-
ever, different historical relationships with the United States and
Americanism (i.e., alignment with American culture and values)
shaped the quite distinct representational strategies for these two
island regions at the expositions.
As Lanny Thompson notes in his analysis of the “new posses-
sions” genre of illustrated books published from 1898 to 1914, while
Native Hawaiians, Filipinos, and other nonwhite peoples in the
Pacific were understood to be less civilized than Americans, the
perceived differences among them shaped the different forms of
governance imposed on these two sites.3 The Hawaiian illustra-
tions emphasized how white settlers had transformed the archi-
pelago into an American outpost in the Pacific and indicated that
Hawai‘i was mature for annexation and, later, worthy of self-rule as
an American territory. Representations of the Philippines stressed
American military successes in the Spanish-American War and
the supposed liberation of the islands from Spanish oppression
and, situated at the beginning of the Philippine-American War in
1899, cast Filipinos in the dual guise of “savages” who required U.S.
governance and “redeemable primitives” who could be managed
and uplifted within an American colonial system. The various dis-
plays speak to the complex history of U.S. interest and influence in
the Pacific. While the colonial histories of Hawai‘i and the Phil-
ippines have quite different origins and trajectories, they became
intimately drawn together in the U.S. imperial theater and shaped
subsequent U.S. intervention in the Pacific.

Hawai‘i at the Omaha Expositions

The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition marks a crit-
ical moment not only in American history but also in the history
of the Hawaiian Islands. In the nineteenth century, Hawai‘i had
transformed from a sovereign kingdom led by Indigenous Hawai-

380 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

ian political authority (c. 1795–1893) to a settler-dominated repub-
lic governed predominantly by whites with American allegiances
(1894–98), and then to an annexed territory of the United States,
which was accomplished the year of the exposition. Most scholar-
ship on this Omaha exposition has thus emphasized imperialism
and the Spanish-American War, tracking and analyzing metro-
politan American perspectives derived from textual and visual
sources. This section focuses instead on how localized political,
social, and cultural debates—centered in the Hawaiian Islands—
guided the content, arrangement, and presentation of the exhibits
sent to the exposition by settler Hawaiian agents. From this per-
spective, their exhibits can be seen as a bid for annexation and can
also be understood as part of the history of Hawaiian participa-
tion in world fairs and international exhibitions.
The Hawaiian Kingdom joined in numerous international fairs
prior to the Omaha Exposition.4 As was the case with other nations’
contributions to world fairs, the content and appearance of Hawai-
ian exhibits was, to a great extent, conditioned by the domestic and
foreign social and political affairs of the kingdom. From the 1860s
through the mid-1880s, the Indigenous elite engaged in world fairs
as a form of anticolonial nationalism and also as an expression of
their genuine interest in a variety of modern cultural and intel-
lectual institutions and practices. Exhibitions submitted to fairs
in the late 1880s and early 1890s, however, indicate a progressively
intensifying bifurcation among the Native and non-Native elite,
with haole (settlers of Euro-American descent) interests becom-
ing increasingly dominant.5 From 1893, when pro-annexationists
overthrew the Indigenous monarchy, haole political leaders and
businessmen deliberately cultivated stronger relationships with the
United States through their participation in the World’s Colum-
bian Exposition in Chicago (1893) and the California Midwinter
International Exposition (1894) in San Francisco.6 Despite changing
political circumstances, what remains constant during the century
is the Hawaiian leadership’s conscious effort to utilize the world
fair apparatus to further certain national visions.
Beginning in the summer of 1897 and into the spring of 1898,
Hawaiian newspapers encouraged government and business

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 381

interests to spend liberally on organizing displays at the Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition that would showcase
modern Hawai‘i’s products, advanced education, and touristic
pleasures.7 These urgings coincided with the Hawaiian Repub-
lic’s renewed attempts, after repeated unsuccessful bids for annex-
ation since 1893, to convince the U.S. Congress that annexation
would be an economic and strategic boon to the nation and to
dispel reservations about incorporating a territory with an “infe-
rior” nonwhite majority. Organizing exhibits for the exposition
was therefore part of a broader annexation campaign enacted
in the United States by white residents of Hawai‘i who aimed
to counter anti-annexationist opinions. In June 1897 President
McKinley submitted another Hawaiian annexation treaty to the
Senate, but could not immediately garner the required two-thirds
majority vote to pass it. Other obstacles arose. Senator Augus-
tus Octavius Bacon (D-Ga.), concerned about the willingness of
the Indigenous population to be annexed as well as the desire of
Americans to acquire the archipelago, introduced an amendment
to the treaty that required a majority of Native Hawaiian voters to
approve the treaty before the Senate would vote on it.8
Additionally, the deposed queen, Lili‘uokalani (reigned 1891–
93), had traveled to Washington in January to meet with President
Cleveland and other government leaders to protest annexation,
and she was still resident there during the beginning of McKin-
ley’s administration. She conveyed her objections through inter-
views published in the American press and, in June 1897, submitted
a written protest to the secretary of state. In December the mem-
bers of the Hawaiian Patriotic League, representing Native inter-
ests, met Lili‘uokalani in Washington to submit to Senator George
Hoar and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations a petition
with more than 21,000 signatures in opposition to the annexation
treaty, and to Secretary of State John Sherman they presented
another formal protest. Through the following month, this group
continued to meet with Senate members; by the time the Hawaiian
group departed in February 1898, barely half of the senators sup-
ported the treaty.9 Furthermore, anti-annexation articles contin-
ued to appear in the Hawaiian and American presses, and Native

382 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

Hawaiians organized anti-annexation rallies, gathered signatures
for the petition, and collected donations to support the commis-
sion delivering the petition to Washington.10
Lorrin A. Thurston, a descendant of American missionaries
who had worked in Hawai‘i since 1820, was a zealous annexation-
ist who fought hard to sway U.S. political and business leaders to
back the treaty. Thurston was a major actor in the overthrow of
the monarchy and contributed to writing the new constitution
that resulted in the Republic of Hawai‘i. Likely in response to the
anti-annexationist activity in Washington, he published A Hand-
book on the Annexation of Hawaii (1897), in which he argued why
Hawai‘i would be an important American possession; described
the Islands’ “People, Government, Laws, Commerce, Finances,
Education System, and Resources”; listed “Twenty Objections to
Annexation and Replies Thereto”; presented Presidents Harri-
son’s and McKinley’s support for annexation; and provided the
texts of earlier U.S.-Hawai‘i treaties to demonstrate the historical
and friendly relationship between the two nations. In the open-
ing text, Thurston characterized Hawai‘i as an “American Colony”
and explained “Hawaiian christianization, civilization, commerce,
education, and development, [as] the direct product of American
effort.” Including a map that graphically illustrated the central posi-
tion of the Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific, he also emphasized
their strategic value, the crucial role they played as a coaling and
supply station, and their value in developing international trade.
This mapping spoke to the westward flow of American expansion
as well as the broader significance of the Pacific region for com-
merce and defense (cf. fig. 55).11
Early the following year, the Republic’s minister of foreign affairs,
Henry E. Cooper, ordered a special edition of the San Francisco
Chronicle “devoted to showing the resources of the islands and
desirability of their annexation to the United States.” The Chroni-
cle sent copies to its Washington bureau and to every member of
Congress. Cooper requested an additional five thousand copies to
distribute widely.12 The twenty feature articles covered Hawai‘i’s
Americanism (with Sereno E. Bishop’s article, “Americanism Domi-
nant in the New Republic”), political history, government, resources

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 383

and industries, education, strategic position, urban development,
healthful environment and the containment of leprosy, tourist
attractions, and finances, and they concluded with an essay titled
“Why Annexation Is Just to Native Hawaiians.” The edition con-
tained numerous engraved illustrations taken from photographs
to support the textual propaganda. Images of Honolulu Harbor
filled with ships of commerce, sugar plantations and mills, cof-
fee trees, pineapple fields, and laborers evidenced the productiv-
ity of the Islands and the modern technologies employed in its
industries. Such pictures also sought to entice white settlement
and investment. Engravings of Honolulu Harbor and a map of
Pearl Harbor also spoke to the military advantages of a Hawai-
ian colony. Portraits of the haole president (Sanford B. Dole) and
cabinet (including Cooper) reinforced the notion that the gov-
ernment was thoroughly Americanized.13 Scenic views of Hono-
lulu and Diamond Head on O‘ahu and Volcano Road on Hawai‘i
Island tempted potential tourists to explore the beauty and natu-
ral wonders of the Islands.
Texts and illustrations such as these set the stage for the pro-
annexationist exhibits designed for the Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition. Hawai‘i was annexed during the sec-
ond month of the exposition, on July 7, 1898, with the passage of
the Newlands Resolution (Joint Resolution 259), primarily because
of the immediate need for a Pacific military station during the
Spanish-American War and not necessarily due to the lobbying
efforts of people like Thurston. But plans had been under way for
months to develop a display that aggressively insisted on the civ-
ilized whiteness of the archipelago and that would sway Amer-
ican popular opinion and Congress to support the annexation
treaty. The Hawaiian legislature provided a $3,500 appropriation
to prepare the displays, which were to focus on American civili-
zation in the Islands and the economic advantages of annexation,
and it appointed Robert W. Shingle, city editor of the Honolulu
Hawaiian Star, as the commissioner to the fair.14 The exhibit was
originally installed in the International Building on the Omaha
fairgrounds, occupying approximately three thousand square feet
and featuring a banner pronouncing “Our Latest Acquisition”

384 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

Fig. 56. F. A. Rinehart, Hawaiian Exhibit, International Building, Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition, Omaha, 1898. The International
Building (north Midway) included Mexican and Canadian exhibits. Banner
on right wall reads, “Our Latest Acquisition.” From the collections of the
Omaha Public Library. Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy of the
Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.
unl.edu.
(fig. 56). Soon after the Newlands Resolution was signed, Shingle
insisted the exhibit be transferred to a more appropriate (“strictly
American”) location. Exposition organizers provided space in the
Agriculture Building, next to the Minnesota, Missouri, Arkansas,
Louisiana, and Texas exhibits, and the Hawaiian booths were in
running order by mid-July.15
Developing a market for Hawaiian coffee was a key objective,
and an entire booth was devoted to coffee. It exhibited a dozen cof-
fee plants in various stages of maturity and featured daily demon-
strations, which resulted in hundreds of orders for Hawaiian coffee
and drew the McCord Brady Company (grocery wholesalers of
Omaha) to explore large-scale purchases to supply the mainland.16
The display of agriculture and resources additionally consisted
of “palms, orange trees, small coconut trees, and other tropical
plants,” supplemented by pictures of plantations taken by J. J. Wil-
liams and Frank Davey, two prominent Honolulu photographers.
Their photographs “proved” that the Hawaiian landscape had been
significantly transfigured by Euro-American pioneers.17
The photograph of Wailuku Mill (fig. 57), for instance, depicts
a productive sugar enterprise from an elevated perspective that
highlights the impressive expanse of cultivation. Numerous carts
of harvested cane approach the large mill with its towering smoke-
stack, which dominates the landscape. In orderly fashion the work-
ers deposit sizable hauls, adding them to the massive stacks of
cut cane being readied for processing, while two carts in the left
foreground prepare to return to the fields for additional loads. A
man dressed in white, framed by the doorway on the upper level
of the mill, could be perceived by viewers as the plantation owner
surveying his prosperous landscape and overseeing ample, dis-
ciplined labor. Behind the mill, in the center and in the distance
to the right, there appear to be two substantial plantation home-
steads shaded by groves of trees. Photographs of working planta-
tions such as this, combined with abundant displays of agricultural
products at the exposition, also lured potential American home-
steaders with promises of landownership and wealth.18
In addition to advertising agriculture and industry, the exhibit
included material and pictorial illustrations of the Hawaiian edu-

386 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

Fig. 57. Wailuku Mill (Maui), from Our New Colonies: The Hawaiian Islands
(Omaha: Union Pacific Railroad, 1899), 47–48. State Archives of Hawai‘i,
#ppwd-18-3-028.
cation system. The education exhibit functioned to demonstrate
that Native Hawaiians and Asians were benefitting from the civi-
lizing influence of haole leadership and to show the advancement
of the Republic more generally.19 A writer for the Evening Bulle-
tin (Honolulu) expressed the importance of the education exhibit
in quelling American fears of incorporating Hawai‘i’s heteroge-
neous population:
The schools exhibit prepared for the Omaha exposition will do more
towards giving the thinking people of the United States an idea of the
development of Hawaii than anything that will be placed on view. In
the solution of the trying problems the United States has had before
it, in the amalgamation of various races, nationalities, and conditions
of mankind, it is recognized that public schools have played an all
important part. Families of ignorant immigrants would be a never
failing source of national danger were it not for the fact that in the
public schools the children gain more or less enlightenment in the
three Rs, and by education and association absorb the America spirit.
Whatever the political dogmas of the parents may have been, the sec-
ond generation accept[s] the changed conditions and follow[s] the
American line of thought.20

Public and private schools contributed samples of composition,

arithmetic, artistic and mechanical drawings, maps, and manual
arts, which were presented on tables and on the walls, forming a
substantial and impressive array. Illustrating the Republic’s align-
ment with American efforts in the Spanish-American War were
children’s maps of Hawai‘i, Cuba, the Philippines, and Asia, as well
as an album illustrating the recent presence of American warships
in Honolulu Harbor. In addition to examples of writing in English
and drawing, the exhibit included “all kinds of useful articles made
by [the] Hawaiian girls” at the Makawao Seminary (Maui), such
as straw hats and hat bands, adornments, lacework, sewing, nap-
kin rings, and other items manufactured from native materials.
Some schools supplied photographs of students and school
grounds taken by Frank Davey and J. J. Williams. Newspapers of the
time described Davey’s views of the notable buildings at the Kame-
hameha Schools and group pictures of uniformed Native Hawai-

388 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

Fig. 58. Kamehameha School, Hawaiian Students, and Hawaiian School
Children, from Our New Colonies: The Hawaiian Islands (Omaha: Union
Pacific Railroad, 1899), 31–32. Bishop Museum Archives, #sp_208368.
ian students (fig. 58), as well as Williams’s portrait of the “national
types” represented at the Fort Street School (fig. 59). These pictures
connected the diverse youth population to the objects on display,
showing neat, orderly, productive pupils and the profits of mod-
ern western educational institutions in the Islands. The displays
materially and visually indicated that the multicultural communi-
ties of Hawai‘i were being successfully educated in English, trained
in manual labor, and flourishing under American leadership.21
Particular notice was drawn to the accomplishments of Chinese
students. For instance, the Hawaiian press made special mention
of Yung Chung, a student at the Fort Street School, who submitted
an essay on Honolulu that he illustrated by hand and with pho-
tographs, and which he also bound into a beautiful book with a
painted cover. This student additionally contributed an island map,
described as “almost perfection,” and a watercolor sketch of carna-
tions. Another student, Wai Kum of the Kauluwela School, gained
favorable attention in the Hawaiian Gazette, which described his
nicely drawn, colored, and framed map of the Hawaiian Islands—“a
really creditable piece of work”—that identified the various dis-
tricts and included a specimen of the product of each district
(e.g., a coffee bean over Kona; small phials of sugar over sugar-
producing regions; wool on the island of Ni‘ihau). Samples of sew-
ing represented the Chinese girls of the Kaumakapili School, and
Miss Snow’s school for Chinese girls sent compositions and nee-
dlework.22 It was especially important for the Hawaiian Republic’s
exhibition organizers to counter American reluctance to annex a
territory with a substantial Asian (particularly Chinese) immi-
grant community.
As historian Eric T. Love argues, it was not defense of the Amer-
ican constitution but rather racist ideologies that stood as an antag-
onist to American imperialism and ultimately thwarted attempts
to officially annex the Islands until 1898. Persuasive challenges to
annexation came from those who rejected rationales based on
social Darwinism and the notion of the “white man’s burden.”
Anti-annexationists feared incorporating what they character-
ized as a degenerate, inassimilable Hawaiian population. In light
of the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by the United States in 1882,

390 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

Fig. 59. School Children, from Our New Colonies: The Hawaiian Islands
(Omaha: Union Pacific Railroad, 1899), 33–34. Bishop Museum Archives,
#sp_208369. “National types” represented among the Fort Street School
student population.
and the growing numbers of Chinese brought to Hawai‘i between
1865 and 1884, augmented by Japanese workers in the 1880s and
1890s, many in the United States fought annexation. In 1898, argu-
ments to incorporate Hawai‘i emphasized the dwindling Native
population, assured restrictions on and control of the Chinese
and Japanese immigrant communities, and stressed the white-
ness of Hawai‘i.23
Bonnie Miller writes that the ethnological language used to
represent Native Americans at the Omaha exposition was based
on a notion of “vanishing” that fed white nostalgia for a precolo-
nial Indigenous presence, prior to their succumbing to the effects
of introduced diseases and displacement, but also referred to the
vanishing of “authentic” lifeways due to the civilizing work of the
U.S. government.24 Similarly, in the Hawaiian exhibit, emphasis
was placed on the positive Americanizing influence on the Native
Hawaiian and Asian immigrant population, as evidenced in the
educational displays. Additionally Nelse Innes, a special corre-
spondent for the Boston Herald, highlighted the dominance of
Americans, American institutions, and the lack of insurgents, and
through his interview with the Hawaiian commissioner Shingle,
Innes reinforced the characterization of the Islands as civilized,
literate, healthy, profitable, and ripe for white emigration. It is
noteworthy that Innes illustrated the article with a drawing of the
beautiful Honolulu residence and tropical garden of the wealthy
Chinese merchant Chun Afong. He concluded his essay by indi-
cating that intermarriage between ethnic groups was not uncom-
mon and that Afong had married a rich Hawaiian-haole woman
(Julia Fayerweather) and produced twelve “beautiful and highly
intelligent” daughters.25
While Native Hawaiians and Asians were somewhat persistently
imaged in the contexts of plantation labor and education to demon-
strate the availability of skilled workers and the strides of Ameri-
canism, they were less present in images designed to attract tourists.
At the exposition, textual descriptions and photographs intended
to encourage travel to the Islands focused on scenery, not the diver-
sity of the island population. Since the early months of planning the
exhibition, from mid-1897 to the spring of 1898, business interests

392 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

pushed to cultivate the tourist industry through illustrated infor-
mational brochures promoting travel to Hawai‘i for health, plea-
sure, and investment, which would be distributed to exposition
visitors.26 Supporters also sought to enlist Davey and Williams to
produce photographs of the Honolulu business district, Hawai-
ian scenery, educational advancements, and investment oppor-
tunities. Businessman E. C. Macfarlane, who held interests in the
Hawaiian Hotel (O‘ahu) and the Volcano House hotel (Hawai‘i
Island), was a prime mover of tourist promotion. He coordinated
with steamship agencies, the Oahu Railway Company, and inter-
national excursion promoters to develop advertising material.27 In
Omaha Shingle worked with Col. William E. Haskell of the Min-
neapolis Times and the Northern Pacific Railway to develop tours
to Hawai‘i by offering low rail excursion rates to the West Coast.
He also negotiated reduced rates for travelers on the Union Pacific,
Southern Pacific, Burlington, and Milwaukee lines.28
Before the exposition closed in November, the Union Pacific
Railroad Company of Omaha had spent $5,000 on printed mate-
rial advertising Hawaiian tourism. Titled Our New Colonies: The
Hawaiian Islands, this substantial eighty-four-page booklet, com-
piled by Alfred Darlow (assistant general passenger agent for the
Union Pacific), contained nearly eighty illustrations and maps.
Because Shingle gave Darlow use of the photographs from the
Hawaiian exhibition (e.g., figs. 57–59), his booklet is now the key
record of what was displayed.29 Our New Colonies visually show-
cased the Kīlauea volcano, panoramic views of Honolulu and
Honolulu Harbor (the same image included in the San Francisco
Chronicle’s Hawaiian edition), modern buildings, hotels, tree-lined
streets, wildlife (e.g., sea birds, seals, and turtles), and exotic plants.
Chapters of the booklet supported other themes presented in the
exposition, such as education, commerce, agricultural develop-
ment, Hawaiian history, amusements, natural attractions, and the
leading-edge accommodations Honolulu offered.
The brochure included only one small, cropped image of a
seated hula performer playing a ukulele, which corresponded to
the Republic’s desire to downplay any representative of “primi-
tive” or “uncivilized” Native Hawaiians. The Omaha-based expo-

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 393

sition organizers were eager to have the Hawaiian government
create a “Hawaiian Village” to be located on the North Midway,
with musicians, dancers, and Natives demonstrating “the dress,
customs, and habits of the people of the islands as they existed a
century ago and also as they exist at the present time.” Some pro-
tourism editorials in Hawaiian newspapers offered support for
this type of concession, particularly if it illustrated the distance
between the past and present states of the Indigenous popula-
tion. Proponents valued the profits to be made and suggested vil-
lage inhabitants could create objects “representing their former
condition and also their present status of civilization, giving the
visitors an opportunity to behold the aboriginal people living in
countries so far distant from the United States, showing the Cau-
casian races in their march of progress in the various spheres of
mechanics and crude arts.”30
Objections to including a Hawaiian Village and hula were more
strenuous, however, fearing that such exotic and erotic images
would hamper the annexation cause. Newspaper commentaries
insisted the government refrain from displaying Native entertain-
ers or ethnographic objects and avoid the caricature of Hawaiian
life and industry that had been presented on the midways at the
Chicago (1893) and San Francisco (1894) world fairs. The Hawai-
ian government intended the main Hawaiian exhibition at Chi-
cago’s Columbian Exposition to consist of “a full and complete
display of what are now the principal products, manufactures and
industries but also of those which may be developed by labor and
capital intelligently employed.”31 However, the dramatic and mon-
umental cyclorama of the Kīlauea Volcano on the Midway, with
its accompanying “Hula Hula” show, music performances, and
display of “rare curios” had a greater impact on American view-
ers, firmly establishing exotic images of Hawai‘i. For instance, the
Chicago Figaro described the “strange superstitions of the people”
who offered prayers and sacrifices to the volcano goddess Pele.32
Responses such as this drove the opposition to a Hawaiian Vil-
lage in Omaha. One editorial stated: “We do not want to show a
collection of stone adzes, fusty mats, and poi calabashes. Those are
curios belonging to a by-gone age; we want to show the Hawaii of

394 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

today.” Another writer indicated that the Omaha managers’ per-
sistent appeal for a Hawaiian Village “betrays a wrong impres-
sion prevalent that it should be one of the aims of our exhibit to
remove” and, with other opponents, he ardently maintained that
the exhibit focus on material advancement, educational prog-
ress, and political development. When the Hawaiian legislature
approved the appropriation for the exposition, it made clear that
funds supported only the main government exhibit and would be
kept separate from any Midway concessions.33
Most of the representational strategies used by the Hawaiian
leadership at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition
were again deployed at the Greater America Exposition the follow-
ing year. The Greater America Exposition was held on the same
grounds as the 1898 fair, and its Omaha organizers sought to make
it a distinctive event that did not duplicate the theme of the previ-
ous exposition. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, they
chose to create the United States’ first colonial fair (fig. 4), focused
on the nation’s new possessions—primarily the Philippines, Puerto
Rico, Cuba, and Hawai‘i—and “to demonstrate the centrality of
colonialism to continued American progress.”34 With the annex-
ation of Hawai‘i, organizers of the Hawaiian exhibit turned their
attention to creating a presence that would attract large capital
investment, stimulate trade, lure tourists, and further their efforts
to convince Congress that they were capable of self-government.
The question of self-government was now a key issue for Hawai-
ian political and business leaders. Following the passage of the
Newlands Resolution, the U.S. government sent a commission to
Hawai‘i consisting of Senators Shelby M. Cullom (R-Ill.), John T.
Morgan (D-Ala.), and Robert R. Hitt (R-Ill.) to study the politi-
cal, social, and economic conditions there and to draft a recom-
mendation for a form of governance. The commission traveled
through the Islands and met with political leaders from August 17
to September 23, 1898, and then submitted its report and three bills
favoring a territorial form of government to the president, who
then transmitted them to Congress for approval on December 6,
1898.35 Feeding the unease of the haole Hawaiian leadership, how-
ever, was a long delay between the work of the commission and

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 395

the passage of the Hawaiian Organic Act (which formally made
the Hawaiian Islands a U.S. territory and determined the politi-
cal structure of the territorial government) on April 30, 1900. In
the meantime, haole exhibit organizers at the Greater America
Exposition worked to cultivate a positive public opinion about
the thoroughly American foundation of the Islands.
Because the United States had not established a government in
Hawai‘i by the time planning for the 1899 exposition began, the
interim government appeared unwilling to authorize any appro-
priations for services and projects that were not vital. Instead, the
Honolulu Chamber of Commerce, closely tied to the government
administration, funded and organized the exhibit. It set out to build
a comprehensive display of Hawaiian scenes and objects, domes-
tic products and their preserved derivatives, to suggest “an almost
infinite vein of industrial resources,” and an educational exhibit
to support Hawai‘i’s claims of American progress. The Chamber
appointed two pro-American newspapermen, Daniel Logan and
Ed Towse, as the commissioners to the exposition.36
Exhibition planners were keenly aware of what historian Lanny
Thompson identifies as the “study, judge, rule” approach to deter-
mining how the colonies should be governed, based on the under-
standing that the people in the new possessions differed in their
capacity to adopt American values.37 While the Omaha exposi-
tion promoters flaunted the opportunity for visitors to study the
exotic people and products of the new colonies, the organizers
in Hawai‘i aimed to elevate the colony’s standing to cement their
bid for an unrestricted government. One writer for the Hawaiian
Gazette directly linked Hawai‘i’s representation at Omaha to the
special session of Congress scheduled for October 1899 to dis-
cuss this matter:
The Hawaiian exhibit at the Omaha Exposition should be made not
for the purpose of direct pecuniary gain, but in order to show our
fellow-citizens of the Mainland that we are quite like them, and are
also civilized. In spite of all that has been said and written about these
Islands, the majority of people in the United States still are suspicious
about our social conditions, and too many of them believe we live in

396 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

 huts and occasionally receive a newspaper from the Mainland. The
Omaha Exposition gives another opportunity for us to show the mul-
titudes of the West that in annexing us the United States did a most
sensible thing, and that it is a grievous mistake to class us among
those who occupy the back seats in the congregation of the civilized.38

Local newspaper articles therefore encouraged exhibit designers

to correct general misunderstandings about Hawaiian life, include
displays that would illustrate their progressiveness (e.g., collec-
tions of books related to Hawai‘i, publications issued in Hono-
lulu, and newspapers published in a variety of languages to show
that “our souls are lighted”) and assemble comprehensive educa-
tional materials.39
Narratives of political and social evolution were central to deter-
mining rulership outcomes.40 The story of the transformation of
the Hawaiian polity from chiefdom to constitutional monarchy
(made possible by the work of American missionaries working in
the Islands since 1820) to a stable and productive republic dom-
inated by the white settler minority was repeated in the litera-
ture generated by the exposition and visually conveyed through
the exhibit. Images of Hawaiian monarchs were largely absent,
although they had been conspicuous in world fairs held prior to
the 1893 overthrow. The Hawaiian and mainland presses made
no mention of any royal representation in the exhibits at either
exposition. The sole acknowledgment of the presence of Indige-
nous monarchs was in the 1898 U.S. State Department’s exhibit
of “Letters from the Heads of Foreign Governments to the Pres-
ident of the United States,” which included an 1887 letter from
King Kalākaua (reigned 1874–91), an 1892 diplomatic correspon-
dence from Queen Lili‘uokalani, and Hawaiian currency in its
coinage display.41 Only a small image of Lili‘uokalani appeared
in the Union Pacific Railroad’s 1899 Hawaiian tourist brochure,
juxtaposed with a picture of the statue of King Kamehameha, the
first ruler of the unified kingdom, marking the beginning and
end of the kingdom. Instead, at the Greater America Exposition,
a large photo collage titled Representative Men of Honolulu, H.I.
(fig. 60) was prominently displayed. It consisted of fifty portraits

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 397

of the “handsome and intelligent” men of the white minority who
led the provisional government instituted after the overthrow of
the monarchy and then the Republic of Hawai‘i.42 The Republic’s
president, Sanford B. Dole, was centered, surrounded by his cab-
inet ministers, businessmen, and military personnel, effectively
demonstrating the blanching of the country.
Native Hawaiian political and social leaders were rendered invis-
ible. As in 1898, Indigenous and Asian representation was focused
on assimilation through the American-styled education system
and demonstrated the unquestionable benefit on these popula-
tions of white settlement and guidance in the Islands. Logan put
great effort into personally collecting the contributions of various
youth and education institutions in Honolulu such as the ymca,
the Royal School, Kawaiaha‘o School, and Kaumakapili School,
in addition to St. Anthony’s School for Boys in Wailuku, Maui,
and the Kohala Seminary for Girls on Hawai‘i Island. The dis-
play consisted of paintings, drawings, maps, schoolwork, sewing,
natural history projects, and school texts. Logan noted that visi-
tors tended to linger over the materials sent by the Kamehameha
Schools, which sent photographs of its buildings and grounds,
as well as of the interiors of the tailoring, blacksmith, machine,
carpenter, turning, and painting workshops. The Omaha World-
Herald wrote a feature story on the exhibit highlighting the Kame-
hameha Schools (fig. 58). The writer explained that the schools
were founded at the request of Bernice Pauahi Bishop (1831–84),
a member of the Kamehameha royal family who left a large and
valuable estate to support the schools and other philanthropic proj-
ects. The author then credited Charles R. Bishop, Pauahi’s haole
husband and a successful banker, with carrying out her wishes
and erecting the main building, museum, and chapel. The article
described the structures as “all of stone quarried on the premises
and . . . not surpassed for solidity and style by the best buildings
in American cities.”43
This article also noted that the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum
would “easily take rank as the first in the world for the richness and
variety of the Polynesian relics and curios it contains.” Unlike the
exhibit at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, organizers appeared

398 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

Fig. 60. Frank Davey, Representative Men of Honolulu, hi, 1898.
State Archives of Hawai‘i.
more willing to show Hawaiian artifacts at the Greater America
Exposition, likely because annexation was secure and the display
of such objects could provide evidence of distinguished scholarly
institutions in the Islands, such as the Bishop Museum. One of
the fair’s Omaha representatives, W. W. Umsted, visited Hawai‘i
in the spring of 1899, desiring to secure a Hawaiian Village and
use of the collections at the museum in order to create a replica
of a tropical Indigenous community inhabited by hundreds of
Natives demonstrating their customs.44 Logan’s advertisements
in the Honolulu press requested curios and historical relics to be
lent for the exposition. A page in The Hawaiian Islands: A Hand
Book of Information (1899) featured the museum and its collec-
tions. Logan liberally distributed this thoroughly illustrated hand-
book to visitors and newspaper editors in Omaha.45 The exhibit
itself contained “novel and unique” Hawaiian instruments and
music samples, specimens of barkcloth (kapa), and items made
from koa, a native wood. A press account remarked on the “wood-
working genius” evidenced in the inlaid koa walking canes, add-
ing that royal coffins had been made of this wood for hundreds of
years; this comment also referenced the passing of the chiefs and
monarchs. Regarding the barkcloth, the author emphasized that
such cloth was made and universally worn by the Natives many
years ago but that few people now possessed the knowledge to
manufacture it.46 Native Hawaiian artifacts, then, minimally rep-
resented and contained within the interpretive scheme of the offi-
cial Hawaiian exhibit proved the skilled craftsmanship (i.e., skilled
labor) of the Indigenous people and underscored the pastness of
their objects and lifeways.
Indigenous Hawaiian presence, less contained by haole organiz-
ers and the political and commercial objectives of the Honolulu
Chamber of Commerce, was to be found on the Midway. From
the outset, Omaha organizers repeatedly requested an “authen-
tic” ethnographic Hawaiian Village, ostensibly to educate view-
ers, but more to attract visitors to the exposition and gain profit
from a popular entertainment venue. Prior to securing any con-
cessions, the Omaha World-Herald announced that hula perfor-
mances would be featured at the exposition, as well as “scenic

400 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

pictures of native life and burning volcanos and [Hawai‘i’s] strange,
sweet, melancholy singers.”47 Corresponding to the kind of Hawai-
ian Village envisioned by the Omaha planners, photographic pub-
lications issued for the exposition conveyed notions of a tropical
paradise inhabited by hospitable and leisurely Natives. Souvenir
booklets such as Book of Views: Greater America Exposition (1899)
and Imperial America as Seen at the Greater America Exposition
(1899) included images of jungle landscapes, flower garland (lei)
sellers, groups of Natives posed in front of thatched houses, and
Natives with canoes. Imperial America contained several photo-
graphs depicting luaus (feasts), most of which show somewhat
exotic scenes of diners arranged on mats next to grass houses
along a shore. But these images, such as Native Grass House and
Feast (fig. 61), are tempered by the orderly arrangement of fully
clad guests and the organized array of food containers. An inter-
esting feature of this photograph is the note in the caption identi-
fying “Queen Lil in Center,” which served to exoticize the queen,
who, in actuality, is not included in the scene. Fictitiously sug-
gesting Lili‘uokalani’s presence at the feast conceptually displaced
her from her throne, from ‘Iolani Palace (the seat of rule erected
in Honolulu in 1883 by her brother and royal predecessor, King
Kalākaua), and from Washington dc, where she was seeking to
gain recompense for Hawai‘i’s crown lands that had been taken
by the Hawaiian Republic.
Imperial America tended to primitivize and commodify Native
Hawaiian life and customs for exposition visitors’ and potential
tourists’ consumption; the publication focused on “ethnographic”
views and generally avoided explicitly erotic representations (even
omitting hula performers), with one exception. A Native Picnic
Group, hi (fig. 62) shows a group of mostly bare-chested women
with foliage covering their bodies from the waist down (a woman
wearing a striped dress to the right is masked from view) and two
clothed children in a forest setting gathered around an ample meal.
Compared to the formally arranged and stiffly posed sitters in fig-
ure 61, the photographer captured a fairly candid pose, with some
of the women in the process of eating and serving food as they
pause their guitar-playing. Thompson identifies this photograph

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 401

Fig. 61. Native Grass House and Feast, from Imperial America as Seen at the
Greater America Exposition, Omaha, Nebraska: Comprising Views of Cuba,
Philippines Islands, Hawaii, as Well as the Principal Views of the Exposition
(Chicago: White City Art, 1899), n.p.
as a very popular image that appeared in several of the “new pos-
sessions” books. He suggests the display of women’s bodies indi-
cated their sensuality and tropical naturalness and served as an
invitation to civilized men to enjoy their hospitality and to pos-
sess them/Hawai‘i.48
Yet it was precisely this type of image the exhibition planners in
Honolulu wished to avoid and which founded their objections to
sponsoring a Hawaiian Village at the exposition. Despite a minority
view that Native performances would stimulate tourism, Hono-
lulu organizers refused to send hula girls, Native musicians, and
the Government Band because they were “liable to involve a lack
of dignity.”49 An article in Honolulu’s Independent dryly stated:
We think it is a pity that Hawaii should be placed on exhibition as
a semi-barbarous country to draw tourists to Honolulu. The visi-
tors at Omaha may believe that the village and semi-nude girls and
the beer-voiced singers are representative of life in Hawaii, and they
might come here to see the “fun” and be disagreeably surprised to
find modern buildings, well lighted streets, telephones and rubber-
tired hacks, and the hulas under strict police supervision. . . . If tour-
ist travelling to the Islands with the subsequent advantages and gains
is to be promoted let us begin by “reforming” at home and cease to
use hula girls and grass huts as drawing cards.50

Nevertheless, by July 1899 persistent Omaha businessmen pri-

vately contracted a Hawaiian Village managed by John H. Wil-
son, a Stanford University–educated engineer and businessman
of Native Hawaiian, Tahitian, and Scottish descent who had close
ties to the Hawaiian monarchy (and who would become the mayor
of Honolulu in 1920). He, his assistant manager and uncle George
Monewa Townsend, and a group of nearly thirty Native Hawai-
ians arrived in Omaha to set up their village and theater, which
was housed in what had been the Wisconsin State Building at the
Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, now relocated to
the Greater America Exposition Midway (fig. 63). The Omaha press
erroneously described the theater as a replica of ‘Iolani Palace, and
while the advertisement lured visitors to witness the exotic spec-
tacle, it also assured readers that the performers were “not prim-

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 403

Fig. 62. A Native Picnic Group, hi, from Imperial America as Seen at the
Greater America Exposition. Omaha, Nebraska. Comprising Views of Cuba,
Philippines Islands, Hawaii, as Well as the Principal Views of the Exposition
(Chicago: White City Art, 1899), n.p.
itive natives of a barbarous land,” and described Wilson as a civil
engineer, many of the performers as English-speaking interna-
tional travelers, and the hula as a mild dance, similar “to the muscle
dance of the Orientals, but . . . less suggestive and more symmetri-
cal and harmonious.”51 Visitors could also watch activities such as
women weaving hats and making barkcloth mats with their sew-
ing machines, Natives building houses, and children swimming
in a miniature lake, and could sample Hawaiian food and coffee
in the adjacent Aloha Restaurant.52
Fearing to be upstaged or sullied by the Hawaiian Village, Logan
and Towse distanced the “official” Hawaiian exhibit in the Colo-
nial Building from the Midway concession in their reports to the
Chamber of Commerce, which were relayed in the Honolulu news-
papers. Logan’s report of July 26 emphasized that the Hawaiian
Village had no connection with the main exhibit and highlighted
the substantial distance separating the two on the fairgrounds.
He added, “I really do not think the troupe will mislead intel-
ligent people as to Island life and customs,” and he assured the
Chamber that the dances were mild compared with other Mid-
way attractions. He noted that many visitors who had attended
the village program remarked upon the praiseworthy demeanor
and neat appearance of the Natives, and Logan made sure to pro-
vide “accurate information” to mitigate any false impressions they
might have gained about the Islands. He also stressed that, despite
the popularity of the Hawaiian Village, the commercial and edu-
cational exhibit would eventually draw greater attendance because
it was free and more advantageously located.53
Logan, Towse, and Honolulu political leaders had reason to be
concerned, because Wilson was a vocal royalist who despised the
haole annexationists, and his assistant Townsend had served in
the armed revolt against the Hawaiian Republic in 1895. Adria L.
Imada, in her study of hula circuits in the American mainland, notes
that Wilson and several of the performers had toured the United
States with the anticolonial Bana Lāhui (Hawaiian National Band)
in 1895–96. As with this earlier tour, Wilson sold copies of sheet
music and photographs of Queen Lili‘uokalani at the Omaha expo-
sition. Imada also characterizes many of the songs and dances per-

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 405

Fig. 63. The Hawaiian Village at the Greater America Exposition, Omaha,
1899. From the km3tv/Bostwick-Frohardt Photograph Collection at the
Durham Museum (folio 3, negative 243).
formed in the Hawaiian Village as deliberately subversive because
they celebrated Native Hawaiian rulers and chiefs, religion, and his-
tory, and she indicates that several of the compositions were writ-
ten by Lili‘uokalani. Demonstrating their support for the queen,
who was living in Washington (where Wilson had visited her sev-
eral times), working to regain Hawai‘i’s crown lands, the troupe
helped to organize a luau to honor the queen’s September birthday.54
While the haole-led government, in its push for annexation,
tightly controlled Hawaiian representation at the 1898 Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition, other competing rep-
resentations emerged at the Greater America Exposition. In 1899
Honolulu’s haole political and business leaders presented a Hawai‘i
in which American civilization had replaced the predominance
and power of the Native population and controlled Asian immi-
grant communities, providing reassurance to Congress that it was
deserving of a territorial government with few restrictions. Extend-
ing the goals of the 1898 fair, images and material displays at the
main Hawaiian exhibit at the Greater America Exposition sug-
gested that the archipelago had been successfully transformed by
the workings of Protestant missionaries and the development of
agriculture and industry through the foundational work of Euro-
American pioneers. Alternatively, Omaha business interests at the
exposition desired a profitable exotic entertainment to draw vis-
itors to the struggling fair. They promoted “ethnographic curios-
ities” and exotic people in the images they circulated in printed
advertising materials. Finally, Native Hawaiians on the Midway,
while to some degree appealing to viewers’ expectations, pursued
their own political agendas and exercised their anticolonial agency
by performing their reverence for Indigenous chiefs, venerating
Native Hawaiian history and culture, and supporting their queen.

The Philippines at the Omaha Expositions

While the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition
and the Greater America Exposition in 1899 signaled a critical
moment in Hawaiian history, these expositions also occurred
during two pivotal wars in Philippine history: the 1898 Spanish-
American War and the much bloodier Philippine-American War,

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 407

which began in 1899.55 While the Spanish-American War resulted
in the Philippines, once a Spanish colony, becoming an unincor-
porated U.S. territory, the Philippine-American War, wherein Fil-
ipino revolutionaries contested the U.S. claim to the archipelago,
resulted in the forced dissolution of the Philippine Republic and
the establishment of a U.S. colonial government in the Philippines.
Both wars marked a key moment in U.S. imperialism, and also
entailed a shift in American popular imaginings of the archipel-
ago. In other words, the Philippines went from being a virtually
unknown country in the American popular imaginary to a cen-
tral site of U.S. militarism and empire in the Pacific.
This transformation is revealed through the representations of
the Philippines at the Trans-Mississippi and International Expo-
sition and the Greater America Exposition. American militarism
and representations of the Philippines at the Omaha expositions
cannot be viewed as separate entities in a larger imperial agenda.
Rather, U.S. military campaigns in the Philippines actively shaped
Philippine displays and their ideological underpinnings at the fairs.
While the Greater America Exposition placed much more
emphasis on “educating” the American public about its new col-
ony in the Philippines, representations of the archipelago at both
expositions were nonetheless closely tied to U.S. military action
in the Pacific. Both featured reenactments and reproductions of
Adm. George Dewey’s naval victory against Adm. Patricio Monto-
jo’s Spanish fleet at the Battle of Manila Bay on May 1, 1898. Manila
and its harbor became a site of U.S. military heroics for fairgo-
ers. Reproductions of the battle, complete with electric lights and
fireworks, celebrated U.S. naval prowess and erased the work of
the Philippine Revolution, a revolution that began in 1896 under
the leadership of Andrés Bonifacio and was continued by Emilio
Aguinaldo. In his analysis of U.S. war monuments, Oscar V. Cam-
pomanes asserts that “all the hard work, bloodletting, and the
laborious years of armed struggle” during the Philippine Revolu-
tion “had practically and effectively withered Spanish power at the
point when the United States came in with its ‘rescue’ missions.”56
Nonetheless, the history of the revolution was entirely overwritten
at the Omaha expositions and in popular depictions of the bat-

408 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

tle, as Admiral Dewey and his fleet were cast as victorious heroes
who seemingly saved the Philippines from the perils of Spanish
empire, only to replace it with U.S. empire.57
The Scenic Railway, featured in F. A. Rinehart’s photograph of
the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition (fig. 64), was
a key site that showcased the Battle of Manila Bay. Located on
the Midway and patented by J. A. Griffiths, this concession con-
sisted of a two-story, open structure attached to a railway track
that was approximately one mile long. Omaha’s Bee boasted that it
was “positively the largest and most costly scenic railway ever con-
structed at any exposition in the world.”58 The cars were often filled
to maximum capacity on important days, such as on the Fourth
of July, when they had 9,000 passengers.59 The popularity of this
entertainment venue is also apparent in Rinehart’s photograph, as
a relatively large group of fairgoers stands in front of the railway
structure, presumably watching the cars speeding down the track.
Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the Scenic Railway was
its representation of the war. In the photograph, a painted sign on
the left side of the structure’s bottom floor advertises the “Battle of
Manila.”60 The depiction of the naval battle was painted inside the
tunnel walls, visible on the right side of the photograph. Omaha’s
Bee reported that this tunnel was lit with electricity and showcased
an image of Dewey and his naval squadron in Manila Bay during
the action.61 Another writer for the Bee described the scene as a
“perfect reproduction” of Manila and Dewey’s fleet in its harbor.
However, the mural was anything but a “perfect reproduction” of
the city. Instead, the capital was reduced to an illuminated paint-
ing of the U.S. Asiatic Squadron “occupying the harbor,” per the
description of the Bee journalist—a choice of words that reflects
the U.S. colonial occupation of Manila following the naval vic-
tory.62 The reproduction of the battle presented a contained nar-
rative, literally contained in the space of a tunnel, that overwrote
the history of the Philippine Revolution, replacing it with a spec-
tacle of U.S. military might.63 While Manila and the Philippines
were now being introduced to the American public via Dewey’s
victory, the history of the country and its people was also, quite
ironically, being erased by such reproductions of the battle.64

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 409

Fig. 64. F. A. Rinehart, Scenic Railway, Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition, Omaha, 1898. James A. Griffith’s train (often with elaborate
carvings on the front) could trip switches to illuminate elaborate tableaus; 10¢
for two trips. From the collections of the Omaha Public Library. Artwork in
the public domain, scan courtesy of the Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition Archive, trans-mississippi.unl.edu.
 While the Scenic Railway emphasized imperialist themes, rein-
forcing a partisan historical narrative of the Spanish-American
War, it also merged thrill-seeking and amusement with an ideol-
ogy of U.S. military supremacy.65 In her study of popular culture
during this period, Bonnie Miller asserts that depictions of the
Battle of Manila Bay turned it “into a visual spectacle that blended
the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginative’ in a pleasing sensory experience
and helped viewers not just imagine but feel the thrill of taking
part in a triumphant naval victory fought on the other side of the
globe.”66 This was also the case with the Scenic Railway, as riders
were immersed in a spectacle of U.S. naval victory while experi-
encing the thrill of racing down the ride’s hill. According to the
Official Guide Book to the Trans-Mississippi and International Expo-
sition, the “sensation of a ride over this railway can be compared
only to that of coasting down icy hills in mid-winter, but there
is no danger to life or limb.”67 This adrenaline-pumping experi-
ence, merged with a luminous image of Dewey’s naval victory, as
depicted in the tunnel, created a means to share the “thrill” of U.S.
military might with guests at the exposition. Such a celebration of
U.S. military supremacy was further enforced when Griffiths hired
a brass band to play at the railway, featured in the bottom left cor-
ner of the photograph.68 This band tellingly stands adjacent to the
“Battle of Manila” sign in the image, a placement that is indicative
of the ride’s celebration of U.S. militarism in Asia and the Pacific.
President McKinley also celebrated the Battle of Manila Bay
during his visit to the exposition on “President’s Day,” which
occurred during Peace Jubilee Week.69 McKinley spoke to a packed
throng, roughly 99,000 people, and wholeheartedly praised the
United States’ involvement in the Spanish-American War.70 He
asserted that the “heroes of Manila and Santiago and Porto Rico
have made immortal history,” and he promoted U.S. imperialist
policies by stating that “every thoughtful man feels the weight of
responsibility which has been so suddenly thrust upon us.”71 McKin-
ley framed U.S victory in the war as an indication of “America’s
divine ordination,” further fueling support for extra-continental
expansion.72
On the evening of President’s Day there was a large fireworks

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 411

Fig. 65. F. A. Rinehart, Grand Plaza—Peace Jubilee (Night), October 12,
1898, Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, Omaha. Sign above
bandstand reads, “Welcome to Our President, Our Country and Peace,”
under illuminated silhouette of William McKinley. From the collections of
the Omaha Public Library. Artwork in the public domain, scan courtesy
of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Archive, trans-
mississippi.unl.edu.
display at the Grand Plaza that was captured by Rinehart (fig. 65).
This display, created by the A. L. Due Fireworks Company, was
a particularly grandiose show. In the photograph, a multitude of
fireworks cascade across the night sky, illuminating the expo-
sition’s bandstand topped with a silhouette of McKinley’s head
and a banner that reads “Welcome to Our President, Our Coun-
try and Peace.” Both the banner and the president’s head are lit
by electric lights, seeming to merge with the flashing fireworks
in the immediate background. Beneath the banner, two Ameri-
can flags are draped along the bandstand, emphasizing the patri-
otism of the display.
However, while the electric banner advertises “Our Country and
Peace,” identifying the fireworks as a celebration of “peace” toward
the end of the war, one could also read the show as an overt cel-
ebration of U.S. militarism. The militaristic underpinning of this
display is particularly apparent in a detailed agenda of the show
provided by the Omaha World-Herald:
Display will be announced by the firing of three aerial cannon, grand
prismatic illumination; welcome; simultaneous firing of extra heavy
peacock plume rockets, flight of A. L. Due’s bouquet rockets; set piece—
emblem of peace, ascension of eighteen-inch bomb shells: flight of
silver snakes, display of mammoth umbrellas, fire portrait—secretary
of war: ascension of meteor-shells; flight of 200 silver plume rock-
ets, comic device—performing acrobats; flight of flying doves, ascen-
sion of Due’s “shell of shells.” American flag seventy-five feet long,
ascension of cascade rockets, flight of parachute rockets, display of
Due’s famous silver shells, ascension of red, white, and blue shells,
fire portrait—secretary of navy.73

This description is rife with militaristic terminology and imagery,

ranging from the “aerial canons” that began the show to the numer-
ous “shells” set off by Due and his company. Interestingly enough,
the display’s agenda situated symbols of peace alongside symbols
of warfare. For example, an “emblem of peace” came before the
“ascension of eighteen-inch bomb shells,” and a “flight of flying
doves” came before the “ascension of Due’s ‘shell of shells.’” Plac-
ing such symbols side-by-side reveals the intimacies of peace and

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 413

warfare—an intimacy that provided the larger ideological frame-
work for both the firework display and McKinley’s speech. In other
words, peace and warfare were presented as two sides of the same
coin, as peace could not be acknowledged without the looming
presence of war. The fireworks display thus celebrated the antici-
pated peace of the Spanish-American War by glorifying the U.S.
military and sending portraits of the secretaries of war and the
navy into the sky. Likewise, McKinley could not announce news
of the “peace near at hand” to a large crowd without also immor-
talizing the Battle of Manila Bay and praising the “usefulness of
the American navy.”74
The firework show on President’s Day, with its celebration of
U.S. military “heroics,” served as a prelude to the Battle of Manila
Bay reenactment at the 1899 Greater America Exposition, which
also incorporated fireworks. This reenactment, titled the “Great
Sea Fight Fought by Admiral Dewey in Manila Bay,” was located
on the Midway in the space where the Wild West show had been
held. One of the features of the Sea Fight was a series of paintings
arranged to create one enormous panoramic view (486' × 98') of
Manila Bay on the day of the naval battle.75 There was a minia-
ture lake in front of the painting, wherein nightly reenactments
of the battle were performed. The reenactment, created by Pains’
Fireworks Company, attempted to miniaturize the city, a strategy
associated with domesticating and possessing a subject, as the lake
stood in for Manila’s bay and movable backdrops represented the
city itself. A writer for the Colorado Spring Gazette reported that
the “drama open[ed] with some 300 Spaniards and natives loung-
ing about the wharves and engaged in characteristic street sports
and feats of strength and endurance.” The beginning of the reen-
actment thus curiously lumped Spaniards and Natives together as
allies, while highlighting the masculine vigor of the United States’
opponent. This opening scene quickly changed, however, as the
rest of the show depicted an epic battle solely between Spanish and
U.S. naval forces. Fireworks were incorporated throughout the bat-
tle, including a patriotic display at the end, wherein the “Stars and
Stripes” were “planted upon the ruined battlements of the fort”
and portraits of McKinley and Dewey were shot into the sky.76

414 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

 Both the 1898 and 1899 firework displays celebrated U.S. military
victory in the Spanish-American War and essentially erased Phil-
ippine resistance to Spanish colonial rule. However, unlike Oma-
ha’s 1898 exposition, the Greater America Exposition intersected
with the timeline of the Philippine-American War, which began
with another Battle of Manila on February 4, 1899. This two-day
battle had close ties to Nebraska.77 In his analysis of the Philippine-
American War, Thomas Thiessen asserts that Pvt. William W.
Grayson, a member of Company D from the First Nebraska Reg-
iment, fired the first shot that began the brutal war. Thiessen notes
that the battle resulted in 59 American deaths and 278 wounded,
while there were an estimated 3,000 Filipino casualties.78 This dis-
parity in fatalities can be compared to the 371 Spanish casualties
and 9 Americans wounded during the earlier Battle of Manila
Bay.79 While the Greater America Exposition continued to cel-
ebrate and reenact the 1898 Battle of Manila Bay, it notably did
not reenact the much bloodier and more recent Battle of Manila,
which was initiated by U.S. forces and was much more difficult to
uphold as a moment of military “heroics.”80 Despite the absence of
the latter conflict, the Philippine-American War did have a notice-
able presence at the Greater America Exposition. Miller observes
that Edison’s Wargraph, which was stationed near the villages on
the Midway, showed a presumably staged film wherein the First
Nebraska and Kansas regiments pursued Filipinos. This film, which
used camera perspective to align the audience with U.S. forces,
overtly upheld U.S. imperial warfare in the Philippines.81
Just as Edison’s Wargraph was intimately connected to the ongo-
ing war, the construction and display of the Philippine Village was
also definitively shaped by U.S. military action in the archipelago
(fig. 66). The Philippine Village was located on the West Midway
in a 150' × 600' space between the Pabst Building and the Cyclo-
rama.82 The entrance had a central tower that was flanked by a
bazaar and restaurant. The buildings were constructed in “typical
Philippine style” with bamboo and thatching. In an effort to make
the village match the landscape of the Philippines, it was deco-
rated with “tropical” foliage, including an assortment of palms.83
To boost its supposed “authenticity,” Henry F. Daily, the commis-

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 415

Fig. 66. Louis Bostwick, Philippine Village on Midway, Greater America
Exposition, Omaha, 1899. Bostwick worked for Rinehart and was a
photographer for the Omaha Bee. From the km3tv/Bostwick-Frohardt
Photograph Collection at the Durham Museum (folio 6400, negative 052).
sioner for the exhibition, transported approximately thirty-five
Filipinos and “all manner of implements, relics, weapons, ani-
mals, vehicles [and] costumes” from the Philippines to Omaha.84
The “living” exhibition featured both Filipinos and animals that
were thought to be characteristic of the Philippines, such as “the
peculiar buffalo only found on the islands,” otherwise known as
the carabao, and “a number of native ponies, monkeys, birds, and
reptiles.”85 Filipinos at the village were also required to perform
for visitors, which included swimming and diving for pennies in
the village’s lake, as well as singing and dancing at the village the-
ater.86 They were subjected to incredibly harsh conditions, such as
exposure to dust and cold, especially during the latter half of the
exposition season, and were given little to no pay for their labor.87
These compulsory performances were extremely degrading.
In a report by Germain Towl, an unnamed man from the village
stated, “We came here to let the people see what sort of a man the
Filipino is, . . . and not to wind ourselves in flags and make mon-
keys of ourselves before a lot of laughing Americanos.”88 Indeed
the village and its organizers objectified Filipinos, making them
a source of ridicule during public performances while relegating
them to the “primitive” past.89 Newspaper reports that stressed
the contemporary nature of the Philippine Village, claiming that
the village was “designed literally to portray the Filipinos as they
are,” also enforced a burgeoning rhetoric in the American popular
imaginary that Filipinos were uncivilized. This rhetoric was blatant
in an article from the Omaha World-Herald, which stated that the
group of people brought from the Philippines to the exposition
included “three members of the ferocious head hunting tribe of
the far interior.” The World-Herald stressed that the entire group
was “very warlike, not only in appearance, but in reality,” and that
they would “be seen in all their native primitiveness at the Phil-
ippine Village.”90
Such descriptions reinforced U.S. imperialist policies in the
Philippines itself, despite the anti-imperialist stance of the World-
Herald’s editor, Gilbert Hitchcock.91 Highlighting the supposed
“native primitiveness” and “ferocious head hunting” of Filipinos
at the Greater America Exposition worked to justify the civiliz-

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 417

ing mission of U.S. colonial rule in the archipelago.92 Rather than
promoting an agenda of assimilation into the U.S. nation-state, as
in the case of Hawai‘i, popular representations of the Philippine
Village were underscored by an agenda of U.S. colonial tutelage,
one that was supported by the archipelago’s status as an unincor-
porated U.S. territory.93
Moreover, the World-Herald’s identification of Filipinos at the
exposition as “warlike” served to legitimize the ongoing Philippine-
American War, a war that was connected to both popular imagin-
ings of Filipinos and that materially shaped the Philippine Village
itself.94 Even before the Greater America Exposition’s opening,
U.S. military campaigns in the Philippines were intersecting with
preparations for the Philippine Village.95 The exposition manage-
ment sent Daily to the Philippines to find people and materials for
the exhibition just one month after he had returned from Manila,
where he had been “connected with the detached service” at the
onset of the Philippine-American War.96 The village also did not
open until August, despite the July 1 opening of the exposition
grounds. This delay was due to Gen. Elwell Otis’s dispute with the
War Department, as he claimed that Daily's recruitment of Filipi-
nos for the village would interfere with his work in the war effort.97
Although General Otis (who would later become military gover-
nor of the Philippines) was eventually forced by President McKin-
ley to cooperate, Daily still faced difficulties in his task of finding
Filipinos for the exposition because of the war.98 According to a
World-Herald report, Daily found that “agents of Aguinaldo were
everywhere stirring up a feeling against the Americans. He was
followed all the time by spies who, unaware of his purpose, con-
strued his actions as hostile to them.”99
When the village did open on the Midway, it became a contact
zone wherein U.S. militarism in the Philippines directly converged
with the fair’s representation of the archipelago. On August 30 the
Greater America Exposition held “Fighting First Nebraska Day,”
an event that welcomed the First Nebraska Regiment to the expo-
sition grounds after their return from the Philippine-American
War. This regiment was given “the appellation of ‘The Fighting
First Nebraska’” for its very active role in the war.100 From their

418 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

involvement in the 1899 Battle of Manila, a battle that began the
war itself, to their demobilization in July 1899, the regiment was
heavily involved in military campaigns throughout central Luzon.101
During the event, the Nebraskan soldiers were welcomed with an
elaborate reception of band concerts and a firework display in the
evening.102 Exposition president George L. Miller also gave a wel-
come address in which he deemed the regiment “the safe reliance
of a free state and welcomed the members of the First Nebraska
from the fields of war to view the monuments of peace” at the
exposition.103
Ironically, these “monuments of peace” included the colonial
villages on the Midway—villages that represented the United
States’ new imperial acquisitions. The First Nebraska Regiment’s
visits to these villages reflected their travels in the Pacific while
en route to Manila. On their journey to the Philippines in June
1898, the regiment departed from San Francisco and had a stop-
over in Honolulu, where the fleet refueled. The regiment remem-
bered this stopover, which included an extravagant lunch on the
grounds of the ‘Iolani Palace, when they visited the Hawaiian Vil-
lage at the exposition.104 The Omaha World-Herald reported that
the “Nebraska boys had not forgotten the royal reception that
was tendered them at Honolulu on their way to Manila, and they
were all anxious to visit the village on the Midway. The reception
they received was not as grand a scale, but was as heartily given
by these generous people.” While the soldiers received a reception
at the Hawaiian Village, many of them also visited the Philippine
Village, claiming to have recognized some of the Filipinos at the
exhibition from their time in the war.105 The soldiers’ visits to the
Hawaiian and Philippine Villages reflected not only their expe-
riences before and during the war but also the role of the United
States in forging an increasingly militarized Pacific.
The Philippine Village was decorated for Fighting First Nebraska
Day. In a photograph of the exposition, a banner is hung on the
central tower above the arched entrance of the village (fig. 67).
The banner reads, “Welcome Fighting First Nebraska,” and is
located just below the four open windows of the tower. In these
windows there are people playing trumpets, who are most likely

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 419

Fig. 67. Louis Bostwick, The Philippine Village Decorated for “Fighting First
Nebraska Day,” at the Greater America Exposition, Omaha, 1899. From the
km3tv/Bostwick-Frohardt Photograph Collection at the Durham Museum
(folio 6400, negative 156).
Filipinos from the village itself, their trumpet playing presum-
ably heralding the supposed liberation of the Philippines from
Spain. However, despite this celebration of the regiment, the Phil-
ippine Village was actually a site where the brutality of U.S. mil-
itary campaigns was revealed.106 The bloody nature of this war
was made particularly apparent by an account from the World-
Herald, which described the initial reaction of Filipinos at the vil-
lage to the arrival of the regiment: “For a few minutes last evening
the Philippine Village looked deserted. When the Filipinos saw
the First Nebraska marching in to the street they were told that
that was the regiment that had won so much fame in the Phil-
ippine islands, and they started to run for their lives, thinking
the regiment had come to take them prisoners.”107 The welcom-
ing banner displayed on the entrance of the village thus directly
contradicted the actual response of Filipinos.
Fear of imprisonment and torture was legitimate, given the
extreme violence and atrocities of U.S. military tactics through-
out the war.108 In his study of genocide and the creation of the
U.S. nation-state, Dylan Rodríguez asserts that the Philippine-
American War was genocide, as it “was shaped at its inception to
strategically extract maximum Filipino mortalities.”109 Casualties
of Filipino troops were estimated at 50,000, and due to U.S. troops
forcing civilians into concentration camps where diseases spread
rapidly, the estimate of fatalities soared to 250,000 total Filipino
war deaths (a conservative approximation); this is a staggering
casualty rate compared with the approximately 4,000 U.S. troops
killed in the war.110 The U.S. military also used a scorched earth pol-
icy that entailed burning entire villages and fields to the ground.111
In March 1899 Louisiana’s Weekly Messenger openly condemned
this practice, publishing an excerpt from the Associated Press dis-
patches which reported that U.S. troops pursued Filipino forces for
fifteen miles and burned every village they encountered along the
way.112 Such accounts expose the sharp contradiction, if not per-
versity, of Nebraskan soldiers visiting the exposition’s Philippine
Village. In other words, Filipinos were expected to welcome the
First Nebraska Regiment to the Philippine Village during a time

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 421

in which the U.S. military was burning and decimating real vil-
lages in the Philippines.113
Although the Omaha World-Herald stated that Filipinos at the
village were later “delighted to converse” with the regiment once
they were told that the soldiers were done fighting in the war, it is
difficult to imagine that there was any “delight” involved in this
encounter, especially because of the racist hostility and epithets
often directed at Filipinos.114 In his analysis of the racial politics
of the war, Paul A. Kramer asserts that U.S. soldiers “commonly
characterized Filipinos on the whole as filthy, diseased, lazy, and
treacherous in their business dealings, sometimes applying the term
‘nigger’ to them.”115 This was also true of the First Nebraska Regi-
ment. Joe Lillie, from Company L of the First Nebraska, repeatedly
used this term in a letter describing U.S. forces’ capture of the for-
mer capital city of Malolos that was published in the World-Herald.
Lillie wrote, “Once over the trench our fellows made short work
of the niggers, for they were wild to get even with them, and it
takes a lot of niggers to square the deal when nine good American
boys are wounded.”116 Such racist, dehumanizing rhetoric starkly
challenges newspaper accounts of Filipinos at the village having
an enjoyable meeting with the regiment.117 Rather, the description
of Filipinos running away from the soldiers seems much more
plausible—an act of agency that undermined, however briefly, the
exposition’s celebration of U.S. militarism.
While the Philippine Village was tied to a narrative wherein Fil-
ipinos were cast as violent “savages” in order to justify the brutality
of an imperial war, the exposition’s official photographic publica-
tions offered a different account of the Philippines.118 The Book of
Views: Greater America Exposition (1899) and Imperial America as
Seen at the Greater America Exposition (1899) recycled Rinehart’s
photographs of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposi-
tion alongside images of villages, buildings, and laborers in the
Philippines as well as photographs of Hawai‘i that appeared in
other books about the United States’ “new possessions.” The sou-
venir books visually integrated official images of the island terri-
tories with views of the 1898 exposition grounds; oddly, neither
one actually pertained to or documented the Greater America

422 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

Fig. 68. A High-Caste Philippine Belle, from Imperial America as Seen at the
America Exposition. Omaha, Nebraska. Comprising Views of Cuba, Philippine
Islands, Hawaii, as Well as the Principal Views of the Exposition (Chicago:
White City Art, 1899), n.p.
Exposition. Perhaps for that reason, both souvenir books fash-
ioned Filipinos as civilizable, though still in need of U.S. colonial
guidance. A High-Caste Philippine Belle, for example, is a portrait
of an elegantly dressed woman in a photographer’s studio (fig.
68). The woman’s long skirt, jewelry, and fan are visual markers
that affirm her status as a member of the upper class. Although
this woman, who poses in front of a serene backdrop, presents
an image of Filipinas as refined and debonair, identifying her as
“high-caste” equally implies that lower-class Filipinas, and Filipi-
nos in general, are not in the same position. A similar distinction
was made by the writers of the “new possessions” books, as the
authors were careful to differentiate between upper- and lower-
class Filipinas, casting the latter as unattractive and animalistic.119
Other photographs in the souvenir books showcased the moder-
nity and development of the Philippines. An image titled Puente
de Espana, Manila, Philippine Islands features the Bridge of Spain
stretching across the Pasig River (fig. 69). Filipinos stroll leisurely
alongside the bridge’s iron railing and lamp posts. A man driving
a horse-drawn carriage, or kalesa, down the bridge’s stone road
underscores Filipinos’ potential to be part of a burgeoning labor
force and therefore U.S. industrial gain. Similarly, the photograph
A Native Village of the Better Class, Philippine Islands shows a row
of structures made of thatched grass and bamboo (fig. 70). The
buildings neatly line the side of a dirt path, upon which a group
of Filipinos walk, including two Filipinas, one of whom is holding
a baby. Despite the tidy appearance of this village, perhaps meant
to evoke the one built in Omaha, the title’s emphasis that it is of a
“better class” suggests to viewers that there are villages of a much
“worse class” in the Philippines. Together, the photographs of the
bridge, village, and villagers present the Philippines to fairgoers
and the larger American public as a site that has the potential to
be civilized but that still is in need of U.S. colonial tutelage. More-
over, books like Imperial America emphasized the anticipated profit
of U.S. colonial rule, as images of Filipinas carrying local goods
on their heads in a lush, tropical setting and a Filipino driving a
carabao-led cart highlight the resources and potential labor force
of America’s new colony.

424 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

Fig. 69. Puente de Espana, Manila, Philippine Islands, from Imperial America
as Seen at the Greater America Exposition. Omaha, Nebraska. Comprising
Views of Cuba, Philippines Islands, Hawaii, as Well as the Principal Views of
the Exposition (Chicago: White City Art, 1899), n.p.
Fig. 70. A Native Village of the Better Class, Philippine Islands, from Imperial
America as Seen at the Greater America Exposition. Omaha, Nebraska.
Comprising Views of Cuba, Philippines Islands, Hawaii, as Well as the Principal
Views of the Exposition (Chicago: White City Art, 1899), n.p.
 The Book of Views and Imperial America’s images of orderly,
quotidian life in the Philippines provided a counternarrative to
reports of chaos and mass slaughter in a war-ravaged landscape.
While reproductions and reenactments of the Battle of Manila
Bay at both the 1898 and 1899 Omaha expositions presented a
straightforward spectacle of U.S. naval victory, casting the United
States as the supposed liberator of the Philippines, representations
of the Philippines at the Greater America Exposition were not
as easily contained in a singular ideology. Newspaper accounts
that identified Filipinos on the Midway as “savage” and “warlike”
worked to uphold U.S. soldiers, particularly the First Nebraska
Regiment, as military heroes and justified the brutality and geno-
cide of the Philippine-American War—a brutality that was none-
theless revealed when Filipinos at the village ran away from the
Nebraskan regiment. Alternatively, the Greater America Exposi-
tion’s photographic publications depicted a Philippines that was
entirely removed from the war, instead showcasing the indus-
try, labor, and natural resources of the archipelago.120 While the
Philippine-American War raged on, and Filipino forces fought
against U.S. colonization, the exposition’s publications presented
the Philippines as fertile ground for the paternal guidance of the
United States’ civilizing mission.

Exhibiting Empire in the Pacific

The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition and the Greater
America Exposition put a public face on the debates and processes
of establishing an American Pacific empire. The Hawaiian and Phil-
ippine exhibits, whether presented by pro-annexationist white set-
tlers from Hawai‘i or by pro-expansionist American organizers,
offered economic rationales for westward expansion through their
displays of island goods, resources, and efficient labor. Seeking to
attract trade and capital investment, these displays indicated that
products could be brought into the United States more inexpen-
sively as part of the American empire. Images, maps, and texts
related to the expositions also highlighted the commercial advan-
tages of their geographic locations between the Americas and main-

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 427

land Asia and underscored how the acquisition of Pacific colonies
would assist in opening up markets in China to the United States.
Superimposed on this economic mapping was the strategic map-
ping of the Pacific. U.S. control of Hawai‘i and the Philippines was
also promoted as a means of defense against Asia and was partic-
ularly advocated as a measure to protect Pacific trade routes and
the American West Coast from military invasion. Hawai‘i’s sur-
render of neutrality during the Spanish-American War, demon-
strating its allegiance to the United States, permitted its harbors to
be used as coaling stations and facilitated the deployment of army
and navy forces to the Philippines. This offer of military assistance
cemented Hawai‘i’s role as a stepping-stone to Asia and prompted
its annexation.121 While Hawai‘i’s contribution to the war effort
was somewhat subtly imaged through maps made by schoolchil-
dren in its education exhibit, U.S. militarism in the Philippines
was powerfully and spectacularly represented at both expositions
through military reenactments, parades, and fireworks shows, in
addition to popular entertainments on the Midway. These theat-
rics enveloped viewers, casting them as participants in the heroics
and victories of the wars and promised an era of peace and pros-
perity realized through colonial expansion.
To mitigate anti-expansionist concerns about incorporating col-
onies with nonwhite, uncivilized majorities, the Hawaiian and Phil-
ippine displays took different approaches to justify annexation and
occupation. The Hawaiian exhibit forcefully imparted a narrative
of American progress enacted through white settlement beginning
with the first missionary settlers who introduced Christian val-
ues, education, and American culture to Native Hawaiians, to the
political, social, and economic maturity achieved by missionary
descendants and other Euro-American settlers who successfully
replaced the “tyrannical” Indigenous monarchy with “enlightened”
American-style republican democracy. The displays of education,
agriculture, and industry and the views of elegant and prosper-
ous Honolulu illustrated how, according to this narrative, pro-
American settlers effectively developed the riches of the Islands,
educated and socialized Native Hawaiians and Asian immigrants

428 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

to serve as an efficient labor source, and made Hawai‘i an easily
assimilable territory.
The apparatus of settler colonialism did not apply to the Philip-
pines, however, due to the logistics of geographical distance mak-
ing Euro-American settlement difficult. Because the relationship
between the Philippines and the United States was so recently and
violently established, and political outcomes remained uncertain
as of 1899, the expositions presented a rather ambiguous portrayal
of Filipinos. As Thompson notes, the Schurman Commission, sent
by McKinley to the Philippines in January 1899 to assess conditions
there and make recommendations for a form of colonial gover-
nance, advised civilizing, not assimilating the local population.122
Thus, instead of publicizing the “whiteness” of the archipelago, as in
the case of Hawai‘i, the Philippine exhibits at Omaha—organized
with the help of the War Department—tended to highlight the
“savagery” and “primitiveness” of Filipinos, especially in the Phil-
ippine Village, in order to justify the American civilizing mission
and military aggression. Alternatively, photographs featured in
official Greater America Exposition publications and newspa-
per publicity depicted industrious Natives, well-dressed women,
and signs of respectable life in villages of “the better class,” ren-
dering Filipinos as assimilable with the potential to be part of a
burgeoning labor force. Such representational discrepancies elu-
cidated the different facets of a U.S. imperial project that revolved
around both militarism and economic profit.
The visual and textual representations of Hawai‘i and the Phil-
ippines at the Omaha expositions crystallized popular and polit-
ical debates about U.S. imperialism in Asia and the Pacific. These
debates shaped American colonial policies and resounded more
broadly as the United States continued to venture into the region,
taking possession of Guam (1898), Wake Island (1899), and Amer-
ican Sāmoa (1899–1904), and later as a result of World War II,
Palau, the Marshall Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and
other island territories. The Hawaiian and Philippine displays coin-
cided with the global expansion of U.S. influence in the Pacific
and demonstrate the complex, varied, and sometimes contradic-

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 429

tory ways in which local, national, and international politics inter-
sected at the expositions.

Notes
We are grateful for the assistance of the Omaha Public Library staff; Karlyn Ander-
son, Gayla Koerting, and Karen Keehr at the Nebraska State Historical Society; Bill
Gonzalez and Kellen Hinrichsen at the Durham Museum Photo Archive; the Univer-
sity of Nebraska Special Collections; Gary Rosenberg at the Douglas County Histor-
ical Society; Richard Green and Holly Reed at the National Archives—College Park
md; Barbara Dunn at the Hawaiian Historical Society; Leah Pualaha‘ole Caldeira
and Tia Reber at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum Archive; and Stacy Naipo at
the Kamehameha Schools Archive. A special thank-you goes to Kara Hisatake, Jamie
McNary, Samuel Montero, and Maggie Wander for research assistance. Research was
supported by the University of California Committee on Research, Arts Research
Institute, and Porter College Research Fellowship.
1. The Spanish-American War is also called the Spanish-Cuban-American War
in order to acknowledge the preceding Cuban War of Independence and U.S. inter-
vention in said war. Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Cul-
ture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 215.
2. Robert W. Rydell, “The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition: ‘To
Work Out the Problem of Universal Civilization,’” American Quarterly 33, no. 5
(Winter 1981): 589; Bonnie M. Miller, “The Incoherencies of Empire: The ‘Imperial’
Image of the Indian at the Omaha World’s Fairs of 1898–99,” American Studies 49,
nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2008): 41.
3. Lanny Thompson, “Representation and Rule in the Imperial Archipelago: Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Hawai‘i, and the Philippines under U.S. Domination after 1898,” Amer-
ican Studies Asia 1, no. 1 (2002): 4–7.
4. These include those held in Paris (1867 and 1899), Vienna (1873), Philadelphia
(1876), Boston (1883), London (1883), New Orleans (1884–85), Louisville (1885), Mel-
bourne (1888), Sydney (1888), and Bremen (1890). See Stacy L. Kamehiro, “Hawai‘i
at the World Fairs, 1867–1893,” World History Connected 8, no. 3 (2011), http://world
historyconnected.press.illinois.edu/8.3/forum_kamehiro.html.
5. In July 1887 members of the Hawaiian League, a group hostile to the monar-
chy, forced King Kalākaua (reigned 1874–91) to sign a new constitution that dra-
matically limited his authority and increased the political power of white propertied
settlers in the kingdom.
6. Cf. Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 109.
7. For example, Evening Bulletin (Honolulu), August 6, 1897, 4, August 25, 1897, 1;
Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), April 29, 1898, 6; Hawaiian Star (Honolulu), July 30,
1897, 4; Independent (Honolulu), July 31, 1897, 2, August 7, 1897, 4, August 10, 1897, 3;
Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), April 27, 1898, 6.
8. “The Hawaiian Resolution,” New York Times, March 22, 1898; “The Bacon
Amendment,” Los Angeles Herald, January 22, 1898, 4; Omaha World-Herald, March
1, 1898, 4.

430 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

 9. Numerous American newspapers reported on Lili‘uokalani’s efforts in Wash-
ington; e.g., Evening Star (Washington dc), January 23, 1897, 1; McCook Tribune
(Nebraska), June 25, 1897, 6; Morning Times (Washington dc), January 25, 1897,
3, January 26, 1897, 5, and January 27, 1897, 1; San Francisco Call, April 13, 1897, 2;
Times (Washington dc), June 18, 1897, 1. For the content of the petition, see “Peti-
tion against Hawaiian Annexation, 1897,” National Archives Record Group 46,
Records of the U.S. Senate, 1789–2011. In March 1898 Lorrin A. Thurston appended
an eleven-page rejoinder questioning the validity of the petition. See also Wyn-
ell Schamel and Charles E. Schamel, “The 1897 Petition against the Annexation of
Hawaii,” Social Education 63, no. 7 (1999): 402–8, http://www.archives.gov/education
/lessons/hawaii-petition/#documents; Alice Kim, “Liliuokalani Meets U.S. Presi-
dent Cleveland Again,” Hawai‘i Digital Newspaper Project, University of Hawai‘i,
https://sites.google.com/a/hawaii.edu/ndnp-hawaii/Home/historical-feature-articles
/liliuokalani-meets-us-president-cleveland.
10. For example, Aloha Aina (Honolulu), September 18, 1897, 5, October 9, 1897,
7, December 11, 1897, 2; Independent (Honolulu), July 31, 1897, 2, January 6, 1898, 4,
February 5, 1898, 1, February 23, 1898, 1; Loea Kalaiaina (Honolulu), March 14, 1898,
3, March 21, 1898, 3.
11. Thurston also presented and refuted eighteen objections to annexation at the
July 1897 Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress held in Salt Lake City. He and
William A. Kinney served as the Hawaiian representatives at the congress and deliv-
ered lengthy speeches on the Hawaiian situation. The convention passed a resolu-
tion, by a large majority, to support annexation. See Evening Bulletin, July 30, 1897,
1, and Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress, Official Proceedings of the Ninth
Session of the Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress, Held at Assembly Hall, Tem-
ple Park, Salt Lake City, Utah, July 14, 15, 16, and 17, 1897 (Salt Lake City: Tribune Job
Printing, 1897), 19, 25, 50–74, 144–49. Regarding the map and case for the strategic
importance of Hawai‘i, Thurston had two years earlier published an essay describ-
ing the commercial, military, and social development of the Pacific Rim and basin
(British Columbia, the U.S. West Coast, Japan, China, Siberia, Australia, South Amer-
ica, and the Pacific Islands). See Lorrin A. Thurston, “The Growing Greatness of
the Pacific,” North American Review 160 (1895): 446–60. See also John A. Harman,
“The Political Importance of Hawaii,” North American Review 160 (1895): 374–77,
and on the westward progress of American civilization, see Sarah J. Moore, “Map-
ping Empire in Omaha and Buffalo: World’s Fairs and the Spanish-American War,”
Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe 25, no. 1 (2000): 111–13.
12. San Francisco Chronicle, January 30, 1898, 18. The Hawaiian edition was released
on January 31, 1898. See also W. H. Cameron to Henry E. Cooper, February 2, 1898,
and M. H. de Young to H. E. Cooper, March 11, 1898, State Archives of Hawai‘i, For-
eign Office and Executive (fo and Ex), Miscellaneous, January–June 1898.
13. Other cabinet members pictured were W. O. Smith, J. A. King, and S. M. Damon.
14. Shingle arrived in Honolulu in 1896. Prior to his move to Hawai‘i he worked in
the editorial department of the Cheyenne Tribune, which was published by his father,
and then as the statehouse and railroad reporter for the Denver Republican. In Hono-
lulu Shingle became a prominent businessman and politician. See John William Sid-
dall, ed., Men of Hawaii (Honolulu: Honolulu Star-Bulletin Limited, 1921), 2:357–59.

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 431

 15. Independent, July 21, 1898, 3; Hawaiian Gazette, July 22, 1898, 6, and Janu-
ary 10, 1899, 6.
16. Grand Forks Herald (North Dakota), August 21, 1898, 2; Hawaiian Gazette,
November 11, 1898, 1, January 20, 1899, 7, January 24, 1899, 5, January 31, 1899, 1; Inde-
pendent, January 31, 1899, 1; Pacific Commercial Advertiser, November 11, 1898, 1.
17. Hawaiian Gazette, January 10, 1898, 6; Pacific Commercial Advertiser, Janu-
ary 9, 1899, 2.
18. As described in the Hawaiian edition of the San Francisco Chronicle (Janu-
ary 31, 1989), the Republic of Hawaii had enacted a new land law in 1895 that offered
land at an average price of five dollars per acre to settlers who intended to become
Hawaiian citizens. It also permitted leasing up to fifty acres of public land with the
option to purchase at the same valuation, made provision for land leases and pur-
chases from private parties, and established a Settlement Association. See Republic
of Hawaii, Act 26, Laws of the Republic of Hawaii Passed by the Legislative Assembly,
Special Session, 1895 (Honolulu: Robert Grieve, 1895), 49–90.
19. Hawaiian Star, July 30, 1897, 4.
20. Evening Bulletin, June 15, 1898, 4.
21. Hawaiian Gazette, June 14, 1898, 1; Pacific Commercial Advertiser, June 14,
1898, 6. To encourage tourism, the Union Pacific Railroad Company of Omaha pub-
lished a lengthy illustrated booklet titled Our New Colonies: The Hawaiian Islands
(Chicago: Rand McNally, 1899), using the photographs from the Hawaiian exhibi-
tion at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition. See Robert W. Shingle to
Henry E. Cooper, November 29, 1898, State Archives of Hawai‘i, fo and Ex, Miscel-
laneous, July–December 1898; Hawaiian Gazette, January 10, 1899, 6. See also Rein-
hardt (this volume) on the similar representation of Native American students as a
means to promote assimilationist values at the Omaha exposition.
22. Evening Bulletin, June 14, 1898, 1; Hawaiian Gazette, June 10, 1898, 10, and
June 14, 1.
23. Eric T. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 7, 13, 20, 84–95. See also John L. Ste-
vens, “The Hawaiian Situation: 2. A Plea for Annexation,” North American Review
157, no. 445 (December 1893): 736–45.
24. Miller, “Incoherencies of Empire,” 45, 49.
25. Nelse Innes, “The Future of Hawaii. Americans Bound to Be Attracted to the
‘Paradise of the Pacific’; People Quite Up to Date; English the Leading Language.
The Climate Wonderfully Healthy,” Sunday Herald (Boston), August 28, 1898, 1.
26. The promotion of Hawaiian tourism was linked to efforts to attract white set-
tlers, ideally to replace Asian laborers. Advertising the opportunities for settlement
apparently drew thousands of inquiries to the Hawaiian government, Honolulu Cham-
ber of Commerce, and the Hawaiian commissioners at the exposition. Because plots
of land for American immigrants who desired to venture into private business (as
opposed to serving as inexpensive white labor) were not readily available, organiz-
ers quickly issued statements in the press to deter mass emigration. See, for exam-
ple, Hawaiian Gazette, August 30, 1898, 7; San Diego Union, December 16, 1898, 3.
27. Evening Bulletin, May 24, 1898, 1; Hawaiian Star, July 30, 1897, 4, August 24, 1898,
1, August 25, 1898, 4; Pacific Commercial Advertiser, May 24, 1898, 1, May 25, 1898, 1.

432 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

 28. Hawaiian Gazette, August 23, 1898, 1, January 10, 1899, 6; Hawaiian Star, August
24, 1898, 1; Pacific Commercial Advertiser, January 9, 1899, 2. See also Robert W. Shin-
gle to Henry E. Cooper, November 14, 1898, Hawai‘i State Archives, fo and Ex, Mis-
cellaneous Foreign, July–December 1898. Haskell’s father owned the Boston Herald.
29. Shingle to Cooper, November 29, 1898, Hawai‘i State Archives, fo and Ex,
Miscellaneous Foreign, July–December, 1898; Hawaiian Gazette, January 10, 1899,
6; Pacific Commercial Advertiser, January 9, 1899, 2.
30. Omaha Bee, August 30, 1898, 5; Evening Bulletin, September 9, 1897, 4; Hawai-
ian Star, August 10, 1897, 3.
31. Samuel Parker, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to W. D. Alexander, November
9, 1891, Hawai‘i State Archives, Ms. m-3, Alexander, William DeWitt, 1833–1913,
Papers, 1864–93.
32. Quoted in Hawaiian Star, October 28, 1893, 5.
33. Evening Bulletin, September 9, 1897, 4; Hawaiian Star, August 7, 1897, 4, April
19, 1898, 1; Hawaiian Gazette, December 31, 1897, 2, and April 22, 1898, 1.
34. Rydell, “Trans-Mississippi,” 607. Miller, “Incoherencies of Empire,” 54, notes
that the two main exposition advertisers, Edward Rosewater (editor of the Omaha
Bee) and Gilbert M. Hitchcock (editor of the Omaha World-Herald), opposed colonial
rule but were driven by profit and the promotion of regional economic development.
35. The report was detailed in the Boston Herald, December 7, 1898, 1, 8. It cov-
ered government organization, citizenship requirements, a system of law, labor, and
an inventory of public lands and property.
36. Evening Bulletin, May 6, 1899, 5, May 10, 1899, 4, 8, May 16, 1899, 1, May 18,
1899, 1; Hawaiian Gazette, May 6, 1899, 4, Independent, May 10, 1899, 2. The cham-
ber appointed Towse to replace A. S. Cleghorn, who resigned in July.
37. Thompson, “Representation and Rule,” 7–9, 32.
38. Hawaiian Gazette, May 30, 1899, 4; cf. Evening Bulletin, May 25, 1899, 1, 8;
Hawaiian Gazette, May 25, 1899, 4. Regarding the Omaha organizers’ advertise-
ment of the exposition as a means for Americans to learn about the new colonies,
see Omaha Bee, November 15, 1898, 4; Omaha World-Herald, December 25, 1898, 16.
39. Independent, June 20, 1899, 3. Regarding concern about American confusion
about Hawaiian life and how it could be remedied in Omaha, one writer described “an
army colonel on board the transport Sherman [who] asked soon after arrival whether
the native Hawaiians knew enough English to make themselves understood, and if
the Government band played anything but native airs. Who says Hawaii should not
be properly represented at the Omaha Exposition?” Evening Bulletin, May 31, 1899, 4.
40. Lanny Thompson, Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insu-
lar Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press,
2010), 88–89, 105–6, 109–11.
41. Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, Official Catalogue of the
Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition. Omaha, Nebraska. June to Novem-
ber 1898 (Omaha: Klopp & Bartlett, 1898), 49, 53.
42. Independent, June 23, 1899, 4.
43. World-Herald, August 2, 1899. See also Evening Bulletin, June 19, 1899, 1, June
23, 1899, 1, August 12, 1899, 1; Hawaiian Gazette, June 23, 1899, 5, August 15, 1899, 6;
Hawaiian Star, August 16, 1899, 3; Independent, June 20, 1899, 3.

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 433

 44. See Nancy Parezo’s discussion (this volume) of the anthropological inter-
est in Native American housing forms and technologies at the Omaha exposition.
45. Evening Bulletin, September 1, 1899, 1; Independent, August 18, 1899, 2; The
Hawaiian Islands: A Hand Book of Information Issued by the Department of Foreign
Affairs, Honolulu, 1899 (San Francisco: Sunset Photo-Engraving, 1899). Correspond-
ing to the aims of the exhibit, this handbook was filled with images reinforcing the
Americanization and civilization of the Islands, their industries, and scenery. More
than half of the booklet’s eighty-six pages contained illustrations, photographs, and
photo-montages of Hawaiian people, views, and products.
46. Evening Bulletin, April 27, 1899, 1, June 13, 1899, 8; Hawaiian Gazette, August
15, 1899, 6.
47. World-Herald, February 26, 1899; cf. April 16, 1899, 5, May 21, 1899, 25–27.
48. Thompson, Imperial Archipelago, 68–69, 72. Cf. Bonnie M. Miller, From Libera-
tion to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 131–32. The photographs appeared
in Imperial America as Seen at the Greater America Exposition. Omaha, Nebraska.
Comprising Views of Cuba, Philippines Islands, Hawaii, as Well as the Principal Views
of the Exposition (Chicago: White City Art, 1899), and Greater America Exposition,
Book of Views: Greater America Exposition. July 1 to November 1. Omaha, U.S.A. 1899
(Omaha: Greater America Exposition Bureau of Publicity and Promotion, 1899).
49. Evening Bulletin, May 25, 1899, 1; cf. May 20, 1899, 1, June 21, 1999, 5; Hawai-
ian Star, July 12, 1899, 1.
50. Independent, July 12, 1899, 2.
51. Hawaiian Gazette, September 5, 1899. Cf. Evening Bulletin, July 3, 1899, 5, August
15, 1899, 3; Hawaiian Gazette, September 12, 1899, 1, 4; Independent, August 14, 1899, 1.
52. World-Herald, August 6 and 12, 1899. The troupe included the Quintette Club,
composed of Maj. Mekia Kealakai, Thomas Silva, Tom Hennessey, W. H. Sea, James
Shaw, John Edwards, Kahulu, and W. Ben Jones; and Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Kaai, Miss
Mahailani, Miss Malie Kahuna, Miss Kalio, Mrs. Keliikahuna, Miss Mele Kaulana,
Sam Kamalue, Keaha Inana, Mr. and Mrs. Kualii as dancers, chanters, and musicians;
Mrs. Shaw as the booth supervisor; Mrs. Edwards in charge of music; Miss Leile-
hua as the supervising chaperone; and several children. Accounts provide slightly
different lists of performers’ names (cf. Hawaiian Gazette, September 12, 1899, 1, 4;
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, September 12, 1899, 1, 2).
53. Hawaiian Gazette, August 18, 1899, 3; Independent, August 15, 1899, 1.
54. Imada, Aloha America, 114–17, 122–26. It is noteworthy that the Hawaiian press
simply described Lili‘uokalani’s stay in Washington in terms of her ill health and her
work on publishing a new portfolio of music compositions. No mention was made
of her political work (see Hawaiian Gazette, October 10, 1899, 3).
55. Although the Philippine-American War was officially declared over by Pres-
ident Roosevelt in 1902, “other accounts note that skirmishes continued for many
more years.” Camilla Fojas, Islands of Empire: Pop Culture and U.S. Power (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2014), 32.
56. Oscar V. Campomanes, “Casualty Figures of the American Soldier and the
Other: Post-1898 Allegories of Imperial Nation-Building as ‘Love and War,’” in Ves-
tiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream,

434 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

1899–1999, ed. Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 2002), 136.
57. On the American press’s idolization of Dewey, see Miller, From Liberation to
Conquest, 247–48.
58. Omaha Bee, October 26, 1898, 7.
59. Omaha Bee, October 16, 1898, 15; Omaha World-Herald, August 1, 1898, 8.
60. Although reproductions of the Battle of Manila Bay often termed it the “Bat-
tle of Manila,” this should not be confused with the 1898 Battle of Manila, which
was a land battle between Spanish and U.S. forces on August 13. This engagement
was characterized as a “sham battle” by the Denver Sunday Post, December 11, 1898,
4, because Dewey and Maj. Gen. Wesley Merritt made an agreement with Fermín
Jaudines for Spanish surrender of the city to U.S. forces after a battle where the
U.S. “fleet [was] to bombard Malate fort, and the army to storm the trenches.” This
arrangement was made to keep Manila from the Philippine revolutionary forces.
61. According to the Omaha Bee, October 26, 1898, 7, this was “a mammoth dou-
ble track tunnel of 900 feet.”
62. Omaha Bee, August 14, 1898, 22. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest, 10, notes
that after the Battle of Manila Bay, “McKinley fortified U.S. power in the Philippines
by creating the Department of the Pacific under the command of Major General
Wesley Merritt. This set in motion the U.S. occupation of the Philippines months
before McKinley demanded that Spain cede the entire archipelago.”
63. The introduction of the Philippines to the American public via Dewey’s naval
victory was particularly apparent in the McCook Tribune (Nebraska), July 7, 1899, 6,
which stated that “it was the reverberating echoes of the valiant Dewey’s unerring
guns that fixed in the American vocabulary the word Filipino.”
64. During the 1898 Battle of Manila Bay, Emilio Aguinaldo, then leader of the
Philippine Revolution, was in exile due to the terms of an 1897 pact with the Span-
ish colonial government, known as the Biak-na-Bato. While in exile, Aguinaldo
negotiated with American officials, stating that American consul E. Spencer Pratt
“promised American support for Filipino independence.” Aguinaldo returned to the
Philippines on May 19, “ready to resume the revolution,” and subsequently began
to negotiate with Dewey, also stating that Dewey “promised the Philippines inde-
pendence.” David J. Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American
War, 1899–1902 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 36, 41.
65. Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American Inter-
national Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 120,
writes that the Scenic Railway was a site that “stressed patriotic and imperial themes”
at the exposition.
66. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest, 95.
67. Official Guide Book to the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition
(Omaha: Megeath Stationery, 1898), 118.
68. Omaha Bee, August 14, 1898, 22.
69. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 120. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest, 179, notes
that these peace celebrations, which were held throughout the country, “expressed
American imperialist ideologies by celebrating U.S. military achievements without
acknowledging the contributions of Cuban and Filipino forces.”

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 435

 70. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest, 184–85.
71. Milwaukee Journal, October 12, 1898, 1.
72. McKinley, quoted in Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 121.
73. Omaha World-Herald, October 12, 1898, 1.
74. Milwaukee Journal, October 12, 1898, 1. Army and Navy Day was held the day
after President’s Day at the exposition. Omaha Bee, October 10, 1898, 1.
75. Omaha Bee, June 28, 1899, 7.
76. Colorado Spring Gazette, July 23, 1899, 7.
77. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest, 233, asserts that the 1899 Battle of Manila
was also closely connected to the 1899 Treaty of Paris, which “formalized U.S. pos-
session of the Philippines.” She writes that the battle began “two days before the
Senate ratified the treaty” and while “Americans initiated this confrontation, at the
time U.S. military and press accounts related the incident to the American public
as an act of Filipino aggression, confirming the narrative of ‘necessity’ rationaliz-
ing U.S. guardianship.”
78. Thomas D. Thiessen, “The Fighting First Nebraska: Nebraska’s Imperial Adven-
ture in the Philippines, 1898–1899,” Nebraska History 70 (1989): 235, 240.
79. Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 2000), 8.
80. This trend of upholding the Spanish-American War and erasing the Philippine-
American War is also evident in contemporary war monuments, as Oscar V. Cam-
pomanes, “Casualty Figures of the American Soldier and the Other,” 137, states that
there is an “odd chronological displacement of the Philippine-American War by
the Spanish-American War in and through the memorial inscriptions on existing
national monuments.”
81. Miller, “Incoherencies of Empire,” 57–58. See Jonathan Auerbach, “McKin-
ley at Home: How Early American Cinema Made News,” American Quarterly 51,
no. 4 (1999): 815.
82. While the Greater America Exposition had a Philippine Village, it is unlikely
that one existed at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition. Although one
article from the World-Herald, October 26, 1898, 2, briefly mentions that a party of
“Manila warriors” were expected to “exhibit their customs, dances, and war imple-
ments at the Labyrinth,” there is no further verification to indicate that Filipinos and
a Philippine Village were present at this exposition.
83. Omaha World-Herald, May 21, 1899, 27.
84. Omaha World-Herald, June 25, 1899, 28. Miller, From Liberation to Con-
quest, 244, and “The Incoherencies of Empire,” 57, also paraphrases this article in
her description of the village. Regarding the rhetoric of “authenticity” surrounding
the Philippine Village, Michael C. Hawkins, “Undecided Empire: The Travails of
Imperial Representation of Filipinos at the Greater America Exposition, 1899,” Phil-
ippine Studies 63, no. 3 (2015): 352, asserts, “Of all the characterizations deployed to
hype and market the Philippine Village, ‘authenticity’ undoubtedly took primacy.”
85. Omaha World-Herald, June 25, 1899, 28. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest,
243, writes that the Greater America Exposition “was the first of its kind to display
‘living’ subjects from U.S.-controlled territories, in three large colonial displays posi-
tioned on the midway.”

436 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

 86. Omaha Bee, July 4, 1899, 7, August 10, 1899, 5.
87. Germain Towl, Omaha World-Herald, November 11, 1899, 9, wrote that Fili-
pinos at the Philippine Village “were miserable and washed repeatedly and often in
the yellow waters of the buffalo wallow in the rear of the village, their exclamations
of disgust at the blowing dust mingling with their involuntary exclamations at tak-
ing an unwarmed dip on a chill October morning.” The Hawaiian Gazette, Novem-
ber 7, 1899, 1, reported that Filipinos from the Philippine Village were stranded in
San Francisco after leaving the exposition due to not receiving pay for two months,
despite the fact that their contract included “all their expenses paid and some of
them were to receive $5 a month in addition.”
88. Towl, Omaha World-Herald, November 11, 1899, 9.
89. Hawkins, “Undecided Empire,” 347.
90. Omaha World-Herald, June 25, 1899, 28, 30.
91. Hawkins, “Undecided Empire,” 346, notes that the editors of the Omaha Bee
and the Omaha World-Herald “were wholly committed to embracing the debate
within the context of the exposition. Hence impassioned pleas for independence
from educated Filipinos and fiery anti-imperial speeches from William Jennings
Bryan were found alongside progress reports from the war and animated accounts
of economic opportunities in the islands.”
92. It is important to note that this racist logic was also used by anti-imperialists.
Miller, “Incoherencies of Empire,” 41, asserts that those who supported imperialism
“often predicated their arguments on the alleged racial inferiority and primitivism
of non-white subjects. The objections of the anti-imperialists, however, who argued
against incorporation based on the same perceived racial lens . . . indicate that this
racial paradigm is not definitively imperialistic.”
93. For a discussion of the Philippines’ status as an unincorporated U.S. territory,
see Allan Punzalan Isaac, American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 3–15.
94. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest, 237, writes that the Philippine-American
War was intimately connected to racist depictions of Filipinos as uncivilized.
95. Hawkins, “Undecided Empire,” 344, also notes that the press’s advertisement
for the Philippine Village was ironically displayed next to reports of the ongoing
Philippine-American War.
96. Omaha World-Herald, March 19, 1899, 6.
97. Omaha World-Herald, May 11, 1899, 5. While General Otis felt that trans-
porting Filipinos to Omaha would deter U.S. military campaigns in the archipel-
ago, Assistant Secretary of War George de Rue Meiklejohn actively supported the
Philippine Village. Miller, “Incoherencies of Empire,” 57, notes that he arranged for
the transportation of Filipinos to San Francisco, and when immigration authorities
refused to let them enter at San Francisco, Meiklejohn “resolved the crisis, assuring
authorities that the War Department would take responsibility for their return.” See
also Hawkins, “Undecided Empire,” 348–52.
98. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest, 246.
99. Omaha World-Herald, June 25, 1899, 28.
100. Thiessen, “The Fighting First Nebraska,” 210.
101. Hawkins, “Undecided Empire,” 345.

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 437

 102. Omaha Bee, August 30, 1899, 5.
103. Omaha World-Herald, August 31, 1899, 5. Although George Miller was a
Democrat and seemed to celebrate “peace” in his address to the regiment, he none-
theless aligned himself with the United States’ ongoing imperial war by stressing
the necessity of the soldiers’ presence in the Philippines.
104. Thiessen, “The Fighting First Nebraska,” 219.
105. Omaha World-Herald, August 31, 1899, 5, 8.
106. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest, 244.
107. Omaha World-Herald, August 31, 1899, 8. Miller, From Liberation to Con-
quest, 244–45, and “The Incoherencies of Empire,” 57, quotes this section of the arti-
cle in her discussions of the Philippine Village at the Greater America Exposition.
108. Being taken prisoner by U.S. forces in the Philippine-American War often
entailed being tortured. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire,
the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2006), 140, writes that the “most notorious form of torture by the American
side, if far from the only one, was the ‘water cure,’ in which a captured Filipino was
interrogated while drowned with buckets of filthy water poured into his mouth.”
109. Dylan Rodríguez, Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and
the Filipino Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 131, 125.
110. Kramer, The Blood of Government, 157. Prostitution and the spread of venereal
diseases were also significant factors in the war. Paul A. Kramer, “The Military-Sexual
Complex: Prostitution, Disease, and the Boundaries of Empire during the Philippine-
American War,” Asia-Pacific Journal 9, no. 2 (2011): 1–34; 2, 23–24, notes that the U.S.
Army established a program for inspecting sex workers that cast “‘native women’ as
the ‘source’ of venereal disease and the exclusive objects of inspection, treatment, and
isolation.” U.S. soldiers with venereal diseases in the Philippines were nicknamed
“Rough Riders,” a name which “possibly legitimated aggressive or coerced sex”—
hinting at the sexual abuse inherent in U.S. military campaigns in the Philippines.
111. One of the more notorious incidents of the U.S. military’s scorched earth and
genocidal policies in the Philippines was in 1901 when Gen. Jacob H. Smith ordered
U.S. soldiers in Samar “to kill everyone over ten and turn the interior of the island
into a ‘howling wilderness.’” Linn, The Philippine War, 306.
112. Weekly Messenger (Louisiana), March 25, 1899, 4. This article noted that U.S.
military campaigns in the Philippines contradicted the seemingly benevolent rheto-
ric of the U.S. civilizing mission: “The burning of houses and rice fields, the destruc-
tion of sugar mills and other industries for the purpose of depriving the Filipinos of
resources can scarcely be called ‘benevolent assimilation,’ or even ‘a war of humanity.’”
113. The U.S. military’s scorched earth policies are generally attributed to later in
the war when guerrilla warfare began in November 1899. But written accounts by
U.S. soldiers show that genocidal and scorched earth tactics were being used as early
as spring of 1899. See Kramer, The Blood of Government, 143–44.
114. Omaha World-Herald, August 31, 1899, 8.
115. Kramer, The Blood of Government, 102.
116. Omaha World-Herald, June 4, 1899, 2.
117. Another article from the Omaha World-Herald, August 31, 1899, 5, reported that
the Nebraskan “volunteers appeared to enjoy the meeting as well as did the Filipinos.”

438 stacy l. kamehiro & danielle b. crawford

 118. Hawkins, “Undecided Empire,” 348, notes that even depictions of Filipinos
at the Philippine Village did not produce stable narratives, as objectified Filipinos
were nonetheless given a certain amount of agency that allowed them to “problema-
tize a burgeoning but yet undefined imperial discourse.”
119. Thompson, Imperial Archipelago, 73–77.
120. Imperial America’s textual description of the Philippines anticipates the end
of the war and the vast fortunes to be made by Americans: “Some of the scenes are
very beautiful, and after the insurgents are pacified, we do not doubt but that many
enterprising Americans will strike out to make their homes and fortunes in these,
our new and beautiful possessions,” n.p.
121. Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in
Hawai‘i and the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 10–12, notes the
symbolic significance of the inclusion of the uss Boston in the American fleet that
invaded Manila Bay in 1898, linking this event to the role of this ship in the over-
throw of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893. Gonzalez also asserts that Hawai‘i and the
Philippines were connected through the routes of the U.S. military-industrial com-
plex and Hawai‘i’s plantation economy. While Hawai‘i served as a refueling station
for U.S. military campaigns in the Philippines, Filipinos were also sent to work on
Hawaiian plantations.
122. Thompson, Imperial Archipelago, 164; see also Gonzalez, Securing Paradise, 148.

hawai ‘ i and the philippines 439

Afterword
The Art of the Historian
timothy schaffert

There is a launch on the lagoon [of the Trans-Mississippi and International Expo-
sition] in the shape of a swan and I wish it would bepuff itself off to another
world. It jars on the senses with its nervous manner and progressive airs, and
reminds me of a fussy, old maid; one almost sees the corkscrew curls bobbing.
—“Society on the Midway,” Omaha Bee, June 26, 1898

Such fussiness seems to contradict not only the intent of the swan-
shaped yacht’s designers (who meant, perhaps, to convey a touch
of romance and whimsy) but also that of the exposition’s manag-
ers and promoters. That boat floats at the periphery of the “offi-
cial” photographs of the exposition’s Grand Court, or “White City,”
taken by F. A. Rinehart. An illustration of the swan boat appears
on one of the souvenir postcards and in a full-page drawing pub-
lished in the October 8, 1898, edition of Harper’s Weekly (fig. 71).
Titled The Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha—Illumination
of the Grounds at Night, the swan boat, loaded with passengers in
elaborate hats, docks at the center of W. A. Rogers’s atmospheric
portrait of the exposition’s beauty and charm.
The exposition was rigorously committed to its flimsily con-
structed façades, from its paste-and-horsehair Acropolis to its his-
torical and cultural misrepresentations, as discussed in the essays
in this book. The “rhetorical enthusiasm” and “empire building”
defined in Sarah J. Moore’s essay is an extension of the exposi-

441
tion’s smaller-scale mythmaking. The commemorative and souve-
nir materials in Bonnie Miller’s essay on the Omaha stamp issue;
the conflicts and complexities of the Indian Congress in Akim
Reinhardt’s chapter; the nationalist and internationalist imagery
examined in the chapter by Stacy L. Kamehiro and Danielle B.
Crawford—these all provide the evidence that leads Robert Rydell
to put “facts” and “authenticity” in quotation marks in his intro-
duction. In some of the exposition’s most grandiose fabrications,
there is no there there.
Rogers’s exaggeration of the swan boat’s elegance, however, seems
as much an act of generosity as anything else; it is fairly harmless
in its coy fluttering and perhaps self-consciously playful. It none-
theless speaks to Omaha’s desire to assert itself into the national
conversation as civilized and sophisticated, as a leader of indus-
try, technology, politics, and art. While it had the East’s attention,
it would offer its own carefully constructed and contradictory cel-
ebrations of the West. It would stand in salute to a war that itself
hinged on illusion. The Spanish-American War owed much to the
yellow journalism that aroused nationalist passions with its pur-
poseful misreporting. The Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition’s stories, its portraiture and distortion, its collapsible
White City: all seem a foretelling of the movie-making empire that
would soon become one of the West’s most influential industries
and global exports.

The Historical Novel

While some reporters found the swan boat to be an enticing
reflection of the actual swans that floated along the lagoon, oth-
ers commented on the noise and stench of it, the steam that spewed
comically from its beak, and the wake it left in the otherwise still
waters. Unlike the Venetian-styled gondolas rowed by gondoliers,
the swan boat was an “electro-vapor,” carnivalesque yacht chug-
ging determinedly along the length of the Grand Court.1
When researching the exposition for a novel set in Omaha in
1898, I was both bemused and captivated by the swan boat. The
vehicle immediately lodged itself at the heart of the novel’s sum-
mer romance and eventually served as a central metaphor, lend-

442 timothy schaffert

Fig. 71. William Allen Rogers, The Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha—
Illumination of the Grounds at Night, from Harper’s Weekly, October 8, 1898,
985. View looks west, toward the U.S. Government Building, with a statue of
Liberty atop its dome. At left: Liberal Arts Building and Fine Arts Building.
Swan boat and gondola in lagoon. Artwork in the public domain.
ing the book its title: The Swan Gondola. The exposition was a
heady whirl of artifice and invention, of high-minded ethnologi-
cal exhibit and lowbrow exploitation. The swan boat, so key to the
exposition’s apparent sense of self, seemed capable of defining for
my novel’s readers the exposition’s fakery and obfuscation as well as
its vulnerability to (and indulgence of) hokum and showmanship.
For the purposes of historical document, I might have felt tasked
with outlining all the boat’s contradictions—I was, after all, intent
on creating an authentic (rather than “authentic”) portrait of life
in the turn-of-the-century American West. What might the boat’s
minor controversies suggest about the culture of the exposition
and the sensibilities of the fairgoers?
When writing about the swan boat as a historian, I expand and
extrapolate. I consider the perspectives and preoccupations of the
twenty-first-century reader and define the fair’s material culture
accordingly. I assess the value of that swan boat and support that
assessment with research and documentation. But as a novelist, I
approximate. History must be bent to serve the story, even as I seek
to create a vivid actuality, a portrait of the time and its people. To
speak with authority, I must narrow the novel’s vision. Too much
information, too much material detail, leads a reader to distrust
the novelist’s insights; alternatively, too little evidence in the anal-
ysis of an object or event threatens our confidence in the historian
and scholar. But with both the historical novel and the historical
essay, the reader is poised to believe and longing to be convinced.
The boat in The Swan Gondola, as described by the novel’s first-
person narrator, an entertainer named Ferret, is a somewhat bat-
tered tribute to love and delicate beauty. As Ferret explains, “The
swan boat, though pretty with its frail, curved neck, needed paint.”2
Its velvet cushions were faded. The wooden feathers were the color
of a dirty egg. And while this fictional boat is somewhat of a wreck,
it’s a different kind of wreck than that described in the firsthand
newspaper reports. And neither is it the romantic ideal captured
by the illustrators of the day. But I wanted to link the boat’s charac-
ter to a news item about the gondoliers who rowed their gondolas
“through the Rivers Cumberland, Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri” in
their journey from Nashville’s exposition to Omaha. “They erected

444 timothy schaffert

a small cabin over each to keep out the wind and rain as much as
possible,” the Omaha Bee reported.
Though the swan boat wasn’t likely part of that procession, the
journey and the imagery of the gondolas in the thick of winter
communicates the challenges facing the nation’s entertainers at the
time—that vision of travel is a spectacle that rivals the exposition
itself. The river adventure eventually led the gondoliers to the expo-
sition’s man-made canal of contained river water, where fairgoers
boarded for a safe and tranquil ride, with the actual muddy Mis-
souri River rushing along just east of the fairground’s edge. And
from these bits and pieces of truth and fiction I found my hero-
ine. The narrator imagines her sailing up the river: “I had pictured
Cecily bundled in furs on a gondola’s pillowed bench, beneath a
candy-striped awning, a kettle of hot tea on a tiny gas stove, like
some Russian duchess.”
There’s much that historians can interpret about the social and
cultural attitudes of the 1890s based on the documents and mate-
rials remaining from the exposition. What’s more challenging is
distinguishing the individual’s voice, the private motivations and
feelings of the men, women, and children who attended the fair,
who were employed by the vendors, who lived in the city or trav-
eled from small towns and farms far away. Political speeches and
official reports can’t fathom the hearts of the 2.6 million people
who visited the expo. But I’ve seen few personal reminiscences of
the fair beyond a line or two on a postcard or in a diary. So we’re
left with the collectibles, the pieces saved and passed along, and
we read between the lines of the newspaper reports for any unex-
pressed truths.

Meaningful Detritus
At eBay.com is a sloppy, aimless, ever-shifting, never-ending, mass-
curated gallery of Omaha exposition remnants. Over the years I’ve
seen for sale scrapbooks of amateur photographs, employee passes,
Midway tickets, souvenir spoons, teacups, medallions, ruby-red
wineglasses etched with “Omaha Expo ’98,” jewelry boxes, embroi-
dered handkerchiefs, and an endless parade of buttons commemo-
rating everyone from President McKinley to notable belly dancers.

afterword 445
 I sifted through these items, attached them to characters, and
attempted to make them work. But the characters only held onto
some of them; unless an item revealed (or concealed) something
vital about the character, it ran the risk of littering the page and
detracting from the world of the story instead of adding to it.
During my research for The Swan Gondola, I felt particularly
drawn to the auction of a “scent bottle” made of abalone shell; fur-
ther research led me to believe that the bottle was not designed
for perfume but rather for fragrant seeds—when you twisted the
bottle’s stopper, a stick attached to the stopper broke the seeds and
released the scent. Across the shell, someone had inked “Omaha
Exposition 1898.” This bottle, with a link on the end of it, ended
up on Cecily’s bracelet.
Cecily’s taste in jewelry and fashion evolved from a weekly
section in the Omaha Bee. Titled “In the Domain of Woman,”
the articles provided a tantalizing glimpse into the fashions of
living in the 1890s. From this page I learned about unexpected
trends—young women getting tattoos, for example. I learned
about silk squares embedded with the jewel-like backs of bee-
tles bought in Egyptian markets. And I’m still uncertain about
the veracity of the newspaper’s article on wearing live chame-
leons as brooches, though the pbs program Antiques Roadshow
once featured a ring and chain attached to a pin, believed to have
been a decorative chameleon’s leash.
I so loved the concept behind the composite portrait of the
“ideal” western woman, which is examined in Tracey Jean Bois-
seau’s essay, that I attempted to introduce the women who mod-
eled for the medallion in a scene in The Swan Gondola. But I found
it difficult to efficiently convey what I found interesting about the
medallion, and the artist’s approach seemed more discordant in
fiction than in fact, more concealing than revealing. Instead, I
found myself most tantalized by the debates on “dress reform,” as
led by Susan B. Anthony. Anthony’s lectures in Omaha during the
summer of the exposition led me to an Omaha window dresser
named Pearl, a character who proved integral in addressing some
of the roles of women and gender that Boisseau discusses.3 And

446 timothy schaffert

the more I learned about the world in which Pearl lived, the more
I could identify her efforts to challenge cultural expectations. She
doesn’t just dress mannequins in department store displays but
also runs the electricity and designs the mechanics that bring the
mannequins to life. Her window display of women cycling in pants
leads to picketing lifted right from the papers of the day—such a
uniform could be a woman’s undoing, according to the protestors.

Cather’s Objects
In her essay “The Novel Démeublé,” Willa Cather criticizes the
“over-furnished” novel. She insists that novelists must “interpret
imaginatively the material and social investiture of their charac-
ters,” rather than pursuing realism via “the cataloguing of a great
number of material objects.” She writes: “If the novel is a form
of imaginative art, it cannot be at the same time a vivid and bril-
liant form of journalism.”4 Cather likens this cataloging also with
the “mechanical industry of a department store window-dresser.”
Cather takes Honoré Balzac to task for his ambitions “to repro-
duce on paper the actual city of Paris,” yet commends Leo Tolstoy,
who “was almost as great a lover of material things.” But she cites a
determining difference: “the clothes, the dishes, the moving, haunt-
ing interiors of those old Moscow houses, are always so much a
part of the emotions of the people that they are perfectly synthe-
sized; they seem to exist, not so much in the author’s mind, as in
the emotional penumbra of the characters themselves. When it
is fused like this, literalness ceases to be literalness—it is merely
part of the experience.”
For decades, generations of Willa Cather devotees have com-
mitted much time, research, money, and resources to dedicating
Red Cloud, Nebraska—a small community just north of the Kan-
sas border (with a population of about 2,000 people)—to the life
and works of its most famous daughter. You can visit buildings
and houses described in her novels and stories; you can see objects
under glass that furnish her characters’ homes and offices. Most
memorable is a musical doll that she recalled from her childhood
and described in O Pioneers! (1913): Carl smiled. “Yes, I remem-

afterword 447
ber that time. Your uncle bought you some kind of a mechanical
toy, a Turkish lady sitting on an ottoman and smoking a hookah,
wasn’t it? And she turned her head backwards and forwards.”5
Though it is certainly a charming artifact, our seeing the actual
music box fails to inform our sense of the scene in the novel—for
Willa Cather, the music box sparked her imagination and found its
way into the lives of her characters. But to the rest of us, it’s some-
thing else; it’s a curiosity that gives the illusion of insight into the
creative process. The fictional music box, though described exactly
in O Pioneers!, bears only a passing resemblance to the music box
on display in the museum case. As writers, when we bring the
outside into our work, we should give it back to the reader for-
ever altered. We’re not preservationists or archivists, no matter
how autobiographical our fiction. Whatever items our characters
pluck from our real lives should then become wholly their own.
Yes, you can view that Turkish lady music box, but Cather—and
her characters—stole it long ago.
Though Cather seems to imply that a “cataloging” of material
objects could make for “brilliant journalism,” the journalist and
the historian are more likely inclined toward the novelist’s “imagi-
native interpretation” of materials. Whether writing about the past
or the present, the journalist rifles through the detritus, squints at
documents, deciphers handwriting, and connects the dots until a
story emerges. And if several disparate stories emerge, the jour-
nalist, the scholar, and the historian rely on insight and instinct to
sort the likely from the unlikely, even as they seek the threads to
tie it all together. We want our readers to draw conclusions. So the
imagination of the historian must contend with the imaginations
of those journalists who witnessed and recorded and the rigorous
fictions invented to enhance and elevate or to deceive and demean.

The Undescribed
Each day of the exposition in 1898, the Omaha Bee featured a front-
page article that contributed to the myth-making. Edward Rose-
water, the paper’s publisher and editor, was also the exposition’s
publicity manager. These articles often initiated a high-octane
hyperbole that ultimately reduced the emotional, intellectual, and

448 timothy schaffert

visual impact of the event to such nondescriptions as “indescrib-
able” or “unlike anything else,” or by likening the event to fantasy
and illusion. The Omaha Bee described the exposition on June
1, 1898, on the event’s opening day: “Palaces of art and indus-
try appeared as though fashioned from some low hanging cloud,
their soaring domes and pinnacles resplendent in the June sun-
shine and their wide stretches of court and promenade gorgeous
with the bloom and fragrance of Oriental gardens.”
While the Bee suggested, in its assessment of the White City,
“that some long forgotten magician had escaped from the dingy
covers of an ancient fairy tale and caressed the bare expanse of
bluff and stubble with his creative wand,” the writers themselves
were the magicians and fabulists. If we look past the fog of that
“low hanging cloud,” and past the paper’s front pages, a different
portrait of the city begins to take shape. Starting at about page 5
of the daily’s twelve-page editions, the Bee tells the stories of pick-
pockets and charlatans, public drunkenness and spousal abuse,
murder and suicide. The Bee’s readership demanded a depiction
of a city of which they could be proud, but they also expected a
titillating glimpse of the city’s underbelly. Unless they could repu-
diate the behaviors of their social inferiors, how could they feel
properly superior?
The Bee, perhaps arrogantly, published the comments of an
unnamed Iowa newspaper editor who reported, “Omaha is the
deadest, dirtiest, and most dilapidated town we ever saw. . . . Omaha
is already dead as a mackerel and by the time the fair is over there
won’t be enough of the town left to pay for burying.”6 Or perhaps
the newspaper hoped to obfuscate through its transparency. Why,
we’re expected to wonder, would the Bee delight in the insult unless
the reports of Omaha’s death were greatly exaggerated?
But the city’s health might also be gauged by the Bee’s adver-
tisements—or, at least, we can gauge its health anxieties. Luridly
illustrated ads for patent medicines promoted cures for flux, stric-
ture, lost manhood, falling or displacement of the womb, spi-
nal weakness, chronic diarrhea, blood poisoning, bad blood, and
undeveloped and shrunken parts. Womanhood, in general, was
pathologized: if you were tired, sad, or burdened by your corsets

afterword 449
and housework, you were advised to guzzle cure-alls such as Syrup
of Fig, Mariani Wine, and Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.
In the days before regulation by the Food and Drug Administra-
tion, these laxatives and concoctions were, at best, worthless; at
their worst, they were lethal. Profiteers mixed concoctions of mor-
phine, grain alcohol, and cocaine, copywriters invented ailments
for the cocktails to cure, and fake doctors endorsed the nostrums.
Meanwhile, real illnesses were left untreated, depending on the
city’s sense of decency and the social standing of the afflicted. If it
weren’t for the false promises of mail-order remedies, there’d be
little hope at all in some cases. Syphilis affected many of the city’s
prostitutes (and those prostitutes served many of the city’s visi-
tors during the exposition), but the city council sought to keep
the epidemic from sullying Omaha’s image. In the council’s pub-
lished ordinances throughout the 1890s, it is declared
unlawful for any person to sell or offer to sell, give away or offer to give
away, distribute or have in his or her possession with intent to give
away, sell, distribute or cause to be distributed in or upon any street,
avenue, sidewalk, park or other public place in the city of Omaha,
any book, pamphlet, circular, handbill, advertisement, or notice of
any kind, purporting to treat, or treating of diseases known as “vene-
real diseases” or giving information from whom or where medicine
or treatment of any such disease can be obtained or describing or
explaining, or purporting to describe or explain, the genital organs,
giving or purporting to give, the nature and remedies of disease pecu-
liar to females or of uterine disease, or the nature or cause of nervous
debility, impotence, sterility, or barrenness, gonorrhea, gleet, stricture,
syphilis, affection of the prostate gland, or the remedies thereof, or
the cause or remedy for abortion or miscarriage, or articles or means
for preventing conception.7

The ordinance is so thorough in its criminalizing of any discus-

sion of venereal disease and reproductive organs that it could be
in violation of itself. And certainly the daily newspaper relied on
the income from such unlawful advertising in order to afford to
celebrate the city of Omaha and to promote the exposition’s por-
trait of progress, influence, and sophistication.

450 timothy schaffert

Up-to-Date Evils
In contrast to the exposition’s pristine White City, and its fairy-tale
interpretation of the newly civilized Wild West, was the Midway,
which featured vendors, carnival rides, and entertainments that
fell outside the exposition board’s design. The “cultural” exhib-
its of the Midway played to white fairgoers’ willful ignorance and
delight in minstrelsy, exoticism, and stereotype. The Midway’s “Old
Plantation,” via music and dance, purported to depict slave life in
the antebellum American South. The “Moorish Palace” included a
chamber of horrors (featuring scenes of cannibalism), the “Sultan’s
Harem,” and the “Devil’s Cave.” The Wild West show employed
white actors playing Indians as savages in scenes of battle, abduc-
tion, and stagecoach hijack.
These exhibits were managed by independent contractors who
moved from fair to fair with their stages and cycloramas, and
ultimately stood in contrast to the exposition’s intentions to edu-
cate and inform in the buildings of the White City. A “converted
singer” by the name of John E. Main recognized how the Mid-
way’s decadence and exploitation challenged the White City’s fic-
tions. In Main’s The Booze Route: A Reform Book on Some of the
Up-to-Date Evils of the Age (1907), the Omaha Midway shows up
as early as page 8.
People came to the Fair and sent their tender boys and girls to see
the great Exposition of the different states. They did not know that
they would come in contact with the vilest men and women the earth
could produce. . . . There were thousands of innocent, tender boys at
this Exposition that got enough of the vile and the depravity to last
them for life. . . . Plenty of large pavilions, vaudeville stages and seats
around, thousands and thousands of tables with all kinds of liquors
served. Thousands of boys and girls away from home and friends
were led to take their first drink in these pavilions and vaudeville
theater saloons.8

Main goes on to say that the Midway’s exhibits were staffed by

“the worst depraved Hop Heads, opium, cocaine and cigarette

afterword 451
fiends, libertines, seducers, thieves, crooks, dips, ex-cons and the
worst toughs on earth.”
Thomas Kimball, the architect of the exposition, boasted to
Harper’s Bazaar that “the Omaha Exposition enjoys the distinc-
tion of being the first actual white city. Chicago was so called
because there was nothing else to compare it with, but in fact the
Chicago buildings were painted a very pale brown. Those here are
pure white, or were when the exposition opened. Nature and the
smelting works, however, are playing the artists we need, for they
are toning them down from the dazzling purity which was a men-
ace to the eye.”9 Historians, scholars, journalists, and other writers
have also sullied that menacing and dazzling purity. The White
City was, literally and metaphorically, a feeble carapace that fell to
ruin in the face of Omaha’s true, grittier nature. And those tem-
porary, plaster-of-Paris buildings weren’t just turning to shades of
soot; parts of them were crumbling away. By July, the rotunda of
the Nebraska Building had fallen into a fountain.10 For the novel-
ist, the facts are almost too like fiction; they seem invented, pre-
interpreted, conveniently communicating social themes.
In the early stages of writing my novel, I entertained the idea
of having the book follow the exposition calendar, remaining true
not just to the schedule of events but to the weather, the accidents,
the phases of the moon. There was one particularly dramatic day
when the sword swallower was stabbed (by someone other than
himself), the lion tamer was bitten on the head, and the ten-year-
old son of a Chinese magician died suddenly. I was intrigued by
the creative challenges of writing a novel in which the characters
were truly citizens of that place and time, their lives projected
against all the chaos and industry.
But, in a novel, a historical fact isn’t inherently dramatic just for
having happened; without relating to the “emotional penumbra” of
characters, as Cather phrased it, it’s all just yesterday’s news. I was
initially inclined to include the 1899 Greater America Exposition
in The Swan Gondola, but it failed to interest me enough; it inter-
ested me more to let the 1898 one collapse into ruin, turning the
fairgrounds into a ghost town, its decay a metaphor for the grim
moralities embraced by the Trans-Mississippi Exposition leaders.

452 timothy schaffert

 Any impulse to overfurnish was perhaps less a creative one than
a desire to exist in the past, to step into the events and imagine
the world forming around me, to experience this vanished world
firsthand. Historians will always partly suspect that they’ve got it
all wrong, regretting the inability to live in the past and speak to
the future.

Notes
1. “Gondoliers Coming by Water,” Omaha Bee, November 15, 1897, 8.
2. Timothy Schaffert, The Swan Gondola (New York: Penguin, 2014), 67.
3. “What Women Should Wear,” Omaha Bee, October 29, 1898, 5. Anthony spoke
at the National Council of Women’s Congress, organized by the Woman’s Board,
and she chaired Suffrage Day.
4. Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé,” New Republic, April 12, 1922, 5–6. Avail-
able at Willa Cather Archive, www.cather.unl.edu.
5. Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 138.
6. “In Return for Favors Shown,” Omaha Bee, August 8, 1898, 5.
7. W. J. Connell, Compiled Misdemeanor Ordinances of the City of Omaha (Omaha:
Klopp & Bartlett, 1894), 19.
8. John E. Main, The Booze Route (Los Angeles: Commercial Printing House,
1907), 8.
9. M.H.W., “Women’s Field at the Omaha Exposition,” Harper’s Bazaar, July 23,
1898, 628.
10. The plaster contracts for the Nebraska State Building were controversial. The
low bid was from Kimball Bros. of Lincoln, inside and outside for $1,500, plus all the
staff work except statuary for $3,100 (they later got the statuary contract for $1,200).
But Kimball subcontracted the work to Omaha firm Hester & McCaslin, which hired
workers for 35 cents a yard rather than union scale of 50 cents. The state commis-
sion in charge of the Nebraska Building had agreed to pay employees union scale
and keep an eight-hour day, but it couldn’t enforce this on a contractor; the Omaha
Bee and the Western Laborer protested. The Nebraska commissioners got Kimball
to agree to pay union wages (though not to hire union men), but complaints came
in as early as February 1898 that the buildings were being put up in an uneven and
crooked if rapid manner. In April more leaks and plaster falling led to a new con-
tract with an Omaha firm (L. D. Walsh), and a deduction of $780 from the Kim-
ball contract to cover it. Hester & McCaslin sued Kimball Bros. for the additional
money to cover the higher wages, and Kimball in turn sued the Nebraska commis-
sioners for the money to cover the difference. Silas Holcomb Papers, Nebraska State
Historical Society.

afterword 453
Selected Bibliography

This bibliography collects secondary published sources on the

two expositions, including theses. The main exclusion was books/
articles cited by the authors in this volume that did not pertain to
either the 1898 or 1899 exposition. For relevant government doc-
uments, personal papers, and ephemera including pamphlets, see
notes to individual chapters.
Alfers, Kenneth G. “Triumph of the West: The Trans-Mississippi Exposition.” Nebraska
History 53 (1972): 312–29.
Auerbach, Jonathan. “McKinley at Home: How Early American Cinema Made News.”
American Quarterly 51, no. 4 (1999): 797–832.
Batie, David L. “Thomas Rogers Kimball: Was He a Nebraska Architect?” Master’s
thesis, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 1977.
Baxter, Sylvester. “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha.” Harper’s Weekly,
October 30, 1897, 1080–82.
Beam, Patrice Kay. “The Last Victorian Fair: The Trans-Mississippi Exposition.” Jour-
nal of the American West 33, no. 1 (January 1994): 10–23.
Bebok, Horace M. “The First Continental Congress of North American Indians.”
Midland Monthly Magazine 11 (February 1899): 102–11.
Bigart, Robert, and Clarence Woodcock. “The Rinehart Photographs: A Portfolio.”
Montana: The Magazine of Western History 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1979): 24–37.
—. “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition and the Flathead Delegation.” Montana:
The Magazine of Western History 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1979): 14–23.
Bolz, Peter. “More Questions than Answers: Frank A. Rinehart’s Photographs of Amer-
ican Indians.” European Review of Native American Studies 8, no. 2 (1994): 35–43.
Brennan, Sheila A. “Stamping American Memory: Stamp Collecting in the U.S.,
1880s–1930s.” Master’s thesis, University of Notre Dame, 1996.
Cajka, Liz. Westward the Empire: Omaha’s World Fair of 1898. Omaha: University
of Nebraska, 1998.
Carey, Grace. “Music at the Fair! The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposi-
tion. An Interactive Website.” Digital Commons @ University of Nebraska–
Lincoln, 2006.
Clough, Josh. “‘Vanishing’ Indians? Cultural Persistence on Display at the Omaha
World’s Fair of 1898.” Great Plains Quarterly 25, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 67–86.

455
Detroit Museum of Art. Sixty-Four Paintings from the Trans-Mississippi Exposition,
December 20, 1898, Closing January 15, 1899. Detroit: Detroit Museum of Art, 1898.
Edwards, Douglas Michael. “Fair Days in the ‘Zone of Plenty’: Exhibit Networks
and the Development of the American West.” PhD diss., University of Mary-
land, College Park, 2001.
Etzel, J. Brent. “A Serious Ethnological Exhibition.” PhD diss., Illinois State Uni-
versity, 2006.
Fletcher, Alice C. “The Indian at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition.” Southern Work-
man 27 (November 1898): 216–17.
Gale, Kira. Buffalo Bill and Geronimo at the Trans-Miss. Omaha: River Junction
Press, 1998.
“Glimpses of Indian Life at the Omaha Exposition.” American Monthly Review of
Reviews 18 (October 1898): 436–43.
“The Government Building at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition.”
Scientific American 79, no. 11 (September 10, 1898): 168.
Greater America Exposition. Book of Views: Greater America Exposition. July 1 to
November 1. Omaha, U.S.A. 1899. Omaha: Greater America Exposition Bureau
of Publicity and Promotion, 1899.
—. Greater America Exposition, Omaha, Nebraska, July 1st to November 1st, 1899.
Illustrated Catalogue Fine Arts. Omaha: Klopp & Bartlett, 1899.
—. Imperial America as Seen at the Greater America Exposition. Omaha, Nebraska.
Comprising Views of Cuba, Philippines Islands, Hawaii, as Well as the Principal
Views of the Exposition. Chicago: White City Art, 1899.
—. Map of the Grounds, Diagram of Buildings: Greater America Exposition,
July 1st to November 1st, 1899, Omaha, U.S.A. Omaha: Klopp & Bartlett, 1899.
Gregory, Grace Virginia. “The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition at
Omaha, 1898.” Master’s thesis, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 1929.
Griffin, Fannie Reed, with Susette La Flesche Tibbles. Oo-mah-ha Ta-wa-tha (Omaha
City). Lincoln: privately published, 1898.
Griffith, Armand H. “American Pictures at the Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition at Omaha, Nebraska.” Brush and Pencil 3, no. 1 (October 1898): 35–
47, 49.
Griffith, Gary. “The 2¢ Trans-Mississippi Is an American Classic.” Stamp Collector,
March 23, 1998, 6.
—. “Soldier-Artist behind the 4¢ Trans-Mississippi.” Stamp Collector, Decem-
ber 28, 1998, 6.
Harriman, Mary Alice. “The Congress of American Aborigines at the Omaha Expo-
sition.” Overland Monthly 33, no. 198 (June 1899): 505–12.
Harris, Alicia L. “Many Worlds Converge Here: Vision and Identity in American
Indian Photography.” Master’s thesis, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2013.
Harrison, Alfred C., Jr. “John Ross Key’s World Fair Paintings.” Magazine Antiques
165, no. 3 (March 2004): 78–87.
Harwood, William S. “The Omaha Exposition.” Harper’s Weekly, August 20, 1898,
820–23.
—. “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition.” Harper’s Weekly, June 18, 1898, 590–91.

456 selected bibliography

Hawkins, Michael C. “Undecided Empire: The Travails of Imperial Representation
of Filipinos at the Greater America Exposition, 1899.” Philippine Studies 63,
no. 3 (2015): 341–63.
Haynes, James B. “The Great Event of 1898—The Trans-Mississippi and Interna-
tional Exposition at Omaha, Nebraska.” Leslie’s Weekly, February 3, 1898, 72–74.
—. History of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898. St.
Louis: Woodward and Tiernan Printing, 1910.
—. History of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898. Omaha:
Published under direction of the Committee on History, 1910.
Herst, Herman, Jr. “Collectors Hated 1898 Trans-Mississippis.” Linn’s Stamp News,
February 19, 1990, 36.
Imada, Adria L. Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2012.
Jacknis, Ira. “James Mooney as an Ethnographic Photographer.” Visual Anthropol-
ogy 3, nos. 2–3 (1990): 179–212.
Johnson, Amanda. “Illuminating the West: The Wonder of Electric Lighting at Oma-
ha’s Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898.” Nebraska History
93, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 182–91.
Kosmider, Alexia. “Refracting the Imperial Gaze onto the Colonizers: Geronimo
Poses for the Empire.” atq 15, no. 4 (2001): 317–31.
Lanier, Henry Wysham. “The Great Fair at Omaha: The Trans-Mississippi and Inter-
national Exposition, June 1 to November 1, 1898.” American Monthly Review of
Reviews 18, no. 1 (July 1898): 53–54.
Main, John E. The Booze Route. Los Angeles: Commercial Printing House, 1907.
Mains, William. “The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition.” Christian
Advocate, August 25, 1898, 34.
McGee, J. F. “A Short History of T.M.P.S.” cornpex, October 11–13, 1957, 8.
M.H.W. “Women’s Field at the Omaha Exposition.” Harper’s Bazaar, July 23, 1898, 628.
Miller, Bonnie M. “The Incoherencies of Empire: The ‘Imperial’ Image of the Indian
at the Omaha World’s Fairs of 1898–99.” American Studies 49, nos. 3–4 (Fall/
Winter 2008): 39–62.
—. From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-
American War of 1898. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011.
Mooney, James. “The Indian Congress at Omaha.” American Anthropologist 1, no. 1
(January 1899): 126–49.
Moore, Sarah J. John White Alexander and the Construction of National Identity.
Plainsboro nj: Associated University Presses, 2003.
—. “Mapping Empire in Omaha and Buffalo: World’s Fairs and the Spanish-
American War.” Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingue 25, no. 1 (2000): 111–26.
Morris Press. Loving Memories: Trans-Mississippi 1898 and Greater America 1899.
Kearney ne: Morris Press, 1999.
Moses, Lester G. The Indian Man: A Biography of James Mooney. Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 1984. Reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
—. “Indians on the Midway: Wild West Shows and the Indian Bureau at the
World’s Fairs, 1893–1904.” South Dakota History 21, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 205–29.

selected bibliography 457

Neil, Randy L., with Jack Rosenthal. United States of America: The Trans-Mississippi
Issue of 1898. Danbury ct: Andrew Levitt, 1997.
Omaha Bee. Snap Shots of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition. Omaha: Bee, 1898.
“The Omaha Exposition.” Harper’s Bazaar, July 16, 1898, 614.
“The Omaha Exposition and the Indian Congress.” Scientific American, October
15, 1898, 248.
“The Omaha Exposition Medal.” American Journal of Numismatics 33 (July 1898): 33–34.
Ortiz, Simon J, ed. Beyond the Reach of Time and Change: Native American Reflec-
tions on the Frank A. Rinehart Photograph Collection. Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 2004.
Our New Colonies: The Hawaiian Islands. Omaha: Union Pacific Railroad, 1899.
Paul, Andrea I. “The Nebraska Exhibit at the 1904 World’s Fair.” Nebraska History
76 (1995): 22–29.
Peavler, David J. “African Americans in Omaha and the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and
International Exposition.” Journal of African American History 93, no. 3 (Sum-
mer 2008): 337–61.
Peterson, Jess R. Omaha’s Trans-Mississippi Exposition. Charleston sc: Arcadia Press,
2003.
Pixley, Patricia Shad. “A Most Interesting Spectacle: Omaha’s 1898 Trans-Mississippi
Exposition.” Nineteenth Century 18, no. 1 (1998): 5–9.
Reasoner, Elsie. “A National Wonder: The Trans-Mississippi and International Expo-
sition.” Godey’s Magazine 136 (June 1898): 609–17.
—. “The Event of the Year 1898.” Midland Monthly Magazine 9 (March 1898):
257–72.
Rinehart, Frank A. Rinehart’s Book of Views: Photogravures of the Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition. Omaha: F. A. Rinehart, 1898.
Rogers, William A. “The Exposition at Omaha.” Harper’s Weekly, October 8, 1898,
985–87.
Rydell, Robert W. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International
Expositions, 1876–1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
—. “The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition: ‘To Work Out the
Problem of Universal Civilization.’” American Quarterly 33, no. 5 (Winter 1981):
587–607.
Sabol, Tessa. “Trans-Mississippi Exposition Commemorative Stamp Issue and National
Identity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Paper for the National Postal
Museum Winton M Blount Symposium, 2010.
Shaw, Albert. “The Trans-Mississippians and Their Fair at Omaha.” Century 56, no.
6 (October 1898): 847.
Thanet, Octave (Alice French). “The Trans-Mississippi Exposition.” Cosmopolitan,
October 1898, 608–13.
Thatcher, Allan M. “2¢ Trans-Mississippi Design.” Stamps, June 24, 1939, 405–6.
Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition. Official Catalogue of Fine Arts.
Omaha: Klopp & Bartlett, 1898.
—. Official Catalogue of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition. June
First to November First. Omaha: Klopp & Bartlett, 1898.

458 selected bibliography

—. Official Guide Book to Omaha and the Trans-Mississippi and International
Exposition. Omaha: Megeath Stationery, 1898.
—. Official Guide Book to the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition,
Omaha, U.S.A. Omaha: Megeath Stationery, 1898.
—. Trans-Mississippi International Exhibition, Omaha, June to November 1898,
Illustrating the Progress of the West. Omaha: Trans-Mississippi Exposition, 1898.
“The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition.” Scientific American, August
27, 1898, 138.
“Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition at Omaha.” Scientific American,
May 28, 1898, 346–47.
“Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, Omaha, June to November, 1898.”
American Architect and Building News 58 (November 1897): 58.
Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress. Official Proceedings of the Eighth Conven-
tion of the Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress Held at Omaha, Neb., Nov.
25, 26, 27, and 28, 1895. Omaha: Press of the Omaha Printing Company, 1895.
—. Official Proceedings of the Ninth Session of the Trans-Mississippi Commercial
Congress, Held at Assembly Hall, Temple Park, Salt Lake City, Utah, July 14, 15,
16, and 17, 1897. Salt Lake City: Tribune Job Printing, 1897.
“The Trans-Mississippi Exhibition.” Youth’s Companion 72 (February 17, 1898): 7.
“Trans-Mississippi Exposition Architecture.” Midland Monthly Magazine 8 (Decem-
ber 1897): 555–58.
Trennert, Robert A., Jr. “Selling Indian Education at World’s Fairs and Expositions,
1893–1904.” American Indian Quarterly 11, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 203–20.
—. “Fairs, Expositions, and the Changing Image of Southwestern Indians, 1876–
1904.” New Mexico Historical Review 62, no. 2 (1987): 127–43.
Vennman, Barbara. “Dragons, Dummies, and Royals: China at American World’s
Fairs, 1876–1904.” Gateway Heritage 17, no. 2 (1996): 16–31.
Wakefield, John. “A History of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition.”
Omaha, 1903. Transcribed by the Omaha Public Library.
Walker, Charles Howard. “Trans-Mississippi & International Exposition at Omaha.”
Harper’s Weekly, October 30, 1897, 1080–81.
—. “The Great Exposition at Omaha.” Century 55, no. 4 (February 1898): 518–21.
Walker, Charles Howard, and Thomas R. Kimball. “Grounds of the Trans-Mississippi
International Exposition.” American Architect and Architecture 58 (Novem-
ber 1897): 59.
Wells, David. “Trans-Mississippi and Greater America Exposition Index.” June 5,
1998–January 12, 2000. http://www.civilwarmuseumnc.org/tm-gaeindex.html.
Wester, Joseph G. “USA: The Trans-Mississippi Issue of 1898 $2 Design.” London
Philatelist 110 (June 2001): 171–72.
“A Western Creation: The Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha, Nebraska.” Frank
Leslie’s Popular Monthly 46, no. 4 (October 1898): 442–46.
Whalen, Abby. “A Temporary Taming of the Wild West: The Events of the Trans-
Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898.” Great Plains Quarterly 36,
no. 3 (Summer 2016): 187–205.

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White, William Allen. “An Appreciation of the West: Apropos of the Omaha Expo-
sition.” McClure’s Magazine 11, no. 6 (October 1898): 575.
Ziska, Courtney L. Cope. “Omaha, Nebraska’s Costly Signaling at the Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition of 1898.” Master’s thesis, University of Nebraska–
Lincoln, 2012.

460 selected bibliography

Contributors

Tracey Jean Boisseau, associate professor, Purdue University

Danielle B. Crawford, doctoral student in literature, University
of California, Santa Cruz
Emily Godbey, associate professor of art history, Iowa State
University
Stacy L. Kamehiro, associate professor of the history of art and
visual culture, University of California, Santa Cruz
Wendy Jean Katz, associate professor of art history, University of
Nebraska–Lincoln
Bonnie M. Miller, associate professor of American studies, Uni-
versity of Massachusetts, Boston
Sarah J. Moore, professor of art history, University of Arizona
Nancy Parezo, professor of anthropology, American Indian studies,
and curator at the Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona
Akim Reinhardt, professor of history, Towson University, Maryland
Robert W. Rydell, professor of history and director of the Human-
ities Institute, Montana State University
Timothy Schaffert, associate professor of English, University of
Nebraska–Lincoln

461
Index
Page numbers in italic indicate illustrations.
aborigines, 52, 263, 343
Adams, Maude, 228–30
Administration Arch, 39, 40, 45. See also
Kimball, Thomas Rogers
Admiral Dewey Arch, 56n38. See also
Dewey, George
advertising, 5, 14, 48, 63, 74, 85, 89–90, 117,
121–22, 124, 171, 177, 183, 185, 223, 261, 347;
agricultural, 386, 388; corporate, 79; mass,
59, 128, 246; postage stamps and, 65; rail-
road, 112; tourism, 393; women in, 215
aestheticism, 106, 110–11, 122–30, 135, 138–
39, 146, 151n9, 167, 182, 185–86, 281
African Americans, 21n12, 140, 143, 199;
Old Plantation and, 11; white attitudes
toward, 259
African American Women’s Club, 140,
158n87, 198
Afro American Sentinel, 140
Agricultural Department (U.S.), 318
agriculture, 33, 39, 70, 78, 81, 95, 258, 302, 393;
advertising for, 386, 388; innovations in, 10
Agriculture Building: of 1898, 2, 32, 39, 46,
93; of 1899, 142, 157n80, 304, 386
Aguinaldo, Emilio, 408, 418, 435n64
A. L. Due Fireworks Company, 413
Alexander, John W.: Woman in Yellow, 127
Algonquians, 358
Allen, William V., 151n11, 277; authorization
bill and, 312–13, 314, 370n53; imperialism
and, 263; land redistribution and, 346
Aloha Restaurant, 405
Amenia and Sharon Land Company, 78–
79, 80
American, circulation of, 151n10
American Anthropologist, 363
American Geography, 27
American Institute of Architects, 46
“Americanism Dominant in the New
Republic” (S. Bishop), 383
American Journal of Numismatics, 197, 202
American Museum of Natural History, 304,
366n14
American Protective Association, 71, 111
American Review of Reviews, 100n25
American West, 4, 23, 26, 52, 197, 224, 444;
civilizing of, 43, 90; dream of, 94; repre-
senting, 233; transformation of, 45
Anishinabee (Chippewa), 370n47; housing
of, 339, 348
annexation: 61, 96, 297n58, 397, 428; bid for,
380–85, 394; debates about, 377–78, 383
Anthony, Susan B., 15, 111, 115, 254n67, 446,
453n3
Anthropological Games, 353
anthropology, 13–14, 242, 311–15, 359–62;
exhibits, 306, 315–18, 320–24, 326–28, 330,
332–33; investment in, 303, 304; public
forum for, 362; scientific, 309; static, 359, 364
Anthropology Building (1893), 7, 204
anti-annexationists, 141, 383, 390–92, 405–7
anti-Catholicism, 71, 111, 112
anti-imperialism, 63, 141, 417, 437n91,
437n92
Anti-Imperialist League, 141
Antiques Roadshow (pbs program), 446
Apaches, 14, 265, 276, 289, 345; Chiricahua,
337, 354, 356; dances of, 355–56; Fort Sill,
271, 338, 354; Plains, 348, 350, 353, 372n76;
San Carlos, 348, 355, 374n87; Western, 356
463
Arapaho, 373n83; housing of, 327, 328; songs
by, 374n100
Arbor Day, 45, 296n37
archaeology: avocational, 306; award cate-
gories for, 305
Arch of the States, 24, 30, 33, 37, 40, 44, 117,
122, 137, 179–80, 200; creation of, 39, 43;
described, 41, 43, 45–48
Army and Navy Day, 436n74
Arnold, Charles D., 40
Aronson, Julie, 230
art, 63, 86, 138, 149, 244; civic society and,
19, 117, 122; cultural appreciation for, 91–
92, 94, 134, 178; high, 174, 183, 187; Native
Americans and, 123–24, 127; nudity and,
119, 124–25, 134, 137, 139, 149, 154n44, 178-
79; popular art and, 128, 130, 185; defini-
tion of, 181–87
Art Amateur, 201
“Art at the Exposition” (Evans), 106, 121
Art Congress, 116, 139–40
Art Department, University of Nebraska, 126
Artists’ Studio, 144–45, 159n96
“Art Notes,” 106, 126, 132
artoscopes, 153n30, 183, 193n64
“The Arts of Industry” (Smithsonian
exhibit), 322, 322–24, 326–27; sections
themes of, 325
Art Workers’ Society, 126, 140, 147–48
assimilation, 154n44, 259–60, 264, 276, 279–
80, 292, 320, 333, 353, 361, 418, 432n21;
achieving, 278; cultural, 277; forced, 262;
Hawaiian, 429; progressive, 293n5
Assiniboines, Fort Peck, 124, 343, 372n69;
housing of, 338
Associated Press, 151n12, 421
Association for the Advancement of
Women, 123
Aurora Daily Express on Isabella coins, 209
Austen, E. J., 32
Bacon, Augustus Octavius, 382
bae. See Bureau of American Ethnology (bae)
Bagg, H. H., 152n23
Baird, Spencer F., 362
Baldwin, John N., 24, 25, 26
Baldwin, Marcus W., 69, 74, 76–77, 79, 80, 84
464 index
Balzac, Honoré, 447
Bana Lāhui, 405
Banksy, graffiti art and, 164
Barber, Charles E., 209
Barber, Elihu, 79
Barnum, P. T., 242–43
Bartholdi, Frédéric, 46
Bates, Charles Austin, 59
Battle of Manila (1899), 415, 419, 436n77
Battle of Manila Bay (1898), 261, 408,
435n60, 435n62, 435n64; reproduced on
Scenic Railway, 409–11, 414; 1899 reenact-
ment of, 414, 427
Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876), 354
Batut, Arthur, 201
Baum, James E., 126
Baum, L. Frank, 99n13
“Beauties of Various Lands” (display),
253n67
beauty, 216, 222; female, 184, 195, 243, 246;
race/class/nationality and, 214, 249; white
female, 199, 214–15, 220, 223–25
“The Beauty and the Freak” (Thomson), 242
beauty contests, 213, 218, 220–24, 248, 251n42,
255n79; white women and, 242, 246–47
“Beauty Gets a Square Show,” 222
Beauty Show, 240
Bebok, Horace, 282, 285, 289; assimila-
tion and, 292; Indian Congress and,
287; Indian schools and, 297n60; Trans-
Mississippi Exposition and, 283–84
Beck, Raphael, 216; emblem by, 219
belly dancing, 163, 214, 445
Benton, Thomas Hart, 65, 78
bep. See Bureau of Engraving and Print-
ing (bep)
Berkeley, Busby, 246
Berkeley, George, 25
Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, 398, 400
Big Shields, 372n76
Big-Whip (Pablino Dias), 354
bird’s-eye view, 6, 31, 33, 40, 53, 53n6
Bishop, Bernice Pauahi, 398
Bishop, Charles R., 398
Bishop, Sereno E., 383
Blachley, May, 273
Black Boys, 372n76
Blackfeet, housing of, 338, 348
Bluff Tract, 37, 307
Blythswood, Lord, 67
Board of Directors (tmiec), 311
Board of Lady Managers (1893), 208
Board of Trade (Omaha), 126
Boas, Franz, 250n19, 366n14
Boisseau, Tracey Jean, 19, 47, 90, 153n37, 446
Bonifacio, Andrés, 408
Book of Views: Greater America Exposition,
401, 422, 427
Bostock, Frank C., 254n69
Boston Herald, 151n12, 392, 433n28
Boston Philatelic Society, 87
Boston Store, 12, 120
Bostwick, Louis, 416; photos by, 416, 420
Bouguereau, William, 134, 135, 159n98;
Return of Spring, 117–19, 149, 183–85; Psy-
che, 157n76, 181
Boyd, James, 112
Boyd’s Theater, 111, 120, 153n32
Boys’ and Girls’ Building. See Girls’ and
Boys’ Building
Brandeis, Estella, 121
Brandeis, Jonas L., 121, 135
Breton, Jules, 134
Bridge of Spain (Puente de Espana), 424, 425
Briggs-Wall, Henrietta, 143, 158n91
Bringhurst, Robert Porter, 41, 117, 122, 179;
sculpture by, 180
Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, 63
Brown, John George, 127
Brunelleschi, 45
Bryan, Bill, 74
Bryan, Mrs. William Jennings, 150n5
Bryan, William Jennings, 35, 133, 157n80;
anti-imperial speeches of, 437n91; free sil-
ver congress and, 151n11; homestead of,
137, 157n80; Trans-Mississippi Commer-
cial Congress and, 61, 62
Buchanan, James, 78
buffalo, 71, 82, 101n44, 210, 353, 357
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 8, 14, 21n12. See also
Cody, William F. “Buffalo Bill”
Buffalo Pan-American Exposition (1901),
3, 5, 18, 216, 218, 238, 277, 364; emblem
from, 219
Bureau of American Ethnology (bae),
8, 187, 263, 299–300, 309, 314, 317, 350,
367n18; annual reports of, 369n36; arti-
facts from, 321; Frank Albert Rinehart
and, 253n66; James Mooney and, 353, 358–
59, 369n36; National Museum and, 328;
negatives for, 368n25
Bureau of Education, exhibit by, 318
Bureau of Engraving and Printing (bep),
65–67, 70, 74, 76, 78, 82, 91
Burlington Railroad, 31, 32, 93, 393
Burnham, Daniel, 31
Butt, Clara, 191n42
Butterfield, Mellona, 116, 132–33, 137, 145–46,
147, 149, 152n23, 159n97, 159n100
Calendar of Southern Beauties, 215; illustra-
tion from, 217
Calhoun, John C., 54n16
California Midwinter Exposition (1894), 3,
5, 364, 381, 394
Caliga, Isaac Henry: After the Bath, 125
Campomanes, Oscar V., 408
Carlisle, John, 65
Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 281,
296n48, 361
Carson, Kit, 66
Cassatt, Mary, 128, 144, 146
Cather, Willa, 105, 134–35, 157n74, 190n32,
119n42, 447–48, 452
Catlin, Charles F., 133, 134, 156n69
Catlin, Josephine, 133, 156n70
Century, 70, 92, 178, 269
Century of Dishonor (H. Jackson), 290
Century of Progress Exposition (1933), 243
Chaffee, H. L., 100n39
Chamber of Commerce, Midway conces-
sions and, 405
Chamber of Horrors, 270
Chaperone, 151n12
Charlton, Paul, 92, 140
Chase, Clement, 129–30
Chase, William Merritt, 145, 147
Cherokees, 312
Cheyennes, 66, 278, 327, 374n100; hous-
ing of, 338
Cheyenne Tribune, 431n14
index 465
Chicago Art Institute, 144
Chicago Daily News: “Those New Postage
Stamps,” 67, 68
Chicago Daily Press, 214
Chicago Figaro, 394
Chicago Post, 116, 134, 179
Chicago Times-Herald, 179
Chicago Tribune, 151n12, 179
Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition
(1893), 3, 5, 7, 9, 17, 23–24, 35, 47, 92–93, 130,
148, 163, 182, 204, 208, 244, 269, 276; Buffalo
Bill Cody and, 8; endorsement of, 65; exhib-
its at, 241; freakishness and, 238; Hawai-
ian exhibition at, 381, 394; Midway of, 10,
394; modeling after, 37; Native Americans
at, 368n31; North Dakota state exhibit at, 79;
stamp series for, 60, 65, 91; tradition and,
213–14; World’s Congress of Beauties at, 247
Child, Jack, 64
Children’s Day, 199
Chinese Exclusion Act, 390
Chinese Village, 11, 13, 119, 236, 240, 270, 452
“Chiquita—the Living Doll,” 238, 254n69
chromolithographs, 143, 184, 187
Chun Afong, 392
Cincinnati Medical College, 182
citizenship, 15, 320; Native Americans and,
297n55
City Beautiful ideal, 31
civilization, 26, 29, 50, 62, 90, 272–73, 282,
313, 324; advanced, 328; American, 91,
233, 260, 290, 301, 407; boundaries of, 31;
Christian, 250n18; emergence of, 274–75;
European, 327; historic/racial evolution
of, 203; Indigenous peoples and, 258, 261,
280, 282–83, 287, 394; progress of, 23, 45,
52; racialized, 198; savagery and, 275, 322;
status of, 394; trajectory of, 30; triumph of,
52; West and, 285; white, 212, 227, 244, 259,
274; womanhood and, 195, 227
civilizing mission, 199, 277, 427, 438n112
Civil War, 3, 11, 30, 48, 236, 378; cultural
concerns of, 259
Clark, William, 170
Clarkson, T. S., 115
Cleopatra, Queen, 202; “Cleopatra’s Needle”
and, 202, 206; Cooper and, 191n39
466 index
Cleveland, Grover, 12, 123, 279, 382
clothing, 10, 120, 138, 163–64, 168, 179, 215,
332, 334, 337, 342, 447; ethnological com-
parison of, 345; middle-class, 355
Coast Guard Life Saving Service, 318
Cody, William F. “Buffalo Bill,” 8, 21n12, 127,
152n22, 155n50, 187, 191n37, 200, 276, 362;
Omaha fair and, 375n106; timing of, 14–15
Cody Day, 375n106
coins, 202–3, 397; souvenir, 60, 196, 207, 216;
Cleopatra and, 202; Isabella and 208–10,
211. See also Trans-Mississippi and Inter-
national Exposition Souvenir Coin Medal
Collins, G. H., 159n100
Collins, Nettie, 145–46
Colonial Building (1899), 17, Hawaiian
exhibit in, 405
Colonial Dames, 138
colonialism, 8, 28–29, 265, 427–28; domes-
tic, 361; imperialism and, 292; marketing,
300; rationale for, 308; settler, 429
Colorado Springs Gazette, 414
Colton, John Hutchins, 29–30
Columbian Historical Exposition (1892), 326
Columbian National Park, 348, 366n16
Columbus, Christopher, 71, 81, 208
commemorative envelopes, 60, 97, 98
commemorative stamp issues, 91; opposi-
tion to, 86–87
commerce, 19, 33, 94, 213, 230, 393; boost-
ing, 61
Commercial Club, 126
compositry, 200–201, 204–7, 210, 212,
255n78, 446; average ideal and, 204
Compromise of 1850, 29
concessionaires, 13, 17, 306, 308–9, 361
Congressional Postal Committee, 65–66, 81
Congress of Representative White and Col-
ored Americans, 115
Congress of Woman’s Clubs (1898), 254n67
consumerism, 59–61, 63, 91, 272; resisting,
85–89
Cooper, Astley David Middleton, 161, 170,
183, 187, 191n36; Cleopatra, 191n39; crit-
icism of, 178, 181–82, 184; illusionism
of, 125–26, 127, 131, 170–71, 177–78; Mrs.
Leland Stanford and, 171, 184; The Morn-
 ing of the Crucifixion, 182; posing for,
187–88; Pygmalion’s Galatee, 170–71,
172; Trilby and, 170–73, 177; Viewing the
Curios, 127, 191n37
Cooper, Henry E., 383, 384
Corps of Engineers, 54n16
Cosmopolitan, 13, 139, 269, 278
Cotton States and International Exposition
(1895), 3, 5, 140, 215
Court of Honor (1893), 39
Court of the Universe (1915), 56n38
Couse, Eanger I.: The Cow Herd (Girl Herd-
ing Cows), 132, 134
Cox, M. V., 360
Coxey’s Army, 74
Craddock, James H., 133
Crawford, Danielle B., 18, 48, 141, 261, 442
Creed, Barbara, 241
Creighton, Edward, 71
The Criminal (Ellis), 203
Criminal Man (Lombroso), 203
Critic, 166, 189n11
Crook, General George, 170, 366n9
Crow, 354; housing of, 339
Crow Creek (Sioux) Indian Agency, 278, 341
Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851), 3
Cuba, 15, 17, 261, 270, 388, 395; annexation
and, 377; intervention in, 297n58; and War
of Independence, 430n1
Cullom, Shelby M., 395
cultural diversity, displaying, 337, 342–43,
345–48
culture, 81, 95, 149, 332, 362; American,
199, 230, 232, 269, 278, 428; classical, 202;
colonial, 8; Eskimo, 309, 331; images on,
246; Indigenous, 260, 276, 304, 312, 336,
373n80; literary, 82; material, 48, 314, 324,
345, 352, 355, 357, 365; philatelic, 88–91;
popular, 161, 177, 187, 261, 264; postal, 98;
Pueblo, 309; souvenir, 88–91; superior-
ity of, 62; Victorian, 258; visual, 67, 82, 94;
warfare and, 264
Currier & Ives, 184
Curtis, Lynn, 152n22
Custer, George Armstrong, 66, 170
Customs Bureau, exhibit by, 318
cyclorama, 11, 162, 240, 394, 415, 451
Daily, Henry F., 17, 415
Dairy Building, 351, 372n69
Dalrymples Farming Corporation, 79
Damon, S. M., 431n13
dances, 263, 265, 269, 273, 333, 355–57, 360,
405, 407; belly, 163, 214, 445; devil, 356;
hula, 394, 400–401, 403; war, 274, 356
Dances with Wolves (movie), 346
Dancing Girls of the Seraglio, 12
Darkness and Dawn: or Heaven and Hell,
162, 240
Darlow, Alfred, 393
Daughters of the American Revolution, 129,
133, 138, 150, 190n28
Daughters of the Confederacy, 218
Davey, Frank, 386, 388, 393; Representative
Men of Honolulu, hi, 397–98, 399
Davis, Charles H.: Abandoned on the New
England Coast, 132
Dawes Act (1887), 9, 318, 333
Declaration of Independence, 47
DeCora, Angel, 123, 280–81, 282, 318
Democratic Party: allying with, 113; Edward
Rosewater and, 152n16; imperialism and,
148; Omaha exposition and, 63; Populists
and, 62, 112
demonstrators, Indigenous, 302–3, 306, 308,
312, 333–34, 342, 355
Dennison, Tom, 113
Denver Republican, 431n14
Department of Army, 49
Department of Navy, 49, 65
Department of Publicity and Promotion,
64–65
Department of State, 65; exhibit by, 397
Department of the Interior, 81, 299, 300;
display by, 318, 319. See also Office of
Indian Affairs (Indian Service)
Department of the Pacific, 435n62
Department of War, 65
Department of Ways and Means, 51
department stores, 48, 59–60, 85, 112, 120–
21, 135, 168, 171, 182, 186, 230, 447
Depression of 1893, 4. See also under Pan-
ics: of 1873
de Rue Meiklejohn, George, 18, 315, 437n97
Descendants of Colonial Governors, 139
index 467
Dessar, Louis Paul: Departure of the Fisher-
man, 132, 134, 135
Detroit Museum of Art, 91, 131
Detroit Photographic Company, 56n30
development: agricultural, 50; racial,
363; urban, 384. See also economic
development
Dewey, George, 24, 411, 435n57, 435n60;
Manila Bay and, 409, 414; Philippines
and, 408, 435n63
discrimination, 106, 147; gender/racial, 19, 143
Disney, theme parks of, 162–63
Dobson, Thomas, 27, 54n13
Dole, Sanford B., 384, 398
domesticity, 278; American, 260, 272; female,
106, 258, 292; progress and, 262; rural, 94
Du Bois, W. E. B., 206
Dubufe family: Una, 145, 159n98
du Maurier, George, 125, 161, 165, 189,
189n11; aestheticism and, 185; novel by,
167; reception for, 163–64, 166; Sarah
Whistler and, 189n17; Trilby and, 154n44
Dunroy, William Reed, 157n75
Dupre, Julian, 135
Durand-Ruel, Paul, 127
Dutcher, Ellenore, 112, 115, 144, 146, 150,
151n12, 152n22
Dvorak, Anton, 155n49
Dye, Claude, 191n34
Eads Bridge, 74, 81
Eakins, Thomas, 132
Earley, James F.: Liberty Enlightening the
World, 41, 46, 317, 443
Eastman, Seth: Buffalo Chase, 82, 84
Eats His Own Blood, 269–70
eclecticism, 130–35, 137–41
economic development, 4–5, 7, 9, 59, 362,
378; consumer-based, 88; encouraging,
303; regional, 299, 433n34
Edison, Thomas, 11
Edison Wargraph, 162, 415
education, 60, 123, 187, 204, 316, 317, 362, 382,
388, 390, 393; Christian, 428; Indian, 320;
plantation, 392; women’s, 214
Eiffel Tower, 3, 7
Elliot, Maxine, 216, 218
468 index
Ellis, Havelock, 203
Encyclopedia Britannica, 27
Engley, Alice D., 128
Equal Rights League, 148
ethnicity, 218, 232, 270
ethnocentrism, 289, 371n60
ethnography, 303, 323, 324, 343, 352–57; sal-
vage, 301, 365n3
Ethnological Parade, 9
ethnology, 9, 10, 13–14, 323, 324, 343; award
categories for, 305; exhibits, 7, 17, 330
Evans, Alice, 190–91n34
Evans, Edith Marion, 158n87, 158n88
Evans, Ethel, 115, 121–25, 130, 131, 137–38,
140–41, 147, 174, 186; career of, 149; col-
umn by, 105–6, 107, 108; credentials
of, 128–29; criticism by, 184; essays by,
139; fine arts and, 110; high art and, 183;
impressionism and, 127–28; municipal
housekeeping and, 106; Nebraska State
Building and, 133–34; on nude model-
ing, 188; painting by, 135, 136; professional
identity of, 106; Trilby and, 181, 184–85;
underworld and, 113
Evans, Kristi S., 64
Executive Committee (Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition), 207
Executive Mansion exhibit, 318
exhibits: contextualizing, 303–4, 306; per-
formative, 303; static, 303
Fairbrother, Mary, 135, 139–41, 146, 148–49,
150n5, 158n93, 159n97; department stores
and, 120; women’s work and, 142–43
Fairmount Park, 162
Farmers and Traders Bank, 140, 158n87
Fayerweather, Julia, 392
Federation of Women’s Clubs, 153n25
female images, 220; commercial potential
of, 218; distribution of, 208; purveyance
of, 213; working-class, 230
Ferris, George, 7
Ferris wheel, 7, 10, 20n7
Field Columbian Museum, 304
Fighting First Nebraska Day, 418–19
Filipinos, 10, 17–18, 21n12, 254n71, 380, 415,
417, 421, 423, 424; aggression by, 436n77,
 436n82; characterization of, 422, 437n94,
439n118; Hawaiian plantations and,
439n121; identification of, 418; in Omaha,
427, 437n97; as savages, 380
Fillmore, John C., 368n31
Fine Arts Building (1898), 39, 41, 116–17,
125–28, 130, 132, 134, 143, 147, 149, 157n70,
180, 228, 443; statuary groups on, 41, 117–
18, 122, 179–80
Fine Arts Building (1899), 144–47, 160n107,
domestic atmosphere of, 145–46; live
exhibit for, 144; Meyer’s Trilby at, 145
Fine Arts Exhibition (1898) artworks: Aban-
doned on the New England Coast (Davis),
132; After the Bath (Caliga), 125; An Ameri-
can Girl (Vonnoh), 228; Bachelor’s Drawer
(Haberle), 124; The Cow Herd (Girl Herd-
ing Cows) (Couse), 132; Departure of
the Fisherman (Dessar), 132; Moonshine
and Mist (Whiteman), 132; Opal (Reid),
132; Psyche (Bouguereau), 157n76; Water
Nymph (Wuertz), 124–25, Woman in Yel-
low (Alexander), 127; A Wordless Farewell
(Lorenz), 132
Fine Arts Exhibition (1899) artworks: Cozy
Corner (McKnight), 160n105; Critical
Moment (Lorenz), 146; First Grief (The
Death of Abel) (Tojetti), 145; A Glimpse
of Nebraska (Gilder), 147–48, 160n105;
Missing (Remington), 146; Old Stairs at
San Gabriel Mission (Lumbard), 160n105;
Pastoral (Sewell), 146; Sail-Boat (Tyler),
160n105; View in the Country (Living-
ston), 160n105
Fine Arts Palace (1893), 39, 149
Fire Dance, 265
First Colonial Exhibit, 18
First National Bank, 159n100
First Nebraska Regiment, 415, 427; celebrat-
ing, 418–19; Philippine Village and, 421–
22, 420
Fish Commission, exhibits by, 317–18
Flandreau Indian School, 278
Flatheads (Salish), 235, 275, 357, 372n69;
housing of, 339, 348
Fletcher, Alice C., 123, 280, 281, 283; display
by, 318, 329; goals of, 320; imperial ico-
nography and, 279; Indian Congress and,
280, 318; lecture by, 368n31; noble savagery
and, 281; progress and, 292
Floral Parade, 224–27, 226, 233, 243, 253n55
Floral Parade medal, 225, 227, 243
Flower Day, 224
Fontenelle Club, 148
Fontenelle Hotel, 149
Food and Drug Administration, 450
Ford, Frances M., 140, 220–22, 223–24
Ford, W. A., 158n91
Foreman, Tony, 253n55
Forepaugh and Sells show, 21n12
Forestry Division, exhibit by, 318
Fort Snelling, 82
Fort Street School, 390
Fournier, A. J., 160n107
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 94, 269
Fraternal Order of Red Men, 267
freakishness, 238–43
Fred Macy & Co., 85
Frémont, Jessie Benton, 78
Frémont, John Charles, 67, 70; on Omaha
issue stamp, 76–78
French, Alice. See Thanet, Octave (Alice
French)
Freud, Sigmund, 168
Fusion Party, 115
Galton, Sir Francis, 202–3, 233
Gamble, Lucinda W., 158n87
gans dance, 355
Garden Theater, 169
Garfield, James, 4
Garland, Hamlin, 134, 138–39, 158n83
Gary, James, 64–65, 96
Gates, Herbert E., 159n100
Gaut, Ione Lee, 366n13
gaze: aesthetic, 122–30; imperial, 26, 270;
Indian, 285
gender, 262, 292, 446; counternarratives of,
206; ideology, 199; issues, 220
General Land Survey, exhibit by, 318
General Mills, 11
Genoa Indian School, 278
genocide, 421; cultural, 259, 293n4; racial, 346
Gentleman Farmers Magazine, 151n12
index 469
George, Henry, 136, 157n79
German Village, 11, 12, 233
Geronimo, 14, 271, 354, 364. See also
Goyathlay (Geronimo)
Ghost Dance, 265, 360, 374n100
Ghost Shirt, 374n100
Giant See-Saw, 20–21n7, 40, 162, 240
Giant Umbrella, 20n7
Gibson, Charles Dana, 227, 230–32; on Gibson
Girl, 253n60; magazine illustrations by, 228
Gibson Girl, 227, 230, 253n60; conception
of, 232; as national ideal, 228, 231
Gilbert, Cass, 1, 45
Gilded Age, 4, 110, 149
Gilder, Richard, 108; A Glimpse of Nebraska,
147–48, 160n105
Girls’ and Boys’ Building, 116, 140, 142–43,
198–99, 220, 252n44, 295n31; perform-
ers at, 199
Godbey, Emily, 19, 125
Gold Rush, 29, 197
gondolas, 162, 442–45
Government Band, 403
Government Exhibit Board, 360
Goyathlay (Geronimo), 354; celebrity of,
355–56
Gracombe, Sarah, 166
Grand Army of the Republic, 133
Grand Canal, 39, 47, 93
Grand Council Wigwam, 263
Grand Court, 31, 37, 39–41, 49, 149, 174, 238,
271, 317, 412, 413, 441–42
“Granny’s Written Opinion,” 135, 137
Grant, Ulysses S., 75, 170, 200, 279
Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), 1
Grass Dance, 155n48, 265
Graves, Almira, 157n70
Graves, Marion, 124, 132
Grayson, William W., 415
Great American Desert, 26, 32, 37, 45, 52;
mapping of, 27–30
Greater America Exposition (1899), 15, 17–
18, 42, 95, 121, 153n32, 156n70, 236, 240–41,
253n67, 254n71, 254n73, 429, 452; atten-
dance at, 148; building for, 333; enthusi-
asm for, 141–42; Fighting First Nebraska
Day at, 418; Hawai‘i and, 380–84, 386,
470 index
388, 390, 392–98, 400–401, 403, 405, 407;
imperialism and, 262, 377, 427; labor and,
142; metrics informing, 23–24; Philippine-
American War and, 415; Philippines
and, 407–9, 411, 413–15, 417–19, 421–22,
424, 427; Philippine Village at, 416, 420,
436n82; photographs of, 144; populism
at, 141–48; potential of, 62; as sequel, 262;
women/art at, 141–48
Greater America Fine Arts catalog, 146
Greater American Home, 142–43
Great Plains, 29, 324, 326, 343
Great Seal of the United States, 47
Greene, Fannie O., 149, 158n88
Griffin, Fannie Reed, 154n39, 282
Griffith, Armand H., 127, 130–31, 134, 140,
143; attendance and, 131; fine arts exhibit
and, 91–92; social order and, 131; Trans-
Mississippi region and, 92
Griffiths, J. A., 409, 411
grisette, 125, 163, 188, 189
Guam, 261, 429
Haberle, John: Bachelor’s Drawer, 124–25, 131
Hagenback, Carl, 239
Hagenback’s Wild Animal Show, 13, 238–40,
239, 254n69
Haggard, H. Rider: She: A History of Adven-
ture, 12, 163
Hallowell, Sara, 144
Hamilton, E. W. D., 160n107
Hampton Institute, 280–81, 296n48
Hardt, H. B., 121, 153n36
Harper Brothers, 174, 185
Harper’s Bazaar, 452
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 167
Harper’s Weekly, 23, 33, 55n22, 87, 269, 285, 441
Harriman, Mary Alice, 258; Indian Con-
gress and, 274, 279, 287, 289; on Indians/
Omaha exposition, 287; literary images by,
292; Sarah Whistler and, 290
Harris, Sarah Butler, 134, 154n39, 157n74,
190n32
Harrison, Benjamin, 122, 383
Harrison, Carter, 177, 290
Harwood, William S., 23, 26, 55n22
Haskell, William E., 393, 433n28
Hatcher, T. B., 156n69
Hatchet, 140, 271–72, 273, 295n31
Havana Harbor, 25, 48, 261
Hawai‘i, 18, 304, 381; annexation of, 297n58,
377–80, 384, 396, 400, 407, 428; assimi-
lation of, 398, 418, 429; Chinese in, 390,
392; colonial histories of, 380; control of,
428; plantations in, 384, 386, 392, 439n121;
postage stamps from, 96; representa-
tion of, 377–78; self-government and, 395;
tourism and, 393, 397, 403, 432n26; visual/
textual representations of, 387, 389, 391,
397–98, 399, 401, 402, 404, 429
Hawaiian exhibit: in 1898, 378, 381–82, 384–
92, 385, 389, 391; in 1899, 378, 395–400,
399, 403, 427–29; crafts and, 400
Hawaiian Gazette, 390, 396
Hawaiian Hotel, 393
The Hawaiian Islands: A Hand Book of
Information, 400
Hawaiian Kingdom, 377, 380–81, 383, 397,
400, 403, 428, 430n5, 439n121
Hawaiian League, 430n5
Hawaiian National Band, 405
Hawaiian Organic Act, 396
Hawaiian Patriotic League, 382
Hawaiian Republic, 383, 398, 401, 431n18;
annexation and, 382, 390; revolt against, 405
Hawaiians, 254n71, 428, 434n45; annexation
and, 380, 382–83; authentic lifeways and,
392; education of, 382, 388, 390, 392; prim-
itive/uncivilized, 393
Hawaiian Village, 406; appeal for, 395; cre-
ation of, 394, 400; objections to, 394, 403;
popularity of, 405; songs/dances at, 405,
407; vision for, 401; visiting, 400, 419
Hayden, William, 121
Hayden Bros. Store, 121
Haynes, James B., 30, 366n8
Heaton, Augustus Goodyear: Hardships of
Emigration, 83–84
Hennepin, 66
Hester & McCaslin, 453n10
Hine, Lewis Wickes, 204; Composite Photo-
graph of Child Laborers, 205
Hinman, Tina McLellan, 156n70
Hinschelwood, Robert, 84
history: cultural, 324; local, 306; national,
206; natural, 303, 304
Hitchcock, Gilbert, 63, 111–12, 115, 417, 433n34
Hitt, Robert R., 395
Hoar, George, 382
Ho-Chunks (Winnebagos), 123, 264, 279–82,
318, 334, 346, 370n57; housing of, 342
Holcomb, Silas, 112, 148, 156n69
Holley, Marietta, 192n51
Holm, N. S., 147
Holmes, William Henry, 316, 321, 328,
370n52
Homestead Act, 30
Homestead strike, 4
Honolulu, 384, 401, 405, 419, 428
Honolulu Chamber of Commerce, 396, 400,
432n26
Honolulu Evening Bulletin, 238, 388
Honolulu Harbor, 384, 388, 393
Honolulu Hawaiian Star, 384
Honolulu Independent, 403
Hopis, dances of, 357
Horticulture Building, 37, 130, 226
Hough, Walter, 316, 322, 370n52; cultural
history and, 324; selections by, 369n43;
Spanish-American War display and, 327
House Committee on Indian and Military
Affairs, 82
housing, 263; ethnological comparison of,
345; James Mooney and, 343, 348, 366–
67n16, 373n78; Native American, 338–
42, 343, 347, 359, 348, 366n8, 366–67n16,
434n44
Howe, William, 92
Hudspeth, Willis, 120–21
“Hula Hula” show, 394
hulas, 394, 400, 401, 403
Hyde, W. T. C., 214
Ibsen, Henrik, 129
iconography, 35, 244; imperial, 41, 258, 261,
262, 266, 270, 272, 279, 282, 290, 293n4;
Native American, 260–61, 270; progres-
sive, 278, 282, 285; U.S. postal, 64
identity: Indian, 292n2, 292n3; national, 23,
227, 231, 246, 301, 316
Iler, Miss, 156n70
index 471
Iler, Peter E., 15, 142, 156n70
Illinois State Building, 143, 159n100
Illustrated History of Our War with Spain and
Our War with the Filipinos (Russell), 378
Imada, Adria, 405
immigrants, 111, 113, 115, 119, 124, 231, 388,
432n26; Americanizing, 259; Asian, 428;
exploitation of, 204
Imperial America as Seen at the Greater
America Exposition, 401, 422, 424, 427,
439n120; photos from, 402, 404, 423, 425
imperialism, 15, 63, 154n44, 242, 262, 275–76,
279, 301, 377; American, 260, 316, 356, 362,
390, 408, 411; celebrating, 283, 435n69; colo-
nialism and, 292; exhibiting, 427–30; extra-
territorial, 262, 346, 377, 380, 381; patriotism
and, 261; populism and, 148; postwar, 395;
support for, 437n92; women and, 292
impressionism, 127, 130–35, 137–41
Improved Order of Red Men, 347, 371n69
Indian Appropriation Bill (1898), 333, 370n53
Indian Citizenship Act (1924), 297n55
Indian Congress, 7–8, 10, 14, 18, 26, 47, 89,
91, 123, 141, 198–99, 238, 262–63, 265, 276–
77, 281–83, 308, 320, 335, 351–53; appropri-
ation for, 312–13, 316, 333; assessment of,
359–61; benefits of, 300; criticism of, 135,
265, 269, 274, 280; ethnographic authen-
ticity and, 346–47; exhibits for, 303, 332;
fantasy of, 269; focus on, 317; housing
at, 338–42; installation of, 314; introduc-
tion of, 122; legitimizing, 306; Native peo-
ple at, 233, 278, 284, 309, 357–58, 363, 365,
368n31; organization of, 361; participants
at, 338–42; phenotypes and, 357; plans
for, 311–12, 315; problems for, 332–33, 348,
350; as progressive moment, 285, 287; sav-
agery and, 265; Trilby and, 186–87; vis-
iting, 346, 363, 366n6; as “White Man’s
Burden,” 360–61; as Wild West show, 264,
345, 359
Indian Congress Encampment, 264–65,
275, 278, 280, 289, 314–15, 362, Table 6; as
exhibit, 333–37, 343, 345–48, 349, 350, 351,
352–59
Indian Industrial School, 278
Indian Music Day, 368n31
472 index
Indian Opening Day parade, 12, 253n55, 340,
342, 370n57
Indian Problem, solving, 284
Indian Territory, 334, 347, 350; participation
from, 314, 333, 338, 341
“Indian War Dances,” 266
Indigenous peoples: civilization and, 258,
261, 280, 282–83, 287, 394; colonial admin-
istration of, 260; conquest of, 257; future
of, 276, 284, 289, 365; marketing with, 302;
natural history approach and, 323; pro-
gressive, 290; as savages, 257, 261, 266,
300–301; tools of, 321; tourism and, 364–
65. See also Native Americans
industrialization, 81, 95, 197; exhibit of, 359;
social consequences of, 3, 204
industry, advertising for, 386, 388
Information Respecting the History, Condi-
tion and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of
the United States (Schoolcraft), 82
Innes, Nelse, 392
Inquiries into Human Faculty (Galton), 203
International Building, 304, 384, 385
International Dress and Costume Exhibit, 214
“In the Domain of Woman,” 446
‘Iolani Palace, 401, 403, 419
Irma Hotel, 191n37
Isabella I of Castile, Queen: coin of, 208–9,
211, 213–14
Israel, Josef, 134
Ittner, Ella, 160n107
Jack, Sam T., 19n34
Jackson, Helen Hunt, 290
Jackson, William H., 39–40, 55–56n29
Jackson and Rinehart (publishing company), 39
Jaudines, Fermín, 435n60
Jefferson, Thomas, 29, 283
Jenkins, Emily, 167, 168
Jewish Council of Women, 254n67
Johnson, Andrew, 82
Johnson, Claude, 65, 66, 76
Jones, William A., 264, 277, 346
Jorgensen, J. O., 132
Joslyn Art Museum, 149, 157n76
Kalākaua, King, 397, 401, 430n5
Kamehameha, King, 397
Kamehameha Schools, 388, 398
Kamehiro, Stacy, 18, 48, 141, 261, 442
Katz, Wendy, 19, 183, 366n9
Kauluwela School, 390
Kaumakapili School, 390, 398
Kawaiah‘o School, 398
Kemeys, Edward, 130, 155n59
Key, Frances Scott, 143
Key, John Ross, 143, 144, 145–46, 148;
Entrance Arch (Bird’s-Eye View), 41, 42, 143
Keysor, Jennie (Mrs. William), 140, 148
Keysor, William, 140, 148
Kīlauea volcano, 393, 394
Kilpatrick, Thomas, 121, 135
Kim, Linda, 228, 253n58
Kimball, Mary Rogers, 140, 273–74
Kimball, Thomas Rogers, 31, 33, 35, 46,
55n23, 92–93, 108, 122, 130, 140, 285, 452;
Administration Arch and, 40, 45–46,
285; Arch of the States and, 33, 43–46, 44;
sketch by, 285, 286, 297n61; souvenir coin
medal and, 48, 90, 196, 195–97, 200
Kimball Bros., 453n10
King, J. A., 431n13
Kinney, Troy S., 159n96
Kinney, William A., 431n11
Kiowa Camp Circle, 309, 310, 314, 348,
350, 351, 352, 369n36, 372n75; finishing,
311; packing/shipping, 336; problems for,
332–33
Kiowas, 310, 345, 350, 372n75, 372n76; hous-
ing of, 348; knowledge from, 350
Kipling, Rudyard, 15, 157n73, 260, 290,
293n4
Kirchner’s Famous Lady Orchestra, 234
Kirkendall, Freeman P., 152n22
Kitchell, Joseph Gray, 250n18
Kitson, Henry Hudson: sculpture by, 204,
250n19
Kitson, Theodora Alice: sculpture by, 204,
250n19
Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben, 62, 153n32
Knox, William J., 214
Kohala Seminary for Girls, 398
Kountze, Herman, 35, 52, 108, 122, 130
Kountze Park, 43
Kountze Tract, 35, 37, 50
Kramer, Paul A., 422
Kristeva, Julia, 241
Labor Bulletin, 120
Labor Temple, 152n22
Lackey, William, 190n34
Ladies Waiting Room, 133
La Flesche, Francis, 123, 281, 368n31
La Flesche Tibbles, Susette (Bright Eyes),
123, 154n39, 199, 289; Indian progress and,
292; progressive iconography and, 282;
Progressive Indian and, 281–82
Lamprecht, William: Marquette and the
Indians, 71
La Salle, 66
Lawrie, Lee, 157n80
Leech, Edward O., 209–10
“Letters from the Heads of Foreign Gov-
ernments to the President of the United
States” (U.S. State Department), 397
Leutze, Emanuel: Westward the Course of
Empire Takes Its Way, 66
Lewis and Clark, 66
Liberal Arts Building, 120, 132, 304, 443
life groups, 321, 328, 332; illustrating manu-
facturing processes, 330
Lili‘uokalani, Queen, 382, 397, 401, 405, 407,
431n9, 434n54
Lillie, Joe, 422
Lincoln, Abraham, 4, 100n25, 354
Lincoln, L. Alonzo, 182, 191n39, 192n51; Ethel
Evans and, 184–86; Trilby and, 128, 171
Lincoln Courier, 134, 135, 154n39, 157n74;
poem from, 169
Lindsey, Zachary Taylor, 51, 115, 152n22, 207,
210, 220, 227, 252n44; medal design and, 90
Lininger, George, 145, 147, 149
Little Billee, 164, 190–91n34
Little Egypt, 247, 251n3, 254n70
Livingston, Mrs. E. E.: View in the Coun-
try, 160n105
Locke, John, 28–29
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 95–96
Logan, Daniel, 396, 398, 405
Lombroso, Cesare, 203
London’s Great Exhibition (1851), 3, 24
Long, Stephen Harriman, 28, 29, 54n16
index 473
Lorenz, Richard: Critical Moment, 146; A
Wordless Farewell, 132
Louisiana Purchase, 15, 52, 283
Love, Eric T., 390
Lovell, Caroline C., 215; Annie Helen Reese
from Alabama, 217
Lovell, Margaretta, 40
Luff, John, 63–64, 74
Lumbard, Nina E., 160n107; Old Stairs at
San Gabriel Mission, 160n105
Lund, L. A., 160n107
Macfarlane, E. C., 393
MacWhirter, John: The Vanguard, 67, 69
Main, John E.: The Booze Route: A Reform
Book on Some of the Up-to-Date Evils of
the Age, 451
Mains, William C., 359
Makawao Seminary, 388
Manifest Destiny, 18, 29, 199, 210, 233, 308,
346; assumptions about, 25; Corps of Engi-
neers and, 54n16; stereotypes about, 373n80
Manila, 411, 419
Manila Bay, 24, 439n121
Mann Act (1910), 252n46
Manufacturers Building, 11, 39, 121, 142, 328
“The Man with the Hoe” (Markham), 148,
160n108
Marcy, William, 378
Marie Antoinette, 270
Marine Hospital Service, exhibit by, 318
Markham, Edwin, 160n108
Marquette, Jacques, 67, 70; Omaha stamp
issue and, 71, 73, 74
Marshall Islands, 429
Maser Family Foundation, 193n62
Mason, Otis T., 309, 316, 321, 323, 326, 328,
370n49, 370n52; cultural history and, 324;
James Mooney and, 372n75; selections by,
369n43
material culture, 48, 314, 324, 352, 355, 365;
bartered exchange of, 357; cases, deco-
rated/manufacturing tools, 329; ethnolog-
ical comparison of, 345
Mattox, Frank, 264, 371–72n69
Maupin, Will M., 295n30
Maurer, Dorothy, 117, 178–79
474 index
McCague, Lydia, 116
McClure’s Magazine, 15, 62, 93, 269
McClure syndicate, 138
McConnell, Emmett C., 143
McCord Brady Company, 386
McCormick, Ensign, 179
McCowan, Samuel M., 361
McDougall, Isabel, 134
McGee, William John (WJ), 311, 321, 352,
366n12, 369n36, 370n52
McKinley, William, 10, 15, 17, 45, 49–50, 96,
98, 116, 142–43, 264, 335–36, 412, 445; assas-
sination of, 4; campaign of, 64, 65; Hawai-
ian annexation and, 382, 383; imperialism
of, 141; nomination of, 74; Peace Jubilee and,
261; Philippines and, 411, 418, 429; President’s
Day and, 271, 411, 413–14; Spanish-American
War and, 261, 411, 414; visit of, 11, 14
McKnight, Anna: Cozy Corner, 160n105
McKnight, J. H., 374n100
Meakin, Lewis H., 146; Moonrise on Cape
Ann, 156n64
medals, 202–4, 342; souvenir, 20, 207
medicine lodge, 309, 350, 351
Medicine Lodge Treaty (1867), 309
Mekeel’s Stamp Company, 61
Mekeel’s Weekly Stamp News, 74, 87
Melchert, James, 120–21
melting pot, 227, 231–32, 253n64
Memorial Day parades, 3
Mercantile Library, 167
Mercer, William A., 292, 354, 370n57,
372n69, 373n80; actors and, 267; Edward
Rosewater and, 335, 336, 345–46, 352;
encampment and, 346; entertainment and,
337, 371n60; Indian Congress and, 277,
285, 352–53; James Mooney and, 334, 336,
346, 352–53, 371n58, 372n75; Kiowa Camp
Circle and, 350; Office of Indian Affairs
and, 263–64; and sham battles as Great
Man Who Fights Them All, 345–46, 352,
371n69; souvenirs and, 356
Merrimac (ironclad), 11
Merritt, John A., 66, 70, 74, 76, 81, 435n60;
commemorative stamp issue and, 67;
Department of the Pacific and, 435n62;
Omaha issue and, 65, 71, 78
Mexican-American War (1848), 29, 48, 197
Meyer, Constant Jones: Trilby, 145
Michelangelo, 45
Midland Monthly Magazine, 151n12, 297n58
Midway, 7, 9, 33, 40, 106, 116, 125, 128, 131,
133, 137, 143, 183, 214, 215; commercial zone
of, 362; concessions on, 395, 405; cul-
tural exhibits of, 451; East, 10, 12, 37, 237,
270; entertainment on, 428; freakishness
and, 238; neighborhoods of, 115; North, 11,
394; organization of, 236; stamp sales on,
88; Trilby on, 162–63, 177–78, 186; villages
along, 11, 13, 17; visiting, 126; West, 144,
415; wildness of, 13
Miles, Nelson, 271
militarism, U.S., 60, 148, 408, 411, 413, 418,
422, 428–29
Miller, Bonnie M., 19, 48, 49, 250n23, 392,
415; Battle of Manila Bay and, 411; exposi-
tions and, 378; Omaha issue and, 442
Miller, George L., 15, 141, 419, 438n103
Miller, Mrs. George L., 150n5
Millet, Jean-Francois: Digger and Sower, 137,
157n80; Man with a Hoe, 160n108
Milwaukee Road, 393
Mines and Mining Building, 117, 304
mining, 33, 303; technology and, 70
Minneapolis Times, 393
Minnesota State Building, 123
Mirror Maze, 11
Miss America, 246, 255n79
Miss Frances Willard and Her Political
Peers, 143
Mississippi River, 26, 27–28, 45, 61, 66,
88, 283
Missouri River, 24, 27, 29, 31, 37, 39, 56n31,
108, 113, 263, 445
modernity, 258, 278, 283; American, 272,
275; Native Americans and, 275, 276
Monitor (ironclad), 11
Montgomery Ward Building, 89
Montojo, Patricio, 408
Mooney, James, 14, 187, 263, 276, 310, 316,
326, 336, 350, 354, 366n13, 370n52, 372n76;
anthropology and, 359, 365; assessment
by, 357, 360, 363–64; bae and, 353, 358–59,
367n18, 369n36; cultural sensitivity of, 348;
cultural symbolism and, 352; demonstra-
tors and, 333–34, 337; Edward Rosewater
and, 263, 311–15, 335, 346, 359, 363; ethnic
art market and, 357; ethnographic artifacts
and, 312; housing and, 343, 348, 366–
67n16, 373n78; Indian Congress and, 277,
313, 315, 353, 360; Kiowa and, 372–73n77;
Kiowa Camp Circle and, 309, 314–15,
332; noble savage trope and, 264; Otis T.
Mason and, 372n75; photographs and, 359;
sham battles and, 347; tmiec and, 358–59;
on Whiteman, 353–54; William A. Mercer
and, 334, 336, 346, 353, 371n58, 372n75; WJ
McGee and, 352
Moore, John De Renville “Pony,” 17, 153n52
Moore, Sarah J., 19, 261, 441–42
Moores, Frank E., 51
Moorish Palace (Village), 12, 163, 174, 178,
192n51, 236, 270, 285, 451
Morgan, John T., 395
Morgan, Thomas, 276
Morris, J. B., 159n96
Morris, Lillian, 120
Morse, Jedediah, 27–28, 54n13
Morton, J. Sterling, 45, 52, 371n68
mounted horn dance, 356
Mucha, Alphonse: Exposition Universelle &
Internationale de St. Louis États-Unis du
30 Avril au 30 Novembre 1904, 245
Muhr, Adolph F., 277, 290, 358–59, 368n25;
photos by, 235, 291
Muir, John, 292n1
Mumaugh, Frances, 108, 147, 157n70,
160n106
music, 11, 13, 127, 130, 181, 278, 400, 405, 451;
Indigenous, 265, 281, 333, 337
Music Congress, 123, 368n31
Mystic Maze, 162, 174
Napoleon Bonaparte, 144
Naranjo, Diego, 354
National Academy of Design, 152n24
National Anthropological Archives, 367n22
National Association of Women Painters
and Sculptors, 158n88
National Child Labor Committee, 205
National Council of Women, 254n67, 453n3
index 475
nationalism, 54n13, 94; anticolonial, 381;
provincial, 189n11
Native Americans, 9, 14, 26, 82, 126, 187,
199, 227, 247; allusion to, 306; anthropol-
ogy/ entertainment and, 19; armed resis-
tance by, 356; artifacts from, 171, 299, 303,
312, 321–24, 327, 369n43; authentic, 364;
citizenship and, 297n55; crafts by, 318, 320,
331–32, 336, 338, 340, 341, 356; exploita-
tion of, 47, 308, 310; facial characteris-
tics of, 330; iconography about, 260–61;
image of, 265, 273, 365n5; inferiority of,
258–59; male, 243, 244; marginalization of,
266, 300; modernity and, 275, 276; partic-
ipation by, 187, 262, 302, 315, 337, 364–65;
past and, 122–23, 279, 308; traditional cul-
ture of, 27; transformation of, 301. See also
Indigenous peoples
Navajos, 321, 330, 345
Nebraska Ceramics Club, 116, 132–33, 142
Nebraska City Conservative, 371n68
Nebraska Day, 115
Nebraska Philatelic Society, 88
Nebraska State Building, 88, 90, 116, 137, 147,
156n57, 156n70, 157n80, 159n100, 306, 452,
453n10; art in, 126, 132–33; concerns about,
134; decoration of, 146; stuffed bison for,
155n50
Nebraska State Commission, 222
Nebraska State Historical Society, 133
Negro Women’s Club, 143
netoscopes, 153n30, 183
Neuhuys, Johannes Albert, 135
Neville, William, 90, 222–23
Newlands Resolution (Joint Resolution 259)
(1898), 384, 386, 395
New Orleans fair, 1, 430n4
New West, 59, 92–94
New Woman, 121, 129
New York Life Building, 144–45
New York’s Art League, 133
New York Times, 86, 197
New York World, 216
New York World’s Fair (1939–40), 3, 246, 248
Nez Perce Reservation, 279
North America, maps of, 27, 28
Northern Marianas Islands, 429
476 index
Northern Pacific Railroad, 79, 393
“The Novel Demeuble” (Cather), 447
Nybakken, Evan, 79
Oahu Railway Company, 393
O’Brien, D. J., 85
O’Fallon, Fannie Clark, 170
Office of Fiber Investigation, exhibit by, 318
Office of Indian Affairs (Indian Service), 82,
259, 263–64, 271, 278, 280–82, 299, 315–
16, 336, 352, 362; assimilationism and, 353;
Chiricahua Apache and, 354; domestic
colonialism and, 361; exhibit by, 318, 319,
332, 368n31; Indian Congress and, 314, 320,
333, 361; Indigenous participants and, 334;
participation by, 312–13
Officer, Julia, 116, 154n40
Official Guide Book to the Trans-Mississippi
and International Exposition, 411
Ojibways, 356
Old Plantation, 7, 11, 126–27, 143, 163, 199,
233, 236, 240, 270, 300, 451
Olney’s Quarto Geography: For Families and
Schools, 29
Omaha: Democrats in, 112; ethnic popula-
tions of, 113; image of, 449–50; immigration
to, 112; map of, 114; modernization of, 299–
300; population of, 112; Republicans in, 112
Omaha Academy of Fine Arts, 108
Omaha and Winnebago Agency, 336
Omaha art institutions, control of, 130-35,
137-41
Omaha Bee, 5, 11, 30, 43, 46, 63–64, 92, 111,
116, 121, 123, 128–29, 146, 174, 179, 221–22,
224, 254n67, 263, 269, 274, 300; advertise-
ments in, 449; on American Indians/fem-
inists, 266; base for, 113; Ethel Evans and,
105–6, 108, 115, 122; Girls’ and Boys’ Build-
ing and, 143; Goyathlay and, 356; Greater
America and, 141; Indian Congress and,
345, 357–58; on Omaha exposition, 449;
postage stamps and, 65, 85; Scenic Rail-
way and, 409; on sham battles, 347; Sioux
and, 265; tmiec and, 311; Trilby advertise-
ment from, 173; Trilby and, 181; William A.
Mercer and, 267; womanhood and, 195; on
Woman’s Board, 220; on women, 223
Omaha Club, 108
Omaha Day, 50
Omaha Excelsior, 129, 145–46, 148, 240–41,
252n43, 252n44; on Omaha series, 70; Post
Office and, 95
Omaha Penny Press, 120
Omaha Public Library, 108, 130-32, 134, 149
Omahas, 93, 199, 282, 289, 334, 336, 358,
370n57; civilization and, 289
Omaha School Board, 106
Omaha stamp issue, 60, 85, 97, 98, 442;
“Farming in the West,” 80; “Frémont on
Rocky Mountains,” 77; “Hardships of Emi-
gration,” 83-85, 84; “Indian Hunting Buf-
falo,” 84; “Marquette on the Mississippi,”
73; “Mississippi River Bridge,” 75; “Troops
Guarding Train,” 72; “Western Cattle in
Storm,” 67, 69; “Western Mining Prospec-
tor,” 72; collecting, 85–86; criticism of, 86–
87; iconography of, 63–67, 70–71, 74, 76,
78–79, 81–83, 85; sales of, 85, 88; settle-
ment/progress and, 91; speculation on, 87
Omaha Woman’s Weekly, 94
Omaha Women’s Club, 110, 139, 140, 142
Omaha World-Herald, 15, 17, 49, 63, 108,
111, 115–16, 125, 128–31, 133, 135, 141, 146–
47, 178, 184, 266, 281, 418; Albert Rothery
in, 126, 132; Elia Peattie in, 137; Filipi-
nos and, 418, 421–22; Fine Arts Build-
ing and, 144; on fireworks display, 413; on
First Nebraska Regiment, 419; hula per-
formances and, 400; Indian Congress and,
278; Kamehameha Schools and, 398; Phil-
ippines and, 417; Salvation Army and, 117
O’Neal, Mr., 152n23
O’Neill, Rose, 129, 155n56
Oo-mah-ha Ta-wa-tha (Omaha City) (La
Flesche Tibbles and Griffin), 123, 154n39, 282
O Pioneers! (Cather), 447–48
Orr, John William, 77
Otis, Elwell S., 17, 418, 437n97
Otoes, 282, 370n53
Our New Colonies: The Hawaiian Islands
(Union Pacific), 393, 432n21; photos from,
387, 389, 391
Outruns the Wolf, 373n79
Overland Monthly, 151n12, 287, 292n1
Pabst Building, 162, 415
Pacific, exhibiting empire in, 427–30; map
of, 379
Pacific Islands, 17, 247, 379
Pacific Telegraph Company, 71
Pains’ Fireworks Company, 414
Palace of the Mysteries, 162, 163
Palais de l’Optique, 230
Palau, 429
Palmer, A. M., 190n34
Panama-Pacific International Exposition
(1915), 56n38, 251n41; poster art for, 251n42
Panics: of 1873, 4; of 1893, 4, 24, 61, 78, 188,
364; of 1907, 4
Parezo, Nancy, 18, 54n9, 123, 277, 293n4,
434n44
Paris, 240; and Commune (1871), 3
Paris Universal Exposition (1889), 3, 8
Paris Universal Exposition (1900), 3, 151n6,
151n12, 206, 228–30
Park, Vena, 160n107
Parker, Cora, 126, 133, 145, 147, 156–57n70
Parral, Apache raid in, 354
Parsons, Morte, 157n80
“The Passing Show” (Cather), 105, 134
Patent Office, exhibit by, 318
patriarchy, 242, 258, 266
Patrick, J. N. H., 130
patriotism, 48, 49, 98, 261
Pawnees, 337
Paxton Block, 115, 144
Peabody Museum, 123
Peace Jubilee, 14, 49, 261, 270, 411
Peattie, Elia, 135, 137, 157n79, 158n83
Peavler, David J., 198
Peck, Ferdinand, 230
Peddle, Caroline C., 209; sketch by, 211
Pele, 394
Pen and Brush Club, 158n88
Pennsylvania Philatelist, 96
Perfect, L. Belle, 160n107
Perrine, Ella B., 115–16, 123, 154n40
Peters, A. C., 152n23
Peterson, Jess R., 207
Philadelphia Centennial Exposition (1876),
3, 24, 60, 162, 364, 366n9
Philadelphia Inquirer, 98
index 477
Philanthropic Educational Organization, 133
philately, 60–61, 64, 74, 85–91
Philippine-American War (1898), 17, 408,
427, 438; beginning of, 380; displacement
of, 436n80; end of, 434n55; as genocide,
421; Greater America Exposition and, 415;
legitimizing, 418; racist depictions and,
437n94; stamp collecting and, 96, 98
Philippine Republic, dissolution of, 408
Philippine Revolution, 408, 409
Philippines, 7, 11, 15, 17–18, 261, 270; annex-
ation and, 377; colonial histories of, 380;
control of, 428; as counternarrative, 427;
introduction of, 435n63; militarism in,
418, 428, 438n111; occupation of, 14; post-
age stamps from, 96; U.S. relationship
with, 378, 379, 429; status of, 437n93; as
unincorporated territory, 408; views of,
424, 425, 426
Philippines Reservation (1904), 10, 18
Philippine Village, 17, 142, 418, 416, 420,
436n82, 436n82, 438n107, 439n118; authen-
ticity of, 436n84; contemporary nature of,
417; Filipinos at, 437n87; First Nebraska
Regiment and, 421–22, 420; location of,
415; narrative of, 422; native primitiveness
at, 417; visiting, 419
Phoenix Indian School, 361
photographs: averaged, 201; souvenir, 233,
357–59
photography, 224; composite, 90, 201, 204,
206–7, 210, 212, 250n18, 251n33, 255n78;
proliferation of, 203–4; social commen-
tary and, 204
phrenology, 203–4
Phyllis, the Artist’s Model, 124–26, 133
Pine Ridge Reservation, 341, 361
Poncas, 199, 281, 340–41, 344, 358
Ponickau, Robert, 72
populism, 4, 99n9, 133, 135, 141–48; free sil-
ver, 74; imperialism and, 148; prairie, 112;
rise of, 62
Populists, 19, 62, 111, 115–16, 120, 137–39, 148,
151n11, 312; allying with, 113; Democrats
and, 62, 112; industrial workers and, 4;
Omaha exposition and, 63; patronage of,
132; vision of, 94
478 index
postage stamps, 70, 79, 89, 211; advertis-
ing and, 65; collecting, 60–61, 76, 85–
86, 94–96, 98, 102n83; from colonies, 96;
commemorative, 63, 81, 86–88; didactic
function of, 64; forged, 74; miniature mes-
sages of, 7, 64, 71, 81, 83–85; production of,
94; triangular, 96; woman on, 251n26
postcards, 40, 63, 89, 98, 102n64, 357
Post Office Department, 19, 67, 78, 86, 88–
89, 91, 95, 211, 317–18; commemorative
envelopes from, 60; criticism for, 76, 87;
exhibit by, 359; as national historian, 64;
Omaha issue and, 85; protest letters to, 71;
stamp collecting and, 61
Pottawattamie County Building (Wigwam),
133, 156n70, 306, 307
Potter, Bertha Palmer, 208–10
Potter, Paul, 169, 190n34
poverty, Indigenous, 279, 314, 337
Powell, John Wesley, 311–13, 367n18
Powell, William H., 81
“The Practice of Primitive Arts: The Life
Figure Series,” 328, 332–33; illustrating
manufacturing processes, 330
Prang, 143, 184
Pratt, E. Spencer, 435n64
Pratt, Richard, 361
President’s Day, 49, 51, 271, 411, 413–14,
436n74
Press Building, 89, 144, 151n12
progress, 23, 50–52, 70, 91, 300, 303; Amer-
ican, 301, 308, 395; boundaries of, 31;
domesticity and, 262; evidence of, 35;
exhibit of, 359; portrait of, 450; symbolism
of, 273; trajectory of, 30
Progressive Era, 110, 259–60, 293n5
Progressives, 140, 148, 199, 204, 258, 260, 282
prostitutes, 113, 119, 151n16, 221, 252n46,
438n110, 450
Pryor, Mrs. L. M., 158n93
Public Comfort Building, 159n100
Pueblos, 309, 337, 343, 345, 366n13
Puerto Rico, 17, 261, 395, 411; annexation
and, 377
Pullman strike, 4
Quintette Club, members of, 434n52
race, 218, 220; counternarratives of, 206;
demise of, 267; differences in, 206, 232;
hierarchies, 13; ideology, 199; language of,
287; progress, 11; taxonomies of, 10; types/
objects, 10; white, 232, 281, 284
racism, 289, 371n60, 422; and essentialism,
281, 301
railroad(s), 61; government subsidized land
sales and, 37; regulation of, 5; strikes, 4
Ramona (H. Jackson), 290
Rattlesnake Pete, 264, 371n69
realism, 128, 138, 170, 178, 250n25, 186, 447
Reasoner, Elsie, 108, 112, 115, 151n6, 151n12
Reconstruction, 3–4
Red Cloud, population of, 447
Red Dog, 372n69
Reed, Joseph R., 158n87
Reese, Annie Helen, 215, 217
Reid, Robert: Opal, 132, 146
Reinhardt, Akim, 18, 54n9, 187, 316, 432n21, 442
Remington, Frederic, 70–71, 74, 146
Republican National Convention, 74;
Ticket, 75, 76
Republican Party, 62, 76, 115; anti-
Catholicism and, 71; factions of, 112, 113,
148; Frémont and, 78; Omaha exposi-
tion and, 63
Revolutionary War, 48
Rice, E. E., 169
Richey, Isabel, 149
Rigg’s Pharmacy, 168
Righter, Alice, 147, 157n70
Rinehart, Alfred Edward, 55–56n29
Rinehart, Anna (Mrs. Frank Albert), 129,
155n56
Rinehart, Dora, 155n56
Rinehart, Frank Albert, 39–41, 55–56n29,
144, 225, 233, 317, 422, 441; Adolf F. Muhr
and, 358–59, 368n25; bae and, 253n66,
277; Louis Bostwick and, 416; marriage of,
40; Native participants and, 124, 294n17,
316, 337; photos by, 6, 12, 44, 175, 176, 180,
226, 234, 235, 237, 239, 268, 291, 307, 319, 331,
344, 349, 351, 385, 410, 412; Rinehart’s Book
of Views, 40; Sarah Whistler and, 277, 290
Rochegrosse, Georges: The Fall of Babylon, 131
Rock Island Bridge, 66, 76
Rockwood, George G., 224–25; article by,
201–2; photography and, 90, 200–201, 227,
230, 244; white womanhood and, 232, 243;
young ladies’ book club and, 201, 206–7
Rocky Mountains, 27–29, 45, 76, 78
Rodriguez, Dylan: on Philippine-American
War, 421
Rogers, William Allen, 441, 442; Scene from
the Indian Congress, 286–87, 288; The
Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha,
441–42, 443
Roosevelt, Theodore, 33, 64, 66, 71, 78, 99n9,
102n76, 129, 200; Philippine-American
War and, 434n55; Zangwill and, 231–32
Rosewater, Edward, 5, 7–8, 17, 33, 51, 63–
65, 71, 78, 106, 111, 113, 129, 148, 433n34;
anthropology and, 359, 362; appropri-
ation and, 313, 314; attack on, 130, 135;
audience expectation and, 302–3; con-
cessionaires and, 308; cultural sym-
bolism and, 352; death of, 152n16;
downtown merchants and, 141; exhibits
and, 303; goals of, 333; Greater Amer-
ica and, 141; groundwork by, 309; impe-
rialism and, 301; Indian Congress and,
263, 300, 315, 353, 359, 360; on Indians/
savage, 300–301; injunction against, 352;
James Mooney and, 263, 311–15, 335, 346,
359, 363; marketing and, 301, 302; myth-
making and, 448; Native Americans
and, 7, 9, 365n5, 366n10; noble savage
trope and, 264; Omaha series and, 65;
progressivism and, 122; railroad monop-
olies and, 55n23; success for, 364; tmiec
and, 302, 306; William A. Mercer and,
335–36, 345–46, 352
Rosewater, Mrs. Charles, 111, 150n5
Rothery, Albert, 108, 126, 129, 132–33, 135,
145–47, 159n96, 159n97
Royal Academy, 67
Royal School, 398
Roybet, Ferdinand: Charles the Bold at
Nessle, 131
Ruskin, John, 185
Russell, Henry B., 378
Rydell, Robert W., 127, 362, 378, 442
index 479
Sac and Fox (Mesquakie), 282–83, 291,
297n65; genetic heritage and, 358; hous-
ing of, 348
Sackett, Leonard, 100n39
Salvation Army, 117, 119–20, 178–79
Salvation Army Building, 117
Sāmoa, 378, 429
Sampson, William T., 97
San Diego world’s fair (1915), 3, 364
San Francisco Chronicle, 383, 393, 432n18
San Juan Hill, 52, 290
Santee Sioux Agency, 278
Sarony, Napoleon, 190n19
savagery, 18, 90, 257, 269–70, 283, 289, 292,
313, 360; beauty and, 243; civilization and,
275, 322; displays of, 265, 271; emphasis
on, 227, 262; Indian, 227, 259, 261, 266, 271,
275–76, 283–84
savages, 9, 260, 265, 273–74, 290, 353; fem-
inine, 266; Filipinos as, 380; freaks and,
242; iconography of, 266; Indigenous peo-
ples as, 257, 261, 266, 300–301; noble, 257–
58, 281, 287
Scenic Railway, 162, 240, 409–11, 410
Schaffert, Timothy, 19, 20
Schlitz, 162
Schneider, Blanche, 160n107
Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 82, 84
Schurman Commission, 429
Scientific American, 316
Scott, Cunningham R., 119, 120
Scott Stamp & Coin Company, 61, 74, 86–
87, 211
Seavey, Lilla, 156n70
Second Treatise of Government (Locke), 28
Sekula, Allan, 203–4
self-government, 359, 377, 380
Seminole War, 82
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 382
Seri, 321
Settlement Association, 432n18
Sewell, Amanda Brewster: Pastoral, 146
sham battles, 83, 187, 264, 267–69, 268, 271,
316, 320, 345–47, 352, 360–61, 363
Shanghai World Exposition, 3
Shaw, Albert, 52, 70, 92, 99n12, 100n25, 269
480 index
Sherman, C. L., 159n96
Sherman, John, 382
Sherman (transport), 433n39
Shingle, Robert W., 384, 386, 392–93, 431n14
Shooting the Chutes, 162, 240
Shoshones, 266
Silbey, Joe, 185
Sioux, 82, 278, 282, 289, 294, 312, 330, 345,
372n69, 374n100; Lakota, 265, 361; housing
of, 340–41, 348
Sisseton Agency (Cheyenne), 278
slavery, 11, 29, 152n22, 233, 236, 240, 259, 451
Smillie, George F. C., 72, 73, 84
Smith, Charles Emory, 96
Smith, Henrietta Draper, 110
Smith, Jacob H., 438n110
Smith, Raymond Ostrander, 69, 72, 73, 75,
77, 80, 84
Smith, W. Morton, 190n32
Smith, W. O., 431n13
Smithsonian Institution, 8, 14, 264, 299, 309,
312, 362, 367n22, 370n47, 373n77; exhib-
its by, 317, 319, 320, 321, 322, 359, 369n37;
funding for, 315; Indigenous peoples and,
370n52; life groups and, 322
“Snap Shots at the Passing Throng”
(Maupin), 295n30
Snap Shots of the Trans-Mississippi Exposi-
tion, 41, 42
Snowden, Martanie, 145, 156n70
Snyder, Ivy Pearl, 1
social Darwinism, 259, 283, 390
social discipline/ordering, 27, 112, 131, 206, 321
social evolution, narratives of, 201, 203,
322–27, 397
social status, 9, 126, 170, 201, 216, 350, 424, 450
Society for the Prevention for Cruelty to
Animals, 138
Society for the Suppression of Speculative
Stamps, 87
Society of the Mayflower, 138
Sousa, John Phillips, 157n73
Southern Plains Indians, 326, 345; hous-
ing of, 348
Southern Workman, 320
souvenirs, 2, 63, 88–91, 195, 199–200, 202,
 215, 227, 231–33, 243, 246, 318, 445; authen-
tic, 357; commemorative, 89, 197; control
of, 355; personal, 210; prize, 89–90; racial-
ized, 357–59; replica, 356, 357; special, 207–
10; touristic, 352–57. See also coins; medals
Sower (Millet), 157n80
Spanish-American War (1898), 23–25, 65,
95, 146, 148, 225, 254n69, 270, 290, 293n4,
314, 346, 414, 430n1; annexation following,
384, 388; challenge of, 50; declaration of,
263, 272; exhibit about, 327; Hawai‘i and,
428; iconography of, 98; imperialism and,
261, 377, 381, 395, 411, 415; Indian Appro-
priation Bill and, 333, 370n53; Laws of
Progress and, 48–53; uss Maine and, 49;
military successes of, 380; patriotism and,
261; Philippines and, 407–8; progress/civ-
ilization and, 62; stamp collecting and, 96,
98; yellow journalism and, 442
Spokane Daily Chronicle, 212, 213
spoons, souvenir, 2, 3
stamp collecting, 60–61, 76, 85–86; imperi-
alistic, 94–96, 98; women and, 102n83
Stanford, Mrs. Leland, 171, 184
St. Anthony School for Boys, 398
Star Tobacco Building, 307
State Department, 47; exhibit by, 318
Steele, George D., 21n12
Steinbeck, John, 1
stereotypes, 285, 451; Euroamerican, 355,
373n80; literary narrative, 257; Native
American, 257, 266, 345–46, 366n10
St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition
(1904), 1, 3, 5, 10, 18, 243, 276, 277, 353, 361,
364, 366n9, 373n83
“The Story of a Model: She Posed for One
Picture and Lifted a Farm Mortgage,” 187,
188–89
Strawn, Rose E., 116
Streets of All Nations, 162, 236
Streets of Cairo, 10–11, 163, 214, 236, 240
Studies on Hysteria (Freud), 168
Suffrage Day, 254n67, 453n3
Sultan’s Harem, 270
Sun Dance (1867) encampment, 350
Sunday Times Magazine, 231
Svengali, 145, 161, 163, 174, 178, 190–91n34;
Trilby and, 166
swan boat, 441–44
The Swan Gondola, 444, 446, 452
Tanner, Henry Ossawa: Raising of Lazarus, 143
Tawakoni Jim, Chief, 373n83
Taylor, James Knox, 45
Taylor, Zachary, 152n22
“Technological Development in the Arts,”
327–28
technology, 20n7, 23, 27, 322, 370n49; com-
plex, 255n78; mining industry and, 70;
Native American, 434n44; representa-
tional, 53; superiority of, 62; surveillance,
55n78
Temple of Beauty, 236
Tennessee Centennial Exposition (1897), 3,
5, 21n7, 140, 309, 320, 370n47, 444
Thanet, Octave (Alice French), 13, 99n9, 128,
134, 138–39, 278–79, 285; literary images
by, 292; on sham battles, 269
Theumba, Inshata (Bright Eyes), 281. See
also La Flesche Tibbles, Susette (Bright
Eyes)
Thiessen, Thomas, 415
Thomas, F. S., 191n34
Thompson, George W., 212, 213
Thompson, Lanny, 380, 396, 401, 429
Thomson, Rosemarie Garland, 240, 242
Thurston, Lorrin A.: A Handbook on the
Annexation of Hawaii, 383–84, 431n9,
431n11
Tibbles, Thomas H., 154n39, 199, 281
tipis, 260, 285, 335, 337, 343, 345, 347, 348,
350, 373n78
Tissot, James, 144, 146
tmiec. See Trans-Mississippi and Interna-
tional Exposition Corporation (tmiec)
Tohono O’odham, 321, 330, 331
Tojetti family: Alonzo, 145, 159n98; Domen-
ico, 159n98; Virgilio, 159n98
Tolstoy, Leo, 129, 146, 447
Total Abstinence Fountain, 162
tourism, 59, 432n21; ethnic, 363–64; Hawai-
ian, 393, 397, 403, 432n26; Indigenous peo-
ples and, 364–65; promoting, 87, 432n26
index 481
Towl, Germain, 417
Townsend, George Monewa, 403, 405
Towse, Ed, 396, 405
trade, 427; increasing, 303; international,
377–78
Trans-Mississippian, 152n22
Trans-Mississippi and International Expo-
sition (1898): achievements celebrated
at, 30; appreciation of, 20; architectural
vista of, 93; delay for, 25; as department
store, 117, 119–22; lessons of, 289; map of,
38; mapping/viewing, 30–31, 33, 35, 37,
39–41; opening of, 49–50, 95; overview
of, 23; remnants of, 445–46; success for,
24, 363–64; uniqueness of, 51, 52; visiting,
59, 94, 366n6
Trans-Mississippi and International Exposi-
tion Association, incorporation of, 35
Trans-Mississippi and International Expo-
sition Corporation (tmiec), 311–12, 333,
336, 346, 358–59; concessionaires and,
308, 309; described, 299–300; exhibit pro-
duction and, 303, 306; fees for, 308–9;
Goyathlay/sales and, 355; Indian Congress
and, 308, 360, 365; infrastructure/operat-
ing funds and, 302; injunction against, 352;
marketing and, 308; Native Americans
and, 301–2, 303, 365n5; natural history
and, 304; souvenirs and, 356; stock certifi-
cate from, 33, 36
Trans-Mississippi and International Exposi-
tion Souvenir Coin Medal, 19–20, 94, 195–
97, 196, 199–200, 210, 215, 227, 233, 260,
318, 445; beauty contest for, 90–91, 200,
210, 212–16, 218, 220; and Gibson girl, 231–
233; Native Americans and, 90, 102n68,
122, 195–97, 199, 227, 243–44; production
and design of, 47–48, 88–91, 94, 199–200,
207, 210, 251n33, 318, 446; reception by
Woman’s Board, 224–27, 243, 252n43–45.
See also Floral Parade medal
Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress
(1894), 35, 61, 62, 151n11, 431n1
Trans-Mississippi Philatelic Society, Omaha
issue and, 88
Trans-Mississippi region, 19, 26, 47–49, 51,
66; global context of, 53; images of, 91–94;
482 index
life in, 27, 71; maps of, 30; national coher-
ence of, 53; people of, 95; settlement of,
90; states/territories of, 35, 43, 61
Transportation Building, 345, 372n69
Treasury Department, 47, 88, 250n23;
exhibit by, 318
Treaty of Medicine Lodge (1867), 350
Treaty of Paris (1899), 95, 262, 436n77
Trilby (character), 145, 154n44, 174, 177–
78; as automaton, 186; behavior of, 166–
67; breakdown of, 164, 166; as citizen of
Trans-Mississippi, 161; described, 163–
64; hypnosis of, 169; illustration of, 165; as
mass market commodity, 167–68; praise
for, 185; real, 191n42; Svengali and, 166; as
western farm girl, 187–89
Trilby (Cooper), 125–26, 128–29, 131, 142,
145, 161, 171, 192n51; aestheticism and, 185;
commercial appeal of, 177–78; criticism
of, 181–82, 184, 186; disappearance of, 174;
Indian Congress and, 186–87; on Midway,
162–63, 177–78, 186; model for, 187, 188–89
Trilby (du Maurier), 165, 168–70, 185; foot
fetishism in, 168; lectures about, 168–
69; reception of, 163–64, 166, 170; suc-
cess for, 161
Trilby (Meyer), 145
Trilby (play in Omaha), 170, 190n34
“Trilby” (poem in Courier), text of, 169
Trilbymania, 144, 166–68, 186, 189n17,
190n28
Trilby Temple, 11–12, 19, 145, 163, 171, 174,
175, 176, 178, 185, 192n51; fire at, 193n69;
ornamentation of, 186
Trinity Cathedral, 133
tropes: cultural, 259; Progressive, 258, 276–
85, 287; savage, 257–58, 262–67, 269–76,
277, 283, 289, 292
True, Frederick W., 316, 321, 369n35
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 47
Twain, Mark, 15, 292n1
Twin Tower restaurant, 6, 12
Tyler, Carolyn D.: Sail-Boat, 160n105
Ulrich, Rudolph, 37
Umsted, W. W., 400
Union National Bank, 62
Union Pacific Railroad, 24, 89, 393, 397;
holdings in, 35; souvenirs from, 89; tour-
ism and, 432n21
Universal Postal Congress, 64, 99n15
Universal Postal Union, 99n15
University of Nebraska, 126, 133, 149,
157n74, 170
U.S. Army, 52, 354
U.S. Asiatic Squadron, 409
U.S. Congress funding for exposition, 301,
312–14; Hawaiian annexation and, 382
U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers, 28,
54n16
U.S. Geological Survey, 299, 318, 358
U.S. Government Building, 6, 30n52, 39–
40, 88, 123, 271, 279, 283, 304, 314, 363,
372n76, 443; anthropology exhibits and,
315–18, 320–24, 326–28, 330, 332–33; coins
at, 207; described, 41, 43, 45–48; exhibits
at, 96, 317, 322
U.S. Mint, 207–10
U.S. National Museum (usnm), 299, 316–17,
322, 372n75; bae and, 328; exhibit by, 320–
21, 324, 326–27, 367n16; housing and, 348;
Kiowa Camp Circle and, 350; visiting, 309
U.S. Postal Card Company, 89
uss Boston, Manila Bay and, 439n121
uss Maine, 87, 98, 261; explosion of, 11, 25,
48, 49, 57n47
Valentine’s Day, 174, 186
vandalism, 117–19, 179, 181, 183
Venus de Milo, 179, 181
Verestchagin, Vasily, 144, 146
“Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts
and Learning in America” (Berkeley), 25
Victory of Samothrace, 117
Vitascope, 11
Volcano House, 393
Vonnoh, Bessie Potter, 116; American Girl,
228–31, 229
Wai Kum, 390
Wailuku Mill, 386, 387
Wakefield, John A., 51, 65, 139, 363
Wake Island, 429
Walker, Charles Howard, 31, 33–34, 92–93
Walker, Harry, 374n87
Wallace, J. Laurie, 131–32, 147, 149, 159n97
Wallace, William: lantern slide by, 331
Walsh, L. D., 453n10
Wanamaker, John, 60, 81, 87
Wanamaker’s department stores, stamp col-
lecting and, 60
Warbington, Carey J., 117, 119, 183–84
war dances, 274, 356
War Department, 10, 271, 327, 418; exhibits
by, 48, 318; Filipinos and, 18; Philippines
and, 429
Washington, George, 47, 140
Washington Post, 200
Washington Times, 188
Wattles, Gurdon, 5, 26, 35, 49–51, 53n7, 122,
142; exposition corporation and, 62; Great
American Desert and, 27
Weather Bureau, exhibit by, 318
Webster, John L., 24, 93, 102n76
Weekly Messenger, 421
Weir, John F., 159n96
Weninger, F. X., 74
Western Art Association, 92, 126, 131–33,
140–41
Western Laborer, 120, 121, 141, 157n78, 453n10
West Indies, 17
Whistler, James A. McNeill, 185, 189n17
Whistler, Sarah A., 289–92, 297n65; por-
trait of, 291
Whistler, William, 297n65
White, Sam, 79
White, William Allen, 62, 93
White City, 13, 14, 49, 89, 105, 441–42, 449,
451; creation of, 93; of 1893, 5, 162, 452;
Omaha and, 51, 178, 452
White Earth Reservation, canoe from,
370n47
Whiteman (Plains Apache), 353–54
Whiteman, I. Edmund: Moonshine and
Mist, 132
“White Man’s Burden” (Kipling), 4, 15, 260,
293n4, 361
whiteness, types of, 246
white slave traffic, 221
White-Slave Traffic Act (1910), 252n46
White-swan (Crow), 354
Whitmore, H. P., 108, 150n5
index 483
Whitmore, Mrs. H. P., 150n5
“Why Annexation Is Just to Native Hawai-
ians,” 384
Wichitas, 345, 353, 372n76, 373n82, 374n100;
dances of, 356; housing of, 347, 348, 359
Wild West shows, 8–9, 187, 236, 264, 267,
276–77, 300, 306, 316, 345, 362, 451. See
also Cody, William F. “Buffalo Bill”
Williams, J. J., 386, 388
Williams, Linda, 241
Willis, Katherine, 147
Wilson, John H., 403, 405, 407
Wilson, Lida Patrick, 153–54n25
Wilson, Thomas, 309
Winnebago Reservation, 264, 279
Winnebagos, 282, 334, 336, 342, 370n57. See
also Ho-Chunks (Winnebagos)
Wisconsin State Building, 403
Wise, J. R., 334, 336, 372n69
Wissler, Clark, 366n14
The Wizard of Oz (Baum), 99n13
Wolfsieffer, P. M., 87
womanhood: American, 227–28, 230; civ-
ilization and, 195; composite image of,
47; idealized, 224, 228; images of, 216; as
national ideal, 247; pathologizing, 449–
50; western, 195, 224; white, 227, 232, 243–
44, 247
Woman’s Board, 110, 116, 140, 215, 221–22,
224–25, 232, 240, 243, 252nn44–45, 453n3;
female images and, 220; medal and, 227
Woman’s Board of Managers, 129, 198, 220–
21, 224, 252n44, 273; education and, 123
Woman’s Building (1898), 91, 134, 139–40,
146, 198; messaging of, 208–9, 215; of 1893,
133, 140, 241; of 1899, 141, 142–43, 241,
254n73
Woman’s Exchange, 144
Woman’s Suffrage Association, 133
Woman’s Weekly, 116, 135, 137–39, 149, 225
women: Anglofied, 232; beautiful, 222–23,
252n43; black, 233; Chinese, 252n42; of
color, 215; as consumable visual objects,
484 index
247; displaying by, 243, 255n77; domestic-
ity and, 292; foreign, 214–15, 233, 251n32;
imperialism and, 292; middle class, 215,
233, 240; as models, 215; Native Ameri-
can, 122–23, 233, 247, 258; nonwhite, 233,
247; other-ed, 233, 236, 238, 240–44; par-
ticipation by, 198; progressive assimilation
and, 293n5; representation of, 212; respect-
able, 121, 215, 243; roles of, 446; seduction
of, 221; self-segregation of, 240; upper-
class, 110–11; white, 215–16, 218, 227, 231,
240, 242–44, 246–47, 292; working-class,
111, 233
Women’s Christian Temperance Union,
133, 143
women’s clubs, 106, 115, 149
women’s suffrage, 115, 133, 150, 214, 249n7
Woods, Maud Coleman, 216, 218
Woodworth, Francis C., 77
Wooster, Charles, 62
“A Word with the Women” (Peattie), 137
World’s Congress of Beauties, 214, 236, 247,
253n67
World’s Congress of Representative Women,
214
Wounded Knee, 122, 154n39, 281, 374n100
Wren, Christopher, 45
Wuertz, Emil Henry: Water Nymph, 124–26
Wyckoff, Miss, 119
Wyoki Nicyople Tigurebli Acolthk (Great
Man Who Fights Them All), 345–46
Yavapais, 356; housing of, 348
Yellow Boy, 124
yellow journalism, 122, 269, 442
Yellowstone: National Park, 318; images
from, 66
ymca, 398
Yosemite, images from, 66
Yung Chung, 390
Yupik, 309, 318
Zangwill, Israel, 231–32
Zulus, 163, 242