CRT, DEI
Identifying Sophie Mousseau From a Civil War-Era Photo Helps Us Understand Our Complex Past
by Martha A. Sandweiss April 21, 2025
ZOCALO
Amidst a mass erasure of historical names on government websites, historian Martha A. Sandweiss reflects on why names matter, and what they reveal about our complicated history. | Public domain.
As a scholar of 19th-century American photography, I’ve looked at countless old photographs: the carefully labeled portraits of the powerful (always the most likely to be photographed), and the many pictures of women and children, enslaved workers and Native families, rural laborers and urban bystanders, that include no identifications at all.
Some years ago, I began to wonder whether I could identify some of the unnamed people in old photographs. Might I be able to name that gold miner, that railroad worker, that soldier lying dead on the battlefield at Antietam? Would my understanding of history shift if I knew who these people were?
My attention focused on a photograph by the celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner. Made at Fort Laramie in spring 1868, it depicts six white men standing in an oddly formal arc around a young Native girl. The men, all fresh from Civil War duty, are members of a federal peace commission sent west to this fort along the Oregon Trail to persuade the Lakota to move to a newly created reservation. The handwritten labels on the extant copies of the photograph carefully identify them: General Alfred Howe Terry, General William S. Harney, General William T. Sherman, General John B. Sanborn, Col. Samuel F. Tappan, and General Christopher C. Augur. The girl is never named. She is simply “Arapaho” on one version of the photo, “Dakota” on another. She looks straight at the camera and begs us to stare back.
Who is she?
I looked for her in other pictures made at the fort. She’s not there. I searched through the personal papers of the commissioners and the government records of the treaty negotiations. Nothing. Finally, in the archives at the Fort Laramie National Historic Site, I found a small notecard left by a visitor in 1978. He’d seen a copy of the photograph on display; the blanket-wrapped girl was his grandmother, Sophie Mousseau. The name connects an unidentified child to the historical records; it lets us find her story.
Sophie proves easier to track than most girls born on the northern plains during the years of the Indian Wars. Traces of her Oglala Lakota mother survive in the spare federal records that track reservation residents. Curious writers recorded her French Canadian father’s memories of the “old days.” Since Sophie’s father turned litigious, and her first husband became a murderer, bureaucratic records also preserve imprints of her life, even as descendants’ memories grow increasingly faint.
Sophie’s life leads us into a sprawling Western world. Born in Dakota Territory shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, she died on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, one of the very poorest parts of a Depression-riddled nation, in 1936. Her first husband, a white Civil War veteran, effectively kidnapped their five children after he fell in love with another woman, and banished Sophie to the newly created Great Sioux Reservation. She was working as a laundress at a federal boarding school in Pine Ridge when federal troops massacred some 250 Native people at nearby Wounded Knee. She later married a mixed-blood Lakota who gave up his career as a circus juggler to become a much-valued translator for some of the country’s leading anthropologists. With him, Sophie had another eight children, for a total of 13.
Names tether people to historical records. Names are what let us trace people through old newspapers and books, census records and legal documents, family memories, and community gossip.
Sophie experienced domestic violence, observed the consequences of military violence, and saw first-hand the consequences of the political and legal violence that denied rights to people like her.
Indeed, she was born of violence. Thirteen years before the photograph was made, General Harney, who stands with Sophie in the photograph, attacked a Lakota village at a place called Blue Water Creek in western Nebraska. His men wounded a young mother named Yellow Woman and used her infant for target practice. Then they rounded her up and marched her to Fort Laramie. At the same time, Harney ordered all the traders in the area into the fort. There, Yellow Woman met the trader M. A. Mousseau. They married, became Sophie’s parents, and stayed married for over half a century. The general was an accidental matchmaker.
When Sophie’s parents ushered her into Gardner’s photograph, they saw two men they knew: Harney, whom they’d met more than a decade earlier, and General Sanborn, whom they’d just hired as their attorney. Sophie and her family had their place in a West that was both a big place and a small world.
Neither the photographer nor government officials saw fit to record Sophie’s name 157 years ago. But Sophie’s name transforms a banal photograph into a picture that leads us into a world of families and the complicated racial politics of the 19th-century West. Her story transforms a picture ostensibly about men negotiating a peace treaty into a meditation on the endemic violence that shaped so many American lives. When we know who Sophie is, the photograph becomes a different kind of evidence altogether.
Names tether people to historical records. Names are what let us trace people through old newspapers and books, census records and legal documents, family memories, and community gossip. Names are what transform the anonymous people in old photographs into particular individuals with complicated stories of their own.
In recent weeks, as part of a broader assault on historical records, exhibitions, and books, government functionaries have scrubbed countless government websites of historical names: Jackie Robinson, Medgar Evers, even the World War II aircraft Enola Gay, whose aeronautic surname offended federal censors (and their computer search engines). Amid fierce public pushback, some of the sites have now been restored. Critics insisted those names mattered, not only because they honor individual accomplishments, but because they denote bigger stories about combatting racial segregation or fighting for civil rights. Individual stories make the abstract more concrete, the past more complex.
When Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian present in the famous image of the flag raising at Iwo Jima, loses his clear tribal affiliation to become simply a man from “a Pima community,” we lose something. It’s no accident that most of the names and stories scrubbed from the record are those of people of color. Government officials who erase a diverse past intend to obscure the reality of a diverse present.
American history needs more names, not fewer. It needs the names of the famous (so recently removed from government websites) and the names of those who, like Sophie, have remained unidentified in personal and institutional archives.
Take that shoe box out of your closet and label your family photos. Everyone’s story matters.
Martha A. Sandweiss, professor of history emerita at Princeton University, is the author of The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West.
As a scholar of 19th-century American photography, I’ve looked at countless old photographs: the carefully labeled portraits of the powerful (always the most likely to be photographed), and the many pictures of women and children, enslaved workers and Native families, rural laborers and urban bystanders, that include no identifications at all.
Some years ago, I began to wonder whether I could identify some of the unnamed people in old photographs. Might I be able to name that gold miner, that railroad worker, that soldier lying dead on the battlefield at Antietam? Would my understanding of history shift if I knew who these people were?
My attention focused on a photograph by the celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner. Made at Fort Laramie in spring 1868, it depicts six white men standing in an oddly formal arc around a young Native girl. The men, all fresh from Civil War duty, are members of a federal peace commission sent west to this fort along the Oregon Trail to persuade the Lakota to move to a newly created reservation. The handwritten labels on the extant copies of the photograph carefully identify them: General Alfred Howe Terry, General William S. Harney, General William T. Sherman, General John B. Sanborn, Col. Samuel F. Tappan, and General Christopher C. Augur. The girl is never named. She is simply “Arapaho” on one version of the photo, “Dakota” on another. She looks straight at the camera and begs us to stare back.
Who is she?
I looked for her in other pictures made at the fort. She’s not there. I searched through the personal papers of the commissioners and the government records of the treaty negotiations. Nothing. Finally, in the archives at the Fort Laramie National Historic Site, I found a small notecard left by a visitor in 1978. He’d seen a copy of the photograph on display; the blanket-wrapped girl was his grandmother, Sophie Mousseau. The name connects an unidentified child to the historical records; it lets us find her story.
Sophie proves easier to track than most girls born on the northern plains during the years of the Indian Wars. Traces of her Oglala Lakota mother survive in the spare federal records that track reservation residents. Curious writers recorded her French Canadian father’s memories of the “old days.” Since Sophie’s father turned litigious, and her first husband became a murderer, bureaucratic records also preserve imprints of her life, even as descendants’ memories grow increasingly faint.
Sophie’s life leads us into a sprawling Western world. Born in Dakota Territory shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, she died on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, one of the very poorest parts of a Depression-riddled nation, in 1936. Her first husband, a white Civil War veteran, effectively kidnapped their five children after he fell in love with another woman, and banished Sophie to the newly created Great Sioux Reservation. She was working as a laundress at a federal boarding school in Pine Ridge when federal troops massacred some 250 Native people at nearby Wounded Knee. She later married a mixed-blood Lakota who gave up his career as a circus juggler to become a much-valued translator for some of the country’s leading anthropologists. With him, Sophie had another eight children, for a total of 13.
Names tether people to historical records. Names are what let us trace people through old newspapers and books, census records and legal documents, family memories, and community gossip.
Sophie experienced domestic violence, observed the consequences of military violence, and saw first-hand the consequences of the political and legal violence that denied rights to people like her.
Indeed, she was born of violence. Thirteen years before the photograph was made, General Harney, who stands with Sophie in the photograph, attacked a Lakota village at a place called Blue Water Creek in western Nebraska. His men wounded a young mother named Yellow Woman and used her infant for target practice. Then they rounded her up and marched her to Fort Laramie. At the same time, Harney ordered all the traders in the area into the fort. There, Yellow Woman met the trader M. A. Mousseau. They married, became Sophie’s parents, and stayed married for over half a century. The general was an accidental matchmaker.
When Sophie’s parents ushered her into Gardner’s photograph, they saw two men they knew: Harney, whom they’d met more than a decade earlier, and General Sanborn, whom they’d just hired as their attorney. Sophie and her family had their place in a West that was both a big place and a small world.
Neither the photographer nor government officials saw fit to record Sophie’s name 157 years ago. But Sophie’s name transforms a banal photograph into a picture that leads us into a world of families and the complicated racial politics of the 19th-century West. Her story transforms a picture ostensibly about men negotiating a peace treaty into a meditation on the endemic violence that shaped so many American lives. When we know who Sophie is, the photograph becomes a different kind of evidence altogether.
Names tether people to historical records. Names are what let us trace people through old newspapers and books, census records and legal documents, family memories, and community gossip. Names are what transform the anonymous people in old photographs into particular individuals with complicated stories of their own.
In recent weeks, as part of a broader assault on historical records, exhibitions, and books, government functionaries have scrubbed countless government websites of historical names: Jackie Robinson, Medgar Evers, even the World War II aircraft Enola Gay, whose aeronautic surname offended federal censors (and their computer search engines). Amid fierce public pushback, some of the sites have now been restored. Critics insisted those names mattered, not only because they honor individual accomplishments, but because they denote bigger stories about combatting racial segregation or fighting for civil rights. Individual stories make the abstract more concrete, the past more complex.
When Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian present in the famous image of the flag raising at Iwo Jima, loses his clear tribal affiliation to become simply a man from “a Pima community,” we lose something. It’s no accident that most of the names and stories scrubbed from the record are those of people of color. Government officials who erase a diverse past intend to obscure the reality of a diverse present.
American history needs more names, not fewer. It needs the names of the famous (so recently removed from government websites) and the names of those who, like Sophie, have remained unidentified in personal and institutional archives.
Take that shoe box out of your closet and label your family photos. Everyone’s story matters.
Martha A. Sandweiss, professor of history emerita at Princeton University, is the author of The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West.
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