In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal government’s treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern plains. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his visceral pictures of the Confederate dead at Antietam, posed six federal peace commissioners with a young Native girl wrapped in a blanket. The hand-labeled prints carefully name each of the men, but the girl is never identified. As The Girl in the Middle goes in search of her, it draws readers into the entangled lives of the photographer and his subjects.
Martha A. Sandweiss paints a riveting portrait of the turbulent age of Reconstruction and westward expansion. She follows Gardner from his birthplace in Scotland to the American frontier, as his dreams of a utopian future across the Atlantic fall to pieces. She recounts the lives of William S. Harney, a slave-owning Union general who earned the Lakota name “Woman Killer,” and Samuel F. Tappan, an abolitionist who led the investigation into the Sand Creek massacre. And she identifies Sophie Mousseau, the girl in Gardner’s photograph, whose life swerved in unexpected directions as American settlers pushed into Indian Country and the federal government confined Native peoples to reservations.
Spinning a spellbinding historical tale from a single enigmatic image, The Girl in the Middle reveals how the American nation grappled with what kind of country it would be as it expanded westward in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Martha A. Sandweiss is professor emerita of history at Princeton University, where she is founding director of the Princeton & Slavery Project. She is the award-winning author of many books, including Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception across the Color Line and Print the Legend: Photography and the American West.
“Martha Sandweiss is not only a delightfully readable historian, she’s a first-rate sleuth. Using one haunting group photograph as a starting point, she succeeds in recreating the intertwined lives of a fascinating cross section of individuals. The Girl in the Middle is an engaging exercise in photographic detective work that gives us many fresh and astonishing insights into the history of the American West.”—Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of Blood and Thunder
“Sandweiss calls attention to the fact that archives of the American West are brimming with photographs of Native Americans whose names are not given. While other individuals in these same photographs may be identified by their full names, their professions, or their roles in particular events, Native people are nameless, their roles in a historical moment understood as symbolic, their presence simultaneously highlighted and made invisible. In this remarkable work, Sandweiss restores the name of ‘the girl in the middle’ as well as her life story and the stories of those surrounding her, using a single image to shift the lens through which we as readers come to know, interpret, and understand American history. An astonishing achievement of scholarship, insight, and empathy.”—Amanda Cobb-Greetham, author of Listening to Our Grandmothers’ Stories
“An unmatched piece of historical detective work, Martha Sandweiss’s painstaking identification of an anonymous Native American girl in an old picture unspools the rich, painful canvas that was the nineteenth-century United States. Replete with generals, killers, survivors, and a photographer, The Girl in the Middle offers a profound meditation on those people too easily thought to be lost to the past—and thus on the meaning and practice of history itself.”—Philip J. Deloria, author of Playing Indian
“Martha Sandweiss has long been the finest scholar working the intersection of visual and textual evidence of the American West. Here she takes a single image and spins from it a detective story. Its title character stands in the middle of both the photograph and the often tortured events that disrupted and reordered the West after the Civil War. Thoroughly researched and beautifully written, this book both teases the brain and pulls at the heart.”—Elliott West, author of Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion
“Martha Sandweiss reveals a century through a single photograph. Fascinating and constantly surprising, The Girl in the Middle abandons the tired binaries of popular visions of the American West to provide a compelling, provocative, and even hopeful history.”—Richard White, author of The Republic for Which It Stands
