The controversial painting shows a Dakota lifting an enemy’s scalp.
Seth Eastman was a cartographer who taught mapmaking at West Point, while his own career was all over the map. Eastman was an expert on the Dakotas and other Indian tribes, but he abandoned his Indian wife, whose descendants through their only daughter were among the most notable Indians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He was a Union general during the Civil War—though his second wife had written a best seller that defended slavery by attacking Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Contemporaries described Eastman as an accomplished artist whose rather gentle paintings treated Indian culture with respect and affection; yet one of his best known paintings was later excised from the halls of Congress as racist propaganda. His life was as full of contradictions as the new American nation itself.
The first American Eastman was Roger, a carpenter who arrived in 1638, in the generation before King Philip’s War, and died in 1694. Roger’s descendant Robert, described as a “gentleman devoted to scientific pursuits and possessing much talent as an inventor,” had hoped his firstborn son Seth, born in Brunswick, Maine, on January 24, 1808, would attend Bowdoin College. Instead, Seth, the eldest of 13 children, entered the new U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., at age 16 in July 1824. He studied engineering and art—central to mapmaking—and graduated in 1829 with a second lieutenant’s commission in the 1st U.S. Infantry. First sent to remote Fort Crawford (near Prairie du Chien, Wis.), then being rebuilt of native rock by Zachary Taylor, he was soon transferred north to Fort Snelling, the northernmost outpost of the new United States, facing British-held Canada. Constructed on bluffs near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Fort Snelling was a regular castle, with a stone round tower straight from the Middle Ages and a garrison that quartered as many as 24 officers and 300 enlisted men. It stood as a peacekeeping bastion between the lands of the Dakotas (or Santee Sioux) and Ojibwas (Chippewas or Anishinabes). Explorer Zebulon Pike had purchased the site and 100,000 adjoining acres in 1805 from Dakota warriors.
The 1830s were the era of novelist Sir Walter Scott, and living in a castle, Eastman must have related to Scott’s protagonist Ivanhoe, whose exotic love of the Jewish heroine Rebecca—based, according to some experts, on real-life heiress-intellectual Rebecca Gratz of Philadelphia—rekindled the Romantic fascination with “Princess” Pocahontas, another exotic beauty. Eastman fulfilled his role as a Romantic by formally marrying Stands Sacred (Wakan Inajin Win), a 15-year-old Dakota girl whose father was a chief known as Cloud Man. Probably from Stands Sacred, or her relatives, Seth learned to speak passable Dakota and to appreciate the culture of the Dakotas. Eastman’s paintings of Indians—with one notorious exception —portray them sympathetically, mostly in peaceful activities, as in Rice Gatherers or Chippewa Playing Checkers.
When Eastman was reassigned to West Point in 1832, the marriage ended, though Stands Sacred had already borne a child named Winona (First Girl). Stands Sacred might have wanted to stay with her relatives, though perhaps someone had whispered to Eastman that Pocahontas had died after contracting disease in white society, or that being formally married to an Indian woman was a poor career move. Winona, raised by her abandoned mother and Dakota relatives, married and had five children of her own. Her husband, Wakanhdi Ota (Many Lightnings), was a full-blooded Dakota and warrior in the Great Sioux Uprising of 1862 who later converted to Christianity. Their oldest son became the Rev. John Eastman, a Presbyterian minister. Another son, Hakadah (Pitiful Last, because his mother died at his birth), was rescued from abandonment by his grandmother Stands Sacred. Hakadah was renamed Ohiyesa (Winner) and later still became Dr. Charles Eastman, a graduate of Dartmouth College and Boston University medical school, a major force in both the YMCA and the Boy Scouts, and an author whose books on Indian life remain in print.
In 1835 Seth Eastman married Mary Henderson, the 17-year-old daughter of a surgeon at the Military Academy. The Hendersons stemmed from the First Families of Virginia, who were slaveholders. But Mary, too, was fascinated by Indian life, and when Seth was promoted to brigadier general and appointed commander of Fort Snelling in 1841, Mary went with him to write a book that became Dacotah, or Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling.
Mary Eastman’s book perhaps wishfully incorporates the legend of the death of the lovelorn Princess Winona—though both Seth’s daughter, Winona Eastman, and former wife, Stands Sacred, were still living at the time of publication in 1849. The tone of Mary’s books, however, is sympathetic to Indians, and Seth’s illustrations for her books are also humane— with one exception: Death Whoop.
Seth Eastman’s health had slumped during a posting to Texas after leaving Fort Snelling. He pulled strings to get a transfer east “to the duty of painting.” Through his and Mary’s persistence he was able to finagle a government commission to illustrate Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s multivolume study of North American Indian tribes. One of his key illustrations was Death Whoop, a melodramatic portrayal of a Dakota warrior ululating as he scalps a fallen enemy. Art curator Felicia Wivchar of the U.S. House of Representatives says Death Whoop first appeared in the 1851 volume The American Aboriginal Portfolio —by Mary Henderson Eastman.
“Every nerve in his body is thrilling with joy,” Mary wrote of the Dakota warrior. “His bloodstained knife he grasps with one hand, while high in the other he holds the crimson and still warm scalp.…Right joyfully falls upon his ear the return of his death-whoop; it is the triumph for his victory, and the death song for his foe.” The anthropology is a bit skewed—a “death song” is sung by a dying person, not by one about to kill—but the image caught on so mightily that Death Whoop, the least typical of Eastman’s Indian paintings, appeared as the title illustration for five out of six of Schoolcraft’s volumes.
Having artistically, perhaps, disowned his former in-laws, Seth next saw Mary pen an attack on Uncle Tom’s Cabin called Aunt Phillis’s Cabin, or Southern Life As It Is, in which she defended slavery as beneficial to the slaves. The 1852 publication sold between 20,000 and 30,000 copies. Abolitionists remained more impressed with the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe or Frederick Douglass.
In 1867 the U.S. House Committee on Indian Affairs commissioned Seth Eastman to depict nine scenes of Indian life for display in the Capitol. One of the paintings was an oil version of Death Whoop. The painting hung in the Capitol until 1987, when U.S. Rep. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a Cheyenne from Colorado, said he found Death Whoop insulting and depressing. Campbell added that none of the other Capitol art depicted either African slavery or Japanese-American relocation during World War II, and he felt Death Whoop was the only work defamatory to a significant American minority group. “If it offends you, it offends me,” concurred committee chairman Rep. Morris Udall of Utah, and the painting came down.
Death Whoop—which may have been removed and replaced once before in the 1940s—returned to a Capitol hearing room in 1995, when the curator at the time sought to restore the integrity of the historically significant collection. But down it came again in 2007. It hasn’t reappeared since, though Eastman’s more benign paintings of Indian life are regarded as Western classics, and his Romantic landscapes of the Hudson Valley near West Point are widely appreciated.
During the Campbell push to remove the gory painting in 1987, Udall told Campbell that Frank Ducheneaux, a Lakota attorney and counsel to the committee, had told him Death Whoop was one of his favorite paintings. “He’s a Sioux,” Campbell reportedly replied. “In that part of the country some of them haven’t given up yet.”
Originally published in the April 2014 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.