Booknotes: The Girl in the Middle

New Arrival:

• The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West by Martha A. Sandweiss (Princeton UP, 2025).

Frontier conflicts that filled the years before, during, and immediately after the Civil War, sparked major realignments in the relationships between the federal government and the Indian tribes of the vast Trans-Mississippi West. One of the most momentous diplomatic events from that period was the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. A photographic image from that time inspired Martha Sandweiss to write The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West.

From the description: "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."

According to the introduction, Gardner's camera activities around the fort produced "52 large and 101 smaller stereo views." The six men in the Gardner photo that sparked Sandweiss's curiosity and quest for finding the identity and story of the "girl in the middle" are well-known to Civil War readers. They are Alfred H. Terry, William S. Harney, William T. Sherman, John B. Sanborn, Christopher C. Augur, and Samuel F. Tappan. The child has been identified as Sophie Mousseau. While her study incorporates in some aspect all eight figures in the picture—photographer Gardner, the six negotiators, and the girl—its primary focus is on three of those individuals: Gardner, Harney, and Mousseau.

More from the description: "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."