Anonymous Lakota winter count on muslin
MS 2001-10 Anonymous Lakota winter count on muslin
NAA MS 2001-10
Pictorial calendar drawn on muslin in spiral form beginning at the center, covering the years 1752-3 to 1886-87. There is no documentation regarding who created the winter count. It is believed to have been collected on the Rosebud Reservation by John Anderson.
Manuscript 2001-10, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
John Anderson (1869-1949) homesteaded in Cherry County, Nebraska in 1883; by 1885 he was working for rhe US Army at Fort Niobrara. He became a photographer and took hundreds of photographs of the landscape and people of Nebraska and South Dakota, particularly of people on the nearby Rosebud Reservation. Many of his negatives are now in the collection of the Nebraska Historical Society. He also assembled a collection of Indian material, now in the Sioux Indian Museum in Rapid City, South Dakota.
The calendar was donated to the NAA in 2000 by Dr. Tim Tackett. It was found among the effects of Myrtle Miller Anderson, widow of John Anderson, who lived for many years with the donor's mother, her niece.
United States Dakota Territory Rosebud Indian Reservation.
United States South Dakota Rosebud Indian Reservation.
MS 2001-10
Published in a paper by in the 4th Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Also published in The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian, C. Greene and R. Thornton, eds, 2005. Also published on the NAA's "Lakota Winter Counts" website, http://wintercounts.si.edu/