But the artists themselves clearly intended their drawings to record personal hunting and military exploits, and Castle McLaughlin now argues that they were also intended to record history, including known episodes from Red Cloud’s War. Beginning in the 1950s, when the actor Vincent Price obtained a now-famous ledger book in La Jolla, California, ledger drawings began to be appreciated as art, first, and later for what they revealed about Plains Indian culture, religion and society. Originally drawn by Native Americans as a personal record, many hundreds of these ledger drawings passed into the hands of government officials, military officers and ordinary tourists who thought of and displayed them as “curios” for a time, then stored them away in attic trunks. Most of the drawings were made on paper taken from ledger books found at military and trading posts or taken from soldiers and civilians killed in the fighting that ended as the buffalo-hunting tribes were confined to reservations by 1880. “Ledger art” is the term given to the large body of colored drawings by Plains Indian artists of the generation that came of age in the 1850s and 1860s, fought in the Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s, and survived into the 1920s and 1930s. Red Cloud, in a photograph by Charles Milton Bell, circa 1880 National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
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