3. Frederic Ward Putnam and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University

Abstract

Harvard University LEDGER BOOKS AND LEDGER ART The Lakota drawings in the exhibition were drawn by warriors who fought U.S. soldiers and civilians and other tribes to preserve their homelands, loved ones, and way of life. Lakotas evidently took the ledger from a gold prospector on the Bozeman Trail near the Big Horn Mountains in the late 1860s. U.S. soldiers found the ledger after the Battle of the Little Big Horn (1876). At least fi ve separate artists drew their war exploits in the ledger; their identities are as yet unknown.