Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: The Nisenan Photographs of Alexander W. Chase (2016) Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection Author: Thomas C. Blackburn Published: 2016 Source(s): Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, Vol 36, No. 2 # of Pages: 15 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-08-27 14:53:02 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 05:53:18 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 05:53:18

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

Page: of 15  

Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology . Vol. 36, No. 2 (2016) . pp. 311-325 A New Look At Some Old Data: The Nisenan Photographs of Alexander W. Chase THOMAS C. BLACKBURN 527 Clark Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711 In 1877, Stephen Powers wrote an extended passage on the topic of money and wealth among Native Californians, and illustrated it by itemizing the treasured possessions of a specific Nisenan chief's family. His account was originally accompanied by four woodcuts based on photographs created in 1874 by Alexander Chase; those photographs are reproduced here, and compared with several additional images from the 1850s to suggest other possible social ramifications of some of the ‘wealth’ items on Powers’ list. E PURPOSE OF THIS BRIEF REPORT is twofold— first, to call attention to the existence and significance of several additional photographs taken by! Alexander W. Chase; and second, to show how those images can be used in conjunction with other newly recovered data to clarify some issues concerning wealth and the use of regalia in traditional societies in Central California. Chase, whose career has been briefly outlined elsewhere (Blackburn 2005; Lyman 1991), was a major contributor to Stephen Powers’ pioneering work, Tribes of California (1877, 1976), and seems to have provided most (if not all) of the photographs and sketches that eventually illustrated Powers’ monograph. Most of Chase’s extant photographs, which primarily depict people from northwestern California, have now been published (Blackburn 2005); however, several others have recently been identified at the Smithsonian Institution (two of which, to my knowledge, have rarely, if ever, been reproduced elsewhere) and all are shown here for the first time. The images in question (Figs. 1-4) depict the members of a Nisenan chief’s family attired in their traditional finery and with all of the family’s accumulated wealth very much on display. The chief involved, Captain Tom Lewis of K’otomyan, was a well-known figure in the Auburn, California Indian community in the 1870s, and figured prominently in Powers’ account of the Nisenan (Bibby 2005:68-70). According to Bibby, Captain Tom’s wife Jane was a highly respected member of that community for many years and was a noted 311 basket-maker, doctor, and revered elder referred to by all as Koto Jane. The photographs of the Lewis family, in the form of woodblock prints (Powers 1976: Figs. 26, 28, 30, 31), were used to supplement and partially illustrate Powers’ text, but some of their informational content was inevitably lost as a result of the process involved in their reproduction. The portraits of Captain Tom and his wife (Figs. 1 and 2) were eventually published a century later in the Handbook of North American Indians (Heizer 1978:391, Figs. 4 & 5), and are often reprinted, but those of the daughter and son? (Figs. 3 and 4) have seldom, if ever, been reproduced. The primary significance of the Chase photographs lies in the way in which they both complement and clarify a rather extraordinary passage in Powers’ volume in which he discusses in considerable detail money, wealth, and comparative economic values in contemporary native societies, and then provides an inventory and description of the economic capital and prestige items owned by one specific, prominent family. Because of its importance, I will quote the entire passage here: The subject of shell-money has hitherto received little more than casual mention. Immense quantities of it were formerly in circulation among the California Indians, and the manufacture of it was large and constant, to replace the continual wastage which was caused by the sacrifice of so much upon the death of wealthy men, and by the propitiatory sacrifices performed by many tribes, especially those of the Coast Range. From my own observations, which have not been limited, and from the statements of pioneers and the Indians themselves, I hesitate little to express