Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953)

We would like to thank Professor Marie Watkins of Furman University for her assistance with cataloguing this lot.


Around the turn of the twentieth century, in addition to Joseph Henry Sharp, another frequent visitor to Montana's Blackfeet Indian Reservation was author and photographer Walter McClintock, who was eventually adopted by the chief, Mad Wolf. In his 1910 memoir The Old North Trail, or Life, Legends and Religion of the Blackfeet Indians, McClintock describes Mad Wolf much as he appears in the present work, writing, "His long hair tinged with gray fell loosely over his shoulders. From his neck hung a medicine whistle made from the wing-bone of an eagle. In his back hair, a single eagle feather stood erect...For a moment, he gazed into my face with eyes as penetrating as those of an eagle." (p. 26)